The Sons of God—Their Blessings and Their Privileges

Next Part The Sons of God—Their Blessings and Their Privileges 2

"Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God– therefore the world knows us not, because it knew him not." 1 John 3:1

"How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him." 1 John 3:1

I think we may see four distinguishing features in our text–

First, the wondrous love of God– "Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us."

Secondly, the amazing blessings and privileges of God's people– "that we should be called the sons of God."

Thirdly, the gross ignorance of the world– "therefore the world knows us not."

Fourthly, the explanation of the mystery– because it knew him not."

I. The wondrous LOVE of God– "Behold, what manner of lovethe Father has bestowed upon us." Our text commences with a "Behold." Let us not pass by this; for is it not as if John would summon us to behold a wondrous sight? Is it not as if he would call up our sleeping graces and animate every faculty of our renewed mind, to gaze upon the stupendous miracle which he sets before our eyes? "Behold, what manner of love!" This call upon us to come and look seems to remind us of the various appearances of God in the Old Testament, when he suddenly and unexpectedly manifested himself as a God of love or power; as, for instance, when he appeared to Abraham in a vision of the night with those gracious words– "Fear not, Abram– I am your shield and exceeding great reward." (Gen. 15:1.) It may also remind us of the wondrous appearance of the Lord to Moses when he was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, in the desert, when "the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush;" and as he drew near to behold the marvelous sight, God spoke to him out of the burning bush– wondrous type of the ever-blazing Deity of our gracious Lord, and yet of his pure, unconsumed humanity in the most intimate union with it!

This call of "Behold" seems to remind us also of Ezekiel, when sitting "among the captives by the river of Chebar, when suddenly the heavens were opened and he saw visions of God." (Ezek. 1:1.) May it not also call to our mind the vision of Isaiah, when he saw "the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple?" (Isaiah. 6:1), or of Daniel, solitary and mourning by the river Hiddekel, when lifting up his eyes "he looked and beheld a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz?" (Dan. 10:5.) It may also serve to remind us of John himself when in the Isle of Patmos he heard a great voice, and turned and saw one like unto the Son of Man in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks. (Rev. 1:10, 13.) As all these appearances were unexpected displays of the Lord in his grace and in his glory, so when holy John says in our text "Behold," it is as if he would rouse up our sleeping graces and bid us behold with eyes of faith and affection a stupendous sight not less marvelous than these appearances of God in the days of old.

Now what is this stupendous sight which John bids us here behold? "What manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us." It is not merely what love, but what "manner" of love. Thus he would bid us contemplate the love of God under that particular form and in that peculiar manner in which God has revealed and made it known to the sons of men. In pursuance, then, of this godly counsel, I think we may contemplate this love under these three points of view–
1. In its nature.
2. In its manifestation.
3. And in its communication.

A. Look, then, first, at the love of God in its NATURE– what it is in itself, as a pure Fountain, distinct from its streams and effects; and I think we shall see certain peculiar features stamped upon it as such, enabling us to say, "Behold what manner of love."

1. First, it was self-originating. Love, if we have any to the Lord and to his people– is God's gift and grace. It does not dwell naturally in our hearts, but its source and spring are from above; but love in the bosom of God dwells in him as one of his glorious, underived perfections. It gushes, therefore, freely out of his bosom, as a river springs out of a mountainside, without any call from earth, without any invitation from man. Whence come three of our noblest rivers– the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Danube? All spring from the bosom of the same mighty Alps, a few leagues only from each other, whence they flow each in its own direction to gladden and fertilize every land to which they come. So the love of God to his people gushes forth from his own bosom unsought, unasked, undeserved, but carrying a blessing wherever it flows.

2. It was also eternal. No change can take place in the mind of God. No new plans, no fresh purposes, no unthought-of schemes can enter the mind of him who is One eternal NOW– the great self-existent I AM. His love, therefore, like himself, must be equally eternal. It had no beginning, as he had no beginning; and it will have no end, as he had no end. Well may we pause before so stupendous a sight, as Moses at the burning bush, and gather up every faculty of our soul to listen to the words with solemn admiration which he spoke by his prophet– "The Lord has appeared of old unto me, saying, Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love– therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn you." (Jer. 31:3.) If, then, you are asked, Why is God's love eternal? all you can answer is, Because it is the love of God who is eternal. And if you are farther asked, "How do you know that God has from all eternity loved you?" all you can reply is, "Because with loving kindness he has drawn me." This is the solution to the question whether in doctrine or experience; we can give no other.

