FOR GOD
John 3.16 begins with God
Someone wrote to me last week and said that they preferred to speak not of God but of ‘the Universe’. Many others speak of ‘a force’ behind creation, a bit like in Star Wars.
But the Bible begins with God.
The first verse in Genesis reads, ‘In the beginning, God ..’
John’s gospel begins with, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ John 1:1
That is important
It means that the ‘force’ that is out there is not impersonal, but profoundly personal.
Of course, God is completely beyond understanding:
Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6.16, “It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.”
And Jesus here in John 3, speaks that only the person who has come down from heaven, who has been there with God in heaven, can speak of heaven.
But even if God is beyond understanding – and by the way, the Church has always taught that God is beyond human gender, and that even though we use male pronouns for God, He is bigger than male or female, bigger than ‘he’ or ‘she’; but even if God is beyond our understanding, Jesus has revealed God to us as ‘God his Father’.
In other words, God is beyond our comprehension – but we can still know him as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
The personal God to whom we call is not the God of the philosophers. He is not simply God Almighty, God Immortal – but, for the Christian, He is God our Father. ‘Our Father in Heaven’ – or as Jesus says in Luke, he tells his followers to simply cry out ‘Father’.
SO LOVED THE WORLD
God loves this world, and that includes you and me.
He delights in this world.
He is like an artist, who has painted the most amazing painting, and then breathed life into the painting. And he loves it – he loves us. If you remember, when God created the world, we are told that ‘it was good’. It was a place of beauty and of harmony, of abundance and creativity and joy.
And our Father in heaven desires right communion, intimacy with his world – especially with human beings who he created in his image.
But God looks at the world and he sees that things are not right. Our world is broken. Sin (rebellion against God) and death have come in.
He may want communion with us, but we do not want communion with him. We want to live separate from him, independent of him. I saw a bag last week which sums up how we want to live. It had on it the slogan: ‘My way, my rules’.
But God so loved the world, and so loved human beings, and so loved you and me .. that rather than give up on his painting, and tear it up and throw it in the bin ....
HE GAVE HIS ONLY SON
Love gives.
The more you love, the more you will give.
Love gives that which it loves, for that which it loves more.
God so loved the world – so longed that we might become what we were created to be – that he gave his only Son.
Others in the Bible are called the Son of God. Adam, the people of Israel, David. But they are only pointing forward to the one unique eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ.
And in giving his only Son, God gives part of his very self.
That is why Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others, are so wrong when they say that Jesus was not the eternal Son of God, equal to the Father, but a being – albeit a super-being, a super-angel – created by God.
God did not create and love the world, and then – when the world went wrong – make a second creation, a super-being, to save the first creation. That would demonstrate the power of God, but not the intimate love of God.
Orthodox Christian belief speaks that God shows his love because he sends himself, his heart into the world.
And Jesus came to reveal God to us
He came from heaven in order to remind us of God because we had forgotten about God. We had turned God into our own invention. You hear people say, ‘The God who I believe in is like this …’.
God sent his Son into the world to reveal, to make known to us, the true and living God; God as he is.
And Jesus came to bring forgiveness and healing,
to defeat sin and death, to restore fallen humanity. He did that by dying for us on the cross.
There is another verse, almost as important as John 3.16. It is Romans 5.8, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’.
And Jesus came to be the bridegroom.
I have spoken of how love desires communion with that which it loves. Well the Father sent His Son in order to draw people to Him.
He says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). He is speaking about being crucified.
And when people see his love, the love of the Son of God who gave his life for us, they will be drawn to him. They will come to him as their brother, their friend, their lover.
THAT WHOEVER BELIEVES IN HIM
That means: believing in who he is: that he is the Son of God, come from the Father, who can speak for the Father, with the authority of Father God.
It means believing what he says and what he teaches.
And it means a personal believing – not just a belief in our head, but a belief, a trust in our heart. Not just вера but доверие.
It is about trusting him, casting ourselves on him: receiving the life that he offers us.
SHOULD NOT PERISH BUT MAY HAVE ETERNAL LIFE
Without him we are lost
Without him we are separated from God; we are deaf and blind to God.
Notice how Jesus says to Nicodemus, who was one of the religious leaders who was supportive of him, ‘no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above (or again)’
The point is that without Jesus we are half dead. We are physically alive, but we are spiritually dead.
But with him, in communion with him, we become alive. We receive the Spirit of God. We are born again and are made spiritually alive. And as we listen to him, we begin to understand his word. And we begin to see the presence of the kingdom of God, the wind of the Spirit, at work in this world.
Eternal life, you see, is not just future.
It is present – it is about a reality now, being part of the kingdom of God now, living in the power of the Spirit as a representative, an ambassador of that kingdom now.
But is also about a future hope: the hope of the day when the kingdom of God will come in all its fullness, when it will be evident to all, and when we will be alive for ever with Jesus.
