Everlasting love is here

The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.—Jeremiah 31:3.

This tender and gracious assurance appears here in a somewhat unexpected connexion. The Book of Jeremiah, taken as a whole, is a sad book; it consists in the main of warnings, expostulations, and prophecies of doom; and these prophecies areshown in process of fulfilment almost while they were being uttered. It is a sombre picture of human life which is presented to us in these vivid pages. And yet here we have, in the very midst of all this darkness and all these oracles of stern judgment, the sweet utterance which forms the text: “The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore withlovingkindness have I drawn thee.” With lovingkindness? Loved with an everlasting love? Nothing could have seemed less like it just then. Fierce, terrible, merciless were the ways of God to Israel so far as appearances went, and not without cause. Love was about the last word that could describe the relations of these suffering people to their offended God.