God so loved the WORLD ...
Which world? The animal kingdom? The plant life? Our ecosystem ... ?
Shall we begin by singing the first three verses of number 28, number 28 verses 1 to 3.
God is love, His word has said it,
This is news of heavenly birth.
In our hearts His Spirit shed it,
Made us know it here on earth
That God is love.
Not in yonder blessed regions
Where the Lord in glory crowned
Reigns amid angelic legions,
Will the brightest proof be found
That God is love.
'Tis on earth the Lord discloses
All His love, how vast it is,
Earth’s the favoured spot He chooses
To display the truth of this,
That God is love.
Just those three verses.
God is love, His word has said it,
This is news of heavenly birth.
In our hearts His Spirit shed it,
Made us know it here on earth
That God is love.
Not in yonder blessed regions
Where the Lord in glory crowned
Reigns amid angelic legions,
Will the brightest proof be found
That God is love.
'Tis on earth the Lord discloses
All His love, how vast it is,
Earth’s the favoured spot He chooses
To display the truth of this,
That God is love.
We’ll ask God's blessing.
O God we give thanks for all your goodness to us. We thank you for the sunshine which warms our hearts and lights our way. And we thank you for the greater light than the sun. The one who has come into this world and who said, 'I am the light of the world. He that follows me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life.' And we thank you that we can put our trust in Him and when we do so He comes into our hearts and lightens our life and not only for this life but for all eternity. And we pray for our fellow men and women that many might turn to Him in this troubled world in which we live. We pray for their souls, we pray for their salvation. And so we ask and give thanks and pray for your help and guidance as we open your word together today in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Now I'm just going to continue my series of addresses on John chapter 3 and verse 16 and we'll just read that well-known verse again together. But I'm going to emphasize one word.
“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. Well, we could ask which world? The animal kingdom? The plant life? The ecosystem of this world that we live in? Well, of course, God loved this beautiful world that He created and set in motion for the benefit of mankind. Or if the word mankind offends your sense of equality you can substitute the word humankind for mankind. But God loves this world but primarily what John 3:16 is talking about, what the Lord is talking about in this chapter “for God so loved the world”, He's talking about the world of people.
God so loved the world, - men and women, - mankind, the children of Adam. Because the Word of God says that God created man in His own image. “In the image of God created He Him. Male and female created He them”, it says in Genesis chapter 1. So God created man in His image, in the likeness of God. That is, He created a human representation of Himself, not an exact copy. Because for a start, to highlight just a couple of differences between ourselves and God:
God is an eternal being. He had no beginning and no end. We had a beginning, although we will live on into eternity. But we had a beginning.
And God has no limits. God is infinite in power and majesty. And we are created beings, we have our limits.
But we are like God, we are created in His image. In the sense that we are rational, thinking beings with the ability to make choices based on reason.
And only people, only men and women, like you and me, can have faith, in a conscious, spiritual sense. In contrast with the animals. Because it says, "Whoever believes in Him should not perish." That's in Jesus, the only begotten Son of God. "Whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life." These words imply choice. An animal is incapable of such a choice because it behaves instinctively. It does what it's programmed to do. It has no morals, no religious, spiritual, philosophical model by which it justifies its behaviour. Because it lives and acts instinctively. Therefore it's not morally accountable for its actions. That's why if a dog bites a child, we hold the owner accountable and not the dog.
"For God so loved the world."
The book of Genesis tells us that God made the world in six days. It tells us that God created man in one day. And that man Adam, was a full grown perfect specimen of a human being in his prime. If you had seen Adam a few minutes after ‘God breathed into him the breath of life and man became a living soul’ - If you had seen Adam you would have said, "He's 33 years old. He's a man in his prime." But he was only a few minutes old.
And so God created this wonderful world. This ecosystem in which we live. And it says “He created the stars also”. The vast universe of which this world, this earth is only a part. And to every scientific measure, it appears to be millions of years old. But God made it inside of a week. In six days God made the world. Because God has all power and all authority. And that's the God who has spoken to us through His word. And in the person of His beloved Son who came from heaven to earth. Because God loved the world. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”. It takes even more faith to dismiss the idea of intelligent design, and believe that the whole thing appeared just by chance.
