The Love of God

The Gaither Vocal Band sings “The Love of God,” a hymn whose first verse starts from what words cannot do: “The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell.” It then gives the distance in two directions, “beyond the highest star” and down to “the lowest hell,” before naming the cause, “God gave His Son to win his erring child,” reconciled and pardoned.

The chorus is a short exclamation, “Oh, love of God, how rich and pure, how measureless and strong,” which says it will last “forevermore” and become “the saints' and angels' song.” The last verse is the best known. It imagines the whole ocean as ink, the skies as parchment, every stalk a quill and everyone a scribe, and concludes that even then the ocean would run dry before the love of God was written, and the scroll could not hold it all “though stretched from sky to sky.”

The idea of a love without measure matches Ephesians 3:18-19, which prays for believers to grasp how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is. Romans 5:8 and John 3:16 supply the gift of the Son given for sinners.