“He concentrates all the light and warmth of His affection upon us” by Geerhardus Vos

“This divine declaration, ‘I have loved thee with an everlasting love’ (31:3), is by no means from Jeremiah’s standpoint the commonplace which our over-familiarity with that attribute, not seldom at the expense of due regard for other attributes in the nature of God, has made it.

The prophet means to describe by this term something quite extraordinary, something well-nigh inconceivable, a supreme wonder in that land of wonders which religion can never cease to be.

Love is to him the highest form of the spiritual embrace of person by person.

To ascribe it to God in connection with a creature is at the farthest remove from being a figure of speech.

It means that in the most literal sense He concentrates all the light and warmth of His affection, all the prodigious wealth of its resources, His endless capacity of delight, upon the heart-to-heart union between the pious and Himself.

And what God for His part brings into this union has a generosity, a sublime abandon, an absoluteness, that, measured by human analogies, we can only designate as the highest and purest type of devotion.

It is named love for this very reason, that God puts into it His heart and soul and mind and strength, and gathers all His concerns with His people into the focus of this one desire.

It is when speaking of this that Scripture employs its boldest anthropomorphisms.

Here nothing but the absolute and unqualified are in place.

He who would give God less than this total by a mere fraction would give Him nothing at all.”

–Geerhardus Vos, “Jeremiah’s Plaint and Its Answer,” Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos (ed. Richard B. Gaffin Jr.; Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2001), 296. Vos is commenting on God’s words in Jeremiah 31:3, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”