FOR GOD SO LOVED...

John 3:16-17
"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.
For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved."
"But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, "Abba Father!" Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ." (Galatians 4:4-7).
"These things I write to you, though I hope to come to you shortly; but if I am delayed, I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory." (1 Timothy 3:14-16)

It would be difficult to think of a single person who has affected human history more profoundly than Jesus of Nazareth.
The modern spirit of historical inquiry could not ignore the history of Jesus. His footprints are all over the Western literary, moral, and social landscape, and on every continent. He has been worshiped as Lord through a hundred generations!
Historical inquiry into Jesus cannot avoid at some point overhearing the question Jesus asked to Peter: "Who do you say that I am?" Peter’s confession, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," remains the concise pattern for subsequent Christian liturgy and confession. The meaning of Jesus’ life and death has never been a permanently dead issue to any generation since His appearance! It remains even today a matter of intense debate as to who Jesus was and what His life and death mean. Deeper even than the mystery of His astonishing historical influence is the simpler, starker question that rings through Christian reflection: "Why did God become human?"

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The facts briefly stated: Date of birth: between 5 B.C. and A.D. 4. Place: Palestine. Ethnic origin: Jewish. Vocation: probably first a carpenter, then a traveling preacher of the coming rule of God. Length of ministry: three Passovers (John 2:13; 6:4; 12:1). Date of death: Friday, 14 Nisan (the first month of the Jewish year), probably, by our calendar, April 7 A.D. 30 (or by some calculations, 3 April, A.D. 33). Place of death: Jerusalem. Manner of death: crucifixion. Roman procurator: Pontius Pilate (A.D. 27-33). Roman emperor: Tiberius.
Christology focuses not simply upon bare facts, but upon what this life meant and how these events have been interpreted--especially as they come down finally to a single, pivotal question: whether Jesus is rightly understood as the expected Messiah of Israel, Son of God, Lord--or not. This is the startling question that His life constantly asks. The nearer one comes to Him, the more clearly He requires that decision. It is the unavoidable issue that the observer of Jesus’ life must finally come up against, for Jesus Himself presses and requires that decision. To avoid that issue is to avoid Him. To avoid Him is to avoid Christianity altogether!
Paul tells us in Galatians 4 that this historical event of the coming of Jesus into this world, came about in the fullness of time.
Search the pages of history up and down, and in all the tale of the centuries you will not find any generation in which Christ could better have come than just the generation in which He did come!
"There is a tide," says Shakespeare, "in the affairs of men." We go beyond that and say that there is a tide in the affairs of God; and it is when that tide reaches the flood, when all the preparatory work is done and world conditions are clamoring for it and human souls are open, it is then, at the flood-tide hour of history, that God launches His new adventure!
It was the fullness of the time, said Paul--it was the hour fore-ordained in the divine wisdom--when God sent forth His Son. Jesus came at the very point in history at which all the conditions were ripe for His coming! When Jesus came, it was the fullness of the time POLITICALLY. What was the dominating feature of the political situation of the generation to which Christ came? It was the unification of the world.
That was Caesar’s achievement. The day of closed frontiers was over. All the way from the Atlantic to the Caspian, from Britain to the Nile, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Eu

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phrates, the Roman standards could be seen.
Three factors contributed to this situation into which the gospel of Christ was born.
(l) One was the ROMAN PEACE. If Christ had come a century earlier, His gospel would have been blocked at every turn, blocked on the land by closed national frontiers, blocked on the ocean by pirates who made the high seas impassable. Or if He had come a few centuries later, He would have found civilization too preoccupied with its terrible struggle against the barbarians from the North to have any ear for the gospel. But Christ came to a generation when the Roman Peace held the world, held it no doubt with an iron hand, but held it sure and far-flung and unbroken; and men could hear the Bethlehem angels sing!
(2) The second factor making for unity of the world when Jesus came was THE GREAT ROADS. From end to end of the Roman Empire the great highways ran, triumphs of Roman engineering. And the ten thousand laborers who had toiled on the making of the roads in the sweat of their brows little thought they were preparing a way for the Son of God. But they were! Along these imperial lines of communication, built to carry Caesar’s legions to every corner of his dominions, the missionaries of the gospel came marching; and everywhere their message spread like wildfire.
(3) The third factor making for world unity when Jesus came was LANGUAGE. For while each province still had its own tongue or dialect, everywhere the people were bilingual and all knew Greek. In the heights of Galatia as much as on the streets of Athens, in Spain as in Rome, the missionaries could speak Greek knowing that they would be understood.
The Roman peace, the great roads, the common language--these were the things that had linked the world into one big neighborhood and so had prepared the way for Christ. When Jesus first came, it was the fullness of the time, not only politically, but also ECONOMICALLY. Indeed, in many quarters of Caesar’s dominions the economic situation had reached the point of crisis when Jesus came. So it was in Palestine. The disastrous aftermath of war, the wild, colossal extravagance of Herod the Great, the burden of taxation, both civil and religious, the growing overpopulation which made it impossible for the land to provide food enough for its own inhabitants--these things had precipitated a period of unexampled depression among the great bulk of the people. Life had grown care-ridden and full of worry. Anxiety for the morrow was written deep upon men’s faces and on their hearts, and all the world seemed

