“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.”
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