of all, is that that
divine love of the Divine Father bends down over His dead children and
cherishes them still. Oh! you can do much in separating yourselves from
God through selfishness, selfwill, sensuality, or other forms of sin,
but there is one thing you cannot do, you cannot prevent His loving you.
If I might venture without seeming irreverent, I would point to that
pathetic page in the Old Testament history where the king hears of the
death, red-handed in treason, of his darling son, and careless of
victory and forgetful of everything else, and oblivious that Absalom was
a rebel, and only remembering that he was his boy, burst into that
monotonous wail that has come down over all the centuries as the deepest
expression of undying fatherly love. 'Oh! my son Absalom, my son, my son
Absalom! Oh! Absalom, my son, my son!' The name and the relationship
will well up out of the Father's heart, whatever the child's crime. We
are all His Absaloms, and though we are dead in trespasses and in sins,
God, who is rich in mercy, bends over us and loves us with His great
love.

The Apostle might well expatiate in these two varying forms of speech,
both of them intended to express the same thing--'rich in mercy' and
'great in love.' For surely a love which takes account of the sin that
cannot repel it, and so shapes itself into mercy, sparing, and
departing from the strict line of retribution and justice, is great. And
surely a mercy which refuses to be provoked by seventy times seven
transgressions in an hour, not to say a day, is rich. That mercy is
wider than all humanity, deeper than all sin, was before all rebellion,
and will last for ever. And it is open for every soul of man to receive
if he will.

But there is another point to be noticed in reference to this wonderful
manifestation of the divine love looking down upon the myriads of men
dead in sin, and that is that this love shapes the divine action. Mark
the language of our text, in which the Apostle attributes a certain line
of conduct in the divine dealings with us to the fact of His great love.
Because 'He loved us' therefore He did so and so. Now about that I have
only two remarks to make, and I will make them very briefly. The one is,
here is a demonstration, for some of you people who do not believe in
the Evangelical doctrine of an Atonement by the sacrifice of Jesus
Christ, that the true scriptural representation of that doctrine is not
that which caricaturi