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Well, let's turn in our
Bibles to John chapter 3 once again. That hymn we just sang, of course, was in the form of a prayer based on verses out of Psalm 119.
There are many of the psalms in our Trinity hymnal that are put to music, and I'm sure the Lord delights in hearing
His word sung from the heart. But here we are once again in John 3, and I forget how many
Sundays we've been here now, but we're making progress, a little more today,
Lord willing. But I think it's important for us to read the context, and so we'll read the passage again, beginning with verse 1 of John chapter 3.
There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. And this man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.
And Jesus answered and said to him, Most assuredly I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?
And Jesus answered, Most assuredly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the
Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the
Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again.
The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes.
So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. Nicodemus answered and said to him,
How can these things be? Jesus answered and said to him, Are you the teacher of Israel and do not know these things?
Most assuredly I say to you, we speak what we know and testify what we have seen.
And you do not receive our witness. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
No one has ascended to heaven, but he who came down from heaven, that is the
Son of Man who is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the
Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
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.
Well, in addressing the subject last Lord's Day, Jesus the brazen serpent and saving faith, we had hoped to consider this glorious and often quoted verse that's in the midst of this passage,
John 3 .16, but we didn't do so due to time constraints. And so today we'll attempt to consider the meaning of this verse, but it's important that we understand its context in which it's given.
We should state at the outset of our study of this verse that though it's the most well -known and commonly cited verse perhaps in all of Holy Scripture, it is commonly misunderstood and misapplied in our opinion.
There are false doctrines that are assumed to be true doctrines due to wrong interpretations of John 3 .16.
And we'll mention three of these false teachings right at the outset, although we'll address them more fully later.
First, there is the common but errant belief based on this verse that God loves all people everywhere in the same way and to the same degree, that there's no difference.
Why? God loves the world. And so based on this verse, anyone and everyone is told
God loves you. I mean, it doesn't matter whether this guy's a heretic, a rebel, you know, a moral person, it doesn't matter.
God loves you. Whether you're a Christian or not makes no difference because God loves you unconditionally. This is a statement that's so commonly heard and so commonly accepted as being true.
And they argue based on John 3 .16, obviously it's true. But please recognize there's a great difference between saying that God has love for someone and that God has been loving towards someone.
There's a great distinction between those two. Let us affirm that the Holy Scriptures teach that God loves his people that are in Christ Jesus with a special, covenantal, eternal love that he does not have for those who fail to believe on his son.
For example, God calls his people beloved, my beloved. God never refers to the reprobate such as Pharaoh or King Ahab, Jezebel, or Simon Bar -Jonah as his beloved.
Beloved is an adjective. We'll address that sometime. And it is applied to his people that are in Jesus Christ, not for all the world indiscriminately.
Yes, God is loving toward all in his actions. But it's not because he loves everyone alike.
It's because God in his very nature is love. And that's why he treats people lovingly, not because he has this tremendous affection for every individual in this world.
We'll explain that more fully. A second false doctrine that is often argued as being supported by this verse is that everyone is capable of becoming saved.
And they argue people have a free will and the ability to choose salvation for themselves.
And the errant reasoning follows this way. John 3 .16 declares quite clearly that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Therefore, and here's where the errant logic or reasoning comes in, therefore anybody can believe of his own free will.
That is a leap of logic that is not grounded or founded in this verse or any other verse.
It's false reasoning. Just because an invitation is given, whoever will, does not mean that anyone can or everyone has the ability to do so.
In fact, the condemnation that comes on the world is because we have this offer, but nobody, because of sin, desires to embrace it.
No due to sin, nobody would believe the gospel to be saved. And we've already addressed this matter in a number of weeks in this study of John 3.
Our Lord Jesus told Nicodemus he was incapable of entering the kingdom of God unless he was first born again.
It's impossible for a sinner to believe the gospel unless he's first born again.
He might understand the gospel, but he wants no part of it because he's a sinner. And it takes a new birth.
It takes God creating new life where there is none in order to incline that person, to put in that person a desire to embrace the gospel.
Of Apollos, it was said he greatly helped those who had believed through grace. People, although the offer is given to everyone very sincerely and fully, every human being in the world is wrong to assume that because the offer is given that everyone has the ability in and of themselves to come to Christ.
