The Text
A Subject Altogether Wonderful
It is of prime importance for the nourishment, health, and fruitfulness of the believer’s spiritual life that he should be constantly occupied with the love of Christ, which is a bottomless, shoreless sea. Samuel Pierce designated Christ’s love thus:
There is nothing in nature that illustrates Christ’s love, nothing in human history or experience that exemplifies it. Only in the divine relations can we find any analogy. There one is given to us which, though it fills the heart with joy and satisfaction, is nevertheless far above the grasp of our finite minds. Said the Lover of our souls, “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you” (John 15:9). Such a love we can neither express nor conceive, yet it should be the one subject on which our hearts are continuously set and from which we daily drink.
The Eternal Love of Christ for His Church
“As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you.” As the Father loved Christ from everlasting, so Christ loved His people: with delight, with special affection, with an unchanging, abiding, eternal love. Christ has loved His church with all His soul from everlasting. His heart was fixed upon His bride before all time. He loved her as the gift of the Father’s love to Him. He loved her as presented to Him by the Father in all her beauty, glory, and excellence, in which she was forever to shine forth as His wife in the kingdom of glory. He loved her as His mystical body, in whom all His glory was to be displayed and admired. He loved her as His “peculiar treasure” (Exo. 19:5), as His very own. He was to be her life, her light, her holiness, her righteousness, her perfection and glory; for she was to receive all from Him as her eternal Head and Husband.
The origin — the spring — of Christ’s love to His beloved is high and incomprehensible. His love originated in the Father’s everlasting love to Him as God-man and to believers as the spouse that He had chosen, loved, beautified, and bestowed on His dear Son. The love of Christ for His people and His feeling toward them transcends all conception. His divine person stamps eternal perfection on His love, as well as everlasting worth, virtue, and efficacy on all His mediatorial acts. His people were divinely appointed to partake with Him in all His communicable grace and glory — to share in all His honours, titles, and dignities, as far as they are shareable. Nothing would satisfy the heart of Christ but that His redeemed should live with Him in heaven, to behold Him in His glory, and to be perfected in happiness by seeing Him as He is.
The wonders contained in Christ’s love can never be fully explored. All that is contained in His love will never be comprehended by the saints this side of glory. That which has been manifested of it in His incarnation and in His obedience and suffering is altogether beyond what saints can ever sufficiently appreciate and bless Him for. It is cause for deepest gratitude that we have been brought to know it, to believe it, and to enjoy it.
How Can Such Love Be Known?
But since the love of Christ is so transcendent and mysterious, so infinite and incomprehensible, how can it be comprehended and known by us? Completely and perfectly, it cannot; yet truly and satisfyingly it may be. Christ’s love to us is discovered in the Word of truth; and as the Holy Spirit enlightens our understanding, we are enabled to apprehend something of its wonders and blessedness. As the Holy Spirit strengthens us within and calls our faith into exercise, we are enabled to take in some spiritual views of Christ’s love.
Faith is to the soul what the eye is to the body — the organ or faculty by which light is admitted and by which objects are seen and known. “Through faith we understand” (Heb. 11:3) that which is beyond the comprehension of mere reason. Though we cannot fathom the love of Christ, we may drink deeply of it. We can know how wonderful, how free, how transcendent, how selfless, how longsuffering, how constant, how infinite His love is. And this knowledge will have a sanctifying influence on our lives. Though we shall never be able to exhaust its unsearchable fullness, it is our privilege to know very much more of this love and have a fuller enjoyment of it than any of us have yet obtained.
The Chief Employment of the Christian
The chief spiritual employment of the Christian should be to live in consideration and admiration of the wonderful love of Christ, to dwell on it in his thoughts until his heart is warmed, until his soul overflows with praise, until his whole life is constrained or influenced. He should meditate daily on its characteristics: its freeness, its pureness, its unstintedness, its immutability. Christ loves us more than we love ourselves. He loved us even while we hated Him, and nothing can change His love for us.