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tangled and gone wrong. It was then at the blackest hour that a Voice of hope rang out in Galilee; and men’s hearts leapt up and listened, for the fullness of the time had come!
When Jesus first came, it was the fullness of time MORALLY. Swineburne in one of his poems cries out protestingly that after Christ the world has never known the same light-heartedness again; that Jesus has taken all its natural gaiety and good spirits away. But all that is false to the facts. The idea of an ancient world happy and innocent and light-hearted and morally at peace is simply a myth! If you want the real truth about that world, you will get it, not in Swineburne, but in Paul, in that terrible picture that stands forever for all ages to read in Paul’s first chapter to the Romans--a world that was sunk in moral depression and hopelessness. Everywhere the best spirits were in despair. Everywhere to the noblest souls it seemed that the whole world was pursuing its riotous way down to disaster and oblivion and ultimate night.
When Jesus first came, it was in the fullness of time RELIGIOUSLY. The old gods of Rome were either dead or dying. To fill the gap, two expedients were tried. On the one hand, a whole new batch of gods were imported from the East, outlandish, oriental deities brought in to stir Rome’s jaded senses--till among the philosophers the overcrowding of Olympus, where the gods were supposed to dwell, became a standing joke!
On the other hand, the strange phenomenon of Caesar worship appeared; the emperor himself was accorded divine honors. But all expedients failed. What was a whole Pantheon of gods worth if they had nothing to say to man with a broken heart? What could the divinity of Caesar say to a soul stabbed with the remorse of sin?
Also, there was a strange sense of something impending from the side of God. In many parts of the world men of deeper nature and more spiritual vision were peering into the darkness for some faint flush of dawn. Among the Jews themselves the hope of the Messiah was blazing more clearly than it had done for centuries. The great mass of Jewish literature from the period between the Old Testament and the New Testament is full of this hope. And when any new voice rang out across the land, the voice of John the Baptist, for instance, immediately on every lip there rose the question--"Is this the Messiah now?" The air was tense with expectation! So the Redeemer came. Somewhere in the mind

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and heart of God from the very foundation of the earth the Christ had been waiting, hidden in the counsels of eternity until the great bell of the ages should strike; and when at last everything in the world and in the souls of men was ready and prepared, He came, the Word of God made flesh, not a moment early and not a moment late, but exactly on the stroke of the hour. It was the day of the Lord! "IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME, GOD SENT FORTH HIS SON."
"And the Word (Christ) became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace." (John 1:14)
"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. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." (John 3:16-17)
This glorious text is the hub of the Bible! It is the vital center of Divine revelation, and the very heart of the Evangel. All the great truths of the Old Testament converge toward it. The high-roads of ancient history make for it. The deep sea-routes of profound prophecies lead to it! The redeeming realities of the New Covenant in Jesus’ blood are all enfolded in it and unfolded from it.
John 3:16 is built around ten great words which stand out: God, Loved, World, Gave, Son, Whosoever, Believeth, Perish, Have, Life.
In these ten distinctive words of Divine revelation, the message of the whole written word of God is comprehended in them as in no others.
When we look a little more closely at these ten words, we find, as the late Dr. A. T. Pierson pointed out, that they go together in five deeply significant pairs.
The first pair--the two words "God" and "Son"--show us the supreme Giver and the supreme Gift, God the Father and Christ the Saviour, two of the ever-blessed Trinity of the Godhead, co-operating in the effecting of our salvation.
The second pair show us the two expressions of the Divine benevolence--God "loved" and "gave".
The third pair show us the two-fold direction of God’s loving and giving--the "world" and "whosoever."
The fourth pair show us the two things that all human beings are privileged and invited to do, namely-"believe" and "have."
The fifth pair show us the two ultimate ex