They don't. No one would unless the grace of God were operative in their souls.
You wouldn't have, I certainly wouldn't have, apart from the grace of God that inclined us to see our sin, enabled us to see
Christ in his glory, to desire to know God through Jesus Christ. It was due to grace that we believe this gospel and was thus saved.
A third false doctrine that is very common in evangelicalism is that John 3 .16 assures that anyone, anywhere who accepts
Jesus Christ as their personal Savior upon a one -time decision receives a gift of eternal life.
And that is not supported by this verse. Irrespective of anything else, people are told if you simply put your faith in Jesus Christ at this moment, if you really believe in your heart that Jesus is your personal
Savior, you will become a Christian and you will receive the gift of eternal life and you will never perish.
John 3 .16 does not teach this, as we'll explain more fully in a bit.
Now examining this verse, let us first be mindful of the grammar of this verse.
And this will correct these errant understandings or beliefs that we have just described.
And then secondly, we'll examine what the Holy Scriptures teach regarding God's loving action toward the human race indiscriminately.
And thirdly, we'll address God's love for his elect. But we're not going to get there today by no means.
Next week, Lord willing, we'll speak about God's special love. And so let's first examine the grammar of the verse,
John 3 .16. Particular points of the grammar. Several points of importance that may be affirmed by considering carefully the structure and grammar of this verse.
And so first, we read, For God so loved the world. Here, God is a reference to God the
Father. We read that God gave his son. So obviously,
God here is God the Father. It was God the Father who gave his son. We, of course, are
Trinitarian in our understanding of the God of the Bible. There's only one true and living
God. We are monotheists. We believe in one God. But this one eternal being exists and manifests himself in three persons.
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Our confession of faith, which is not inspired, of course, but we believe it reflects what the
Bible teaches, states it this way. In this divine and infinite being, see, there's one
God. There are three subsistences. The Father, the Word, or Son, and Holy Spirit of one substance.
See, one God. Power and eternity each, having the whole divine essence, and yet the essence undivided.
The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding. The Son is eternally begotten of the
Father. The Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, all infinite, without beginning.
Therefore, but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative, in other words, how they relate to one another, relative properties and personal relations, which doctrine of the
Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence on him.
In other words, the way the persons of the Trinity relate to one another teaches us how we are to relate to one another and how to relate to God, the persons of the
Holy Trinity. I could have mentioned another common error that is corrected by this verse.
Some people, and it's always been a problem throughout history, Christian history, have set
God the Father almost like the God of the Old Testament, who is angry and full of wrath against sinners.
But Jesus Christ is one of us, and so he loves us. And that Jesus Christ somehow secured the
Father's favor and got the Father to really love us and like us through who he is and what he did.
And that's terrible error. There's one God, and here we see it's God the
Father who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. The one
God, the glorious Holy Trinity, is set forth as a God of love in this verse.
And we shouldn't set the persons of the Trinity against one another as though one thinks one way, one thinks another way, one feels one way, one feels another way.
There's one God manifest in three persons, and those three persons are one in their purpose, one in their understanding and view of mankind.
And so there's but one God. We distinguish between the three persons of the Trinity and the manner in which each person relates to us.
God the Father gave his Son to die for our sins. It's wrong when you hear in prayer, and it happens, sadly, it's wrong in prayer to thank
God the Father for dying for us. God the Father did not die for us. The Holy Spirit did not die for us.
No, that's not what the Bible teaches. The Word of God tells us that God the Son died for us. The incarnate, eternal
Son of God died with respect to his human nature in order to make atonement for our sins.
We next read that this clause or phrase, for God so loved the world, and I want to focus on this word loved because here a lot of error creeps into people's understanding about this verse.
Recognize that this word loved in this sentence is a verb, which is preceded by the adverb so, so loved, which speaks about the degree to which
God loved the world. Here loved is set forth for what
God did for the world, not how God feels about the world. And that's very important to make that distinction.
Loved here speaks of his action, not how he thinks or feels about people.
God was so loving to this fallen world that he gave his Son to die so that believers would be and could be saved.
