There is not perhaps any single passage of Holy Scripture more frequently quoted than this text, and yet it is often evident from such remarks as are made upon it that the text has not the same meaning for all who quote it.
Commentators seem to think it necessary to discuss whether the words of the text were actually spoken by our Lord to Nicodemus or that they are in the nature of an interpolative comment by the Apostle John. This however, overlooks what the Apostle Paul makes clear, even that the words of Scripture are the words of God the Holy Ghost. In Heb. 3: 7-11 Paul quotes from the Psalms and makes it very plain that the words of the Psalmist in Psalm 95 : 7-11 are the words of the Holy Ghost. Similarly here, it makes no difference whatever whether the words were uttered by the Saviour or by His apostle, John. What we have to deal with is the actual meaning of this great utterance of God to ourselves.
In endeavouring briefly as the Lord may enable me to enter into our text, we shall consider:—
1. The object of God’s love—’ the world.’
We shall have occasion to direct attention for the sake of order and simplicity to sub-divisions under these three chief divisions of the text.
- First of all, then, let us consider the object of God’s love — ‘the world.’
We must consider two things under this head,
(a) The connotation of the term ‘world’ here, and,
(b) The condition or state of the ‘world’ God ‘so loved.’
(a) It is evident that the word ‘world’ is used in many different ways in the Scriptures, and by the Apostle John himself. The context in every case leaves us in no doubt as to the meaning of the term, and it alone must guide us as to the real meaning of the word ‘world’ here. Some for instance, have taken the ‘world’ here as meaning all mankind alike. It cannot mean this, for the context makes it clear that faith divides those spoken of under the term ‘world’ into two parties. The one party believes and is saved: the other continues in unbelief and is lost.
Others have gone to the opposite extreme and contend that the ‘world’ means the elect. But the context is just as emphatic against this view as it is against the other. The elect will believe and there is no possibility of any of them being lost: whereas here emphasis is laid on the awful possibility of some of the ‘world’ being lost.
What then are we to understand by the ‘world’? It means and can only mean, sinners as such, both Jews and Gentiles. Let us consider the matter from the experimental point of view — the only point of view in fact from which it is possible for us to understand the things of the Spirit. What does the Holy Spirit bring before the mind of the self-despairing sinner in the day in which the love spoken of here is apprehended? Is it that God loved me? No. Is it that God loved all men? No. Is it that God loved the elect? No. What, then? It is that God loved sinners as such, and that fact is so prominently presented to the mind that the sinner has no hesitation in believing this glorious reality. He sees it to be something which had never previously entered into his mind. But I shall deal more fully with this experimental side of the text when I come to the third major head. So much, then, for the meaning of the word ‘world’ here.
We come now to consider (b) i.e. the condition of the ‘world’ God loved.
We are told in Scripture that God looked down from heaven on the world of lost men to see if there was any at all among them that had the least resemblance to that holiness from which they had fallen. What is the judgment of the Judge of all the earth? “There is none righteous, no, not one.” Psalm 14: 2, 3. They are all not only dead in trespasses and sins but they are also enemies of the Most High. Rom. 3: 9-18, and Rom. 8: 7. His law condemns them eternally: His infinite justice demands the execution of the verdict of His law upon them: and let man try his very utmost to deliver himself and he will find, as all who have tried have found, that it is as easy for him to create a world as to deliver himself.
Such then are the objects of God’s love — sinners as such, ruined, undone, hopeless, with all they do in this condition ‘a smoke in the nose’ of the Most High.
Men who were, perhaps, more interested in questions of theological subtlety than in the simplicity of the Gospel have asked the question, whether God loved His elect as He contemplated them before the Fall of Man, or after the Fall? But, as our text is not taken up with the elect as such, as has already been pointed out, it is clear that neither of the above-mentioned schools of thought can derive any support from the text. It is not the elect as such we are dealing with here, but sinners as such who hear the Gospel; and God brings before them here that He can love sinners who are in themselves spiritually obnoxious in His sight. As the Holy Spirit says in Romans 5: 8,—“But God commendeth His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”
2. We now come to the Second Major head — i.e. The manifestation of this love.
Here, too, we must consider —
(a) The nature of this love.
