An Inseparable Love

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.—Romans 8:38-39.

1. We always think of this chapter as St. Paul’s finest composition, and perhaps the most precious legacy which he bequeathed to the Church. It is a noble piece of literary work, full of choice language and deep philosophic thought. As a picture of the Christian life and its possessions and hopes, it reaches a sublime elevation which is nowhere else attained except in the lofty sayings of Jesus. And the best of it is kept to the last. The climax and peroration are where they ought to be. They form the grand Hallelujah Chorus which brings the oratorio to a close.

A great French critic remarks upon St. Paul’s indifference to style, the rough, rugged sentences of the Apostle, with their abrupt transitions, their lack of grace and finish, falling gratingly on the Frenchman’s sensitive ear. And no reader of St. Paul’s writings will challenge the truth of this criticism, for there is absolutely nothing of the conscious rhetorician about him; he is too intent upon pouring out his mind and heart, too eager to get into direct, living contact with men, to think of elegance of style. But, now and again, when he becomes impassioned, when in the progress of argument or exhortation some of the grander truths of life, or some of its vivifying hopes, come pressing upon him, then the preacher, the expounder, the controversialist, the counsellor, the pastor, becomes a seer. Brain and heart getting on fire, the thoughts that come, come molten, and fashion themselves naturally, without any need of art, into forms of beauty; and so we have his hymn to Charity, his ode to Immortality, and here his pæan to Love Divine.

2. These rapturous words are the climax of the Apostle’s long demonstration that the Gospel is the revelation of “the righteousness which is of God by faith,” and is thereby “the power of God unto salvation.” What a contrast there is between the beginning and the end of this argument! It started with sombre, sad words about man’s sinfulness and aversion from the knowledge of God. It closes with this sunny outburst of triumph. Like some stream rising among black and barren cliffs, or melancholy moorlands, and foaming through narrow rifts in gloomy ravines, it reaches at last fertile lands, and flows calm, the sunlight dancing on its broad surface, till it loses itself at last in the unfathomable ocean of the love of God.

What we have before us is, first of all, love—a love which brings us into indissoluble union with God in Christ; it is called “the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Next, we have a rapid list of the forces in the universe which might be conceived capable of separating us from that love. And then we have the persuasion which prevails above them all. The persuasion is mentioned first, but it may be taken last, as it closes the great argument.

A Love that will not let go.

Powers that are Powerless.

A Persuasion that Prevails.

I

A Love that will not let go

i. The Love of God

“Who shall separate us from the love of God?”

1. “The love of God” may mean our love to God or God’s love to us: which does St. Paul mean? He certainly means God’s love to us: “Who shall separate us from the love of God?” In the argument of this Epistle the reality of God’s love is confidently assumed. St. Paul was no shallow optimist, easily contented with the colour and glitter of the surface of things; he recognized as frankly and vividly as any pessimist can do the dark enigmas of nature and life; yet, notwithstanding this recognition, the fact of God’s love is the fundamental article of his creed. Whatever may perplex him, he never suspects that the cosmic trouble may arise in some defect of this love; in his conviction it is the primary, central truth of the universe.

Readers of Matthew Arnold will remember that in his essay on St. Paul he interprets our text as if the Apostle were exulting in his own love of God instead of God’s love of him; exulting in a love proceeding from himself instead of a love which found him and carried him away with it. It shows almost as strange a lack of insight as does the same writer’s conception of the God of Israel as an impersonal force. The secret of St. Paul’s calm outlook and triumphant hope, the power that enabled him to rise above all evil and fear of evil was, most assuredly, not his own love of God, but God’s love of him. The great saints of the Church have never thought much of their own love of God. It is His love of them and their fellows—a love greater than their hearts—that possessed them. “I think I am the poorest wretch that lives,” said the dying Cromwell; “but I love God, or rather (correcting myself) I am loved of God.”

I love; but ah! the whole

Of love is but my answer, Lord, to Thee.

Lord Thou wert long beforehand with my soul,

Always Thou lovedst me.

In his Reminiscences of Frederick Denison Maurice the late Mr. Haweis relates this incident: “I remember asking him one day, ‘How are we to know when we have got hold of God? because sometimes we seem to have got a real hold of Him, whilst at other times we can realize nothing.’ He looked at me with those eyes which so often seemed to be looking into an eternity beyond, whilst he said in his deep and tremulously earnest voice, ‘You have not got hold of God, but He has got hold of you.’ ”

Niagara stopped once! Owing to an ice dam thrown across the river the waters failed, the rainbow melted, the vast music was hushed. But there has been no moment in which the love of God has failed toward the rational universe, when its eternal music has been broken, or the rainbow has ceased to span the throne. There never will be such a moment. The crystal tide flows richly, and flows for ever.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson]

Let me no more my comfort draw

From my frail hold of Thee;

In this alone rejoice with awe,—

Thy mighty grasp of me.

Thy purpose of eternal good

Let me but surely know;

On this I’ll lean, let changing mood

And feeling come and go:

Glad when Thy sunshine fills my soul,

Nor lorn when clouds o’ercast,

Since Thou within Thy sure control

Of love dost hold me fast.

2. But the love of God to us carries with it our love to God. Without a response to God’s love how can we be persuaded of it? As God’s love to us is rich and everlasting, surviving all variations of time and circumstance, we will respond to His love with a love as like His own as it is possible for the creature to give. Mutuality is of the essence of love. We have thinkers who recommend the substitution of nature for God. They assure us that when we properly know the universe we can regard it with awe and fear, with admiration and love. Nature is infinitely interesting, infinitely beautiful; there is food for contemplation which never runs short; it gives continually exquisite pleasure, and the arresting and absorbing spectacle, so fascinating by its variety, is at the same time overwhelming by its greatness and glory. But reciprocity is surely of the essence of love; and however we admire, love, and praise the creation, it cannot return our affection. We smile upon it, yet there is no answering flash; we extol it, but find no sympathetic response; appreciation passes into adoration, and still our worship is unrequited. We see the folly of falling in love with a statue, notwithstanding its beauty; and nature is that statue. “They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not; noses have they, but they smell not; neither speak they through their throat.” In nature-worship, as in all idol-worship, mutuality is not possible; all thought and feeling, confidence and sacrifice are on one side. But with God in Christ fellowship becomes a fact. He declares His love to the race most convincingly, and we love Him because He first loved us. He stretches forth His hand out of heaven, we clasp it; henceforth we are inseparable, no fortune or misfortune can unclench the grip. The love of the Eternal is one link of gold, our love to Him is another, and together they bind us to His throne for ever.

