God loves us until the very end
By Marcel Rebiai
“Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” John 13:1
What does that expression ‘He loved them to the end’ mean? Jesus knew His disciples well and was also aware of what they would do. He knew Peter would betray him, and that all His disciples would abandon Him as a result of their cowardice when He most needed them in desperation at Gethsemane and in His death on the cross. He knew that all the men sat before Him, with whom He had shared His life and heart, would finally betray or abandon Him as cowards.
Therefore, ‘He loved them to the end’ simply means that although Jesus knew all too well what was going on in the hearts of these men and what was to come, He would not distance Himself from them. God is love and that’s why He hates evil and sin, but He does not turn away from the weak and the suffering. Until the very last moment, as long as there is still a spark of hope, God will stand by us. It is not a coincidence that Isaiah wrote of Jesus,
“A bruised reed He will not break, and smoking flax He will not quench; He will bring forth justice for truth” (Isaiah 42:3).
This is the good news for us. God will never give up or turn away from us, regardless of what comes to pass – God already knows. Because He is love, He is ready to withstand anything and everything until a change takes place within us.
Love “bears all things, believes all things (even when we stop believing), hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7).
This devotional is taken from the book To See God by Marcel Rebiai. If you would like to order your own copy, please email us here, [email protected].
Marcel Rebiai is a board member of Revive Israel, and is inspiration for our community. Marcel was born in Algiers in 1953. He came to Switzerland as a war orphan and received faith in Jesus in his youth, which changed his life and made him a messenger of God’s love in Jesus. Since then, he has been faithfully working for the building of the community of Messiah. Marcel is the founder of the “Community of Reconciliation”, an organization that works for reconciliation between Jews and Arabs based on God’s forgiveness and love in Christ. Marcel teaches in various settings around the world about the love that God revealed to us in Jesus, a love that enables reconciliation. Marcel has been living in Jerusalem for the last 30 years, is married to Regula, and has four children and eleven grandchildren.
