The love of God in deed and truth.
Here the producing cause of the gospel is briefly stated—why men need it, and why God sends it. How God regards the world and what he would do for it are here set before us.
I. THE WOULD IS A PERISHING WORLD. If those believing in the Son of God will not perish, the conclusion is plain that those who remain unbelieving in Christ will perish. The word might have been, "God so loved the world as to fill it, with all manner of things pleasant to eye and ear and taste, comforts various and numberless for the temporal life of man." But the awful word "perish" is brought in, and so we are forced to think, first of all, not of comforts and blessings, but of perils. Drop the word "perish" out of the text, and the profit of all the rest is gone. The world is a perishing world, and we are perishing in the midst of it. The assumption that man is a perishing being without Christ underlies every page of the Scriptures, and is implied in every doctrine of the gospel. The very fact that there is a gospel is the very proof that the gospel is needed. None but he who made us can have an adequate sense of the ruin of our nature through sin. Only he knows all the glory and perfection of which we are capable without sin; only he can estimate the corresponding shame and corruption when sin has gotten the mastery. God only knows all we can enjoy, all we can suffer.
II. THE FEELING OF OUR DANGER NEEDS TO BE PRODUCED AND INTENSIFIED IN US. It gets hidden from our eyes by present comforts and enjoyment. And God knows how indifferent we are, how we trifle with the danger, and style those who would impress us with it fanatical and impertinent. And so we need God's grace opening our eyes to spiritual danger as well as offering to us spiritual salvation. The feeling of danger will never come of itself. The danger is a spiritual one, and hence only as the Spirit of God takes hold of us shall we feel how real and great the danger is. There will be no fear of our failing to see the danger when once the Holy Spirit gets full control in our life. We are ever to remember that part of his work is pressing home upon us our need of salvation and our debt to a Saviour.
III. THE DANGER SEEN, THE SAVIOUR WILL BE WELCOMED. We cannot took to one another for salvation. The perishing cannot help the perishing. We need a Saviour who does not need to be saved himself. It is a grand thing to point, not to a feeble, uncertain earthly friend, but to a heavenly one. When we feel ourselves to be perishing, we shall rejoice in being able to look to such a Saviour. Faith grows gradually and. strongly when the peril and the Saviour are continually present to our thoughts. Then, with salvation ever more and more present to us as a reality, the sense of God's love to the world will be also more and more an inspiring power in our hearts.—Y.