The Love of God is Greater Far

As we often say at Faith Fellowship, songs are like sermons that you won’t forget by Sunday afternoon. That is why we want to let you know about a wide range of songs that we hope will stir your affections for Christ and encourage you throughout the week.

VERSE 1
The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell
It goes beyond the highest star
And reaches to the lowest hell
The guilty pair, bowed down with care
God gave His Son to win
His erring child He reconciled
And pardoned from his sin

VERSE 2
Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made
Were every stalk on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky

BRIDGE
O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints' and angels' song

The love of God is something that preachers and poets have been trying to put words to for centuries, but have always seem to come up short in their descriptions. Its almost as if the best beginning to explain the love of God is to start by saying, “This explanation doesn’t even come close to describing it!”

As the lyrics of The Love of God is Greater say:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade,

To write the love of God above,

Would drain the ocean dry,

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky

Charles Spurgeon, the prince of preachers as some say, said that if there were one subject that he could always talk about but felt utterly incapable of explaining was the love of God. Preaching one Sunday morning he quietly said, “The love of God makes me shrink back from this platform utterly ashamed of my poor feeble words. This love of Christ is the most amazing thing under heaven, if not in (all of) heaven itself.”

King David, a man responsible for writing more about the love of God than most in Scripture, wrote in Psalm 103:11: For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.

Now think about those words for second.

Spurgeon is shrinking back in shame.

The hymn writer is saying that if all the oceans were ink and all the sky were paper, we still wouldn’t have enough writing material.

At least King David is putting some measurements on it.

But how do you measure how high the heavens are?

You can’t exactly pull out a tape measure for this sort of the thing. It’s not as if we could measure the volume of the ocean or the length of the stretched sky to sky. Oh wait, we do though…

Science has provided us with a little bit of measurement for how high the heavens are as well as the length of the horizon stretched sky to sky. When you hear these numbers though, at least to me, it only makes the preachers and poets point even stronger.

To get to the edge of our galaxy — the good ol’ Milky Way — traveling at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years!

Light travels at 186,282.2 miles per second. Which if you want a reference, in the time it takes me to snap your fingers, light circumnavigates the globe six times.

The Millennium Falcon may do the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs but get this; it takes 100,000 years for light to get from one edge of the galaxy to the other!

Oh, and astronomers believe there are about 80 billion or so of these galaxies in our universe — so many in fact that they estimate that it would take light 15.5 billion years to cross.

And this is the analogy that God Himself uses to measure His love for you in His Word.

Meditate on that as you listen to this hymn today.