s expressed in saying 'His name is Jehovah,' and in yet
another aspect is expressed in saying 'God is love,' viz. the thought
which sounds familiar, but which has in it depths of strength and
illumination and joy, if we rightly ponder it, that, to use human words,
the motive of the divine action is all found within the divine nature.

We love one another because we discern, or think we discern, lovable
qualities in the being on whom our love falls. God loves because He is
God. That great artesian fountain wells up from the depths, by its own
sweet impulse, and pours itself out; and 'the good pleasure of His
goodness' has no other explanation than that it is His nature and
property to be merciful. And so, dear brethren, we get clean past what
has sometimes been the misapprehension of good people, and has oftener
been the caricatured representation of Evangelical truth which its
enemies have put forth--that God was made to love and pity by reason of
the sacrifice of the Son, whereas the very opposite is the case. God
loves, therefore He sent His Son, 'that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish but have everlasting life,' and the notion of the
Cross of Christ as changing the divine heart is as far away from
Evangelical truth as it is from the natural conceptions that men form of
the divine nature. We shake hands with our so-called antagonists and
say, 'Yes! we believe as much as you do that God does not love us
because Christ died, but we believe what perhaps you do not, that Christ
died because God loves us, and would save us.' 'The good pleasure which
He hath purposed in Himself.'

Then, still further, there is another aspect of this same divine will
brought out in other parts of this letter, of which this is a specimen,
'Having made known unto us the mystery of His will, according to His
good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself, that in the
dispensation of the fulness of the times He might gather together in one
all things in Christ,' which, being turned into more modern phraseology,
is just this--that the great aim of that divine sovereign will,
self-originated, full of loving-kindness to the world, is to manifest to
all men what God is, that all men may know Him for what He is, and
thereby be drawn back again, and grouped in peaceful unity round His
Son, Jesus Christ. That is the intention which is deepest in the divine
heart, the desire which God has most for every one of us. And when the
Old Testament