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Heaven is a World of Love

 

By Ian Hamilton, Editor

Reprinted from The Banner of Truth Magazine, November 2022, Issue# 710

 

Jonathan Edwards is best known, sadly, for his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In his sermon, Edwards uses the vivid and unsettlingly dramatic images that the Bible uses to depict the horror of hell and the unimaginable fate of unbelievers facing a lost eternity. The sermon’s language is no more lurid than the language and metaphors found in the Bible. However, Edwards was far more at home preaching the glories of heaven than the horrors of hell. He is in his personal element speaking of Christ and the sure and certain hope that every Christian has of being ‘forever with the Lord.’

This personal element is what marks his sermon, “Heaven is a World of Love.” The sermon was part of a series on 1 Corinthians 13. He begins his sermon with this introduction:

The apostle speaks, in the text, of a state of the church when it is perfect in heaven, and therefore a state in which the Holy Spirit shall be more perfectly and abundantly given to the church than it is now on earth. But the way in which it shall be given when it is so abundantly poured forth, will be in that great fruit of the Spirit, holy and divine love, in the hearts of all the blessed inhabitants of that world. So that the heavenly state of the church is a state that is distinguished from its earthly state, as it is that state which God has designed especially for such a communication of his Holy Spirit, and in which it shall be given perfectly, whereas, in the present state of the church, it is given with great imperfection. And it is also a state in which this holy love or charity shall be, as it were, the only gift or fruit of the Spirit, as being the most perfect and glorious of all, and which, being brought to perfection, renders all other gifts that God was wont to bestow on his church on earth, needless. And that we may the better see how heaven is thus a world of holy love, I would consider, first, the great cause and fountain of love that is in heaven; second, the objects of love that it contains; third, the subjects of that love; fourth, its principle, or the love itself; fifth, the excellent circumstances in which it is there exercised and expressed and enjoyed; and, sixth, the happy effects and fruits of all this.

My intention in setting before you Edwards’ introduction is to encourage you to go and read the sermon itself!1 What follows is, hopefully, an attempt to highlight the grace that Christians talk about so much, that Jesus said would be the church’s compelling apologetic to the world (John 13:35), but that is sadly so often absent from the way we live as individuals and churches.

In Reformed churches we rightly and passionately promote the vital importance of doctrine. The gospel of God is a panoply of doctrines, all of them vital to know and embrace. Our Reformation forebears were so committed to the truths of God’s word that they composed catechisms and confessions in order to instruct and imbed God’s people in the treasures of his saving revelation in Christ. But our Saviour himself impressed on his hearers the great danger of confessing him accurately with our lips while our hearts are far from him (see Mark 7:6, 7). This is what Paul is telling the dysfunctional church in Corinth in the opening verses of 1 Corinthians 13. This chapter is NOT a ‘hymn to love,’ it is a sledgehammer to pride. Ponder prayerfully the apostle’s words:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

I am conscious that everyone who reads this magazine will know these words well and that many will have memorized them. But how well do we take them to heart? Here is a question: When was someone last disciplined in a faithful Reformed church for a lack of love? We rightly discipline men (usually men) who teach and promote heresy, or at least we should. But what about heart heresy? The devil not only attacks the church with insinuating heresies into its midst; he also, and perhaps even more nefariously, attacks the church by sowing discord, selfishness, pride, anger, cold-heartedness, snobbery, and much else besides, within the fellowship of the saints. I have only once heard of a church that disciplined a member for behaviour that was unloving.

When the Bible tells us that ‘the greatest of these is love,’ it is not telling us to be sentimental Christians. Our Saviour said, ‘If you love me, keep my commandments’ (John 13:35). Loving God and loving the brothers and sisters is revealed in a resolve to seek their good and their best no matter what. Our God is love, a fellowship of love, a fellowship where each One delights in the others and actively seeks their good. It is into this eternal fellowship of love that we are brought when the Holy Spirit renews our hearts and unites us to Christ.

It would surely be a good thing if every Christian, every day, read and meditated on the Bible’s exposition of Christian love: ‘Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends’ (1 Cor. 13:4-8).

So, ‘Heaven is a world of love.’ Love for God and fellow believers, whoever they are, is the family likeness. Will it be easy to love? No. Must we practice the grace of love? Yes, unless we want to exclude ourselves from the kingdom of God here on earth and in its final and perfect expression in heaven. These words of the apostle John surely search out our hearts: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love’ (1 John 4:7, 8).

Being a loving Christian does not mean turning a blind eye to sin and error in the church or in the world. It does mean treating other people, believer and unbeliever, with the same grace with which God has treated you. Let me give our Lord Jesus Christ the last word: ‘By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ He ‘so loved’ us, we must ‘go and do likewise.’

 

1 The full sermon can be found in Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits: Chris-
tian Love as Manifested in the Heart and Life (1852; repr. Edinburgh: The Banner of

Truth Trust, 2005), pp. 323-68.

 

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