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tremes of human destiny--in the one case "perish" and in the other, "life."
These are five deeply significant pairs of words!
It is interesting that when we look deeply into these pairs of words, we find that the second grows out of the first!
Consider! "God" and "Son"...That word "God" is the comprehensive name for the Deity; but now, emerging from the mystery of the Divine being, and coming to us through the miracle of the Incarnation, is One who, while being "very God of very God" bears the name of the "Son." Paul writes in the Book of Philippians, chapter 2, verses 5 through 11, these words: (Amplified Text) "Let this same attitude and purpose and [humble] mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus; [Let Him be your example in humility:] Who, although being essentially one with God and in the form of God [possessing the fullness of the attributes which make God God], did not think this equality with God was a thing to be eagerly grasped or retained, but stripped Himself [of all privileges and rightful dignity], so as to assume the guise of a servant (slave), in that He became like men and was born a human being. And after He had appeared in human form, He abased and humbled Himself [still further] and carried His obedience to the extreme of death, even the death of the cross! Therefore [because He stooped so low] God has exalted Him and has freely bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, That in (at) the name of Jesus every knee should (must) bow, in heaven and under the earth, and every tongue [frankly and openly] confess and acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father."
In our John 3:16 passage, the second pair of words--"loved" and "gave" tells us that God does not love us because Jesus died for us--as some have mistakenly supposed.
No; it is the other way round--the Son of God died to redeem us because God already loved us! Despite the plain teaching of the New Testament, many people have held the erroneous idea that God the First Person of the Trinity, is a kind of hard, cold, revengeful Judge who looks down upon this world of human sinners with nothing but an unsympathetic determination to judge and punish--and that the tender-hearted Lord Jesus, in pity for us, came between this wrathful Judge and ourselves, and died for us, so that at any rate the offended Judge might try to feel some merciful relentings towards us!
D. L. Moody, the famous evangelist, tells us

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that this was the idea which filled his own mind in the earlier years. Later, he came to see that this was a tragic caricature of the real Gospel! Christ’s redemptive work for us is the proof of the Father’s love, not the cause of it.
God’s love is not static or self-centered; it reaches out and draws others in. Here God’s actions defined the pattern of true love, the basis for all love relationships--when you love someone, you are willing to sacrifice dearly for that person.
Sacrificial love expresses itself without assurance that the love will be returned in kind. The timing of that love was highlighted by Paul’s words, "But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
Sacrificial love is also practical in seeking ways to meet the needs of those who are loved. In God’s case, that love was infinitely practical, since it set out to rescue those who had no hope of rescuing themselves. God paid dearly to save us; He gave His only begotten Son, the highest price He could pay. The term translated "only begotten" expresses Jesus’ unique value and position as God’s only Son.
John 3:16, along with the rest of the New Testament, assumes that apart from God’s intervention, people perish. "And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My Father’s hand." (John 10:28). "He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him" (John 3:36).
The word (perish) adds a sense of hopelessness to the fact of dying—"to perish" is to come to a dead end. In this verse, escape from the tragic fate of perishing is promised to those who believe in God’s Son. Instead of perishing, they will have "eternal life." There is no eternal life outside of Christ.
There is another interesting verse in Ephesians 3 that we can place alongside of John 3:16 that illumines the wonderful truth of God’s love for fallen man. It is probably best to read the entire prayer that Paul prays for the Ephesian Christians. "For this reason, I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be

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able to comprehend with all the saints, what is the width and length and depth and height--to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19) Paul speaks of "the breadth and the length and depth and height" of the love of Christ. Now, let’s compare those dimensions of love and the glorious truths of John 3:16. "God so loved the world"--there is the BREADTH. "That He gave His only begotten Son"--there is the LENGTH to which His love would go. "That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish"--there is the ghastly DEPTH from which His love comes to save us. "But have everlasting life"--there is the wondrous HEIGHT to which His love can lift us!
The love of Christ finds its crowning expression in the Cross! The superscription of His accusation affixed to the Cross was written "in Hebrew and Greek and Latin." These three languages comprehended the whole of the ancient world. They reach out to all points of the compass, and bespeak the universality of the Redeemer’s love. The wide-flung arms of that wondrous Cross welcome the whole world.
When we stand before the Cross, we hear the Saviour’s words, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me." Never can we know the utter suffering of that awful hour, or sound the depths of the inconceivable woe when the Father withdrew from the forsaken Son of His bosom. We can but dimly discern that Christ’s substitutionary identification with man’s sin somehow involved that He must in some deep and awful way "taste death," and that even the Father must turn from Him as He hung there—"made to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Oh!! What LENGTH the Divine love would go, to save and win the love of our poor heart. The thief who hung along side of the Saviour cries out--: "Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom." The response of Christ was—"Verily, I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise!" Behold the DEPTH to which the Saviour’s love can reach, and the HEIGHT to which it can lift even such a one as the dying thief...
"For God so loved that He gave..."
May we never lose the wonder of our salvation and may we never wander far from the Cross. "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ" (Ephesians 2:14).
Ah! What a wonderful gift is God’s only begotten Son!