John 3:16 again, it says:
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.
“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”. God gave.
God, the generous giver of good things for the benefit of mankind, gave the most precious thing that a father could give. He gave his only begotten Son.
He’s a generous God, a God who not only created a beautiful world with such an intricate ecosystem, and has not only provided all that’s necessary for our well being, but a God who gives because he loves. God richly provides us with everything to enjoy, Paul writes to Timothy in 1 Timothy 6:17. Luke writes in Acts 17:25, he says,
God gives to all life and breath and all things.
And Psalm 86:5 says,
For you, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive, and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon you.
And James writes in chapter one of his letter. He says,
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.
We don’t need to go far to find proof of God’s benevolence. The evidence of His loving-kindness is all around us in this beautiful world. For God so loved the world that He gave gave what? He gave His only begotten Son. This is the ultimate evidence of God’s love for you and me, the fact that He was willing to give His beloved Son to take our place, to bear the punishment for our sins. This is a divine act of sacrifice, and it’s beautifully illustrated in the Old Testament record of Abraham and Isaac. So we’ll go to Genesis 22, where it says there, that “God did prove Abraham and said to him, ‘Abraham’, and he said, ‘here am I’.
This was a test of Abraham’s faith in God. It was a test that was so out there, so unusual, so extreme. that God would not have asked it if He thought Abraham would fail the test. That’s a divine principle. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10,
God will not allow you to be tempted or tried beyond what you’re able, but will, with the temptation, will also make the way of escape.
God doesn’t tempt or try a person beyond what he has made them constitutionally able to bear. God knew that Abraham would not fail him because he knew the spiritual caliber of the man. He knew that Abraham’s faith in him was such that he would follow wherever God led him. How many of us are willing to trust God no matter where He leads? We sometimes sing, “Where He may lead me, I will go, For I have learned to trust Him so” But the secret lies in that little word trust, and we only trust people if we’ve learned to trust them. People who will never let us down. People whom we’ve learned by experience never deceive us. They never say one thing and do another.
Abraham had learned to trust God, and over many years he proved God’s faithfulness to him in the practical things of life. Through crisis after crisis in his life, he found out by first-hand experience that God was on his side. God was rooting for Abraham. God was looking after him, and Abraham learned that this God did not lie, he always kept his word - in contrast to the gods of the nations, some of whom according to the religious beliefs of the time, demanded human sacrifices in order to appease them or to ensure their continuing support.
But this God, the God that Abraham trusted in, cared deeply about his welfare. And because of God’s gracious dealings with Abraham, he came to an unshakable personal understanding that this Almighty Being who had revealed himself to Abraham as El Shaddai, (God Almighty), Abraham came to know in his heart that God always had his best interests at heart.
So then, after he had been on this progressive journey of faith, during which Abraham had proved God’s unfailing care and protection and blessing, it says this “God did prove Abraham”. He tested him. It says,
Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am. Then he said, Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. So Abraham rose early in the morning, and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son. And he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose, and went to the place of which God had told him.
After God had proved his love to Abraham, God tested Abraham’s love for him. But what a thing to ask! “Take now your son, your only son whom you love, and offer him there for a burnt offering”!
Why did Abraham meekly obey such a request? A request that on the face of it appeared to completely contradict the promise God had given Abraham about Isaac? Because God had said to Abraham, In Isaac shall your seed be called, which meant that although Abraham was to be the father of many nations, there was only one nation in particular - Israel - that would be directly descended from Isaac. And yes, God said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love” - ‘that miracle son who was born to Sarah and yourself in your old age. that son upon whose life so much depends’ And God is now telling him to offer Isaac as a human sacrifice? What a test of that man’s faith in the promise that God had made about Isaac. Why did Abraham not argue with God? Why did he just do as he was asked, even when the request must have come as a bolt from the blue? How could he square this apparently contradictory direction from the very same God who had blessed and protected him and his family until this day?
The only explanation that makes any sense is the one given in the letter the Apostle Paul wrote to the Church of God in Rome. where he spoke about
the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, I have made you a father of many nations In the presence of Him whom He believed, God, who gives life to the dead, and calls those things which do not exist as though they did, who contrary to hope, in hope believed so that he became the father of many nations according to what was spoken, so shall your descendants be and not being weak in faith He did not consider his own body already dead, since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb. He did not favour waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith giving glory to God, and being fully convinced that what he had promised he was also able to perform.
That was Romans 4: 16-21. So the answer to the question why did Abraham not argue with God? The answer is this. Abraham believed that God would raise Isaac from the dead. He must have. That’s why as they climbed the mountain together, Abraham, the father, said to Isaac, the son, God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. And that’s why when they got to the top of the hill and built the altar together, that’s why God stopped him doing the deed.
At the very moment when Abraham stretched out his hand to take the knife and kill his only son, that’s when the angel of God said to Abraham ‘Enough!' Stop!’ Verse 12: “Lay not your hand upon the lad, neither do you anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me”.