By the way, John 3 .16 does not promise salvation for the world. It does promise salvation for believers from the world.
He doesn't promise salvation for unbelievers here, does he? It's only a promise for believers.
Many people have wrong views of God's love based upon this verse. The problem on our part is that when we see the word loved, we think in terms of a feeling of affection rather than saying this verb to be describing the kind of action that God performed.
We assume that it's stating how God feels about this world rather than what God has done for this world.
And this tendency that we think in this way is really largely due to the abiding influence of the
Romantic movement that took place a couple centuries ago in our
Western culture in which it reshaped our understanding of love, in which we view the word love largely in terms of romantic love.
We think of love in terms of one's feelings of affections rather than of one's actions. And although certainly the
Bible speaks about romantic love, you see that in the Song of Solomon, very clearly and graphically displayed.
But love for the most part, especially when it's in the form of a verb, is not talking about God's affections for people, it's talking about his loving action toward people.
That's very important. Let's just illustrate this, what we mean by this, love is action.
For example, when the Lord Jesus commands us as his disciples to love our enemies, he was not telling us that we're to have warm, fuzzy feelings for them, to have feelings of affection for them, love your enemy.
How can I do that? I can't even stand being in the presence of him or her. How can
I love them? They wrongly think of love in the terms of feelings. But Jesus commanded his disciples how to love your enemies.
And you can see this in Luke chapter 6, where Jesus declared, I say to you who hear, love your enemies.
And I put that in bold and italic font. He gives this command at the outset of this passage.
And if you drop down in that block quote in your notes, and you see it verse 35, but love your enemies, he repeats the command.
And I would argue that between verse 27 and verse 35, he tells his disciples what it is and how it is you love your enemies.
Not by feeling affection for them, but rather how you deal with them.
And so love your enemies. And then he explains how to love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.
Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also.
He gives a whole series of instructions and directions. And that's how you love your enemies. Not somehow work up affection for them.
That's not the idea of love in many places in the scripture.
And so Jesus initially commanded his disciples to love their enemies, verse 27. Then he listed a number of ways in which this is done, not felt, but done.
And then he repeated his command in verse 35, stating again to love your enemies.
John 3 .16 is setting forth the loving action of God. It does not declare that people are lovely to God and that he longs for their friendship or fellowship, that they move
God to be favorable toward them because he just gets all warm and fuzzy whenever he thinks of anybody.
The Bible does not teach that. John 3 .16
says everything about who he is and what he's done in spite of who we are, not because of who we are.
And so here in John 3 .16, love is a verb. It describes what
God did on behalf of sinners, not how he feels about them. And yet when people in our culture read this verse, this is immediately how they think.
And so it seems that this verse is more often than not abused and twisted so that unbelievers are told that God loves them unconditionally.
I heard that twice this week in two different contexts. Sounds good on the surface.
It's not actually true. Now, the reason God loves you and me as Christians is because he sees us in Christ.
That's the only thing that separates us from anybody else in this world. It's not really because he loves us unconditionally.
He loves us conditioned on the fact that you and I are in Christ. And he loves Christ with all his being, and therefore he loves us because we're in Christ.
And so it's a misnomer. It's errant to go to anybody and everybody in the world and say to them,
God loves you unconditionally. You just don't know it. That's not a proper representation of the
God of the Bible. It should not be taught. The psalmist declared
God is a just judge and God is angry with the wicked every day.
That is God's feeling toward people who are in rebellion to him. Yes, God has been loving to his enemies, but make no mistake about it.
They are his enemies. They are under his infinite and eternal wrath unless and until they repent of their sin and believe on Jesus Christ as their
Lord and Savior. In fact, the verse at the end of this chapter, John chapter 3, states it quite clearly.
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him, abides on him, continues to be on him.
And so every exhibition of God's patience and extension of his mercy that he shows to every human being in the world, every kind gift that he's bestowed upon them is because God is a loving, patient, merciful
God, not because people are lovely in his sight, just the opposite.
And so the greatest demonstration of God's loving action toward the world is that he gave his Son that whoever believes on him will not perish but have everlasting life, but to fail or refuse to turn from sin, to refuse to believe the gospel in disregard of God's loving patience, aggravates one's condemnation, and calls forth for God's stored -up wrath to be unleashed on that day of judgment and then throughout eternity.