Planet Earth, our world, the world in which we live, it hangs in space upon nothing. Job said in the Old Testament, he said, that “God stretches out the north over empty space. And hangs the earth upon nothing”. That's the invisible power of God at work. And this world that we live in is so finely balanced, so interdependent, displays the most incredibly complex macro and micro engineering, that we still only understand a fraction of it. Of how it all works. And the odds of this happening by chance, without the purposeful actions of a super intelligent being, are astronomically impossible.
So faith in the existence of a divine creator makes far more sense than the opposite idea that men propagate today, the theory of evolution. Because if there's no God, then the concept of a God who loves the world is a figment of our imagination. If this amazing world of people and animals and plants moving interactively in the apparent nothingness of space, along with all the planets in the solar system - If this amazing world is only a product of blind chance, then -and this is important - then we're not ultimately accountable to our creator. And the concept of absolute morality of right and wrong is nonsense.
If there's no God: morality is what WE say it means. Not what God says it should be.
If there's no God: the concept of absolute truth is outdated.
If there's no God:we're accountable only to ourselves.
That's the shifting sands of modern philosophy. That's the moral quagmire of cultural relativity. If I say I'm a lamp post - or a llama - or a woman. Then you better affirm my chosen identity or I'll see you in court! That's the madness of the logic of evolutionary theory. That's where it takes us. Nothing makes sense unless we acknowledge the existence of a higher power. A higher moral authority than ourselves.
Someone once said if we deny the existence of God, we're living inside a big question mark.
Therefore, I believe that there is a supremely intelligent being. An eternal almighty person who created the world and everything in it. And I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God because God says it. I believe what He's revealed there about Himself and about the world that he made. And about the world of people whom He loved. “God so loved the world”.
However, the book of Genesis also tells us about another person. It tells us about a mighty created being who Jesus called the prince of this world. Otherwise known as the devil. Satan. The opposer of God and man. This is what Jesus said about him. We're going to read three scriptures from the Gospel according to John. We'll just turn to it.
John chapter 12 verse 31. John 12:31.
Jesus said, "Now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the prince of this world be cast out."
And John 14:30. "I will no more speak much with you, for the prince of this world comes and he has nothing in me."
And then over to John chapter 16:8. "And he when he is come," that's the Holy Spirit he's talking about. "And he when he is come will convict the world in respect of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. Of sin because they believe not on me. Of righteousness because I go to the Father and you behold me no more. Of judgment because the prince of this world has been judged."
And back over to John chapter 8:44.
He said to the Jewish religious leaders who didn't believe that he was their Messiah. He said, "You are of your Father the devil and the lusts of your Father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning and stood not in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie he speaks of his own for he's a liar and the Father thereof."
So Jesus said about the prince of this world about Satan, He said: he's a murderer, he's a liar and he's the Father of lies. And he called him in another place he said he's the Evil One. The prince of this world hates God. His very name Satan means the opposer. Because he opposes God's purposes, God's purposes of grace. He's the very embodiment of evil and rebellion.
So this baleful person, the prince of this world, holds this world of fallen men and women. Because Adam and Eve disobeyed God and they fell from grace in the Garden of Eden. They fell away from God's good law, morally and spiritually. And as such we are “dead through our trespasses and our sins”, it says in Ephesians. Because Satan, the prince of this world, deceived our first parents Adam and Eve. Well, deceived Eve and then she gave it to her husband and he took that forbidden fruit and the full knowledge of what he was doing. So we are spiritually dead because sin came in. “So death passed unto all men for that all have sinned”, Paul says in Romans. And we're spiritually dead to all that's holy and pure until the Spirit of God awakens us to a sense of our fallen state through the preaching of the gospel, of the living and active Word of God and ‘convicts us of sin, of righteousness and of judgment’ which we read in John 16.
God so loved the world, the world, the whole world of people since Adam until the end of this world. He didn't just love a select few, the elect which the Calvinists love to say. No, he loved the whole world regardless of whether they would accept God's love or not. Jesus died on the cross for every single person. God took the sins of this whole world and laid them on his beloved Son. That's why it's possible for Jesus to say to Nicodemus, "Whosoever believes on him should not perish but have eternal life." He died for all. He died for whosoever. We used to sing a little chorus in Sunday school, "Whosoever means me." Yes, whosoever means the whole world, the whole of the human race.
God did not place a limit on the souls for whom Christ died.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes on him should not perish but have eternal life - everlasting life”.
