Because God First Loved Us

And what was true with reference to extinct Ephraim is just as true with reference to the past of
every child of God.

Each one carries for himself through life the consciousness of what cannot be
undone.

Who has never heard that doleful voice in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel
weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted, because they are not? There is nothing that
will silence it except the thought of the infinite sweep of the omnipotent divine love:

Refrain thy
voice from weeping and thine eyes from tears, for they shall come again (31:16).

There is still a thought lying even further back for our comfort and satisfaction.

The idea has always
proved hard to bear that there should ever have been a stretch of existence in which our persons were
indifferent to God. Love, and not the least religious love, seeks to eternalize itself, and that backwards
no less than forward. In the unlimitable round of His timeless existence we have never been absent
from nor uncared for by Him.

A greater wonder as an object of the divine interest is Ephraim not yet
than Ephraim no more. The best proof that He will never cease to love us lies in that He never began.

What we are for Him and what He is for us belongs to the realm of eternal values.

Without this we
are nothing, in it we have all. Ours is the paean of Paul:

For we know that to them that love God
all things work together for good . . . for those whom He foreknew [that is, eternally loved] he also
predestinated to be made like unto the image of his Son . . . 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 (Rom. 8:28, 38, 39).

On this day…

• Wiki – 2025
• Christian History – 2025
• Exodus 25 – 2024
• Exodus 24 – 2024
• April 19, 2014 – 2014
• THE INITIATIVE AGAINST DESPAIR – 2009
• Genesis 25:11 – 2009
• Mark 15:23 – 2008
• compeers – 2007
• Revelation 5:12 – 2007