Salesian Literature

Chapter 8:  How much God wants our love

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Although the Saviour’s redemption is applied to us in as many ways as there are souls… love, after all, is the universal means of salvation.  It is warp and woof of all creation: without it nothing can be saved, as I shall explain later[1].  So God posted his Cherubim before the garden of delight, with a sword of fire that turned this way and that (Gen. 3:24), to teach us that no one will enter the paradise of heaven until he is transfixed with the sword of love.

 

For this reason our good Jesus, whose blood paid our ransom, has an infinite longing for us to love him, so that we may be saved for ever; he has a longing too for our salvation, so that we may love him for ever … his love urges him to save us; our salvation urges us to love him.  See, he cries, it is fire that I have come to spread over the earth, and what better wish can I have than that it should be kindled? (Lk. 12:49).

 

To provide a more vigorous expression of this desire, he compels our love in wondrous terms: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind.  This is the greatest of the commandments, and the first (Mt. 22:37,38).  Heaven above, Theotimus, how desperately the heart of Christ longs for us to love him!  He could not rest satisfied with announcing that we were all free to love him, as Laban allowed Jacob to woo the fair Rachel, to win her by his service.  No, he had to make a stronger declaration of his passionate love for us; he had to command us to love him with all our might.

 

No reflection on the great gulf that separates majesty from misery, God from us, nor any other excuse whatever, should then deter us from loving him.  This goes to show that it was not for nothing he left in our hearts a natural tendency to love him.  To ensure that this tendency does not remain idle, he urges us to use it by a comprehensive commandment.  To make it possible for his command to be carried out, God sees to it that no man alive lacks what he needs to practise it. 

 

The sun’s warm rays give life to all things; nature depends on the sun for fertility.  God’s goodness too gives life to the souls of men, inspires all hearts to love him; as with the sun, none can escape its burning heat (Ps. 18:7).  See, then, how deeply God longs for our love.

 

What it amounts to, then is that God not only gives us enough help to enable us to love him and, through loving him, to save our souls; he gives us enough and to spare, amply, without stint, lavishly – in fact, exactly what we should expect from such immense goodness.

 

The divine Saviour overlooks nothing to prove that his mercy reaches out to all that he has made (Ps. 144:9), that with him is abundant power to ransom (Ps. 129:7), that his love is infinite.  Consequently, it is his will that all men should be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), that no one should be lost.

 

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[1]  Book 10, Chapter 1;   Book 11.

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