There's a great difference between those who are in Christ and those who are outside of Christ. And the wrath of God abides on all those that have not turned from sin and believed on Jesus.
Consider what the prophet Nahum declared about God. We don't read from Nahum very often, do we?
God is jealous and the Lord avenges, the Lord avenges and is furious. That won't fill a church building very much in these days.
People don't want to hear that. The Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries and he reserves wrath for his enemies.
The Lord is slow to anger and great in power and will not at all acquit the wicked.
The Lord has his way in the whirlwind, in the storm, in the clouds, or the dust of his feet.
He rebukes the sea, makes it dry, he dries up the rivers, Bashan, Carmel, Wither.
The flower of Lebanon wilts, the mountains quake before him, the hills melt, the earth heaves at his presence.
Yes, the world and all who dwell in it. In other words, God does whatever he wants whenever he wants. Who can stand before his indignation?
Who can endure the fierceness of his anger? His fury is poured out like fire and the rocks are thrown down by him.
The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and he knows those who trust in him.
But with an overflowing flood, he will make an utter end of its place and darkness will pursue his enemies.
And every human being in this world is his enemy until they repent of sin and they surrender to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, thankfully, of sinners.
And then next we read in John 3 .16, For God so loved the world. The world is set forth as having been the object of God's loving action.
Now the Holy Scriptures teach in many places that God has a love for his people which is unique and special.
And again, we'll address that next week. The eternal special covenant love that God has for his people is because they are in Jesus Christ.
We read that Christ loved the church and gave himself for it. We read in John 13 .1,
Jesus knew that his hour was come and that he should depart out of this world unto the
Father. Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.
There's a special covenant love that God has for his people. And so God has a covenant love for his people that he does not have for anyone else.
And so when people come to John 3 .16 which declares that God so loved the world, they attempt to say and understand this is what's being asserted.
God loves every human being alike in the same measure, in the same degree. Well, how do people address this then?
How does someone who's reformed, say like ourselves, address this? How do others address it?
And there's basically three different ways in which people interpret these words regarding the world.
First, there are those that say John 3 .16 teaches that God loves everybody everywhere alike.
And this, of course, is error. We've already shown that. Arthur Pink wrote of this.
God's love toward all his creatures is the fundamental and favorite tenet of universalists.
Those are the people who believe everybody's going to have salvation. There's no hell, no damnation. Unitarians, they're the ones who do not believe in the
Trinity. Theosophists, I'm not going to go into that cult. Christian scientists, spiritists,
Russellites. That was a term Arthur Pink used for Jehovah's Witnesses. No matter how a man may live in open defiance of heaven with no concern whatever for his soul's eternal interest, still less for God's glory, dying perhaps with an oath, in other words, a curse on his lips, notwithstanding,
God loves him, we are told. So widely has this dogma been proclaimed, and so comforting is it to the heart, which is at enmity with God, we have little hope of convincing many of their error.
That's how common it is. And yet Arthur Pink said, you know, there's no way we're going to fix everybody's understanding in that.
I might add to this list that Pink included, all Arminians, those who argue that, you know, people are saved basically through their own free will, not through God's sovereign grace.
All Arminians would espouse this interpretation as well of John 3 .16.
They believe in a universal love of God for all mankind, that God loves everyone in the same way, to the same degree, but the
Bible does not teach this doctrine, which is so apparent, so clear. A second way in which people understand this word world within this context, there are those that say in John 3 .16,
God loves his people from all over the world, not just Jewish people. In other words, the word world shouldn't be understood as all humanity, but rather his people from all the nations of the world, not just Jewish people.
This was the understanding of John Gill, and Gill was an 18th century
Baptist pastor, pastored the same church Charles Spurgeon would pastor 100 years after him.
And he wrote, one of the few men that's written a full commentary on every book of the Bible, and he wrote these words.