We should ponder the manifestations of His love: first, in His acceptance of the Father’s proposals in the everlasting covenant, whereby He freely consented to become the Sponsor of His fallen people and serve as their Surety; and then in His actual carrying out of that engagement. View Him leaving the holy tranquility and ineffable bliss of heaven, where He was so worshipped and adored by all the celestial hosts, and coming down to this scene of sin, strife, and suffering! What love that was! Consider Jehovah’s condescending to take upon Him a nature that was inferior to the angelic, so that when the Word became flesh His divine glory was almost completely eclipsed. Contemplate the unspeakable humiliation into which the Son of God descended — a humiliation which can only be gauged as we measure the distance between the throne of heaven and the manger of Bethlehem.
Bear in mind that even as the incarnate One, He made Himself of no reputation, that instead of appearing in pomp and splendour, He “took upon him the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7) — that He came not to be ministered to but to minister, not deeming the most ignominious acts as beneath Him. Remember that He knew from the beginning the kind of treatment He would receive from those He befriended. He knew that instead of being welcomed, appreciated, loved, and worshipped, He would be despised and rejected of men. He knew that though He went about doing good, healing the sick, relieving the needy, preaching the gospel to the poor, He would be opposed and persecuted by the religious leaders, hated without a cause, and misunderstood and ultimately deserted even by His own disciples. What love that was — love indeed that passes knowledge, love that should ceaselessly occupy our hearts and shape our lives.
Comprehending and Knowing
The apostle made request that God’s people might have a more spiritual and enlarged view of the immeasurable love of Christ, that their understanding might be swallowed up in it, that their renewed minds might be more and more filled with the wonders of it, that they should enter into a deeper experimental acquaintance with the same. All the discoveries of the love of Christ that the Holy Spirit makes unto us are in the Word and by the Word, and we are brought to spiritual discernment of that love by the exercise of faith.
It “passeth knowledge” not only because it is infinite and therefore incomprehensible to the finite mind, but also because our personal experience and enjoyment of it can never exhaust it — we but touch its edges and skim its surface. So far as we can perceive, the “comprehending” is via the understanding, the “knowing” via the heart; the former being more the result of mental effort, the other of intuition. Thus “knowing” in addition to “comprehending” is feeling a sense of the love of Christ, or having an experimental acquaintance with it. Though it transcends the grasp of our intellect, it is a subject of inward consciousness. Though it can be only faintly recognised, it may be adoringly appreciated.
As the Spirit graciously takes of the things of Christ and shows them to us, as He opens to us more and more the love of Christ by His own effectual teaching, and as He opens our minds to understand and exercise our thoughts upon it, we enjoy the same in our hearts. That knowledge being formed within becomes a spiritual part of us, so that what we read in the Word concerning the love of Christ we know to be truth, for we have the reality of it within our own souls.
A Love That Surpasses All
Pierce pointed out: “All [that is] known of the love of Christ in and by all the saints on earth — all [that is] known and enjoyed of the love of Christ by all the saints in heaven — is far below what is contained in the person and love of Christ, as considered in His own heart towards us… The love of Christ surpasseth the whole of His sufferings as much as they surpass all our guilt and sin. His love was the cause, and His sufferings the effect of it.” As the cause excels the effect, as the tree is greater than its fruit, so the fountain of Christ’s love exceeds all the streams that flow from it to us.
The angels never can enter fully into the love of Christ for His church and people. The finite-minded saints can never fully understand the fullness of Christ’s love. Nevertheless, it is important that the saint should make it his paramount concern to be more and more absorbed with the love of Christ — exercising his mind thereon, feeding his soul therefrom, delighting his heart therein, praying earnestly that he may more fully understand the love of God. He should attentively consider the revelation given of it in the Word of truth, meditating on its ineffable characteristics, contemplating its wondrous manifestations, and realising that Christ’s love to His own is eternal, infinite, and unalterable — not only without cessation but without the least diminution.
Such a subject is worthy of the saint’s best attention and constant pursuit. It will amply repay his best efforts and greatly enrich his spiritual life.