EVERLASTING LOVE I have loved
you with an everlasting love, therefore with lovingkindness
have I drawn you. Jeremiah 31, verse 3 Believer, are you tempted now
to doubt his love? Are his footsteps lost amid the
night shadows through which he is now conducting you? Remember,
he had his eye upon you before the birth of time, yes, from
all eternity. What appears to you now, some
sudden capricious exercise of his power or sovereignty, is
determination and decree of everlasting love. I have loved you, he seems
to say, suffering one, into this affliction. I will love you through
it, and when my designs regarding you are complete, I will show
you that the love which is from everlasting is to everlasting. Child of God, if there is a ripple
now agitating the surface of the stream, trace it up to this
fountainhead of Love. God is faithful. He cannot deny
Himself. If some dark clouds are now intercepting
those gracious beings, He must have some wise end to subserve. For a brief moment I abandoned
you, but with great compassion I will bring you back. In a moment
of anger I turned my face away for a little while, but with
everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord
your Redeemer. Just as I swore in the time of
Noah that I would never again let a flood cover the earth and
destroy its life, so now I swear that I will never again pour
out my anger on you. For the mountains may depart
and the hills disappear, but even then I will remain loyal
to you. My covenant of blessing will
never be broken, says the Lord who has mercy on you. God sets
his rainbow in the dark sky, and, as if it were not enough
that his people should look upon it and take comfort in its many
and varied promises, he himself graciously becomes a party in
gazing on the covenant pledge. And the rainbow shall be in the
cloud, and I shall look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting
covenant. He puts himself, so to speak,
in mind of his own everlasting love. In his saints' dark and
cloudy day, when they imagine that their eyes are alone resting
on the tokens of covenant faithfulness, the eye of a covenant-keeping
God is resting upon them too. I will look upon my own promises,
he seems to say. They shall be memorials to myself
of my purposes of unchanging mercy. Nor is this love merely
a general indiscriminate affection. The verse speaks of each individual
member of the covenant family. I have loved you. Oh, my father,
says Madame Guillaume, it seems to me sometimes as if you did
forget every other being, in order to think only of my faithless
and ungrateful heart. Let us seek to view our trials
as so many cords of lovingkindness, by which our God is seeking to
draw us, yes, and will draw us, near Himself. Who knows what
mercy may be bound up in what may seem to us dark and mysterious
dispensations? We are apt to misname and misinterpret
His ways. We call his dealings severe trials. He calls them loving-kindness. Drooping Saint, let your eyes
rest on the rainbow overarching the throne of God, spanning from
eternity to eternity, and read for your comfort the gracious
declaration, The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting
upon those who fear Him.