For though “The love of God is broader than

The measure of man’s mind,” yet all in vain

The broad sun shines apace for him who hath

No window to his house; and human love

Must make an eastern outlook for the soul

Ere it can see the dawn. He cannot dream

Of oceans who hath never seen a pool.1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 8.]

Cynics speak scornfully of love; yet we may remember that it is the sublime element in our nature which most clearly reflects the Divine and Eternal. It sets at naught all the categories of time and sense, and identifies us with the infinite and timeless. It is indifferent to environment. It does not rise and fall with the fortune of the beloved, as the quicksilver in the glass responds to the weather; it is delightfully unconscious of secular vicissitude. It is unaffected by distance:

Mountains rise and oceans roll

To sever us in vain.

Duration does not weaken it. On receipt of his mother’s portrait Cowper wrote: “It is fifty-two years since I saw her last, but I have never ceased to love her.” Fifty-two centuries would not have chilled his affection. Death does not quench love. In Pompeii they showed me the bone of a human finger with the ring still upon it: fine symbol of the immortality of love and loyalty!

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

ii. In Christ Jesus

“Which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

1. St. Paul does not find the proof of God’s love and the justification of ours in nature, history, or life. The love of God in creation is in eclipse, or at least in partial eclipse; and if we are to construe the Divine character from the facts of nature, we must hesitate and fear. The light is not clear, and thinkers are sorely puzzled. Here, then, comes in the mission of the Christian Church—to affirm the love of God in Christ Jesus to all mankind. The justification of an absolute confidence in God’s unfailing love is found not in the sphere of nature, but in the sphere of redemption. The austere science of our day has put entirely out of court the rosy philosophy of the old deism. It annihilates sentiment; it will have none of it. If men are now to admire, reverence, and love God, they must find another basis than nature for their worship. There is none other except redemption; more than ever is the world shut up to that glorious fact. It is enough. Here the eternal love blazes out with irresistible demonstration. We cannot deny it, we cannot doubt it. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.” “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us.”

To-day two great schools of scientists seriously differ in their interpretation of the world. One holds that nature knows only force, selfishness, and violence; whilst the other, recognizing the large play of egotism and violence in the evolution of things, discerns that sympathy and sacrifice are prominent facts of the physical universe; the first denies love, the second acknowledges it. The contention between the philosophers will go on interminably, for really they are occupied with the diverse aspects of a paradoxical world, the moral of their controversy being that love is not absent in the creation, but revealed only partially, faintly, fitfully. In many creatures the evidences of love are conspicuous, in others there seems a denial of it. The delightful element is unmistakable in doves, butterflies, nightingales, and a thousand more lovely things; it is painfully lacking in hawks, sharks, crocodiles, rattlesnakes, and microbes. But men do not argue at noon whether the sun shines or not; and in the presence of Calvary there is an end of all strife touching the nature of God and the design of His government. Naturalism may doubt God’s love, may deny it, but at the Cross we no longer guess and fear. He who died for us loves us, whatever enigmas may mock. We see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ—the face marred more than any man’s. What shall separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord?1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

What is it to the circling hours,

The life they take or bring?

What is it to the winds and showers?

They know not anything.

But somehow, ere I am aware,

There comes a hush and thrill,

For all the sunshine and the air

A Presence seems to fill;

And from the sudden-opening sky,

A low Voice seems to say,

“I am the Resurrection, I

The Life, the Truth, the Way.

This Nature, which you idly blame,

Is but the robe I wear;

From Me the human spirit came,

And all its griefs I bear.

The smile whose light thou canst not see,

The grace that left thy side,

Though vanished from the earth, with Me

For ever they abide.”

With Him I cannot be at strife;

Then will I kneel and say,

“In love He gave me that sweet life,

In love He took away.

And love’s unfailing life, in Him,

Outlasts this arching sky;

For worlds may waste and suns grow dim,

But love can never die.”

2. God’s love is illimitable, all-pervasive, eternal; yes, but it is a love which has a channel and a course; love which has a method and a process by which it pours itself over the world. It is not, as some representations would make it, a vague, half-nebulous light diffused through space as in a chaotic, half-made universe; but all is gathered in that great Light which rules the day—even in Him who said: “I am the Light of the World.” In Christ the love of God is all centred and embodied, that it may be imparted to all sinful and hungry hearts, even as burning coals are gathered on a hearth that they may give warmth to all who are in the house.

The love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord is the heart of the Christian Gospel. It was what won the world at the beginning to the Christian obedience, and it is what holds the world now and will hold it as long as there are sins to be forgiven and hearts hungering for reconciliation with God. It is independent of much knowledge which may be discredited, and of much opinion which may become a fashion of the past. Whatever else which passes for Christianity and is supposed in some way to uphold it may decrease and disappear, this will increase and rise with purer and greater brightness upon the world. Every one of our intellectual conceptions of the mystery of the Godhead, of the Incarnation and the Atonement, may undergo a change, but the love which spoke, and acted, and lived in Jesus Christ will always touch the human heart with the deepest conviction and assurance of the love of God, and be the revelation and symbol of the Divine disposition towards the children of men.

Ideas and ideals do not manifest the love of God to men—only what God has done shows that.1 [Note: Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 137.]

