God Loves Man

People Find It Easy to Believe in God’s Love

We saw last week that most people who believe in any God at all see their god as a loving god. Yet being comfortable with the notion of the love of God has been accompanied by some fairly spongy notions as to what that love means.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

The Bible Reveals An Astonishing Truth God Loves Us

Many people feel God loves us and should love us for two reasons. One, that is what God does for nice people and two, we are nice; we don’t rob banks or intentionally hurt people. We are good people. He has to love us.

Biblically, that is nonsense. The word “world” in John’s Gospel typically refers not to a big place with a lot of people in it, but to a bad place with a lot of bad people in it. It is a world of human-centered, created order that has rebelled against God in hatefulness and idolatry, resulting in broken relationships, infidelity, and wickedness. (John 1:1–18) However, the text says, “God so loved the world”—this broken and fallen world! Why doesn’t He just condemn us instead, and destroy us?

We Can Measure God’s Love for Us in Jesus

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.

John’s Gospel is rich in expressions that talk about the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father. The Son loved the Father in a perfection of love, far past our wildest, most generous imaginations.

God who is there does not need us. He exercised and enjoyed a perfection of love in eternity past. Jesus, the eternal Son, the eternal Word, was already one with the Father in a perfect circle of love in eternity past. Now the Father gives His Son for us. That is how much He chooses to love us. So, God in essence, gives Himself.

We mean two things when we say The measure of God’s love for us is Jesus.

1. What did giving Jesus cost the Father?
God the Father gives His Son over to death for our benefit, ungrateful and self-centered creatures that we are.

2. What love does Jesus Himself show?
Watch Jesus and you see a heart as big as eternity. He looks out on a crowd that seems leaderless, spiritually empty, and lost. He calls them sheep without a shepherd, and He has compassion on them. The following verses are a few of the places where the love of Jesus for lost mankind is displayed. Matt. 9:36, 19:14, 23:15–16, 33, & 11:28–30.

The Purpose of God’s Love for Us Is That We Might Have Life

John 3:16b that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.17 but to save the world through Him.

(1) shall not perish versus shall have eternal life;
(2) not to condemn the world versus to save the world. The purpose of God’s love for us is clear, and directed.

Jesus had a purpose in going to the cross. It was and is to save people from condemnation already hanging over them. We are already under God’s judgment. We are already a lost and ungrateful hoard.
Yet He still loves us.

The burden of the New Testament is that Jesus dies a substitutionary death. He does not deserve to die. When God sent Him to do His Father’s will, to go to the cross and die, it was with a purpose: to die our death so that we do not have to die, so that we may have eternal life. But we must trust Him and discover that His life becomes ours as our death becomes His. His life becomes ours! Much of the New Testament is given to unpacking precisely that point.

Faith is the Means by Which We Come to Enjoy God’s Love and Life

John 3:18 Whoever believes in Him is not condemned.

Just as the people were saved by simply looking at, trusting in, and believing the bronze snake that God had provided could heal them, (Numbers 21:9), in the same sense we are also called on to look to Christ, trust Him and to find life.

If all of this is true, and I believe without question it is, then the first response every person should have toward a God who loves that much ought to be: gratitude for what He has done, brokenness before God,
and a willingness to commit our lives in faith to Him.

However, there are voices in our world who argue that thankfulness before Jesus shows what an inferior, sappy, emotional, weak religion Christianity is.

C. S. Lewis, said, “The humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious minds praised most while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least.” We should remember: When I am ungrateful, I am selfish and immature.

When I am overflowing with gratitude to God: I am healthy, servant-minded, Christ-exalting, and joyful.