The boundless love of God
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
Two days ago, I sent the above Bible verse to all my friends, assuring everyone that I was thinking of and praying for them. More than that, I wanted to remind them that it was Good Friday, a day when Christ provided a preeminent example of love to all humankind.
In the finiteness of our lives, it’s easy to forget how immense God’s love truly is. The Author of all of creation took on the form of humanity – thereby subjecting Himself to rejection, scorn, hunger, thirst, ridicule, humiliation, verbal abuse, physical torture, and – ultimately – death. He did so out of love for you, me, and everyone that ever has and ever will exist. Think about that for a minute: we weren’t even born when Christ laid down His life to pay the penalty for sins we weren’t alive to commit yet. Such love is at once both immeasurable and limitless.
In 1907, Frederick M. Lehman attempted to describe this emotion in his hymn, “The Love of God.” Lehman felt compelled to pen his words after the Holy Spirit moved him to do so. He had recently suffered a massive reversal of fortune which forced him to find work in the shipping industry, packing oranges and lemons into crates. Undeterred by his circumstance change, Frederick easily wrote the first two stanzas of his song but struggled with the third.
Remembering a card he had been given, Lehman retrieved it to find a poem that he deemed perfect for his hymn. The words had been found written on the wall of a room in an insane asylum two hundred years earlier. The sentiments were so beautiful that the attendants captured them before the room’s walls were repainted.
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
Historians later learned that the above stanza came from an English translation of a poem written in 1050 by the Jewish Rabbi, Meir Ben Issac Nehoria. How the unfortunate asylum patient had ever heard these words, let alone remembered them, remains a mystery. The fact that they later made their way to Frederick on a card to be preserved, recalled, and used in perfect meter with his developing hymn is nothing short of the grace of God.
Just as Lehman found these exquisite sentiments at precisely the time he needed them, so the love of God is always ready and waiting for us to accept into our hearts when we require the same. God’s love is the most precious gift we will ever receive – offered freely, willingly, and without cost. All we have to do is welcome it to know the unspeakable joy that can only come from the boundless love of our Savior.