3. If we would know God and love Him, we must find Him in Christ, in that Perfect Man—so strong and yet so gentle, so true, yet so tender—who moves before us in the Gospels. Is it difficult to love Him? It is not difficult to admire and praise Him. There is hardly a man in Christendom who does not do that. Even those who reject His claim to be one with the Father, even those who hold the Gospel to be but a late and imperfect tradition overlaid with many incredible fables, even those whose keen eyes detect flaws in His character and teaching—even these admit that no man ever lived or spake like Him, that He is beyond all rivalry, the wisest and best of the sons of men. It is easy, then, to admire and praise Christ; but to love Him is not so easy; for that takes faith.

“God so loved the world”—not merely so much, but in such a fashion—“that”—that what? Many people would leap at once from the first to the last clause of the verse, and regard eternal life for all and sundry as the only adequate expression of the universal love of God. Not so does Christ speak. Between I that universal love and its ultimate purpose and desire for every man He inserts two conditions, one on God’s part, one on man’s God’s love reaches its end, namely, the bestowal of eternal life, by means of a Divine act and a human response. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” So all the universal love of God for you and me and for all our brethren is “in Christ Jesus our Lord,” and faith in Him unites us to it by bonds which no foe can break, no shock of change can snap, no time can rot, no distance can stretch to breaking.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

4. As we look at the love of God in Christ what do we find to be its most striking characteristics?

(1) It was a universal love, including all, even the most unworthy, in its embrace. It was not arrested by the prejudices of His time, nor did it even acknowledge their presence. It was not obsequious to the Pharisees, and cold or suspicious to the publicans. None of the numerous parties which were then struggling for ascendancy in Judea established the slightest preference to His regard. None could allege that by His partiality for others He displayed a proportionate indifference to them. Even that deep and almost impassable gulf between Gentile and Jew closed up before Him. In Him love placed itself at the disposal of every man without being deterred even by his sin. Indeed, the greater the sin the more earnestly it strove for a hearing. But its purpose was always the same—to save us from what it knew to be our deadliest foe, and to win us to the cause of holiness and truth. And it never despaired even of the most abandoned, or allowed him to go on to destruction because it was impotent to help him.

(2) Another characteristic of the love of God in Christ is that it issued in the most perfect act of self-sacrifice. It is often said that love sets no limits to itself, and this is true. It is the complete negation of selfishness. When it works it imposes no restraints upon its efforts, for their cessation would mean its own cessation also. When it forgives it forgives till seventy times seven, and then starts afresh. When it suffers there is no point at which it stops and refuses to go further, for that would be to acknowledge its own exhaustion. Now, in Christ Jesus we see this love as it never had been seen on earth before. In Him it shrank from no labour or humiliation. It carried Him from the cradle to the cross without ever pausing or hesitating on the way. He left nothing undone which might accomplish its purpose, and when the supreme act of obedience was demanded He did not shrink. “The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” Among His last words was a prayer for His murderers: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” So “he loved us and gave himself for us.” “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

(3) Another characteristic of the love of God in Christ is that it invests us with all it has. It not only spares nothing in effecting our salvation from sin, but it enriches us with its whole possession. It is too frequently conceived as having exhausted itself in the great act of atonement, so that no surplus survives for further use, or as though it had then completed its work and remains henceforth in a state of quiescence. But Christ gave Himself for us that He might be able to give Himself to us—always the last ambition of love, short of which it never rests. Hence He prayed for His disciples: that the love wherewith His Father loved Him might be in them, and He in them. And St. Paul prays that our knowledge of the love of Christ may lead to our being “filled with all the fulness of God.”

(4) And, lastly, it follows from all this that the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord is a love which clings inseparably to its object. Whoever gives himself wholly to another with a perfect knowledge and understanding of what he is, can have no conceivable reason for finally renouncing him. Nothing in his own nature can urge him to do so, for this is precluded by the very fact of his self-surrender; and nothing in the person for whom that surrender has been made, for that has already been considered and overcome. So it is with the love of Christ. If it had stopped at any point short of a complete sacrifice of Himself, then it might, so to speak, have retraced its steps. It would not have been irretrievably committed. But Christ has committed Himself. He is pledged to go the whole length which our complete salvation requires. So that there can be nothing in Him which at any moment can move Him to let us go. He has left Himself no place of repentance.

Passing the prison of one of our large cities early in the morning, I once saw what seemed to be a mother in a humble cart from a distant village, waiting at the entrance, for the release, perhaps of her son, that day from his term of bondage. There were the vacant seat beside her, the little basket of dainty food, change of outer garments, and her tearful, eager glances at the door, all telling, very affectingly, to how much love the prisoner was about to be liberated, and how readily he would be transported to his far-off home. There was only a step for him from exile and shame to the parent’s resources, the parent’s dwelling, the parent’s arms, the parent’s joy—all these anxiously waiting for the moment of his discharge.1 [Note: Charles New.]

A poor lad once, and a lad so trim—

A poor lad once, and a lad so trim,

Gave his love to her that loved not him.

“And,” says she, “fetch me to-night, you rogue,

Your mother’s heart to feed my dog!”

To his mother’s house went that young man—

To his mother’s house went that young man,

Killed her, and took the heart and ran,

And as he was running, look you, he fell—

And as he was running, look you, he fell.

And the heart rolled on the ground as well.

And the lad as the heart was a-rolling heard—

And the lad as the heart was a-rolling heard

That the heart was speaking, and this was the word:

The heart was weeping and crying so small—

The heart was weeping and crying so small,

“Are you hurt, my child, are you hurt at all?”2 [Note: Jean Richepin, A Mother’s Heart.]

