We would all easily agree that the greatest picture of God's marvellous,
overmastering passion of love is seen in the cross. All men as they have
come to know that story have stood with heads bowed and bared before the
love revealed there. They have not understood it. They have quarrelled
about its meaning. But they have acknowledged its love and power as beyond
that of any other story or picture.

However men may differ as to why Jesus died, and how His dying affects us,
they all agree that the scene of the cross is the greatest revelation of
love ever known or ever shown. All theories of the atonement seem to be
lost sight of in one thought of grateful acknowledgment of a stupendous
love, as men are drawn together by the magnetism of the hill-top of
Calvary.

But there is a wondrously clear foreshadowing of that tremendous cross
scene in the earliest page of this old Book. Nowhere is love, God's
passion of love, made to stand out more distinctly and vividly than in the
first chapter of Genesis. The after-scene of the cross uses intenser
coloring; the blacks are inkier in their blackness; the reds deeper and
redder; the contrasts sharper to the startling-point; yet there is nothing
in the cross chapters of the Gospels not included fully in this first leaf
of revelation. But it has taken the light of the cross to open our eyes to
see how much is plainly there. Let us look at it a bit.



The Love Passion.