3. But being eternal it must be infinite, for God is infinite; and as he is love in name and nature, his love must be the same as all his other gracious and glorious perfections, all of which like himself are infinite. But what a wondrous mercy it is for the Church of God that his love is thus infinite. To see this point more plainly, look at two other perfections of God in their infinity– his wisdom and his power. First look at his wisdom, and see how it is displayed on every side in creation. See in what infinite wisdom the Lord has ordained and arranged everything in the visible creation, adapting each part to the other with all the perfection and finish of an exquisite machine. The sun moving in its daily orbit; the moon walking in her midnight brightness; the succession of seasons; the multiplicity of animals upon the face of the earth; each one of them a miracle in its formation, propagation, and provision– what proofs before our eyes do all these daily wonders afford us of the infinite wisdom of God. And do they not also give us equal proofs of his infinite power?

If, then, his wisdom and his power are thus shown to be infinite, is it not equally true of his love? Now the peculiar blessedness of this love as being infinite is that as such it includes all the saints of God in one universal embrace. It is like his wisdom and his power in nature. In creation, there is nothing too great and nothing too small to display the infinite wisdom and power of God. There is as much wisdom and power in the creation of the stinger of a bee as of the trunk of an elephant; in the making of the sting of a wasp as of the claw of a tiger; in the formation of the eye to see the light of the sun as in the formation of the sun to give light to the eye. Now what is true in creation is true in grace; what is true of God's wisdom and power is true of his love. Do but apply this.

You may think yourself too insignificant a creature or too sinful a wretch for God's love to embrace. But as his love is infinite, it embraces with equal strength all the elect of Christ; and if you are so blessed and favored as to be among the number of those whom God from all eternity has loved, his love reaches down to you who are less than the least of all saints as much as his wisdom and his power to the smallest of his creatures.

4. But being infinite, this love is also inexhaustible; and this is another blessed object of contemplation in looking at "the manner" of God's love. We would soon have drained it dry, were it not an inexhaustible fountain. Look at the millions of God's redeemed family, whether glorified spirits in heaven or still sojourning upon earth, or still to be born in the process of time. How inexhaustibly the love of God has been flowing forth for ages to every one of those countless millions. As an emblem of this inexhaustible love, look at the sun; think of the ages for which it has shone unexhausted and inexhaustible; consider the millions and millions of beams which it has cast upon the earth; the thousands of crops which it has ripened, the millions of fruit it has brought to perfection; and yet it shines still. It shines to day as it shone 6,000 years ago; and it will not cease to shine until he who made it what it is bids it cease to be.

So with the love of God– it has shone into the hearts of millions; it has been the spring of all their happiness and the source of all their fruitfulness; their joy in life, their support in death, their bliss in eternity. Their sins have not worn it out, nor their backslidings exhausted it; for its very nature is to be unexhausted, inexhaustible.

5. It is, therefore, unchangeable. God does not love today and hate tomorrow. His own words are– "I am the Lord, I change not; therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed." (Mal. 3:6.) It is most contrary to the revelation which God has given of himself in the Scripture as "resting in his love" (Zeph. 3:17); as "being of one mind and none can turn him" (Job. 23:13); as "one with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1:17)– to think that after he has once fixed his love upon any of his people, he should repent of that love and take it away from them as being unworthy of it. "The gifts and calling of God," we are expressly told, "are without repentance" (Rom. 11:29); that is, God never repents of the gifts of his love and grace, and the calling which is the fruit of them. Did not the Lord know from all eternity what his people would be? Did he not know that, as Moses said to the children of Israel, they would be "a stiff-necked people," provoking him continually to his face? And yet he says of them– "If heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, says the Lord." (Jer. 31:37.) The immutability of his love is the foundation of all our hope; for we well know if our sins and backslidings could turn this love away we would soon sink to rise no more. But this is the consolation of the family of God, that his love is as immutable as his own eternal essence. Thus far then have I endeavored to describe the nature of God's love; but O, how weakly and imperfectly have I set it forth!

