ce is shrined in Christ alone, and from Him
flows forth into a thirsty world. That love, 'unmerited and free,' holds
in solution power, wisdom and all the other physical or metaphysical
perfections belonging to God with all their energies. It is the elixir
in which they are all contained, the molten splendour into which have
been dissolved gold and jewels and all precious things. When we look at
Christ, we see the divinest thing in God, and that is His grace. The
Christ who shows us and certifies to us the grace of God must surely be
more than man. Men look at Him and see it; He shows us that grace
because He was full of grace and truth.

But Paul is here not propounding theological dogmas, but pouring out a
heart full of personal experience, and so adds yet other words to
express what he himself has found in the Divine Grace, and speaks of its
riches. He has learned fully to trust its fulness, and in his own daily
life has had the witness of its inexhaustible abundance, which remains
the same after all its gifts. It 'operates unspent.' That continually
self-communicating love pours out in no narrower stream to its last
recipient than to its first. All 'eat and are filled,' and after they
are satisfied, twelve baskets full of fragments are taken up. These
riches are exceeding; they surpass all human conception, all parallel,
all human needs; they are properly transcendent.

This, then, is what God would have us know of Himself. So His love is at
once the motive of His great message to us in Jesus Christ, and is the
whole contents of the message, like some fountain, the force of whose
pellucid waters cleanses the earth, and rushes into the sunshine, being
at once the reason for the flow and that which flows. God reveals
because He loves, and His love is that which He reveals.

II. The great manifestation of grace is God's kindness to us in Christ.

All the revelation of God in Creation and Providence carries the same
message, but it is often there hard to decipher, like some
half-obliterated inscription in a strange tongue. In Jesus the writing
is legible, continuous, and needs no elaborate commentary to make its
meaning intelligible. But we may note that what the Apostle founds on
here is not so much Christ in Himself, as that which men receive in
Christ. As he puts it in another part of this epistle, it is 'through
the Church' that 'principalities and powers in heavenly places' are made
to 'know the manifold wisdom