John 3.16

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 

John 3.16 may be the most well-known verse in the Bible. It’s certainly important. Nearly forgotten is that it comes to us as part of the conversation Jesus held with Nicodemus. Jesus had just introduced the command that it is necessary to be born again. He helps explain the command via some wonderful background news: God loves the world…very much. The news can be applied to humanity as a whole, and it can be applied to each individual. God loves all of his creation; God loves you. This is made clear when he adds, “whoever believes in him is not condemned.”

The love of God resolves all the serious problems. It means we don’t live in an apathetic universe where all is by chance and nothing has meaning. Because of God’s love there is hope for good resolutions for all the problems that torment us. Because of his love we can be confident that each one of us is wonderfully made—made to be like him, endowed with practical skills, granted the ability to love, and certain to be the recipient of love. We can rest assured that others are loved by him. We can rest assured that God’s love is transforming them and us into better lovers, better servers, better creators, better enjoyers of life, and that we will experience social peace and inner peace. Because of his love we will not perish but have everlasting life. Death does not arrive with the terror of nothingness, it arrives with the promise of resurrection to glory. God’s love addresses all our fears and replaces them with joy. 

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” The first word to consider is “so”. We might understand so to mean, “in this way,” or we might understand it to mean, “so much”. Either way gets us to the point that God’s love for us is so great that he made a huge personal sacrifice for our sakes. There is nothing that requires the Creator of the universe to be compassionate and benevolent. God could (theoretically) have had the character of a Greco-Roman god, which is to say, a fickle, temperamental human with super powers. It’s astonishingly good news that our Creator is a good God—good to such an extreme that it is beyond what we could hope for. It is certainly beyond what we deserve. 

Some critics of Christianity look to this conception of God and insist that he is a human construct, that he is the product of wishful thinking. It’s a potentially valid criticism. Wanting something to be true can induce blindness. Of course, this criticism holds true no matter what your conception of God may be…and equally true if your conception is that there is no God. But wishing for something to be true also begs the question: why do we wish it? 

If humans are the product of a blind universe, the problem of how the organic arose from the inorganic remains a complete mystery; the problem of species evolving into each other, a problem that once seemed resolved, has again become a complete mystery; the problem of consciousness is a complete mystery. The formation of the universe, in fact, remains a mystery. Putting these (and quite a few other) problems aside, we ought to wonder how it can be that creatures, formed by evolution would come to the perspective that they should have a god who would provide them with everlasting life. “We’ve experienced the pleasure and we want more of it.” Well, no doubt. But these are not the thoughts of young people during their reproductive years. Such thoughts contribute nothing to survivability of a species. And the whole pleasure argument only begs a broader question: Why does a reproduction-driven creature experience pleasure at hearing music, at seeing colors, at looking at grand vistas or the details on a leaf? Why do we take pleasure in seeing our grandchildren play soccer? Why do we take joy in a well-appointed kitchen? Why do we take joy in stories of love and personal sacrifice and conflict and resolution? The evolutionary answers are simplistic and inadequate.

Virtually everyone would agree that heaven, (or the kingdom of heaven), as described in the John 3.1-15 commentary, would be wonderful. Many people insist it is a myth or a fairy tale, but they don’t dismiss it for being a horrible idea. If we dig a little bit, there’s a strong correlation among all people as to the ideal life. We may live our lives according to divergent ideologies, but our ideas of a perfect world tend to converge. Why is that? The answer is that we are all made in the image of God and that, to a large extent, it is evident to all of us how life ought to be, even if we don’t know how to get there and don’t have the character as individuals to live according to the ideal life we desire. From this perspective, fairy tales are far more true than soap operas. All this is to say that wishful thinking, while it can serve to support delusion, can just as easily be evidence of recognition. The parched man, staring across the desert, may be looking at a mirage…or he may be looking at an oasis. It’s the stuff of tragedy when the man convinces himself that the oasis is really a mirage, so he stumbles off in a different direction.  