II

Powers that are Powerless

“Who” or “What,” demands the Apostle, “shall separate us from the love of Christ?” And in his reply he gives us two catalogues of the various powers and influences which we fear as likely to weaken or to alienate our love from Him in whose love we live. In his first catalogue he enumerates “tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, sword”; in his second catalogue he enumerates “death, life, angels, principalities, powers, things present and things to come, height and depth.” As we follow and consider his words, the first catalogue presents no difficulty to our thoughts; we feel, we acknowledge, that the rigours of pain, want, hunger, danger have often strangled love; we forbode that, were we long exposed to them, our love might die. But the second catalogue is more difficult. We ask, for instance, How should “height” or “depth”; or, again, How should “angels” separate us from the love of Christ? And it is not until we perceive that St. Paul is indulging in one of those passionate and rhetorical outbursts which are characteristic of his style that his words shoot into light. But then, when we seize this clue and follow it, we understand that, in the rapture and exaltation of his spirit, he defies all heaven and earth to extinguish, or even to lessen, his love for Christ, or Christ’s love for him; the very “angels and principalities” of heaven, supposing them capable of the endeavour, could not shake him from his rest; nor all the “powers” of hell—no vicissitudes of time, whether “present” or “to come”; nor aught within the bounds, the “heights and depths,” of space. Strong in the love of Christ, he is more than conqueror over them all.

Observe the difference in order between the Authorized and Revised Versions. There is overwhelming manuscript authority for placing “powers” after “things to come.” We naturally expect them to be associated with “principalities,” as in 1 Corinthians 15:24; Ephesians 1:21. It is possible that in one of the earliest copies the word may have been accidentally omitted, and then added in the margin and reinserted at the wrong place. But it is perhaps more probable that in the rush of impassioned thought St. Paul inserts the words as they come, and that thus “nor powers” may be slightly belated. When not critically controlled, the order of association is a very subtle thing.1 [Note: Sanday and Headlam, Romans, 223.]

The possible enemies may be taken in four groups—(1) those of our own Experience, gathered under the two comprehensive words death and life; (2) those of the world of Spirits, called angels, principalities, powers; (3) those of Time, “things present and things to come”; and (4) those of Space, “nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation.”

i. Our own Experience

“Neither death, nor life.”

1. Death! What a crude fact it is, driving its iron wedge into the limits of this strange, mysterious life of ours; and the whole question of immortality comes quivering up into consciousness with such a sentence as this. Death, that seems to end things, but leaves us so far apart from our beloved! Shall death end thought also, and shall the dream that has been so fair—that beyond the world there lived a Heart that cared for us—vanish into thick darkness and leave us utterly alone? Death shall not separate us from the love of God; death is but a moment in life, an incident in a soul’s career; and if God has loved us once He will love us for evermore, and on beyond the boundaries of the world God’s love waits to be gracious. Death need make no man afraid who has believed in the love of God.

That men fear death, as likely to separate them from the love of God, to impair their union with Him, or, perchance, to put them beyond His reach, is beyond a doubt. There is nothing that most men fear so much as death; nothing, alas, that most Christians fear so much. We have an instinctive and natural dread of it, which even faith finds it hard to conquer, and to which our imperfect faith often lends an additional force. It is not only the darkness and decay of the tomb that we dread; it is also the judgment which lies beyond the tomb. It is not only that we are loth to part with those whom we love; we also fear, lest, in the pangs of death, we should relax the grasp of faith. And, hence, in the Service for the Dead, we use a prayer than which few are more pathetic: “O Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from Thee.” A most pathetic, and yet, as we often mean it, a most un-Christian prayer! For what we too commonly imply by it is that if, amid the pangs of dissolution and the darkness of death, we should cease to see God by faith and to put our trust in Him, He will forsake us; that if, oppressed by mortal weakness, we loosen our hold upon Him, He will let us fall; that at the very crisis, and in the very circumstance, in which an earthly friend would strengthen his comforting grasp on us, our heavenly Friend will relax His grasp and let us drop into the darkness which waits to devour us up Whereas Christ has taught us that God’s help is nearest when we most need His help, that He perfects His strength in our weakness, that our redemption from all evil depends, not on our fluctuating sense of His Presence, or on our imperfect love for Him, but on His being with us although we know it not, and His eternal unbounded love for us.1 [Note: Samuel Cox.]

2. It is a great thing to be persuaded that this power we call death, which has been so feared and fought against, cannot sever the ties which unite us to God. It seems to separate the children of men from so much. Every day we see it in its own ancient and awful way invading human homes, breaking up circles of friendship, and laying its touch upon the dearest attachments. But let us not make too much of the isolating power of death even from this point of view. There is a love between soul and soul which death cannot destroy—a love that loves on though the outward presence has vanished, and is often conscious of even a closer communion than when each could only half express itself through the poor medium of the body. Death means invisibility, but not the loss or destruction of love; not separation, perhaps not even distance. And how much more must it be true of God that death cannot divide us from Him, cannot pluck us out of His hands, cannot crush us out of existence? To be loved by God is to be preserved and cherished. We are His children, therefore we must live on with Him and be cared for by Him.

To God death and the hereafter are not the mysteries and barriers they are to us. Those who die to us live to Him. They are in His care wherever they are. They have not passed from His sight because they have passed from our sight—gone beyond the range of our eye and ear. The mere passage from the seen to the unseen cannot touch His influence, His love to them, His power to help them and to hold communion with them. Death can have no manner of dominion over the Love that gave us their love, and gave it, not that it might perish, but for everlasting life.2 [Note: J. Hunter.]

I thought the road would be hard and bare,

But lo! flowers,

Springing flowers,

Bright flowers blossoming everywhere!

The night, I feared, would be dark and drear,

But lo! stars,

Golden stars,

Glorious, glowing stars are here!

And my shrinking heart, set free from dread,

Sees Love

(Lo! it is Love.)

God’s love crowning with Death my head!1 [Note: Margaret Blaikie, Songs by the Way, 56.]

It happened in 1901—if I may introduce a personal illustration—that my only child fell ill, and for a time, as it seemed, dangerously ill. One day she fell into a troubled sleep, in which it was evident that her dreams were disquiet. She tossed about and cried aloud. Her mother bent over her, touched her, and she awoke. The eyes of the little sufferer opened. She looked up at her mother’s face, and oh! what a change passed over her own; and she said, “Oh, mother dear, I have been dreaming such dreadful things. I dreamt that I was far away in a dark place, and that I called and called and you could not hear, and did not answer. And then you touched me, and I opened my eyes, and there you were.” The language of the child reminded me of the language of a saint, one of the greatest that ever lived, in a prayer addressed to the King of kings and Lord of lords: “We sleep, o our Father, on Thy tender and paternal bosom, and in our sleep we sometimes dream that all is wrong, only to wake and find that all is right.”2 [Note: R. J. Campbell.]

