John 3:16-21

11/23/08
John 3:16-21
Hudson UMC

I have a professor who has repeatedly cautioned us that, when we read things, especially about God, we need to pay attention, not only to the words that are being used, but how they are being used. In other words, we need to not only pay attention to the vocabulary, but also the dictionary. People might be communicating with words you know and have used a million times but mean something different than you think. For example, I read in a book once that the author warned teenage girls to beware when they hear a teenage boy say the words, “I love you”. You see, though she might think, when she hears those words, that all of her romantic dreams have come true and he will be her knight in shining armor and that her happily ever after has arrived, his use of the word “love” might have been closer to how he would use it when he says “I love pizza” than “I will give my entire life to you.” If we are not careful, we might not ever notice that we have not quite understood what is being said.

I think that this might be the case with this most famous of all passages in the Bible. You see, we read and we hear that God so loved the world, but I don’t think we often know just what Jesus means when He says this. Jesus is not telling us that God loves the world like God loves pizza; He means something far more than this. If I wanted to flex my seminary muscles, I could stand up here and talk about how the Greek language has three words for “love” and this one, agape, is the highest word for it, implying an unconditional love that will not let us go. I could wax eloquent about the wonders of agape love, but I think that we would still be missing the real power of what is being said. For Jesus to say, “For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life”, shows us a love that is so deep and so powerful, that we can never understand it fully.

So, because I believe that this passage is rightly one of the most popular and well known in all the Bible, I want to try and explain in some explicit terms just exactly what this really means, that we might fall all the more deeply in love with God and His Son through the Holy Spirit.

We love to hear about the fact that God loves the world and we have heard it said so many times that we might even take it for granted, but if we look around the world, our first thoughts might not be, “Wow, what a great place; no wonder God loves it.” We might just as easily, if not more easily, say, “What is Jesus talking about? How could God love the world?” After all, the world is full of hate and violence and greed. Nicodemus might have been ready to hear Jesus say that God tolerates the world, but not that God loves. He might, especially as a Pharisee, have been ready to hear that God is angry at the world, and particularly mad because the people are not keeping Torah like they should. In fact, the most popular image of the coming Messiah at the time was someone who was going to come as a conquering king and fix all the problems, like disobedience to the Torah and improper sacrifices. To say that God had come to earth in flesh would be seen as a time for God to be vindictive and force people into compliance.

Indeed, the world has many problems. Even if we turn our gaze to ourselves, we might question why Jesus would say what He said. After all, it is one thing for me to say that God loves you, it is another thing entirely for me to say that God loves me. After all, I know myself pretty well. I know the bad things I’ve done, I know my bad attitude, I know my obstinate refusal to obey even though God has shown me unfathomable grace. It is easy for me to tell you that God loves the world, so that means that God loves you, but it is not so easy for me to really believe, deep in my heart, that God really loves me. Some of you might have the same problem. The world is messed up, and I am messed up more than most.

We talked last week about how we so often are not able to truly believe in the earthly teachings of Christ by nature. But even if you weren’t convinced by my argument and use of Benjamin Franklin as an example of how each of us really needs God to be “good” people, when we look at the human condition, we can see that there is something wrong with it. Our tendency to sin is universal; there is not a single one among us from the oldest person in this congregation down to Chris and Beth Barber’s newborn that is not prone to sin. You see, temptations come all the time and we give in to them all the time. We are not truly neutral. If we were, we could simply grit our teeth and try really hard and we could overcome sin, but we have seen time and time again that this is not the case. The problem with us is that, when temptation comes, we do not sin blindly, but something resonates deep within us and makes us want to sin against God and we do so boldly and barefaced. There is something fundamentally alienated from God in human nature.

Now, this might seem to be a somewhat pessimistic view of humanity, but I think that it is finally accurate and I believe that you will find the same to be true when you look back on your life. You might be somewhat confused as to why I would go to such great lengths to explain the alienation of humanity from God when I want to impress upon you the magnificent depths of the love of God, but it is absolutely necessary. The reason I bring this up is because we need to understand that sin is not only a purely rational choice, but a characteristic of diseased and broken humanity brought on by the fall. It isn’t just that every human being is tainted by sin purely by their own choice, but that our very nature is alienated from God. Every single one of us is a sinner by nature.

The good news is that our sin has, miraculously, not kept God from loving us. We read in Romans 5:8 something that clarifies our passage a little bit. It reads, “But God demonstrates His own love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” So Christ came to die for us; have you ever contemplated really how powerful that is? The second verse in the great Charles Wesley hymn we sang this morning, “And Can It Be” reads, “Tis mystery all, the Immortal dies, who can explore his strange design? In vain the firstborn Seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. Tis mercy all, let earth adore, let angel minds inquire no more.” It is the great mystery that the Son of God has submitted Himself to death, not just for people in general, but for sinful and alienated people.

Jesus does not go into great detail when He talks about God giving His Son, but it is a powerful thing. You see, when the Son of God was given, He actually became a human being. For those who have been in the church for a while, it is not very difficult to consider Jesus as being fully God; the problem is often understanding that Jesus was indeed also fully human, with a nature just like ours. Do you remember what I just said about human nature being diseased, broken, and alienated from God? It was this very same humanity that our Lord Jesus Christ took up. He took up a humanity that was not neutral, but that was liable to temptation. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus was really hungry and actually had to fight temptation to turn the rocks into bread. When Jesus was at the grave of Lazarus, he really felt human grief and wept for the loss of His friend. In the garden of Gethsemane facing His own death, He was sweating blood. This was not a show. He was really grieved and in agony about the thought of crucifixion. Not only did Jesus suffer real temptation, He suffered it worse than we do, because we tend to give into temptation before it gets really hard, but Jesus endured to the end.

