#85 The Love and Kindness of God
From Meditations on the Epistles of John, by Samuel Froehlich
I John 3:1
Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God:
The apostle requires that the believers shall see and diligently consider the great love which the Father has bestowed upon them in that they are called the sons of God. The question is how and where can one see this love of God and by what is it recognized. It is revealed only by its working if it has been shed abroad in our hearts, for natural man has no mind for God and His love, not even for that which God does for everyone without exception in this earthly life. Men are so dull, so apathetic and ungrateful that they think that all that takes place is entirely natural, without the incidence of God and His love that they should acknowledge and thank Him; hence they recognize His love revealed in Christ even less and can see nothing particularly unusual in it because they do not feel their misery in sin and their removal and estrangement from God.
But the children of God, who have tasted the love and kindness of God, cannot be astonished enough that they should be called the sons of God and, compared with this love of the Father, nothing else any longer seems great to them. If an earthly king or a great man on earth would adopt a lost and forsaken beggar-child as his own and his heir (or would provide for a great number of such poor children), we would be astonished and would consider such a child (or children) very fortunate and to be envied. But the great of this world despise the lowly among them and consider them unworthy of their notice, although the distance between them is not a shade of the distance of sinful men before God, and had God been inclined toward us as men are toward one another, He would never have regarded us.
But God now commends and proves His love to us in that He gave His Son for us while we were yet sinners, ungodly, and His enemies. Now if we know and consider from what depths of misery God redeems us and to what heights of grace and glory He transfers us, through Christ, we must reasonably be astonished, and we can never understand and treasure this love of God enough, or we would consider insignificant all that we have to suffer and deny ourselves of in this world.
And even if it appears as if none envy us of our great blessedness in being children of God, since by reason of it we are despised, mocked, reviled and persecuted, yet it is in just this way that the devil expresses his envy. And if men, whom he uses as tools, do not know what they are doing, he who envies us on account of our salvation, certainly knows it, as he already envied the first two persons because of it and through envy even brought Christ to the cross. So the devil lies in wait for all children of God, that he may rob them again of their treasure and of the crown, be it by affliction or by the lust of the world, and whoever does not know what he has and what is eternally prepared and presented to him by God. (I Corinthians 2), is in danger of being deceived by the devil, like Eve. Therefore we must firmly resist the devil by faith so that we save the eternal and veritable and, for it, leave the temporal and perishable behind, as Joseph left his coat in the hand of the adulteress.