So he not only paid the price for the redemption of those who would believe on him, it means that he also paid the price for those who would reject him, for those who spat in his face, for those who scourged him with a Roman lash, for those who put a crown of thorns on his head and mocked him as "Hail, King of the Jews," they said - for those who hated him without a cause.
That hymn that we sung, we'll sing the rest of the verses at the end. We will sing this verse. It was written by Thomas Kelly.
Not for those who ever loved him
did the Lord of glory die.
"Pity to the wretched moved him.
Who that hears it will deny
that God is love."
This is the measure of God's greatness. The all encompassing agape love of God. That's a Greek word that means the love that loves when there's no love in return. God loved this guilty world even when he got no love in return from it. Jesus said, "Father, forgive them” from the cross. Nailed to that cross, he said, "Father, forgive them for they don't know what they're doing."
Even when they murdered his beloved son, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son”. This is not a God who tells his followers to go around chopping people's heads off if they refuse to submit to his authority. This is a God who loves a world of rebels and has gone above and beyond the demands of justice. And he's demonstrated his Grace, (undeserved kindness) to a world of proud misguided sinners. Yes, even those who are misguided enough to commit such atrocities on their fellow men and women. This is a God who holds out the offer of forgiveness, a way of escape from the eternal judgment that our sins demand. This is a God who holds out the offer of salvation,
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. And whosoever believes in him”, the one who died on that cross for you, “should not perish but have an everlasting life”.
Because there's a day of reckoning coming. Only those whose sins are covered by the blood of the Lamb who died on Calvary's cross can escape the eternal judgment of God. Because if we turn our backs on the Saviour, then there's no other way that we can enter into heaven. God won't allow guilty sinners, unforgiven sinners into that perfect holy place that he's prepared. And into the new earth that he's prepared for those who put their trust in his Son.
So the love of God is awesome, it's majestic, it goes far beyond the deepest love that we've ever known in this world. That divine heavenly love, the love of our Creator, caused him to send his Son to die for a world of guilty rebels. Sinners like you, sinners like me. He took my place, he took your place. And Jesus, when he offered himself to God as a spotless sacrifice for our sins, he endured the righteous wrath of the holy God of heaven against sin. We sometimes sing a hymn,
"Here is love vast as the ocean,
loving kindness as the flood,
when the Prince of life, our ransom,
shed for us his precious blood."
Another hymn says,
"The love of God reaches to the highest heaven and reaches to the lowest hell."
I think we quoted it at a previous time. There will be people in the lake of fire for eternity separated from the loving presence of God because they turned their back on Jesus Christ, on the Son of God who loved them so much that he was willing to bear the punishment for their sins. God cannot admit into heaven those who haven't bought a ticket, those who scorn the incredible sacrificial love that Jesus has shown towards them. And that's the solemn reality of the Gospel. If you turn your back on the love of God, he'll turn his back on you forever.
And so I close again with the words of God's invitation to this world, to every individual, to you, and the choice is yours to make,
"For God so loved the world." That means me. That means you. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life."
Shall we speak to God in prayer.
Gracious God and loving Father in heaven, we give thanks for your wonderful grace. And we confess to you, O God, that we only appreciate your holiness in a small, small measure. And if people were more aware of your holiness, then they would fall down at your feet and worship. And they would acknowledge your greatness. But we pray, O God, for our fellow men and women that your gracious Holy Spirit will lift the veil from their hearts and help them to see in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God who loved them and gave himself up for them. So part us with your blessing today and be with us, we ask, for we ask in the precious name of our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
We'll just sing the last four verses of number 28. Verses 4 to 7.
Verse 4 says,
"Tis that man of sorrows yonder,
object of contempt beneath,
but in heaven of highest wonder,
teaches fully by his death
that God is love.
Not for those who ever loved him
did the Lord of glory die.
Pity to the wretch who moved him,
who that hears it will deny
that God is love."
Number 28, verses 4 to 5.
"Tis that man of sorrows yonder,
object of contempt beneath,
but in heaven of highest wonder,
teaches fully by his death
that God is love.
His a throne, the throne of heaven,
yet he comes to earth to bleed;
and for man his life is given,
this is what declares indeed.
That God is love, that God is love.
Not for those who ever loved him
did the Lord of glory die.
Pity to the wretched moved him,
who that hears it will deny that God is love. That God is love.
Let us lowly now adore him,
triune God of love and grace,
joyful bow the knee before him;
laud his goodness, shout his praise.
For God is love. For God is love.