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SearchDivine Love is Everything
The cross of Jesus portrays the full measure of the supreme devotion of the true shepherd for
even the unworthy members of his flock. It forever places all relations between God and man
upon the family basis. God is the Father; man is his son. Love, the love of a father for his son,
becomes the central truth in the universe relations of Creator and creature--not the justice of a
king which seeks satisfaction in the sufferings and punishment of the evil-doing subject.
The cross forever shows that the attitude of Jesus toward sinners was neither condemnation nor
condonation, but rather eternal and loving salvation. Jesus is truly a savior in the sense that his
life and death do win men over to goodness and righteous survival. Jesus loves men so much that
his love awakens the response of love in the human heart. Love is truly contagious and eternally
creative. Jesus' death on the cross exemplifies a love which is sufficiently strong and divine to
forgive sin and swallow up all evil-doing. Jesus disclosed to this world a higher quality of
righteousness than justice--mere technical right and wrong. Divine love does not merely forgive
wrongs; it absorbs and actually destroys them. The forgiveness of love utterly transcends the
forgiveness of mercy. Mercy sets the guilt of evil-doing to one side; but love destroys forever the
sin and all weakness resulting therefrom. Jesus brought a new method of living to Urantia. He
taught us not to resist evil but to find through him a goodness which effectually destroys evil.
The forgiveness of Jesus is not condonation; it is salvation from condemnation. Salvation does
not slight wrongs; it makes them right. True love does not compromise nor condone hate; it
destroys it. The love of Jesus is never satisfied with mere forgiveness. The Master's love implies
rehabilitation, eternal survival. It is altogether proper to speak of salvation as redemption if you
mean this eternal rehabilitation.
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Jesus, by the power of his personal love for men, could break the hold of sin and evil. He
thereby set men free to choose better ways of living. Jesus portrayed a deliverance from the past
which in itself promised a triumph for the future. Forgiveness thus provided salvation. The
beauty of divine love, once fully admitted to the human heart, forever destroys the charm of sin
and the power of evil.
The sufferings of Jesus were not confined to the crucifixion. In reality, Jesus of Nazareth spent
upward of twenty-five years on the cross of a real and intense mortal existence. The real value of
the cross consists in the fact that it was the supreme and final expression of his love, the
completed revelation of his mercy.
On millions of inhabited worlds, tens of trillions of evolving creatures who may have been
tempted to give up the moral struggle and abandon the good fight of faith, have taken one more
look at Jesus on the cross and then have forged on ahead, inspired by the sight of God's laying
down his incarnate life in devotion to the unselfish service of man.
The triumph of the death on the cross is all summed up in the spirit of Jesus' attitude toward
those who assailed him. He made the cross an eternal symbol of the triumph of love over hate
and the victory of truth over evil when he prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do." That devotion of love was contagious throughout a vast universe; the disciples caught it
from their Master. The very first teacher of his gospel who was called upon to lay down his life
in this service, said, as they stoned him to death, "Lay not this sin to their charge."
The cross makes a supreme appeal to the best in man because it discloses one who was willing
to lay down his life in the service of his fellow men. Greater love no man can have than this: that
he would be willing to lay down his life for his friends--and Jesus had such a love that he was
willing to lay down his life for his enemies, a love greater than any which had hitherto been
known on earth.
When thinking men and women look upon Jesus as he offers up his life on the cross, they will
hardly again permit themselves to complain at even the severest hardships of life, much less at
petty harassments and their many purely fictitious grievances. His life was so glorious and his
death so triumphant that we are all enticed to a willingness to share both.
We know that the death on the cross was not to effect man's reconciliation to God but to
stimulate man's realization of the Father's eternal love and his Son's unending mercy, and to
broadcast these universal truths to a whole universe.