“I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.” (Jeremiah 31:3) These words, if ever heard or read, are almost always dismissed as “filler” for God’s message to Jeremiah to give to his people; but I believe that they express both God’s method and His motive in dealing with humanity since the fall n the garden. Jeremiah accepted them as if he recognized their truth and passed it to his people and now to us.

The notion that God has loved His people ever since they were created, needed to be re-affirmed strongly for the many set-backs in the people’s relationship with Him. Many centuries later, in the New Testament, John, a different spokesman, asserts, “God is Love.”(1 John 4:16)

The notion that, not only is love his very character, but, perhaps most notably, it is “everlasting”, is the message: God has always worked and will always work to restore His own eternal life to the creation who lost it in the garden. Not just life, but Life Eternal has been His focus, his goal, His very reality for His people from the beginning of time. His motive and method are both love.

It must be hard to give to people the whole beauty of His creation in the natural world, and at the same time to guide them to see through the temporal beauty to an even better life with an unseen God.

Ultimately the problem of seeing the invisible reached the place where God knew that he would send Himself in Jesus so that Jeremiah’s and John’s and many other messengers’ words would have visible flesh. The very thought of such an event produced the joyful expression of Jesus’ mother: “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,. . . From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is His name.” (Luke 1:47-49)

In the birth of Jesus we witness that God’s love is deeply personal. Though it almost forms a chorus in the Old Testament, it is brought into intimate reality when the Holy Spirit becomes a personal gift accessible to all who seek Him. After the Resurrection. The Scriptures themselves convey all this, another priceless gift to those who turn to them really seeking God’s word. The testimonies of thousands of years of messengers has cast light on the ways of God that enable us to walk through our generation sure-footed in the intimacy that is both personally loving and everlasting. He has given us a Book.

Love in Him,

Prue