The Unselfishness of God

And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. 1 JOHN 4:16

On the flyleaf of her Bible, Hannah Whitall Smith kept a sentence whose source she did not know: “This generation has rediscovered the unselfishness of God.” When, past seventy, she wrote the story of her soul, she took it as her title, and said that if she had to sum up her whole religious experience in one sentence, this would be the one.

The God she grew up with

Many Christians, she wrote, without ever putting it into words, look on God as one of the most selfish beings in the universe — intent on His own honour and glory, watchful of His rights, and too absorbed in His own righteousness to have much pity left for the sinners who offend Him. She had believed exactly this through all her years of searching. God was a stern and distant autocrat who might, with enough effort, be persuaded to take some notice of her. “I grew up believing God was like this. I have discovered that He is exactly the opposite.”

The discovery came, she says, through Christ. We cannot see God as He is; we need an interpreter, an incarnation. She compared it to a person trying to make himself known to a colony of ants: he could speak over the anthill for a lifetime and not one word would reach them, unless he became an ant. So God became a man. “Whatever Christ was, that God is.” All the tenderness, justice, kindness and unselfishness we see in Jesus are simply God shown to us in a form we can grasp.

Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? JOHN 14:9

The duties of ownership

Out of this came one of her most helpful insights. She had always thought of God’s ownership of us in terms of His rights. Now she saw it in terms of His duties. Just as a decent society holds people responsible for the proper care of what they own, so the Creator is bound, by the law of His own loving nature, to care for the creatures He has made. That He knows everything about us, once a terror, became a comfort: it meant He could do His best for us.

And it gave a new meaning to a familiar word. Nothing can be lost unless it belongs to someone. The lost coin still bears the king’s image; the lost sheep is still a sheep; the lost son is still a son. “To me, the word ‘lost’ contains the strongest possible proof of ownership.” If a man is a lost sinner, it means he is owned by the Good Shepherd, who must go after him.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. JOHN 3:16

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. ROMANS 5:8

This is Hannah at her best, and it is simply the gospel. God is not grudging. The cross was not wrung out of Him. It is the natural expression of who He is.

The restitution of all things

But this chapter must also be honest about where her discovery led her. In The Unselfishness of God she describes a moment, riding on a tramcar in Philadelphia, when the misery of the human race seemed to overwhelm her, and she cried out to God that she could not see how He could bear it. Then, she says, an inward voice answered with the words of Isaiah.

He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. ISAIAH 53:11

She reasoned that nothing could satisfy Christ except the salvation of every human being. As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive; the remedy must be as wide as the disease. She went home and found the restitution of all things on every page of her Bible. She held this hope for the rest of her life. When the Brighton organisers asked her to keep it quiet, she wrote to her husband that she would make no compromises, and that she believed in restitution more firmly than ever.

Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. ACTS 3:21

Readers must weigh this carefully, and most will not be able to follow her. The historic churches have not taught universal salvation, and the reasons are in Scripture. The same Lord who reveals the Father’s heart also speaks, more solemnly than anyone in the Bible, of a final division.

And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal. MATTHEW 25:46

He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him. JOHN 3:36

Her hope rested largely on her own sense of what love must do — she said that as a mother she could never enjoy heaven while one of her children was shut out. That instinct is not to be despised, and Scripture does say God is not willing that any should perish. But our sense of what love requires cannot overrule what the Lord Himself has said. In places she even speaks as though God owed humanity forgiveness for making us sinners, which reverses the gospel. The wise course is to hold fast to what is revealed and leave the secret things with God.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. DEUTERONOMY 29:29

What remains

It is worth noticing what she herself admitted about her zeal for this view. When a visiting preacher at her breakfast table insisted that God’s love had limits and called her view grandmotherly religion, she told him she would not sit at table with such ideas and left the room in tears. Years later she wrote, “I do not claim that this reaction was courteous or even Christ-like.” That honesty is itself instructive.

Set her universalism aside, and what remains is a truth the church always needs: God is not selfish. He is exactly like Jesus. He loves the lost because they are His, and He goes after them.

The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works. PSALM 145:9

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Be honest: do you, deep down, think of God as more concerned with His own glory than with your good?

2. Read a Gospel chapter this week and say after each scene: this is what God is like.

3. Think of someone you would call lost. Pray for them as one who belongs to God and is being sought.

4. Weigh her hope of universal restoration against Christ’s own words. Where must you hold your own hopes more humbly?

5. If there is someone whose view of God you find offensive, consider how to disagree in a Christ-like way.

A PRAYER

Father, I have imagined You as grudging and self-absorbed, and You are exactly the opposite.

Thank You for showing me Your heart in Jesus, who came to seek and to save the lost.

Keep me from making You in my own image, whether harsher or softer than You are. Teach me to hold what You have revealed and trust You with what You have not.

Give me Your heart for those who are far from You, and let me love them as Yours. Amen.