Think about what this means, brothers and sisters. God did not have to love us in response to our continual rebellion against Him. Jesus did not have to take on flesh and a diseased humanity to redeem it. God and Christ did not have to send the Holy Spirit to illuminate the Gospel and to unite us to Christ. God did not have to do anything, and yet He did. I want you to imagine what God has done. What must it have cost the second person of the Trinity to lay aside the fullness of the power of God and become incarnate in a weeping wailing baby? What does it say about the love of God that Jesus would willingly take our brokenness upon Himself and redeem it, resisting the sin that we could not, making a perfect sacrifice to God that we are incapable of doing?

When people die for a noble cause, we call them heroes; people who die in wars while fighting for freedom, those who lay their lives on the line to protect others. We hear these stories and we think to ourselves that, if only the cause was great enough, I would die for it, too. I have had times, and perhaps you have, too, that I thought to myself, “Of course Jesus gave Himself up. His death paid for the redemption of the world. If I could pay that big of a price, I would do it, too.” I have been encouraged in this because Paul, when talking about his Jewish brothers and sisters who have rejected Christ and broken his heart, said that he wished that he could be accursed for them to come to God. The thing is, he couldn’t, not because he was not willing, but because he was not able. It is tempting, and there are many authors who have said this, to believe that we follow Jesus simply because He taught good morality and his death was so inspiring that it serves as a magnificent example of who we are called to be. However, if Jesus was nothing more than a human hero, why follow Him more than anyone else. No, Jesus was more than just a human.

Human beings give up their lives for noble and altruistic goals all the time, but it is not everyday that God dies. The robbers who were crucified next to Jesus were zealots, Freedom Fighters who were seeking to liberate Israel from Roman power. Depending on your point of view, they were heroes too. They were dying for their country. And yet, we hear the one robber say to the other, “We indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” The Son of God did not simply die for us, but died for us unjustly.

I hope that you are beginning to see how great this love really is that Jesus talks about in John 3:16. He says that, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”. I mentioned before a willingness to die for the world. When I think about it on my best days, I may or may not be willing to do it, but I, unfortunately, do not live my life daily as if that is what I would be willing to do. I am far more likely to rationalize it away by saying something like, “I would be willing to die to redeem the world, but that won’t ever happen,” and I begin to realize that I might have some problems dying for the sake of just one other person. How about you? Would you die for me? How about dying for a distant acquaintance? How about dying for a stranger? How about dying for someone who hates you? To drive the point home, what if you were not being asked to die but to give up your child? Would you allow someone to kill your child to save someone who hates you? I would be surprised if anyone in this room has that kind of love for all of humanity.

This love, a love that we simply do not possess, a love that gives up children to save enemies, is precisely the love that God has for the world, and for each individual in the world. God had never suffered so much loss before the time when the second person of the Trinity took on flesh and died on the cross. God’s love was always what it is, but it was only at this point when the depths of that love became clear. Again, I want to ask you, what does this tell us about God? What does it tell us that God willingly gave up His Son unto terrible unjust death, just so He could show His enemies how much He loved them? He did not do this because He felt He needed to prove Himself to anyone, He did not do this as a mere show of compassion, but did it for no other reason than that He loves us and does not want to be God without us. He could have avoided the pain of giving up His child to death if He was willing to let us go. What does this mean? What kind of love is this? It means that, when we look at it in a certain way, God loves each of us more, even when we were in rebellion, than God loves even God’s self.

When we begin to see the depths of the love of God, we begin to see why rejecting it is such a big deal. John tells us that, “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” God is not watching us from heaven, waiting for us to mess up so He can be a jerk and strike us down. He has shown us His love in a breathtaking way. We are tempted, when we hear about the idea of judgment, to wonder, if God really loves us, why would there be judgment? First, this tends to show that we think of love in terms of non-confrontation, when in reality, the love of God is both confrontational and incredibly self-giving. Secondly, Jesus is saying here that the judgment that is to come is primarily the rejection of the light of the world. God will indeed judge those who do not respond to His love, but it is a judgment that is entirely rooted in their obstinate refusal to accept the greatest love that was ever shown. The love of evil deeds and the hatred of the one who exposes those deeds, forgives them, and transforms us so that we can be free from them is the judgment.

“God so loved the world that He gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” God does not talk about this kind of love for pizza, but for you and me. He did not give himself up for people who were already pretty good on their own, but for enemies. This is what is invoked week after week in the benediction. When I pray that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father and the fellowship and communion of the Holy Spirit would be with you, I am talking about this kind of love, this kind of sacrifice, and this kind of transformation that changes lives now. We are going to sing the children’s song, “Jesus Loves Me” in a little bit. I pray that as we sing it, we would see the love of God in a new and bigger way. If you have ever wondered how much God loves you, know that He gave up His Son to death so that He might not be God without you. God loves you that much. Live in that truth and spread it to all you meet. Let us pray.

AMEN