The truest and tenderest earthly love says to its beloved, what is said on Charles Kingsley’s tombstone in Eversley Churchyard: Amavimus, amamus, amabimus.

Even for the dead I will not bind

My soul to grief; death cannot long divide,

For is it not as if the rose that climbed

My garden-wall had bloomed the other side?

3. Nor life.—We know death—that black cloud which is ever travelling towards us across the waste and will presently touch us with its cold shadow. St. Paul bids it come. Ay, and life too. His defiance rises from death to life; for life, did we but realize it, is a worse enemy than death—more perilous, more mysterious, more awful.

Many there be that seek Thy face

To meet the hour of parting breath;

But ’tis for life I need Thy grace:

Life is more solemn still than death.

What dread chances it holds! what appalling chances of disaster, of suffering, of shame! Who can forecast what may be on the morrow? Perhaps poverty, or disease, or insanity, or—worse than all—disgrace. Many a man has succumbed to a sudden temptation, and, in one passionate moment, has defamed the honour of his blameless years. Surely life is more terrible than death, and it is nothing less than a deliverance and a triumph when a wayfarer arrives at his journey’s end and is laid to rest without reproach.

Out of the sleep of earth, with visions rife

I woke in death’s clear morning, full of life:

And said to God, whose smile made all things bright,

“That was an awful dream I had last night.”

4. Not a few honest and devout souls in these days are compelled by their experience to interpret “life” in our text as including intellectual perplexities and doubts, suspensions of judgment on important matters of faith, uncertainties, even positive disbelief in things once surely believed among us. Growing knowledge in many directions, physical discovery, the advance of philosophical thought, the new study of comparative religion, the more purely critical study and interpretation of our sacred religious literature—these and other causes are operating to unsettle and change traditional ways of thinking about many things and to make ancient symbols fade and fail. Let us not be anxious or fearful. The mind must obey its laws; and to feel and obey the sacred claims of truth is to love God with the mind. The truth of things is also the thought of God in things.

(1) Realizing the love of God in Jesus Christ, we more than triumph over all the mystery of life. The natural tendency of the painful things of human life is to induce a depressed mood, to render us sceptical towards the greatest truths. Many are not affected by the dark aspects of nature and history: they give these no place in their thought; they never brood over them, wondering what they mean; thoughtless and shallow, they eat and drink and sleep. It is very different with others. They cannot rest because of the suffering and sorrow of the world, and the natural action of such brooding is to work havoc in the soul. Reason fails to solve the cruel problems; then scepticism sets in, and despair by scepticism. But so long as I can say “He loved me and gave himself for me,” I am immune from the baneful power of mystery and intellectual bewilderment: the darkness emphasized by science and felt by us all cannot blind and destroy me. He who has saved me from death in His own death will one day clear up these painful puzzles; they are incidental and temporary. Love in the heart means light in the eye. Believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things, I keep my hold on the eternal truths which ensure eternal life.

In the sunless deeps are animals with eyes of extraordinary size. And the marvellous thing is that these particular creatures have in a high degree the power of manufacturing their own light, and the economizing of the delicate phosphorescence has developed in them eyes of remarkable magnitude and power. With their self-created luminousness these abyssal fish withstand the blackness of their environment, and indirectly the darkness has secured for them eyes far more splendid than those of their shallow-water relatives. Thus is it in the abyss in which we live, and which proves to so many a gulf of dark despair. There are thousands of noble men and women with splendid eyes. They see God as clearly as any angel in heaven can see Him; they behold His government over them causing all things to work together for their good; they view the golden consummation to which the universe tends. The very darkness that presses upon them has taught them the secret of making light in themselves, and it has developed in them a power of vision that pierces to the heart of things.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

What, then, is to be done in this rickety, crazy world, so mad, so tumultuous, so vexatious in its moral mysteries? This brings us right away to Bethlehem, to Calvary, to the Christ. I grow in the conviction that nothing can reconcile all mysteries and contradictions, and illuminate all perplexing darkness, but the light which streams from the priesthood of Him whom I worship as God the Son. He keeps the world alive; inquire more deeply into that suggestion, and find how large and true it is. Christ is the life of the world and the light of the world, and though He be statistically outnumbered, He is influentially supreme.1 [Note: Joseph Parker, Well Begun, 169.]

O Thou, in all Thy might so far,

In all Thy love so near,

Beyond the range of sun and star,

And yet beside us here,—

What heart can comprehend Thy name,

Or, searching, find Thee out,

Who art within, a quickening Flame,

A Presence round about?

Yet though I know Thee but in part,

I ask not, Lord, for more;

Enough for me to know Thou art,

To love Thee and adore.

O sweeter than aught else besides,

The tender mystery

That like a veil of shadow hides

The Light I may not see!

And dearer than all things I know

Is childlike faith to me,

That makes the darkest way I go

An open path to Thee.2 [Note: Frederick Lucian Hosmer.]

(2) In the consciousness of the Divine love we more than triumph over all the suffering of life. The sorrow of life does not harm. Conquerors are often much the worse for the battle. A victorious fleet is a shattered fleet, often scarcely able to find a spar on which to hang the flag of victory; a triumphant army is a stricken host that moves spectators to tears; a conquering athlete is a ghastly sight. But the Apostle intimates that this stern fight unto death shall inflict upon us no serious and abiding wound. If we could for a moment transcend carnal limits and peep into glory, we should see that our glorified ancestry are not one whit the worse for their life of hardship and martyrdom, They suffered great tribulation, but they have survived all without a scar.

