#87 The infinite love of God

From Meditations on the Epistles of John, by Samuel Froehlich

I John 3:1 ff.

When we hear how profoundly and greatly astonished was the favorite disciple of the Lord at the love of God that some men are called sons of God, how then ought we to feel? This infinite love of God toward men is the least of all things that touches carnal men, at which their hearts of stone should break. They are much more astonished at completely different things that are called great and wonderful in the world. Carnal men judge all things wrongly and perversely, according to the outward appearance, not according to their inner worth. Only in the light of the Gospel and the love of God in Christ do we know all things in their right worthfulness or worthlessness as God knows them. Then we see that all men are correspondingly high and low by nature, have the same value before God, namely, that of being sinners, who fall short of the glory of God. They are not children of God and cannot be saved, except in Christ only. For these—His enemies—the Father sacrificed His own Son. We see by this proof of the love of God that man in himself has no merit before God, but we also see that he has a very great worth in His sight, else Christ would not have died for us.

We must compare and value all men according to the measuring scale of God. Then all honor and glory of the flesh falls away and no boasting remains unless we, in Christ, become children and heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, through a new creation. Sinners, in themselves, are really worth nothing: God has only taken pity on them and drawn His lost property to Himself again. As many as let themselves be reconciled through Christ with God and accept His love are saved and become children of God. But those who despise and spurn this love of God become devils and are wilfully and willingly lost on their own account. Acts 13. Here all human means and help and the inventiveness of education are of no avail toward the healing of the hurt in Adam (which one even with them cannot conceal). These artists become nothing more than hypocrites, and are worse than all other sinners because they wrongly close up the wound with a plaster and then consider themselves better than gross evil doers, whereas before God there is no difference between them.

How much better it is for man to learn to know himself in his gross nakedness and barrenness, to enable him to take off the old man and put on the new one and as a consequence be lifted up to the real dignity of children of God in Christ. Natural man, in his own name, has no access to the Father; before God it must all take place and be done in the name of Jesus. That all men were children of God is so entirely wrong that, rather, of himself, not a single one is that, for God is not the Father of sinners—the devil is—and therefore the children of God, who are in Christ, are no longer sinners either, but the righteous and saints.