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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘Keep yourselves in the love of God.’
Jud_1:21
I. What the love of God is.—Far, infinitely far from being a word only, or a vague profession, it is so great a necessity, that if it were once withdrawn in every sense our own hold on life would be lost. Through many a channel it streams. There is the love which He has for all He has made; for us, as He made us, and as He would see us again. It is a creative, parental, guardian love. How good it is to be—at present still inalienably—in this love! There is the pitying love which He has for us as sinners, for a whole saddened, suffering, sinful world—and this love, so real, so commanding, outweighs all. How good to have the resort and refuge of this love! There is the fostering, welcoming love, which He has, to receive and to help first repentant conviction, first penitent tearfulness, first practical endeavour, first symptoms of the returning prodigal. Oh, how good to have the help of this love! There is the love which He has to those who have strayed from the Lord, who have fallen, who have denied Him! and whom He would receive again, with tenfold pitying grace. There is the love which He has to a company of brethren and sisters in the truth, in Christ. Oh, how needed is this love!
II. The fulness of sense in which we may be in it.—The love of God is so vast, that there is no risk of not being entirely surrounded by it, safely wrapped in it—bathed in it. The love of the creature has danger in it; but in and to the love of God you may literally give yourself up, ‘spirit, soul, and body,’ with a safe and a blessed abandon. The love of God has no fickleness, no uncertainty about it. ‘The gifts and calling of God are without repentance.’ Nothing ‘shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.’
III. We may keep in it for ever.—Of all else that is innocent, honourable, good, and great, in which we may rest, we have to say (as when some morning awakes us), it is time to be getting up! But never, never so, if our place of folding is ‘in the love of God.’ In it, work and rest, sleep and wake, day to day, and night to night, while you live even here below; and when you last lie down to sleep ‘in’ it, let the morn awake you, it will be still to find you ‘in’ it; ‘in’ it satisfied; ‘in’ it ‘clad in bright and deathless bloom’; ‘in’ it, for ever supremely blest! So then, ‘keep yourselves in the love of God’—in the one only way of doing so, by giving yourself afresh to Him Who alone can ‘keep you.’
Illustration
‘This very short Epistle is for vigour surpassed, perhaps, by no portion of any other. Its matter and tenor are most striking, and in large part awfulness is the tone of it. Short as it is, it finds room for some statements not found elsewhere in Scripture, or only darkly intimated, such as those respecting the angels who lost their first estate, and Michael the archangel, and the fresh particulars respecting Enoch and Balaam. Its warnings are of the most thrilling and unqualified character. As we read through the short, sharp, incisive sentences we wonder how they must have smitten the ear of those to whom they were originally addressed. Yet the outcome of all is a sentence breathing tenderest solicitude and the warmth of love itself. It seems that a fearful apostasy was in the very air all around, and the writer of the Epistle trembled with fear lest it should find a harbour in the heart of those whom he now so earnestly warns.’