Our Lord was now discoursing with a Jewish rabbi, Nicodemus, and that he is opposing a commonly received notion of theirs, that when the
Messiah came, the Gentiles should have no benefit or advantage by him, by the
Messiah. Only the Israelites, the only Jews. So far should they be from it, that according to their sense, the most dreadful judgments, calamities, and curses should befall them, that is the
Gentiles. Yea, hell and eternal damnation. And now in opposition to such a notion, our
Lord addresses this Jew, and it's as if he said, you rabbis say that when the
Messiah comes, only the Israelites, the peculiar favorites of God, shall share in the blessings that come by and with him, and that the
Gentiles shall reap no advantage by him, being hated of God and rejected of him. But I tell you,
God has so loved the Gentiles as well as the Jews, that he gave his only begotten son to and for them as well as the
Jews, to be a covenant to the people, the Gentiles, the savior of them, and a sacrifice for them, a gift with sufficient evidence of his love to them, and it being a large and comprehensive one, an irreversible and unspeakable one, no other than his own son by nature, of the same essence, perfection and glory with him, begotten by him in a way inconceivable and inexpressible by mortals, and his only begotten one, the object of his love and delight, in whom he is ever well pleased, and yet such is his love to the
Gentiles as well as Jews, that he's given him in human nature, up into the hands of men, and justice and death to itself.
He wrote in these sentences that were paragraphs long. It was incredible. That was his style of writing.
But you see what he's saying. He's saying that the word world in John 3 .16 does not mean all humanity, but the world of believers, including
Jews and Gentiles. And by the way, that is not necessarily a wrong interpretation.
This is the view of many who are Reformed, that is historically Protestant, Calvinistic, if you will.
We understand that the Bible teaches that God has love for his elect, a love that he has for no one else but his chosen people, that God loves them with a special covenant, covenantal love.
He's loved them in Christ before the foundation of the world. It's not because the elect are more lovely or lovable, but because God set his love upon them in Christ before creation.
And certainly the Holy Scriptures teach this truth. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
He intended to save his people. But God has purposed to have a people that he loves comprised of people from all over the world,
Gentiles as well as Jews, thankfully. They would argue therefore, that is these
Reformed people would argue, the world therefore, John 3 .16, should be understood as the world of believers, ones whom
God called forth from all the world. Again, Arthur Pink shows that the term world is a relative term that can mean different groups of people.
It doesn't have to mean every human being that's ever lived. And so he wrote this.
The objector comes back to John 3 .16 and says world means world. True, but we have shown that the world does not mean the whole human family.
The fact is that the world is used in a general way. When the brethren of Christ said, show thyself to the world, did they mean show thyself to all mankind?
Obviously not. When the Pharisees said, behold, the world has gone after him, did they mean all the human family were flocking after him?
When the apostle wrote, your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world, did he mean that the faith of the saints at Rome, the church at Rome, was the subject of conversation by every man, woman, child on earth?
And when Revelation 13 .3 informs us that all the world wondered after the beast, that would be the
Antichrist, are you we to understand that there will be no exceptions? These and other passages which might be quoted show that the term world often has a relative rather than absolute force.
And world, therefore, has to be understood within its context. And to claim and assert it means all humanity.
Well, that's an assumption. And it may be true, may be false, depending on the context and depending upon the other clear teachings of Holy Scripture.
However, there's a third interpretation of this word world, also held by reformed people.
They affirm that God certainly has a covenant law for his elect, and yet they would say that John 3 .16
teaches that God is loving, again, that's active, isn't it, a loving toward all people, that he has a general benevolence for all people because he made them, though he has a special covenant law for his elect.
This was Matthew Henry's view, solid, reformed, Puritan commentator.
Herein God has commended his love to the world. God so loved the world, so really, so richly, and now his creatures shall see that he loves them and wishes them well.
He so loved the world, he's not talking about feelings here, he's talking about God's action. He so loved the world a fallen man as he did not love that of fallen angels.
Behold and wonder that the great God should love such a worthless world, that the holy
God should love such a wicked world with a love of goodwill when he could not look upon it with any complacency.
This was a time of love indeed. The Jews vainly conceded that the Messiah should be sent only in love to their nation and to advance them upon the ruins of their neighbors, but Christ tells them that he came in love to the whole world,
Gentiles as well as Jews. Though many of the world of mankind perish, yet God's giving his only begotten son was an instance of his love to the whole world because through him there is a general offer of life and salvation made to all, and certainly we would affirm that to be true.
