Oh Love That Will Not Let Me Go

“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 19^th 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" Copyright 2010

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