I now, then, pass on to consider the two other peculiar features of this love, that is, its manifestation and its communication; and I think I shall do this best by coming at once to the second branch of my subject in which they more conspicuously appear:

II. The amazing BLESSINGS and PRIVILEGES of God's people in being called the sons of God.

A. Manifestation. God loved his people from all eternity, but he loved them only in Christ. This must ever be borne in mind, or we shall make sad mistakes in this important matter. If God loved you, it is not because he saw anything in you to love. He does not only love you as the mere creature of his hand, for that you share in common with your fellow men; for you must bear in mind that there is a love which God bears to the creatures of his hand distinct from his love in grace. We therefore read– "He loves the stranger in giving him food and clothing." (Deut. 10:18.)

But the love which he has to your soul, whereby he means to make you a partaker of his eternal glory, is not the love which he has to you as the creature of his hand, but the love he has to you as a member of the mystical body of Christ. This is what I mean by the love of God in its manifestation. The apostle therefore says– "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because God sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

If, therefore, sometimes you stand astonished at the love of God, or have ever been incredulous that the love of God should be fixed upon you, as feeling your utter insignificance as well as miserable sinfulness and vileness, you must consider why it is that God has loved you or any other of the human race– it is in his dear Son. It is in his Son that he chose the Church; in his Son that he blessed her with all spiritual blessings; in his Son that he accepted her as without spot or blemish, for she is "accepted in the Beloved." Is not this the clear, indubitable language of the apostle? "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ– according as he has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love– to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he has made us accepted in the beloved." (Eph. 1:3, 4, 6.) The Church never was separated in the mind of God from her covenant Head, for she is "his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." (Eph. 1:23.)

The love, therefore, which God has to his dear Son reaches and is extended unto all the members of his mystical body. This is blessedly intimated in the intercessory prayer of our Lord– "I in them, and you in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved them, as you have loved me" (John 17:23); and again– "And I have declared unto them your name, and will declare it– that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:26.) The apostle, therefore, says, "But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ, (by grace you are saved;) and has raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus– that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus." (Eph. 2:4-7.) Is God "rich in mercy?" It is "in Christ Jesus." Is the love with which he loved us great? It is so only in Christ Jesus. When we were dead in sins, did he quicken us? It was "together with Christ." Did he raise us up together and make us sit together in heavenly places? It is "in Christ Jesus." Will he show "in the ages to come the exceeding riches of his grace?" It will be "in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus." Christ, then, in his Person and work is the manifestation of the love of God– the consecrated channel through which it flows, and by which it is bounded.

Now this brings us to a very important feature in the love of God as thus manifested in the Person and work of his dear Son, which is REDEMPTION. This is a point which it deeply concerns us experimentally and savingly to know, for it meets us in our lost ruined condition as sinners; and it is as being in this case that the love of God is specially manifested. You know that in Adam we all sinned and fell from our native purity and innocency. The image of God in which we were created was utterly defaced; we became alienated from the life of God, and sank down before him dead in trespasses and sins. There was a need, therefore, of redemption from this state of alienation and death, guilt and condemnation, and all the other dreadful consequences of the Adam fall. Here love was so singularly manifested. The fall did not forfeit sonship, but it forfeited the image of God; it did not blot the names of the elect out of the Book of Life, but it blotted them all over with the mud and mire of sin; it did not destroy the union which the people of God had with Christ their covenant Head, but it sank the members of his mystical body into a pit of sin and misery, out of which nothing but the incarnation of the Son of God and the propitiation he made by his blood shedding and death could lift them out. It did not remove or impair the love of God towards the Church of Christ, for that was antecedent to the fall, but it made redemption necessary for its manifestation. It enhanced it, made it more signal and glorious, and displayed in all its luster the nature of that love which is as strong as death, which many waters of sin could not quench nor all the floods of evil drown. Whatever God was to man, whatever man was to God, sin had come in and separated between them. Sin is so dreadful an evil; it is so loathsome to the eyes of infinite Purity, such an insult to his divine Majesty, such treason to his authority, such a violation of his justice, that whatever the love of God might be to man it could not flow down to him while this barrier stood in the way. It must then be removed, or God and man be ever separate. But none could remove this barrier except God's dear Son, and he only by his mediation and death. Hence the necessity and nature of redemption by the blood shedding of Jesus.

