Isaiah 54:7-8, 10 — For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.

For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.

My every devotional thought, recently, seems to have led me right back to the cross.
God’s love is astonishing. Do you love anyone? Do you really love them? Do you love them no matter what they do? I know that that’s what God’s love is like. He loves me and nothing I can do can alter His love for me — make it lesser or greater in the tiniest degree.
Shakespeare wrote beautifully about unchanging love:

… Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. (Sonnet 116).

The trouble with this beautiful poem is that it describes an ideal of romantic love that many men and women aspire to yet few really achieve. God’s love, though, is exactly this way.
God’s love doesn’t change if I change. Satan cannot play the “remover” and steal God’s love from me. God’s love will not change if there are upheavals in my life. Even if I try to wander far from Him, His love for me will not waver. Even time, that most determined of enemies, cannot change His love for me, which spans not a few brief hours and weeks, but the infinity that includes all of time.
The contemplation of God’s love for you might leave you speechless for a long time. But it’s the last line of the sonnet that leaves me breathless when I think of God’s love for me. His love “bears it out even to the edge of doom”. It is that that leads me to the cross, for there it was that Jesus loved me even to the edge of doom … and beyond. He loved me to the cross, and then to the grave. He loved me to the grave, and to resurrection, and to all eternity.
Everlasting kindness, mercy, grace … God’s love is amazing, unchanging, unending …