“I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you
with loving kindness.” (Jeremiah 31:3, KJV)
I think that there
is not a more beautiful song in all the earth than the song represented by the
title of this devotion. I have loved it from the time I first heard it sung.
George Matheson, a
well-known Scottish minister of the 19th century, claimed to have
written this song while enduring the tentacles of intense emotional strain.
I love the
incomplete, (but admittedly mysterious) account that Matheson left us.
"My hymn was composed in the manse of Innelan on the evening of the 6th of June, 1882, when I was 40 years of age. I was alone in the manse at that time. It was
the night of my sister’s marriage, and the rest of the family were staying
overnight in Glasgow. Something happened to me, which was known only to myself,
and which caused me the most severe mental suffering. The hymn was the fruit of
that suffering. It was the quickest bit of work I ever did in my life. I had
the impression of having it dictated to me by some inward voice rather than of
working it out myself. I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in
five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any
retouching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other
verses I have ever written are manufactured articles; this came like a
dayspring from on high.”
While no one
currently living can provide an adequate account of his emotional pain, it is
known that Matheson faced impending blindness, and having discovered it, his
fiancee called off their engagement. “Oh love that will not let me go” may have
been the resulting fruit of this desperate incident in the life of a blind
pastor.
The words of this
melody are as poignant as anything ever written:
“O Love that will
not let me go, I rest my weary soul on Thee; I give Thee back the life I owe,
that in Thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.”
Who can say?
Perhaps Matheson’s loss of his fiancee caused him to reflect on mortality
giving way to immortality. Corruption giving way to incorruption. Losing an
earthly lover. Gaining a heavenly One.
We can be sure
that Our Lord loved us before we were a twinkle in our Daddy’s eyes, or before
light shone on the face of the waters. His love, that “love that will not let
me go” is Past, Present and Future. His love lives in all life’s tenses.
Christ’ atoning death on that cruel cross
served and still serves as The Earnest of our inheritance, and assures us of
that sort of Love the Scottish preacher wrote about in this glorious hymn of
the church.
“O Joy that
seekest me thru pain, I cannot close my heart to Thee; I trace the rainbow thru
the rain, and feel the promise is not vain that morn shall tearless be.”
By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "Musings"
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