“The great love of Jesus”

“Jesus has loved His own people from of old. A most blessed fact! He has loved them eternally. There never a time when He did not love them.

His love is positively dateless: before the heavens and earth were made, and the stars were first touched with the torch of flame, Jesus had received His people from His Father, and written their names on His heart.

‘Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.’ Jesus, before all the world, set the crown of His peculiar love upon those whom He foreordained unto His glory.

This love of His is infinite. Jesus does not love His own with a little of His love, nor regard them with some small degree of affection, but He says, ‘As the Father hath loved me, even so have I loved you,’ and the Father’s love to the Son is inconceivably great, since they are one in essence, ineffably one.

The Father cannot but love the Son infinitely, neither doth the Son ever love His people less than with all His heart. It is an affection which no angelic mind could measure, inconceivable, unknown.

Jesus loved His people with a foresight of what they would be. Love is blind, they say, but not the Saviour’s love. He knew that ‘his own’ would fall in Adam; He knew that as they lived personally each one would become a sinner; He understood that they would be hard to reclaim and difficult to retain, even after they had been reclaimed; He saw every sin that they would commit in the glass of the future, for from His prescient eye nothing can be hidden.

And yet He loved His own over the head of all their sins, and their revoltings, and their shortcomings. Hence we see that He bears towards them an affection which cannot be changed, for nothing can occur which He has not foreseen, nothing therefore which has not already been taken into calculation in the matter of His choice.

No new circumstance can shed unexpected light upon the case. No startling and unforeseen event can become an argument for a change. Hence Jesus’ love is full of immutability. There are no ups and downs in the love of Christ towards His people.

On their highest Tabors He loves them, but equally as well in their Gethsemanes. When they wander like lost sheep His great love goes after them, and when they come back with broken hearts His great love restores them.

By day, by night, in sickness, in sorrow, in poverty, in famine, in prison, in the hour of death, that silver stream of love ripples at their side, never stayed, never diminished. Forever is the sea of divine grace at its flood; this sun never sets; this fountain never pauses.”

–Charles H. Spurgeon, “The Faithfulness of Jesus,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, Vol. 14 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1868), 270-271.