(2) Now the wonderful thing to contemplate is that God should actually ask for human love. Is it that there is that in the depths of the divine nature which would remain unsatisfied without it? It is out of the hidden deep of the abyss of eternal love that those tender, pleading words have come forth: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy mind and with all thy soul and with all thy strength." Do these words explain the reason for the divine self-expression in the creation of the universe with man in the divine image as the crown and climax thereof? If so, we must regard man as the highest manifestation of the passion of the divine heart for love, created and endowed for no other purpose than to minister to that heart, which is man's true origin, the love without which that heart would never be satisfied. Creation, then, by whatever process, with man as its noblest fruition, seems to have been a necessity in God involved in the fact of His being Love.
(3) We know alas! that in seeking from man the response of love the Divine Lover has been to a large extent disappointed. For love, if it be real, must be spontaneous and not forced. And that pain of disappointment which the divine heart has felt concerning man leads us to the recognition of another feeling in the divine nature, even that terrible quality which is called in the Holy Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments: "the Wrath of God." Alas! how theologians have stumbled over this word, bringing it down to our own private perceptions of human vindictiveness! It is really the very opposite. It is nothing less than the jealousy of perfect love. The "wrath" of God is the holy concern of the Divine Lover about His loved ones lest they should set their affections on something meaner and less worthy than that One Object in whom alone they can realize their perfect harmony and happiness. For if human love is a necessity to the divine, the enjoyment of the divine is an equal necessity to the human. It is the spirit of love and not of a jealous kill joy that inspires the warning: "Love not the world neither the things that are m the world. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world; and if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."
(4) But if this be so, we are obliged to go a step further. For "wrath," even in the sense of the divine jealousy of perfect love, can never be God's last word in the presence of that which has disturbed the rest of divine love. It certainly must burn in its purity of intention like coals of juniper as long as there is anything which hurts, pains, mars or in any way disturbs the harmony and happiness of its beloved objects. But just because of this it is redemptive in the very nature of things, so that the longings of the divine nature, the hunger of divine love for human love, might not be forever disappointed. And so to confess that "God is Love" is to come face to face with the unveiled mystery of the Cross of Christ.
(5) The Cross of Christ was more than an event in history. It revealed the age-long tragedy of the love of God. God has been all along an unmeriting and smitten face, even as the face of the holy Jesus was when they spat upon it and smote it with the palms of their hands. The Cross demonstrated that divine love cannot but suffer in a scene such as this, in a groaning and travailing creation, where self will has supplanted the beautiful will of God, bringing pain, sorrow and disappointment in its train--a scene where the dark shadow of death and bereavement lies like a funeral mantle over the fairest landscape. And so the Cross becomes the standing symbol of the suffering of the divine nature, a suffering ever redemptive in its effects where it is understood and welcomed. And thus to understand and welcome is really to take up the ancient confession. "We have known and believed the love that God hath towards us, God is Love." This was the sweet evangel Pascal heard and which melted his heart and hallowed all his years: "I love thee more ardently than thou hast loved thy sin." And thus he, and many like him, learned to fall in love with the Lover. The "thou shalt love" of the old commandment becomes then the new commandment of "thou canst love." Both the Law and the Gospel make love the supreme thing, the very pivot and circumference of the spiritual life, but with this infinite difference. The revelation of the redemptive power of divine love in Jesus brings the spirit of love into human hearts, renewing and energizing them until men become in some measure reproductions of that One whose whole life on earth was nothing else but the exhibition of perfect love both to God and Man.
(6) The ultimate of all that Jesus did in life and death was that He might gratify the craving of the divine nature for human love. To this end He revealed the Father. He has shown Him forth in all His loveableness. He has by life and teaching corrected false conceptions which had hypnotized, and to a large extent still hypnotize, the minds of men concerning the Divine Being. We can now say of Him whom Paul called "the Image of the invisible God," that all that Jesus was God is--yea always was and always will be. To know the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is to love Him. And it is a love conjoined with reverence. For both love and reverence are necessary to a true and warm life. You cannot love purely what you do not revere; while reverence divorced from love is as cold as an icicle and as unfruitful as the pale light of the moon. Not only has He left us His example of love, but by His Spirit He can multiply Himself in a love in all whom He succeeds in attracting away from the falsities of the temporal to the realities of the eternal.