Not long ago I visited a flower-show, and, following the crowd, found myself amid a delightful host of orchids. It is needless to say what wonderful shapes and colours were displayed; masters of language need the wealth of poetry to describe the grace and magnificence which they unfold; they epitomize the perfection of the world. They are strangely privileged plants, gorgeous children of the sun, and they show what can be done under blue skies in depths of safety, in balmy air, with brilliant light. But before leaving the exhibition I wandered into another department, where the Alpine plants were being exhibited. Not expecting much this time, I was surprised and delighted by triumphs of form and colour. They did not suffer in comparison with the tropical blooms. Delicate, curiously beautiful, inexpressibly elegant, vivid in colour, of manifold dyes, perfumed with subtle scents of sweetness, they charmed and dazzled eyes that had just been satiated by the butterfly colours of Eastern beauties. And the Alpine gems owed all that they were to what they had suffered. Their sparkle is the gleam of the ice-age; their whiteness that of the eternal snows on whose border they sprang; they caught their royal blue whilst dizzy peaks thrust them into the awful sky; they are so firm because the rock on which they grew has got into them; they are so sensitive because they trembled so long on the precipice. They are the children of night and winter, the nurslings of blizzards; cataracts, glaciers, and avalanches perfected their beauty. In a vast, savage, elemental war they won the glory which makes them worthy to stand by the picked blooms painted by all the art of perpetual summer. Thus the sanctified sternness of human life blossoms in great, pure, beautiful souls which adorn heaven itself.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

Thou hast visited me with Thy storms,

And the vials of Thy sore displeasure

Thou hast poured on my head, like a bitter draught

Poured forth without stint or measure;

Thou hast bruised me as flax is bruised;

Made me clay in the potter’s wheel;

Thou has hardened Thy face like steel,

And cast down my soul to the ground;

Burnt my life in the furnace of fire, like dross,

And left me in prison where souls are bound:

Yet my gain is more than my loss.

What if Thou hadst led my soul

To the pastures where dull souls feed;

And set my steps in smooth paths, far away

From the rocks where men struggle and bleed;

Penned me in low, fat plains,

Where the air is as still as death,

And Thy great winds are sunk to a breath,

And Thy torrents a crawling stream,

And the thick steam of wealth goes up day and night,

Till Thy sun gives a veiled light,

And heaven shows like a vanished dream!

What if Thou hadst set my feet

With the rich in a gilded room;

And made me to sit where the scorners sit,

Scoffing at death and doom!

What if I had hardened my heart

With dark counsels line upon line;

And blunted my soul with meat and with wine,

Till my ears had grown deaf to the bitter cry

Of the halt and the weak and the impotent;

Nor hearkened, lapt in a dull content,

To the groanings of those who die!

My being had waxed dull and dead

With the lusts of a gross desire;

But now Thou hast purged me throughly, and burnt

My shame with a living fire.

So burn me, and purge my will

Till no vestige of self remain,

And I stand out renewed without spot or stain.

Then let Thy flaming angel at last

Smite from me all that has been before;

And sink me, freed from the load of the past,

In Thy dark depths evermore.1 [Note: Sir Lewis Morris, From the Desert.]

ii. The World of Spirits

“Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers.”

“Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers;” this is a Jewish phrase for the spiritual hierarchy. The modern equivalent is the unseen forces which encompass us, those mysterious powers and operations which act upon our lives, and compel them to unthought-of issues. They lie without us, mysterious, incalculable, uncontrollable, invading us unexpectedly, shaping our experience, and determining our destiny. We never know what they will be doing with us.

This second set of enemies is still more mysterious and strong. The experiences of this world shall not separate us, but what is there beyond this world? What is that unseen which lingers near us and sometimes almost breaks through into sight—angels, principalities, and powers? There have been different views of what this means.

(1) It is important, says Maclaren, to observe that this expression, when used without any qualifying adjective, seems uniformly to mean good angels, the hierarchy of blessed spirits before the throne. So that there is no reference to “spiritual wickedness in high places” striving to draw men away from God. The supposition which the Apostle makes is, indeed, an impossible one—that these ministering spirits, who are sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation, should so forget their mission and contradict their nature as to seek to bar us out from the love which it is their chiefest joy to bring to us. St. Paul knows it to be an impossible supposition, and its very impossibility gives energy to his conclusion, just as when in the same fashion he makes the other equally impossible supposition about an angel from heaven preaching another gospel than that which he had preached to them.

(2) On the other hand, Kelman says: If we study the thought of St. Paul’s day we shall find a very orderly and detailed system of demonology, in which they conceived a brood of evil spirits who tempt the souls of men. There are those who still hold that view, and there are those who take other views of such matters. You may call it that, or you may call it nerves, or you may call it any name you please; the difficulty is not in what you call it, but in what you find it to be in your daily experience. And whatever may be the ultimate explanation of these things, this remains true, that some day we waken with our whole heart set upon doing the will of God and pleasing Him, and before the day is half-done some power from without or from within in this strange mechanism of body and spirit in which we live, some power like a great evil hand, has laid hold upon our life and broken it across, and everything has gone wrong with us, and we. try in vain to right it. The day is handed over to the powers, of darkness. And if there is anything in our experience which makes it difficult to remember and believe in the love of God, it is just such a thing as this. In any sort of bitterness, so long as it be a smooth-flowing experience, we can continue to believe; but when this sort of thing happens, God has gone from heaven, and all things are left the sport of evil power. But we are in His universe, and these are but the hounds of God that He holds in the leash in His hand and will not let too far upon the souls He loves. That also is part of the great love of God, and His love has not been defeated by angels, or principalities, or powers. He loves us still through the worst day of it all.

Lord, whomsoever Thou shalt send to me,

Let that same be

Mine Angel predilect;

Veiled or unveiled, benignant or austere,

Aloof or near;

Thine, therefore mine, elect.

So may my soul nurse patience day by day,

Watch on and pray

Obedient and at peace;

Living a lonely life in hope, in faith;

Loving till death,

When life, not love, shall cease.

… Lo, thou mine Angel with transfigured face

Brimful of grace,

Brimful of love for me!

Did I misdoubt thee all that weary while,

Thee with a smile

For me as I for thee?1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

iii. Time

“Nor things present, nor things to come.”