(b) The measure of it, brought before us in the word ‘so.’
(c) The giving of His Son.
(a) The nature of this love, the love of God.
It is quite different from anything we naturally associate with the term ‘love.’ Before we can love anyone there must be something in the person loved to win our love: some attraction: something amiable: something we desire to possess. But there is not a shred of excellency in the sinner. There is nothing in the sinner but that which God hates, namely, sin. This is the wonder of wonders that God can love a guilty sinner with a love that is the same as that which He bears to His only begotten Son, John 17: 23 — “I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me.”
In our text God in the Person of the Father is brought before us, and this is again in agreement with the experience of the sinner in the day in which he becomes acquainted with God as Trinity. Man by the Fall lost the true knowledge of God, — Rom. 1: 20-25. This is nowhere more evident than when God as Trinity is brought before the natural man. Man may be taught sound doctrine, and that is desirable, but it does not matter how sound the teaching may be, the knowledge of God as Trinity cannot be communicated to the natural man except by the Holy Spirit.
(b) We now come to consider the measure of the love of God.
The value of what we call ‘little’ words is evident here. What a difference the word ‘so’ makes in the text! “God ‘so’ loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” No one but God Himself could measure God’s love. His Son is God’s only-begotten, equal with the Father. The Father and the Son are one God. It is impossible that there should be more than one God or anything equal with God which is not God. Now Christ is equal with God, John 10: 30, “I and my Father are one.” His love, then, to lost men constrained God to give His only begotten Son, and God appointed a day from all eternity in which He would send His own equal from the glory He had with the Father before the world was to this world of sin and misery.
(c) This brings me to consider the giving of His Son.
If there is any text of Scripture that brings before us more strongly than another what it meant to God to save His people it is this Scripture. God cannot suffer because of the infinite perfection of His nature. No created being can by any possibility make God suffer, but here the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ gives His own Son over to shame and suffering. The sword of God’s justice had to awake against the man who was equal with God. What made the obedience and sufferings of our Lord Jesus of such infinite value in the estimation of the law and justice of God was the fact that they were the obedience and sufferings of a Divine Person. We must remember that the human nature of Christ had no human personality. After all, sin is the product of a finite creature and although sin is against an Infinite Being and so entails infinite guilt, yet it had a beginning. But the obedience and sufferings of Christ are those of a Person who had no beginning. He was with the Father before there was any such thing as sin. The law of God would have been fully satisfied with the obedience of Adam, had he continued to obey, as the representative of the race. Yet his obedience was only that of a creature. But the obedience of Jesus magnified the law. It gave the law infinitely more than it originally required.
Consequently any sinner who is enabled by faith to lay hold on the obedience and sufferings of Christ makes them, so to speak, his own, God imputing them to him. Such a sinner thus receives the wholehearted blessing of God’s law and justice, for he comes to God’s law and justice with what is infinitely of more value in the eyes of God than if, on the one hand all mankind had been confirmed in innocence on the ground of the obedience of the first Adam; or, on the other hand, all mankind would eternally suffer the punishment due to their sins, even everlasting punishment in hell.
But, further, the Scriptures clearly bring before us that in the counsels of eternity each glorious person of the Trinity undertook certain things connected with Redemption, peculiar to each Person. To the Father it belonged to appoint everything in regard to the way of salvation; to send His Son; to accept His work; to justify those who believe in Him. To the Son it belonged to undertake and finish the work of redemption by His sufferings and death—by His obedience. To the Spirit it belonged to apply the work of Redemption and afterwards to dwell in the children born in Zion as the Spirit of access to the Father. Eternity in Heaven will be taken up in the contemplation of the love of the Father in giving His Son to die the just for the unjust, and we cannot enter into what the humiliation of the Son meant, not only to the Son Himself but also to the Father.
3. We now come to consider the Third Major Head — i.e. The end God had in view in giving His Son, namely, the salvation of sinners.
Here again we must consider —
(a) The Person in Whom sinners are called upon to believe.
