The everlasting love of God.
I. IN CONTRAST TO OTHER LOVERS. Note Jeremiah 30:14, "All thy lovers have forgotten thee," etc. Israel had had many lovers professing regard and offering service; but what had their regard and service come to? They were now cold, careless, perhaps even hostile. They had shown the appearance of love to Israel, not that they cared for Israel, but because they themselves were advantaged. Now, that is no true affection which changes when the thing loved ceases to gratify us. Yet this was all the affection of these other lovers amounted to—a mere name of love; a feeling which, in the course of time, was to evince their own instability and bring shame to them. But God is a contrast to all this. He loves with an everlasting love. He loves Israel, not only in the days of prosperity and wealth and beauty, but in the days of downfall and despair. His thought penetrates through to the abiding worth of humanity. We do not slander human affection, or in any way underestimate it, when we say that man cannot love his fellow man as God loves him. God it is who first of all shows man what love really is; then man, having the Spirit of the Divine Father breathed into him, learns to love also. We cannot attain to any thing which will give us the right to say with respect to duration that ours is an ever lasting love; but, as true Christians, we may have something of the quality of that affection.
II. IN SPITE OF UNRECIPROCATED AFFECTION. Israel had had other lovers, and she had loved them in return. They had bestowed gifts on her, and she had bestowed gifts on them, and so there was profession of mutual regard as long as it was profitable to make it. But there was no love to God. His holiness, his goodness, was not seen. Year by year his open hand was stretched forth, filled with the corn and the wine and the oil; and the people greedily laid hold of the gifts, and thought nothing of the Giver. Not but what there were individuals whose hearts went out gratefully and devotedly to God, as the Psalms show. But then these individuals would not find very many to respond to the invitation, "Oh, love the Lord, all ye his saints." And still the love of God goes on. Men need the manifestations of God's love all the more, just because of their unreciprocating attitude towards him. Love cannot prevent the headstrong prodigal from seeking his own desires, but it can keep things ready for the season of repentance and return. The manifestations of the Divine love are to constitute a great spectacle, breaking down the heart of the selfish man.
III. THE LOVE IS DECLARED WHEN MOST THE DECLARATION IS NEEDED. Love does not always look like love. The spurious puts on the appearance of the genuine, and the genuine gets hidden behind the necessary manifestations of righteousness and fidelity to law. They that break law must be punished and suffer. They that have false, unstable, misleading lovers cannot escape the consequence of their foolish connection with them in the day when the lovers are destroyed and go into captivity (Jeremiah 22:20, Jeremiah 22:22). Israel itself must suffer loss and go into exile and sit with dust and ashes on its head. But in that very day comes the assurance of everlasting love. The lower skies are filled with cloud and storm and rain, but the abiding sun is still above, and its radiance will remain when the storm has passed away.—Y.