1. “Nor things present, nor things to come” is the Apostle’s next class of powers impotent to disunite us from the love of God. The rhythmical arrangement of the text deserves to be noticed, not only as bearing on its music and rhetorical flow, but as affecting its force. We have first a pair of opposites, and then a triplet: “death, nor life”; “angels, nor principalities, nor powers.” We I have again a pair of opposites: “things present, nor things to come”; again followed by a triplet: “height, nor depth, nor any other creature.” The effect of this is to divide the whole into two, and to throw the first and second classes more closely together, as also the third and fourth. Time and Space, these two mysterious ideas, which work so fatally on all human love, are powerless here.

2. Men believe in the gay dawning of youth, and in the brilliant days when all things are fair, and the longest day is never too long, nor the hardest work too hard, and all things appear in the charm of life in which we began it. But how much disillusion comes, and the grey skies succeed the blue, and hopes do not fulfil themselves, and life is not what it seemed to promise! Then shall we have to give the venture up at the last, clinging to spar after spar of our wrecked ship, until at last it is altogether water-logged and sinks, and we are like to perish. When will the day come that the love of God also will die out, and we shall be left loveless in this ghastly universe? That day will never come.

Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race,

Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,

Whose speed is but the heavy Plummet’s pace;

And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,

Which is no more than what is false and vain,

And merely mortal dross;

So little is our loss,

So little is thy gain.

For when as each thing bad thou hast entomb’d,

And last of all, thy greedy self consumed,

Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss

With an individual kiss;

And Joy shall overtake us as a flood:

When every thing that is sincerely good

And perfectly divine,

With Truth, and Peace, and Love, shall ever shine

About the supreme Throne

Of Him, t’whose happy-making sight alone,

When once our heav’nly-guided soul shall climb,

Then, all this Earthy grossness quit,

Attir’d with Stars, we shall for ever sit,

Triumphing over Death and Chance, and thee O Time.1 [Note: Milton.]

The great Revelation of God, on which the whole of Judaism was built, was that made to Moses of the name “I AM THAT I AM.” And parallel to the verbal revelation was that symbol of the Bush, burning and unconsumed, which is so often misunderstood. It appears wholly contrary to the usage of Scriptural visions, which are ever wont to express in material form the same truth which accompanies them in words, that the meaning of that vision should be, as it is frequently taken as being, the continuance of Israel, unharmed by the fiery furnace of persecution. Not the continuance of Israel, but the eternity of Israel’s God is the teaching of that flaming wonder. The Burning Bush and the Name of the Lord proclaimed the same great truth of self-derived, self-determined, timeless, undecaying Being. And what better symbol than the bush burning, and yet not burning out, could be found of that God in whose life there is no tendency to death, whose work digs no pit of weariness into which it falls, who gives and is none the poorer, who fears no exhaustion in His spending, no extinction in His continual shining? And this eternity of Being is no mere metaphysical abstraction. It is eternity of love, for God is love. That great stream, the pouring out of His own very inmost Being, knows no pause; nor does the deep fountain from which it flows ever sink one hair’s-breadth in its pure basin.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

iv. Space

“Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature.”

1. While our Revisers had the courage of their scholarship in dealing with Romans 8:19-21, that courage seems to have failed them in dealing with this 39th verse, where the same Greek word is used, and where therefore it should, by their own rule, be rendered by the same English word. Instead of putting “nor any other creation” into the text, they have banished the word “creation” into the margin, and retained the word “creature” in the text, although every one must admit that between a single creature and a whole creation there is a considerable, even an enormous, difference.

There may yet, says the Apostle, be some fresh transformations. I know not what new environment may yet confront me, what strange world, what undreamed-of surroundings, what play of forces more dread and solemn than I have hitherto experienced; but I fear not even that. For there is nothing here, nothing there, nothing anywhere about which I need to fret or trouble; because, wherever I may be and whatever may happen, I shall have the love of God for my comrade and my portion.

2. As the former clause proclaimed the powerlessness of Time, so this proclaims the powerlessness of that other great mystery of creatural life which we call Space. Height or depth, it matters not. That diffusive love diffuses itself equally in all directions. Up or down, it is all the same. The distance from the centre is equal to zenith or to nadir. Here we have the same process applied to that idea of Omnipresence as was applied in the former clause to the idea of Eternity. That thought, so hard to grasp with vividness, and not altogether a glad one to a sinful soul, is all softened and glorified, as some solemn Alpine cliff of bare rock is when the tender morning light glows on it, when it is thought of as the Omnipresence of Love. “Thou God seest me” may be a stern word, if the God who sees be but a mighty Maker or a righteous Judge. As reasonably might we expect a prisoner in his solitary cell to be glad when he thinks that the jailer’s eye is on him from some unseen spy-hole in the wall as expect any thought of God but one to make a man read that grand 139th Psalm with joy: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.” So may a man say shudderingly to himself, and tremble as he asks in vain, “Whither shall I flee from thy presence?” But how different it all is when we can cast over the marble whiteness of that solemn thought the warm hue of life, and change the form of our words into this of our text: “Nor height, nor depth, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”

Love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,

Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,

The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,

Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it.

And I shall behold Thee, face to face,

O God, and in Thy light retrace

How in all I loved here, still wast Thou!

Whom pressing to, then, as I fain would now,

I shall find as able to satiate

The love, Thy gift, as my spirit’s wonder

Thou art able to quicken and sublimate

With this sky of Thine, that I now walk under,

And glory in Thee for, as I gaze

Thus, thus! Oh, let men keep their ways

Of seeking Thee in a narrow shrine—

Be this my way! And this is mine!1 [Note: Browning, Christmas Eve.]

III

A Persuasion that Prevails

“I am persuaded.”

1. “I am persuaded,” says the Apostle, and this is one of his great phrases. Wherever it occurs, it expresses, not merely an assured faith, a strong conviction, but a faith in something which is not obvious or indisputable, and a conviction which has been reached after many a doubt and many a struggle, after much questioning and long groping in the darkness. The Apostle has had to feel his way through the tangle out into the open. And thus, when he says “I am persuaded,” he is proclaiming a conviction which has satisfied his deepest need.