(b) The universal nature of this call.
(c) The ‘belief’ itself.
(d) The certain result of believing, on the one hand, and of refusing to believe, on the other.
(a) The Person in Whom sinners are called upon to believe.
This is no ordinary Person. He is the only begotten Son of God, the Second Person of the glorious Trinity. This Person is at the same time the historical Person who was crucified under Pontius Pilate; who rose from the dead and who is now at the right hand of God in His glorified humanity. Great emphasis is laid in the Gospel and in the New Testament generally on the historical Person, Jesus of Nazareth. In all their epistles the Apostles associate Jesus with the promised Messiah or Christ, and with God the Father. In other words, this Jesus who was born in Bethlehem is none other than God the Son in our own nature. He is then the Person we are called upon to believe in.
(b) The universal nature of this call.
All who hear the Gospel are called upon to believe in Christ. Some people deny this. They stress their objection to the universal call on the inability of the sinner to believe. But it would be as consistent for them to deny that men are bound to obey the call of the law to perfect obedience, in spite of their inability, as to deny the call of the Gospel to believe in Christ. The man with the withered hand could not previously stretch it out, but yet Christ called upon him to do so. Strength came with the call. Similarly with the call of the Gospel. Ministers are Christ’s ambassadors, and they are commissioned by Christ to preach the Gospel to every creature. They are told that faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God — not by the word of man. If sinners do not hear the universal call — ‘whosoever’ — how then can faith come?
Besides, it is evident that all the miseries the Jews have suffered since the beginning of the Christian Era came upon them for their rejection of Christ. He came unto His own home and His own people did not receive Him. How could they reject Him if He had not offered them Himself as their Saviour?
Any mankind sinner out of hell, whoever he may be, is welcome to Christ. The purpose of the love of the Father in sending Him was that any sinner coming to Him should be saved through Him.
(c) The ‘belief’ itself.
What is it to believe in Christ?
To begin with, to believe in Christ is to cease for ever to think or expect or hope that God can or will have mercy upon me on account of anything I can do, but solely and wholly because of what God Himself has done out of His wonderful love in sending His Son to obey and die in the room and place of His own people, all of whom were sinners. Faith in Christ might be said to be begotten in the soul by the Holy Spirit revealing the love of the Father to sinners as such, and through apprehending the nature and freeness of this love the soul closes with Christ, God’s Son as Redeemer.
The sinner who believes in Christ found believing as easy as breathing the material air when in the enjoyment of perfect health. It is when the soul understands in a measure the nature of the Gospel that faith becomes, we might almost say a ‘natural’ experience, although it is in fact all supernatural, for faith is ‘the gift of God.’ Some of God’s people have been afraid, because of this ‘naturalness,’ so to speak, that theirs was not the right faith at all. But right faith is marked out for ever from all spurious exercises which others may call faith. The soul that has true faith no longer looks to its own works for acceptance before God. That soul is satisfied with Christ’s righteousness alone for acceptance and seeks no other. That soul needs Christ’s righteousness more and more after years in the wilderness. Faith then is a receiving of Christ alone for salvation, and a continuous receiving of Him with an empty hand all the days of one’s life.
(d) The result of believing and not believing.
Those who believe in Christ are said to have everlasting life. They can never perish. Our life in a state of innocence was life indeed and worthy of the name. God Himself called all He had made ‘very good.’ But that life was not everlasting, for it was lost, and man perished. He did not cease to exist, but he perished. He was lost.
But those who believe in Christ are not only saved, but they have everlasting life — they can never perish, John 10: 28.
But as to those who refuse to believe in Christ, there cannot by any possibility be any other way for them to escape if they reject Christ. And let us remember that those who reject Christ do so deliberately. The Jews in rejecting Him did so for some reason or other, and hearers of the Gospel who refuse Christ do so for some reason or other known to themselves. But, as the rejection of Christ was the crowning sin of the Jewish people so the crowning sin of Gospel hearers is their refusal of Christ.
“This is the condemnation (above all others) that light is come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” John 3: 19.
They would not part with their evil deeds: they preferred rather to part with Christ.