George Smeaton
John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
1Comments on John 3:16 taken, with editing, from the writer’s valuable work, The Doctrine of the Atonement According to Christ, which has been reprinted by the Banner of Truth Trust. Smeaton (1814-89) was the last of the firmly-orthodox professors in the nineteenth-century Free Church College in Edinburgh.
This saying makes known more fully to Nicodemus the fact of the atonement and its source in divine love. That it forms part of our Lord’s address, and is not the comment of the evangelist, is obvious to everyone who has noticed the way in which John appends his comments on the Master’s words. This is never left doubtful (see John 7:39).
The allusion to the atonement is obvious in the phrase, “He gave His Son”. Though some have explained this as equivalent to being sent, it rather has the sacrificial sense of being given up to death. Here it corresponds to the lifting up in the previous context. This giving of the Son does not go back to the divine purpose, nor go down to the individual’s experience when Christ is given to the believer, but denotes a giving up to death. It is properly the giving up in sacrifice, because the presentation of the victim formed part of the act of sacrifice. The expression, He delivered, or gave, is not infrequent as a description of God’s act of giving His Son to a sacrificial death; and wherever it occurs, whether as denoting the Father’s act in giving the Son (Rom 8:32), or the act of the Son in giving Himself (Mt 20:28; Gal 1:4), it always describes the sacrifice which He offered to God the Father.
It will be necessary to refer to a few points mentioned here in connection with the atonement:
1. The atonement is here described as emanating from the love of God.
These words of Christ plainly show that the biblical doctrine on this point is not duly exhibited unless love receives special prominence, and that it would be a misrepresentation against which the biblical divine must protest if, under the influence of any dogmatic prejudice, love is not allowed its rights. If even justice were made paramount, the balance of truth would be destroyed.
In His justice, God maintains the inalienable rights of the Godhead. He loves Himself and cannot but delight in His own perfections. Hence, in describing it, the Psalmist says, “The righteous Lord loveth righteousness” (Ps 11:7). In a just conception of the divine attributes, none of them can be said to predominate; their equipoise is so perfect that it could not be disturbed without ruin to the universe. One cannot be surprised that the opponents of vicarious [substitutionary] satisfaction repudiate this equipoise of justice and love in the work of redemption; they would resolve justice into love. But these attributes are as distinct as love to Himself and love to mankind, or as giving and retaining. He gives Himself, in the exercise of love, to His creatures; but He does not give up, and He cannot recede from, those rights which belong inalienably to Himself as God. And the same principle is daily practised by the man of active benevolence made in the image of God, and acting like God in communicating goodness. He gives or communicates, but when he does so, he retains His own proper rights.
Several modern writers, in describing God’s attributes, avoid calling love an attribute at all. They choose rather to call it a definition of God in His whole procedure toward men, or the concurrent action of all the attributes. There is no ground for this. But, on the other hand, the selection of this one perfection by an inspired apostle as the most descriptive name for God, furnishes sufficient ground for giving a central place to it, and for investing it, as it were, with all the other perfections, if we would arrive at the fullest and most accurate idea that can be formed of God in His relation to His Church. If we invest love with all the natural and moral attributes, and speak of omnipotent and holy love, wise and omnipresent love, we do not mistake the significance of the phrase, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Here the love is viewed as self-originated, self-moving, free and infinite; the text before us, as Luther well describes it, is a little Bible in itself. The extent of the divine love depicted in these words of Jesus, may be surveyed from the three points here indicated: the great Giver, the infinite sacrifice of God’s Son, and the unworthy objects.
But it must be further noticed that, when Jesus here sets forth the divine love in connection with the atonement, it is not stated simply to assure us of the divine love; for He shows that it mainly consisted in the sacrificial giving of the Son; it is important to apprehend this. There is a necessity on God’s part, as well as on man’s. While the death of Christ, as a costly declaration of divine love, removes the slavish fear and distrust which prompt men to flee from God, it does this only as it meets a necessity on God’s part, and provides a vicarious sacrifice for sin. The text exhibits the harmony of justice and love – the demand of justice and the provision of love.
It is the more necessary to notice this, because it is objected that any prominence to divine justice comes at the expense of divine love. The one, however, by no means excludes the other. If a divine provision is made at all, it could proceed from no other source but love. And the greater the difficulty to be surmounted, and the more inflexible the necessity which insists on a satisfaction to justice beyond the compass of our own resources, the greater is the display of love. If love is in proportion to the difficulties to be overcome, and if redemption could be effected only at the cost of the humiliation and crucifixion of the Son of God, the love which did not allow itself to be deterred by such a sacrifice was infinite. Then only does love come fully to light; and they who do not acknowledge the necessity of the satisfaction can have no adequate conception of love. Thus the cross displayed the love of God in providing the substitute, and was the highest manifestation of its reality and greatness. If the demand or the necessity for such a fact in the moral government of God resulted from the claims of justice, the source from which it flowed was self-originated love.
