Have you ever stopped to ponder the variety of ways in
which God chooses to show us His love for us? I am highly
confident that the ways and means He uses to show us His love
are innumerable and as infinite as the stars of the sky or the
sand of the seashore. Yet, sometimes we still wonder if He
really, honestly, truly loves us.
Flowers can speak to us of how He longs to whisper to us.
Mountain vistas that He created were made to sweep us off our
feet. The vastness of the universe on a cold, clear night speaks
to us not only of His greatness, but of our importance to Him
that caused the Psalmist to wonder aloud how amazing it was
that He should care about and “visit” us. The touch of a lover’s
hand upon the skin excites us as does the gentleness of the
breeze borne of the Spirit. In all these things, and so many
more, He speaks love to us.
Donald McDonald, in Behold Your God (1995), perhaps
captured the thing that most ultimately is the proof of His love.
He said, “In the last analysis, God expresses His love for us not
by putting another to suffer in our place, but by Himself taking
our place. He meets the whole cost of our forgiveness in
Himself, exacting it of Himself. He demands the ransom. He
provides the ransom. He becomes the ransom. Herein is love.”
That God provided someone to suffer in our place is not the
greatest measure of His love for us. God could have
commanded the archangel Michael to come to earth and die on
a cross. We don’t know for sure, but we must all assume that
Michael, along with the balance of the heavenly host, are all
without sin. Could they not have been the sacrifice? Why not?
Why didn’t God send one of them to suffer in our place? To
my very limited way of thinking, I have to believe that He
didn’t do that because it wouldn’t speak to us of His love for us
if He’d sent someone else.
If a father is watching a drowning child struggle in the
middle of a lake, would the loving thing be for the father to ask
someone else to go an die in an effort to save the child, or to go
himself? Which would be love? It’s obvious, isn’t it.
God’s love isn’t shown just by Him having sent someone
to die for us, but in coming to do it Himself.
Today, live with the thought that He loves you far more
than you will ever know or imagine!
And thank Him for His great love that is higher than the
stars, deeper than the sea, and wider than eternity…
Hallelujah!! In Jesus’ name, Amen.
~Adapted from Galen Dalrymple
~Justo
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