Christianity insists that, in spite of the many difficulties of life—the struggle for survival, the brokenness of relationships, human brutality and wars, diseases, aging, and death—behind all these life diminishings there is a benevolent God who is offering to humans a place of peace and prosperity. Did the Creator God lose control of his creation? Christianity says, “No”. The chaos in the world is due to humans turning their back on God, but God uses even rebellion to bring about his purposes. The trials are training. The difficulties are part of the maturation process, and God is in the process of making a nation of people who are full of wisdom, strength, integrity, and love. The Good News is that even the bad news is good news in God’s economy. 

We read in this verse that the extent of God’s love is proven by his determination to put his own son through torment and death in order to resolve the dilemma of humans being sentenced to death. 

I can think of three objections to this scheme of things. The first objection is: “Why did God go through all the trouble? Why create humans, knowing they would fail, knowing the world would descend into a place beset by evil and death, knowing that redemption would be necessary? In one sense I feel that any attempt to answer this question will result in an inadequate explanation. The answer must come through the sum total of the lives of those who experience redemption and their stories of what it means to be in bondage to sin and death, only to be freed and gloriously remade. These millions…these billions of stories must be added to the glory and wonder of the heart and actions of Jesus, himself. I think the library of heaven will be filled with the volumes that recount these stories. 

The short answer to the question is that we trust in God’s wisdom and goodness. This means that God knew that his plan for humanity, in spite of the difficult and horrible trials, was well worth doing. 

The second objection is: “How does this make God good? He sacrificed his son, not himself. That just makes him horribly cold.”

The answer to this question is two-fold. The first portion of the answer is that the Father and the Son genuinely, perfectly love each other. This was no cavalier tossing aside of something worthless to the Father. On the contrary, the Son is more precious to the Father than the rest of creation combined. When the Father commanded the Son to submit to sacrifice, it was a terrible ask. The best analogy I can think of is when an earthly father and earthly mother send their only son off to war in order to shield the homeland from invasion, and they have a high expectation that their son will not return to them alive. It is a horrible choice from which there seems to be no turning away. 

The second part of the answer, which is even more difficult, I think, is to remember the nature of God (which is mysterious, which we don’t really understand, but which the Christian Church has tried to capture in the creeds, based on the relatively few details we have about it in the New Testament. God is a trinity. Father, Son & Holy Spirit. Orthodoxy says that there is only one God, but this one God, of one essence, is of three persons. It’s weird and incomprehensible, but I find that comforting. If the Christian God was the result of human imagining, he would tend to be highly imaginable. Why wouldn’t we expect a God who is brilliant enough to create and maintain the universe to have a nature beyond our comprehension. At any rate, the point is that when the Father called on the Son to sacrifice himself, we cannot say that the Father did not sacrifice himself. Jesus, the man-God experienced the sacrifice in the flesh, but the Holy Spirit and the Father, one with the Son, experienced it as well. I will not pretend to understand the nature of that experience. Perhaps it was a sort of deep heart-rending. I venture where angels fear to tread. My point is that the Father and the Holy Spirit also sacrificed dearly for our sakes through the crucifixion of Jesus. 

The third objection is that the Father knew Jesus would rise from death, so it wasn’t as if he really had to die. This objection is a half-truth, at best. First of all, even though we can’t possess the certainty the omniscient God possesses, it could be argued that, through faith in Christ, all may die with confidence of the resurrection. That certainly, as the Apostle Paul says, takes the sting out. Nevertheless, even people who go through the process of gradual aging are suffering the process of slow death…and it is not pleasant. 

The death Jesus suffered was, I believe, the worst death ever suffered. There was the overt misery of it—the ridicule, the hatred and mean remarks tossed in his face. Then there was the torture of the crown of thorns and whipping. And, finally, the pain-inducing, torturous death inflicted via crucifixion. In today’s enlightened societies, one argument against the death penalty is that, since the executed experiences pain, execution is cruel and unusual punishment. Without entering that debate, the point here is that crucifixion was specifically designed to be cruel and unusual. It’s objective was to terrify. It was a public display and its primary use by the Romans was to remind the general populace that Rome was in charge and that it would meet any and all acts of rebellion swiftly, brutally, and with finality. Jesus really experienced this lengthy horror before his body finally failed.