2. Another point made prominent in this text is the value of the sacrifice from the dignity of the only-begotten Son.
As the Lord in the previous verses designated Himself the Son of Man, that is, by the title of His humiliation, He here describes Himself by a title which calls up before us His divine dignity; and it intimates that such a sacrifice was of infinite value and sufficient to cancel sin, though infinitely great. The divine nature united to the human, incapable of suffering in itself, gave to the suffering of the Mediator an infinite value. The infinite dignity and worth of His suffering, as the atonement of the Son of God, had a perfect efficacy for redeeming all for whom He gave Himself to death.
This saying is designed to show that the communication of divine life is attainable only when love and justice coincide in securing the acceptance of the person by the Son’s expiation. All this is plainly put in as the preliminary to life. As to the clause, “He gave His only-begotten Son”, the allusion is, as we have seen, to the sacrificial death of Christ; the very idea, while it involves the utmost-conceivable degree of love, implies that it has the effect of pacifying an offended God. All these terms point to the thought that God cannot forego His inalienable rights when He has been wronged, but necessarily punishes, as a satisfaction to Himself; for He cannot deny Himself. This thought is capable of solving several difficulties.
(a.) The plain meaning of this clause is repugnant to the notion, too widely current in our time, that pure love, without any tincture of wrath, is the sole principle of God’s action toward man; that we are not to speak of punishment borne, or of vicarious obedience rendered; that, in a word, it is not God’s relation that is to be changed but man’s.
The clause under consideration teaches the opposite, and shows us that the love of God specially appears in this, that He provides the very atonement which puts Him on a new relation to those whose sins had incurred His anger. The two principles, love to the race, and love to Himself, are so far from being incompatible that they can be placed together in the atoning work of Christ. Punitive justice, which is just regard for His perfections, called for the penalty; love for our race provided the substitute to bear it. What is there of incompatibility in these two?
(b.) But, it may be further asked, as the atonement is the effect of the divine love according to this testimony, how is it also the cause of the divine favour? Does not love so great imply that He is already reconciled?
Here we must distinguish between the moving cause and the meritorious cause. If we look at the prime source of the atoning work, then the incarnation and death of Jesus must be regarded as the fruit of love, and not as its cause. But if we look at our actual acceptance, or the enjoyment of divine favour, and the new relation on which God stands to the redeemed, the atonement is as much its cause as its counterpart, the Fall, was the cause of divine wrath.
(c.) God cannot impart the effects and visitations of His love while the hindrances caused by sin are not removed.
If men will continue to assert that God, without the intervention of any reparation or atonement, can take them into favour, and that He actually does so in the exercise of pure love, they assert what cannot be deduced from the divine perfections, which are ever in full equipoise. They assert, moreover, what is contradicted by all the divine actions, in sending His Son and in giving Him that sinners should not perish.
The final clause intimates that the channel of divine life is opened only when the divine rights have been secured. It is the same clause which we find in the previous verse, but in a new connection. In the former verse it was placed in relation to the indispensable necessity of the atonement; in the present it is put in connection with the equipoise between love and justice in rectifying men’s relation to God; and this clause indicates that the eternal life flows out of it. It is the more necessary to put this matter in the proper light, because all the parts of modern theology are so disjointed, and so much out of their due setting in respect to the whole doctrine of the communication of the divine life.
Our Lord and His apostles commonly adduce redemption or the remission of sins as the immediate end of the death of Christ. But that new and adjusted relationship is designed to secure a further end – the communication of divine life. Thus the removal of the guilt of sin opens the way for imparting eternal life, as a further end; and yet it is the result of the death of Christ, through the acceptance of the person. The spiritual life is that to which every man has a right who enjoys the remission of sins; but the immediate link is the acceptance of the sinner’s person, or the remission of sins, which is in order before the communication of the divine life or the sanctification of the nature.
It must be kept in view, then, that the design of Christ, in offering Himself a sacrifice, was to free His people from the power of sin itself. But it is also true that this end is reached only through the acceptance of the person as the immediate fruit of the atonement, and by means of the Spirit of life, for which the death of Christ paved the way. But neither the present or any similar passage represents the spiritual life as the direct and immediate end of the death of Christ. To that a man can possess no right unless the guilt of sin on the person has been removed. The person is accepted, and then the nature is renewed.
To deduce from this passage and from others similar, as many do, that life is first in order; and that the acceptance of the man and the remission of his sins do not immediately flow from the redemption work of Christ, but immediately from the possession of life, is to pervert the exposition of language. The argumentation from the tenor of the old covenant, “do” and “live”, taken up and enforced by the apostles as the competent interpreters of the Redeemer’s words (Rom 5:17), is conclusive. The opposite opinion, too much in vogue, turns all upside down. These modern writers will not have a reconciliation through Christ, but one in Him, that is merely a mystical reconciliation. They will have it that God cannot forgive sin but in a way which is in process of effecting its removal. And hence they argue that a previous atonement is superfluous – nay, impossible. But this testimony puts the relation between the atonement and the life quite otherwise.