Bible Commentaries

Infinite Love

Jude 1:21

In the first verse we read, "Beloved in God the Father" (R.V.),—or, keeping the preposition as we find it, "Beloved by God the Father." Then the exhortation "Keep yourselves in the love of God,"—often read thus: Keep on loving God,—watch the state of your affections; be very careful not to relax the grasp of your love as it lays hold upon God. That is not the meaning of the text:—Keep yourselves in the fact that God loves you, not in the fickle circumstance that you love God. The distinction is vital, the distinction is infinitely consolatory, the distinction is what we need every day to keep us right and to give us peace. Men cannot be lectured into love. Jude is not telling us to be very careful about our love; for then we should be mechanicians, artisans, interested in keeping our love bright and pure, and in an interesting state, so as to attract the Divine complacency—that fickle feeling that rules the universe so waywardly. This would be impossible and absurd. Yet this is the ruin of the Church; this it is that brings so many weaklings to profess Christianity. They are always complaining about themselves, as who should say, My love is weak and feeble, and I am afraid I am not in the right way; my heart misgives me when I think of my relation to God and eternity. That is blasphemy. Your relation means nothing, except in a very secondary and remote sense. What is God's relation to you? God does not change. The one thing you have to be certain of at the beginning is that God loves you, then leave it. We have had far too much self-analysis, personal vivisection, taking, so to say, the soul to pieces, fibre by fibre, and filament by filament, to see how it is getting on. We have forgotten that we have to keep or guard ourselves by God's love to us. His is an unchanging love.

What is the consequence of forgetting this simple but vital truth? The consequence is that we have an atmospheric piety: a west wind makes us buoyant in the faith, an east wind plunges us into dejection and covers us with a cloud of fear, wherein we say, The Lord hath forgotten to be gracious, and we seriously think of withdrawing from the Church. No man who belongs to the Church can withdraw from it. Certain men have crept in unawares, crawled in by the interstices, oozed in through the doors when they did not closely fit, crept in in the gloaming before the lamps were lighted: they will go out again; they would leave heaven if they could get into it; they do not belong to celestial quality or society, and they would soon discover the discrepancy between themselves and their circumstances, and they would first endeavour to create an insurrection, and secondly endeavour to creep out more humbly than they crept in. The consequence is that we have a stomachic piety; the question becomes, How is your digestion to-day? Given a good digestion, and we shall have a good creed, and a good hope through anything but grace of acceptance: given an ill-working digestion, and we shall have fears and complaints, and sink into poor creatures and miserable sinners and unworthy worms. That is stomachic. It is not intellectual, it is not moral; there is no point of intelligence in it: these be thy worshippers, O dyspepsia! The consequence is that we have a circumstantial piety. Given an abundant harvest, and we stand up for the creeds one and all, for nine-and-thirty articles, and nine-and-thirty thousand articles if anybody cares to write them: the table is spread plentifully, the vineyard blushes with purple, the herd in the stall is abundant, and as for the fig tree, it droopeth, so heavy is the fruitage; now we shall have song and Genesis 6:1) and of the judgment to come upon them and upon the giants, their offspring (6-16); and this is followed by the description of the journey of Enoch through the earth and lower heaven in company with an angel, who showed to him many of the great mysteries of nature, the treasure houses of the storms and winds, and fires of heaven, the prison of the fallen and the land of the blessed (17-36). The second part (37-71) is styled "a vision of wisdom," and consists of three "parables," in which Enoch relates the revelations of the higher secrets of heaven and of the spiritual world which were given to him. The first parable (38-44) gives chiefly a picture of the future blessings and manifestation of the righteous, with further details as to the heavenly bodies: the second (45-57) describes in splendid imagery the coming of Messiah and the results which it should work among "the elect" and the gainsayers: the third (58-69) draws out at further length the blessedness of the "elect and holy," and the confusion and wretchedness of the sinful rulers of the world. The third part (72-82) is styled "the book of the course of the lights of heaven," and deals with the motions of the sun and moon, and the changes of the seasons; and with this the narrative of the journey of Enoch closes. The fourth part (83-91) is not distinguished by any special name, but contains the record of a dream which was granted to Enoch in his youth, in which he saw the history of the kingdoms of God and of the world up to the final establishment of the throne of Messiah. The fifth part (92-105) contains the last addresses of Enoch to his children, in which the teaching of the former chapters is made the ground-work of earnest exhortation. The signs which attended the birth of Noah are next noticed (106-7); and another short "writing of Enoch" (108) forms the close to the whole book."—Smith's Dictionary of the Bible.