The assurance came to him, as it comes to every man who makes the glad discovery, out of his experience. He looked back along the road which he had travelled blindly, with bleeding feet and a troubled heart, and he saw that an unseen hand had been guiding him and shaping his lot and making all things work together for his good. And thus he was “persuaded.” This is the surest, if indeed it is not the only, evidence of God. It is not the teleological or ontological argument that has compelled my faith. No, it is this—that I have found God in my life, and have seen there the operation of His grace and goodness, His wisdom and strength. I recognize, as I look back, that, when I thought I was wandering alone in the darkness, He was leading me all the time, and the experiences which were so painful and distressing at the moment have proved the most precious of all and have brought me enlargement and enrichment.

2. It is a great thing to be able to use such words as these with regard to the supreme verities. It is like having one’s house built upon a rock instead of upon the shifting sand. It is like having one’s course clearly marked upon the chart, and one’s rudder and compass in perfect order, as compared with the man who has neither chart nor compass, and simply drifts. This explains why, on the scientific side of life, men in this age are so strong, and on the religious side so weak; they are sure of their science; they are not sure, or at least not so sure, of their religion. Agnostics, that is what so many call themselves to-day—not atheists, not infidels. Few say there is no God. What they say is, “We do not know”; and the uncertainty paralyses religious, action. “I am persuaded,” wrote the Apostle, and, being persuaded himself, he has persuaded millions more; for your convinced men, the men certain of their ground, the men who can ring out, “It is so,” “I know,” “I do verily believe”—these are the strong men, the men who do most work, the men of widest, most potent influence. For the masses are always attracted by confidence, and will embrace the wildest superstition, embark on the most Quixotic enterprise, if one who has absolute faith in his cause leads the way; while what is in itself an unquestionable truth will hardly touch them if it is advanced with hesitancy or faltering. It is the men who, like St. Paul, can say, “I am persuaded,” “I know whom I have believed,” or, like Luther, “Ich kann nicht anders,” “I cannot do otherwise,” that move the world; for if doubt is contagious, thank God faith is contagious too.

It is still the evident and immediate duty of many people living in Christian lands to set themselves at once to know God as He has been revealed to the world by Jesus Christ. To know Him is to have an untroubled and unlimited confidence in Him, and their want of confidence shows that they do not know Him. Right knowledge of God is everything for strength and peace. It is told of one of our Scottish martyrs, that, looking up to the hills of his native Nithsdale, he cried out, “I could pass through these mountains were they clothed in flame if I could only be sure that God loves me.”1 [Note: J. Hunter.]

One Sunday night, as I was preaching in my own place, I had finished the sermon, as I thought, with the declaration of the sufficiency of Christ. I had closed the sermon, and had passed down to the vestry, when a plain working man followed me in. He said, “Did you finish your sermon just now?” I said, “Yes, I think so; I meant to.” “I think,” he said, “there is something you did not say; you spoke about the forgiveness of sins, and the sufficiency of Christ, and the love of God in Redemption; but there is something else you did not say, and it is a part I never like to be left out.” I said, “What is it?” “Why,” he said, “years ago I was brought to Christ; and a terrible load I took to Him. I placed it down at the Cross, and I thought all was right. But the next morning my skies were grey. The next day I was beaten in the Valley of Humiliation fighting with Apollyon. He won. My temptation was too strong, I failed and I fell, I failed again, till everybody ceased to believe in me; and I ceased to believe in myself, and held myself in contempt. At last, one day, in desperation, I raised my hands to heaven and said, ‘Lord Jesus, I claim Thy promise, I claim Thy power, look at me to-night.’ ” The man, continuing, said, “For five years He has kept me as I am, and I am amongst the living to praise Him. Preach, I beseech you, next time you approach this subject, preach that Christ is able to save to the uttermost. The Saviour can battle with temptation, and make us sufficient, every time the assault comes, to win the victory for the glory of God.”1 [Note: R. J. Campbell.]

The motto of the order of knighthood called St. Patrick is “Quis separabit”: “Who shall separate?”

Yea, of this I am persuaded—

Neither Death, nor Life, nor Angels—

No, not the Celestial Hierarchy,

Not “they that excel in strength”—

Nor the present world, nor the world to come;

Nor the height of Heaven,

Nor the abyss of Hades,

Nor aught else in God’s creation,

Shall avail to sever us from the love of God,

The love incarnated in the Messiah, in Jesus,

Our Lord—ours!2 [Note: A. S. Way.]

An Inseparable Love

Literature

Burder (H. F.), Sermons, 462.

Campbell (D.), The Roll-Call of Faith, 11.

Cox (S.), Expository Essays, 189.

Cox (S.), Expositions, i. 91.

Garratt (S.), A Pastor’s Farewell, 194.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Mind of Christ in St. Paul. 47.

Hunter (J.), De Profundis Clamavi, 171.

Iverach (J.), The Other Side of Greatness, 170.

Kelman (J.), Ephemera Eternitatis, 319.

Maclaren (A.), The Secret of Power, 145.

Mills (B. F.), God’s World, 51.

Moinet (C.), The “Good Cheer” of Jesus Christ, 19.

New (C.), Sermons Preached in Hastings, 234.

Paget (F.), The Redemption of War, 65.

Parker (J.), Studies in Texts, i. 149.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 165.

Smith (D.), Man’s Need of God, 257.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xlii. (1896), No. 2492.

Temple (F.), Sermons in Rugby, i. 12.

Thomas (J.), Concerning the King, 217.

Watkinson (W. L.), The Supreme Conquest, 1.

Cambridge Review, i. No. 4 (Hessey).

Christian World Pulpit, lvii. 388 (Kelman).

Church Pulpit Year Book, iii. 153.

Churchman’s Pulpit: Easter Day and Season, vii. 332 (Temple).

Expositor, 1st Ser., iii. 119 (Cox).