One other aspect of the crucifixion that I think does not receive sufficient attention is the internal debate that Jesus had to manage. As he says in the Gospels, a simple request on his part would have resulted in the Father sending twelve legions of angels to his rescue. This statement suggests that a fighting force more powerful than any ever assembled on earth could have invaded the scene at a moment’s notice. Like encountering a tsunami, all of Jesus’ foes would have been wiped from the face of the earth before they would have had opportunity to raise their swords in defense. Jesus was abused horribly by horrible men, and he didn’t have to be. He didn’t have to put up with it. He had to actively decide throughout the torturous event that he would submit to the torture. They thought he was in their control, but they were in his control. His control moved him to submit to the will of the Father and in spite of the evil of his murderers. 

I think we have to acknowledge that the Father and the Spirit were undergoing their own “trial” through all of this at the same time. While it was certainly the will of God that Jesus should die to rescue people from their sins, it was a most distressing experience to stand by and permit the torture and murder of the Son. God so loved us that he permitted his Son to die when he had every good reason to be relieved of us. 

The last aspect of Jesus’s death that made it the worst of all deaths was the separation from the Godhead. The Apostle Paul wrote these shocking words: For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5.21). One of the key teachings about the meaning of the crucifixion is that Jesus submitted to the crucifixion/death punishment as a substitute for the sins of all who would believe in him. The Jewish sacrificial system was always an expression of the need for substitutional sacrifices for human sins—evil behavior that separated the people of God from their holy God. Jesus is the Lamb of God. His act continued and fulfilled the sacrificial system. The fulfillment came about because Jesus was more than an “unblemished sheep”, he was a man of unblemished character…and he was God. When Paul says, “he made him to be sin,” this is what he was talking about. The sins of the world were assigned to Jesus as he hung, cursed, not only by men but by God, on the cross. 

While on the cross Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This expresses Jesus’s experience of being the bearer of sin, and of having the Father turn his back. 

So in the crucifixion Jesus experienced the torture and destruction of his body; the terrible mental battle in which he chose personal sacrifice and obedience to the Father over his own rights to justice; and the abandonment of his Father as he clothed himself in sin. Jesus, alone, could have endured this battle and come out victorious, as he demonstrated 3 days later when he rose from the dead. 

This verse tells us that Jesus put himself through all this for the sakes of all who would simply trust him. I have heard ministers proclaim numerous times that the most fundamental human sin is pride. I’m not sure how it’s possible to quantify the value of any particular sin though, no doubt, we must go through the exercise in some fashion or another so that we punish and correct at commensurate levels. But all sins tend to bleed into each other. Murder is always the result of a variety of other unaddressed sins, for example. At any rate, I have my doubts about this singling out of pride. It seems to me that the Word elevates trust/belief over all other issues. It could be argued that love is paramount for Christians but I think the counter-argument is that, when it comes to God, we best demonstrate our love for him by trusting him, which is demonstrated by obeying him. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. It’s not clear to me whether the fruit actually conferred powers. It’s certainly true that eating the fruit subtracted powers from humanity. But the sin was trusting in Satan and not trusting in God. It was profound foolishness. It was a turning of the back against the One who had provided abundant life. 

Jesus reintroduces the importance of belief/trust when he tells us that abundant life is available to us once again if we will trust in him. Be clear on this: faith in itself is not a virtue. Faith in the man/God Jesus is the greatest of all virtues. Faith in Jesus is appropriate. He is good and he is all-powerful. He has proven his love for us over and over. He proved it profoundly on the cross. It is the key decision of life. If you are reading this, this is God speaking to you: Put your trust in him now. Put your life in his hands. In his hands is where you belong.