The Channel of Love

“To the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:6).

We must not think that the Father loves us because our Savior made Him love us when He interposed between His wrath and us. To think this is heresy indeed. We cannot separate between the Father and the Son, for God is one. As is the Father, so is the Son. It was the one purpose of Jesus to make man see that His own life and love were a true reflection of the depths of His Father’s heart.

The death of Jesus did not cause the love of God, but was caused by it. God did not love us because Jesus died; Jesus died because God loved us so much as to give Him up for us all. God loved us from eternity, but it was needful for Him to satisfy the claims of a broken law, to vindicate His righteousness, to be just. Therefore He gave Himself to us in Jesus, who manifested God in the flesh, put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, and entered into the Holiest of all to become a merciful and faithful High Priest.

Though God’s love was not caused by the Beloved, it comes to us through Him. The ocean fullness pours itself through the channel of the Man Christ Jesus. Because of this, God’s love is brought to us with all the abundance and wealth of the Divine Source, and all the adaptation and tenderness of the human channel. The only-begotten and beloved Son is like the reservoir in which the great love of God is stored. In exact proportion therefore as we abide in Him, we shall realize and enjoy its blessed fullness.

—Condensed from Devotional Commentary of Ephesians by F. B. Meyer.