The Love of God

Frederick M. Lehman, 1917 (verse 3 adapted from an ancient Jewish liturgical poem, c. 1050)

What This Song Teaches Us About God

This hymn makes a single enormous claim: the love of God is bigger than anything you can measure or imagine. Frederick Lehman wrote it in 1917 while working at a fruit packing house in Pasadena, California — sitting on a lemon crate during his breaks, scribbling with a pencil stub. He had suffered business failures and was doing manual labor to get by. The hymn he produced from that low point has been sung for over a hundred years.

Verse one is a compressed gospel summary. God’s love “reaches to the lowest hell” — there is no depth of sin or failure that falls outside its range for those who turn to Him. “The guilty pair, bowed down with care, God gave His Son to win” — that is the entire story of redemption in one line. God saw guilty people and responded not with abandonment but with the most costly rescue imaginable. Verse two tests that love against the end of history itself. Kingdoms fall, thrones crumble, the rebellious face judgment — and God’s love does not move. It “shall still endure, all measureless and strong.” The final verse is the most famous: if the ocean were ink, the sky were parchment, and every stalk on earth were a pen, you still could not write it all down. That image traces back nearly a thousand years to a Jewish cantor named Meir ben Isaac Nehorai, who used it in a poem about God’s infinite greatness. Lehman heard it quoted at a camp meeting and recognized it as the only fitting conclusion to his hymn. Whether or not the popular story about it being found written on an asylum wall is literally true, the instinct behind the story is right: this is the kind of truth that a person clings to when everything else is gone.

Scripture Connections

• Ephesians 3:17–19 — Paul prays that believers would grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” — the same spatial vocabulary Lehman uses, and the same conclusion: it “surpasses knowledge.”
• Romans 8:38–39 — Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God — the theological claim the entire hymn is built on.
• Romans 5:8 — God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us — the truth behind “the guilty pair, bowed down with care, God gave His Son to win.”

Clarifying the Language

“Reaches to the lowest hell” — This is not saying that hell is a place of redemption. It means there is no depth of human sin or despair that God’s love cannot reach into and rescue someone from. The point is the reach of grace before judgment, not after it.

“On rocks and hills and mountains call” — This refers to Revelation 6:16, where people at the final judgment cry out for the mountains to fall on them and hide them from God. Lehman is contrasting two responses to God: those who receive His love and those who refuse it.

“Redeeming grace to Adam’s race” — This means that God’s offer of salvation extends to people from every nation and background — the whole human family descended from Adam. It does not mean every person is automatically redeemed, but that no category of person is excluded from the invitation.

“Could we with ink the ocean fill” — This is a thought experiment, not a literal claim. If every possible writing material in the world were used to describe God’s love, it still would not be enough. The image is meant to stop you in your tracks and make you realize that what you are singing about is genuinely beyond comprehension.