To us, then, as sinners there is no manifestation of the love of God but in the Person and work of his dear Son, for in him there is redemption, and in no other. The apostle therefore says– "In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace." (Eph. 1:7.) But what is the result of this work of redeeming blood? That by it poor guilty sinners obtain the pardon of all their sins; and their sins being pardoned and put away, they obtain access unto God. They are thus reconciled and brought near to their heavenly Father; for sin being removed by the sacrifice and blood shedding of Christ, there is now no longer a barrier between God and them.

Now to obtain a sense of this pardon in his own soul every child of God is made to sigh and cry mightily with prayers and supplications before the throne of grace. He is thus taught the value and blessedness of atoning blood; and as the sufferings, blood shedding, and death of the Lord Jesus are more and more revealed to his heart, the more simply and unreservedly does he look to the blood of the Lamb to purge his conscience from dead works to serve the living God. Thus the very weight of sin on his conscience makes him enter all the more feelingly and experimentally into the nature of redemption; and it becomes more opened to his view that by his precious blood-shedding and death Jesus redeemed unto God all who believe in his name, put away their sins, and forever blotted them out. He sees that he silenced the curse of the law by himself being made a curse for us; that he appeased the anger of God due to our transgressions, and fully satisfied the claims of justice, which otherwise would have dragged us to her dreadful bar, and hurled us for our offences into a deserved hell. A sight and sense of our danger much open the ear to receive instruction; and thus as the work of redemption is more plainly discovered to our spiritual view, and faith is raised up and drawn forth to believe more personally and experimentally what is thus revealed, we get clearer, more abiding, and soul-transforming views of the love of God in Christ.

Despair on the one side, and self-righteousness on the other, get a deadly wound from a believing sight of the cross; and the soul rejoices in a crucified Christ with trembling. Well may John then say– "Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us." How wondrous in its nature; how gracious in its manifestation; how blessed in its communication. This last is the point to which we are now come, and which I shall attempt to open.

B. Whatever be the nature of the love of God, in all its self-originating, infinite, inexhaustible, and immutable character; or whatever grace there is in its manifestation in the Person and work of his dear Son, it is only by its communicationto our soul that we come to any personal experience of it. It is therefore with this as with all other precious truths of the gospel. Though they are all contained in the Person and work of the Son of God; though they are most blessed realities as unfolded in the word of his grace, there must be a communication of them to our souls that we may believe them, feel their power, and walk in the sweet enjoyment of them.

1. Here, then, we are at once brought to the first work of the Holy Spirit upon the heart in regeneration, to make us sons of God by a new and spiritual birth. "Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us." This is the love of God in its first communication, for it is bestowed upon us as an act of sovereign grace to make and manifest us to be the sons of God. And do we not see all the three Persons of the Godhead in the manner of this love? In the manner of its nature, we see the Father; in the manner of itsmanifestation, we see the Son; in the manner of its communication, we see the Holy Spirit; and each and all of these three Persons of the Godhead engaged in the bestowing of this love on the members of the mystical body of Jesus. But the work of the Holy Spirit upon the heart, in regeneration, is to manifest us sons of God by making us partakers of a new birth.

2. But this is not enough. There must be the spirit of adoption, breathed into our soul by the same Holy Spirit, before we can claim the sweet relationship, for we are sons before we know it, before we feel, or believe, or enjoy it. As the apostle says, "Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." (Gal. 4:6.) This is the Spirit's witness– "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God." (Rom. 8:16.) This, therefore, is the greatest and most blessed communication of the love of God, for it is then shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit. It is what few enjoy in its full communication, and they only at special seasons; but some measure of it is necessary before we can see our sonship clearly, or believe in our heart that God is our Father.

Next Part The Sons of God—Their Blessings and Their Privileges 2

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