It is love to the revolted rebellious province to issue out a proclamation of pardon and indemnity to all that will come in, pleaded upon their knees and returned to their allegiance.
And so far God loved the apostate, lapsed world that he sent his son with his fair proposal that whoever believes in him, one or other, shall not perish.
Salvation has been of the Jews, but now Christ is known as salvation to the ends of the earth, a common salvation.
I don't take issue with anything he stated there. God is loving even to the entire fallen world that he would provide a way of salvation to anyone, any sinner anywhere, that believes this gospel can be saved.
Now, as we'll state later, again, we know that no sinner would ever do so apart from the grace of God.
But the offer is there. Any sinner anywhere, if they would believe on Christ, you go tell them about the gospel, you tell them about Christ, and see if they will come.
No, they won't. And they'll tell you you're a bigot, you're ignorant to even think so until the grace of God begins to work on their soul and puts in them a desire, and a faith, and a belief, and a love for the gospel, a love for Christ, and then they will come.
Because they want to. Because God changed their wanter. He put the desire within them to desire
Christ. Because no sinner would do so apart from the grace of God.
We're not going to read those other block quotes from J .C. Ryle and F .F.
Bruce that basically argue the same. But I do want to drop down to page 7 and talk about this love of God for the world as J .I.
Packer set forth. He's still around. He's in his 90s now. He's written more books than I think anybody around.
But he wrote about this in his little book, Knowing God, which, of course, is a classic, probably in the top ten
Christian books that people ought to read. And he wrote about the love of God. St. John's twice -repeated statement,
God is love, is one of the most tremendous utterances of the Bible and also one of the most misunderstood.
He's basically saying the same thing about those verses that I said about John 3 .16. False ideas have grown up round it like a hedge of thorns, hiding its real meaning from view, and it's no small task cutting through this tangle of mental undergrowth.
Amen, J .I. Packer. And so, sadly, many take the thought that God is love, and then they run with it, forming all manner of false thoughts about the nature of God and His ways among the peoples of the earth.
The Bible does state that God is love. But the Bible also defines what that love is like.
Scripture does not merely say God is love and then leave it to the individual to interpret it subjectively and what that means, wrote
John MacArthur in his book on the love of God. Many, however, have done this.
They suggest that because God is love that He is easy to mollify towards sin and sinners.
He does not look upon sin as a great evil to be punished with His eternal wrath, but merely sin is an unfortunate malady that needs healing.
They then take their shallow, skewed concept of divine love and apply it as a means to justify their behavior and to form and shape a
Christianity that suits them. It doesn't matter what I think, how I believe, and how I behave.
God loves me, and I know this. John 3 .16 tells me so. They've deluded themselves, and Satan has blinded them to the truth that they're under the wrath of God outside of Jesus Christ.
And so, as MacArthur wrote, they envision God as a benign, heavenly grandfather, tolerant, affable, lenient, permissive, devoid of any real displeasure over sin, who without consideration of His holiness will benignly pass over sin and accept people just as they are.
Why, He loves you unconditionally. It's a delusion, and it's a deception under which so many are laboring.
Perhaps the cause of greatest confusion about this subject is due to the failure to distinguish between the general love that God has, or general love that God shows toward all people indiscriminately and the special love that He has for His chosen people.
Again, there's this tendency for people to assume God loves all people alike, and so they draw wrong conclusions about how
God views people and how they relate to God. Granted, there's a general love that God has for all mankind, but thankfully there's a special love, a redeeming love that unbelievers will never know.
And in our treatment of this subject, we'll therefore attempt to distinguish between these two, the general love that God has for all mankind and the special love that He has for His elect.
Next week, we'll deal with the special love that He has for elect. But I want us to address the general love this morning.
However, first let's look at one more word in our text as we're considering the grammar. 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.
Notice carefully the tense of this verb, believes, I put it in bold italic.
It does not say, For God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son that whoever at one time believed on the
Son has everlasting life. It's a present tense verb, whoever believes on the
Son, and that is very significant. The word believes is a verb that sets forth what needs to be done in order not to perish but to have everlasting life.
Every verb has tense in every language. