But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared. Titus 3:4
As a lad, I loved to read adventure stories, especially those with mysteries in them. We had some of the earliest of the Hardy Boys series, and there were many more that I could access, and I devoured those books rapidly. One book whose name or author I cannot remember was about two teenagers marooned by shipwreck on an island inhabited by fierce and dangerous animals, and even more fierce and dangerous men. As the perils and escapes piled up, I could hardly wait to finish one breathtaking chapter to turn to the next one to see what would happen. The words ‘but after that’ in our text come to mind as I recall those adventures. But what happened ‘after that’ in the storybook was small compared to the ‘but after that’ in our text.
To appreciate the impact of these words, we have to go over the previous verse, Titus 3:3: ‘For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another’. Not a pretty picture, is it? What a disaster our lives were before God reached and saved us! All these ugly things were true of every one of us, to a greater or lesser extent. When we consider how far away we were from the righteousness of God and what the life of our Lord Jesus as described in the Gospels was like, we can only be ashamed. And then we come to those lovely words in our text today that changed everything: ‘but after that’.
All of eternity will be far too short to exhaust what is contained in the words ‘the love and kindness of God our Saviour’. That is what the apostle Paul had in mind when he penned the words of Ephesians 2:7: ‘That in the ages to come He might shew the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.’ That great eternal occupation will be so much more than we can appreciate today of those exceeding riches of His grace. But we do appreciate it today, as we gather to remember the Lord. We recall that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. We see that kindness and love appearing in His sinless and compassion filled life, and in His willing and sacrificial death for us at Golgotha.
As we consider the kindness and love of God our Saviour, we must worship Him. – Jim MacIntosh