In the hymn O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus the first stanza reads:
O the deep, deep love of Jesus! Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free;
Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me.
Underneath me, all around me, is the current of thy love;
Leading onward, leading homeward, to thy glorious rest above.
I have come to appreciate more God’s great love for us. The hymn writer said: “It’s a mighty ocean in its fullness over me. It is also underneath me and all around me.” What does this mean?
I am reading a book entitled The Incarnation of God by John C. Clark and Marcus Johnson. Let me share with you briefly some of the wonderful things they tell us about God’s great love for us: “In Matthew 17:5 when God the Father said ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to Him’. The Father and the Son share precisely the same desire—to open up to us the love They eternally share with one another. So the Father directs us to His Son, His eternally beloved and the Son directs us to Himself, the bearer and bestower of that love.
The stunning reality of the incarnation is that the love that God the Father has for God the Son has come into our humanity through the enfleshing of the Father’s Son. The love of God for His Son has actually entered into our humanity, allowing our humanity entrance into that love.
We must consider Jesus’ words in John 14:6, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No One comes to the Father except through Me’. When Jesus said that He is the ‘way to the Father’, and that it is only ‘through Me’ that one comes to the Father, it surely makes all the difference in the world that it is specifically the incarnate Son of God who said so! The incarnate Son is Himself our way to the Father—only God incarnate could do that! This is what it means to say that when the incarnate Son reveals God as Father, it is supremely good news (Gospel).”
Donald Fairbairn says: “Jesus is not saying eternal life is something that He will give us. He is not saying that because of what He has done, or what He will do or what we do, then we will get X, Y, or Z while living forever in heaven. Eternal life is knowing Christ and His Father, God. At the heart of the central idea of Christianity lies the reality that Christians will know the Father and the Son.”
To know the Father through the Son is to be joined to the Father through the incarnate Son.
Martin Luther said: “For the Son comes down to us from the Father and attaches Himself to us; and we, in turn, attach ourselves to Him and come to the Father through Him. This is the reason for His incarnation and His birth from the Virgin Mary, that He might mingle with us, be seen and heard by us, yes, be crucified and put to death for us, and draw and hold us to Him. He was sent to draw up to the Father those who would believe in Him, just as He is in the Father. He forged these links between Himself and us and the Father, thus enclosing us in this circle, so that now we are in Him, and He in us, just as He is in the Father and the Father is in Him. Through such a union and communion our sin and death are abolished, and now we have sheer life and blessedness in their stead.”
Such is the great love of God for us through His Son, Jesus.
See you Sunday.
Dick
Grace Presbyterian Church 
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