And Abraham turned round, and he found a ram caught in a bush by its horns, and he killed it in place of Isaac, and offered it up as a burnt offering on the altar instead of his son. Abraham was convinced that even if he killed his only son, God was going to keep his promise.
But then we ask, why? Why did God put Abraham through such a traumatic experience? Surely it was to lay down a marker, a symbol that would help Abraham and all who came after him to have some understanding, dim as it might have been to Abraham, some understanding of what God Himself was going to do for mankind. It was to underline in our minds the enormity of the sacrifice that God the Father was going to make around 2000 years later, when His only son, the Son of God, walked up that very same hill, Mount Moriah, to the place called Golgotha, where God gave - God the Father gave His beloved Son, His only begotten Son, whom He loved, He gave Him as a sin atoning sacrifice for this guilty world; for this world of sinners that includes you and me.
for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son
There was no ram caught in the bush at Golgotha that day. Golgotha, (the place of a skull,) that ugly place of execution, the place of death. There was no substitute for him, because he was the substitute for sinners like you and me. God revealed through John the Baptist that Jesus was “the Lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world.” Jesus had to endure the cross if we were to have any hope of redemption, because he was holy and we were not. And He gave Himself for us, voluntarily, out of love for our souls; and the decision was made within the counsels of deity, in the eternal foreknowledge of God before ever the world existed, God gave His Son, and the Son gave Himself.
The hymn says,
“Who is he in yonder stall, At whose feet the shepherds fall? ‘Tis the Lord, O wondrous story, ‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory At his feet we humbly fall Lord him, own him, Lord of all”
Who is the Son of God? The Bible tells us that he was God in human form, God incarnate, virgin-born. He was the person through whom God made the worlds. “In the beginning was the word”, John says in John 1, “and the word was with God, and the word was God”. And then he goes on to say that “the word became flesh and dwelt among us”.
So he was co-eternal and co-equal with God, and God did not withhold his only begotten Son, his beloved one.
How did God give? He gave freely, it says in Romans 6.
The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
That means you can’t work for it, and you can’t pay for it. In John 10, Jesus said,
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give to them eternal life. and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand. My Father, which has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.
God gave the Son, and the Son gave himself, so that those who put their trust in him who accept by faith the free gift of God so that they will have eternal life.
What did men give to God in return for such a generous, undeserved gift? They gave him undeserved hatred, brutality and violence, a crown of thorns, nails through hands and feet. Scourging, rejection. John tells us that “he came to his own, and they that were his own did not receive him. “ The miserable religious leaders of the Jews despised and rejected their Messiah. It says in Micah 6,
The LORD has a controversy with his people, and he will plead with Israel.
And it says in Hosea 4,
The Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land.
And then if you read in Hosea 5 from verse 15 through to 6:2
it says,
I will go (This is God speaking)
I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence and seek my face. In their affliction they will seek me earnestly.
Come, and let us return to the Lord, for He has torn and He will heal us He has smitten and He will bind us up after two days He will revive us on the third day He will raise us up and We shall live before Him.
Now notwithstanding the fact that in God’s foreknowledge his Son would be despised and rejected, and by their rejection the Lord Jesus would become a sacrifice for all mankind - notwithstanding all that, God still has a case, a controversy against both Jew and Gentile for the abominable way that men treated his son.
It says in Jeremiah 25,
“The Lord has a controversy with the nations. He will plead his case with all flesh.”
So God has a case against you and against me if we dare to turn our back on the Son of God and spurn this Mighty One who loved us to the uttermost. You know, he is the heir of all things, it says. “He has all authority in heaven and on earth.” It says of him, He is “the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” And Jesus said,
No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of myself.
In the face of man’s hatred and rejection, God gave His Son; Jesus gave His life for you and for me, and so each one of us must respond to God’s mercy. We must decide whether to surrender - surrender our pride at the feet of the man who had no pride, or to turn away from the love of God and turn away from the eternal lover of our souls who died for us on the cross, and go on in our blood guiltiness. Because it was your sins and mine that nailed them to the cross. He died to take away our sins, to save us from eternal destruction.
Will you say from your heart “thank you,” thank you, Lord Jesus, for dying for me” - “thank you for dying for a sinner like me” - ?
So we’ll close again with the words of 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 old hymn says,
Oh, what will you do with Jesus?
The call comes low and sweet,
As tenderly He bids you your burdens lay at His feet
O soul so sad and weary,
That sweet voice speaks to you.
Then what will you do with Jesus?
O what shall the answer be?
O what will you do with Jesus?
The call comes loud and clear
The solemn words are sounding in every listening ear.
Immortal life is in the question, and joy eternally.
Then what will you do with Jesus?
What shall the answer be?
O think of the King of glory,
From heaven to earth come down,
His life, so pure and holy,
His death, His Cross, His Crown.
Of His divine compassion, His sacrifice for you.
Then what will you do with Jesus?
O what shall the answer be?
