Everlasting Love
“Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” (Jeremiah 31:3).
There is a line spoken in Scripture that only grace can hear. It was not written for angels, nor offered to the righteous. It was spoken over a people who had wandered far, to hearts faint with shame and years of forgetfulness. It is a Voice that finds the sinner in exile and comforts him: “I have loved thee with an everlasting love.”
Everything about us changes. Our hearts grow cold, our words falter, our strength runs dry. Yet here is a love that was never kindled; it has always been. Before time began, when the world was still an unspoken thought, that love already was. It did not begin when you first believed, and it will not end when you fail. This love has no sunrise or sunset, no winter or spring. It is as eternal as God is eternal.
“I have loved thee.” Not, I will love thee if thou art faithful. Not, I once loved thee but now am weary of thee. The verb is complete. It stretches backward into eternity and forward into glory. It means that nothing has taken God by surprise, not your sin, not your weakness, not your wandering. His love has seen it all and still says, I have loved thee.
And because it is everlasting, it is drawing. “Therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” The cords that pull a soul to Christ are ribbons of mercy. The sinner who feels the weight of guilt and yet senses a strange desire to pray again, to come home, to believe, he is already being drawn by that everlasting love.
Do you see what this means? God’s love is immovable. It is not dependent on the temperature of your heart, but on the constancy of His. Even in your most barren season, when you feel furthest from grace, the everlasting arms are beneath you.
This is the love that called Abraham out of Ur, that found Jacob at Peniel, that carried Israel through the wilderness, that came down in Christ to wash the feet of sinners. It is the same love that speaks today.
No matter how far you have gone, you have not outlived His affection. The One who spoke through Jeremiah still speaks through His Son. His love has no beginning, and it will have no end. You were loved before you fell, and you will be loved beyond your rising.
That is the everlasting love of Christ.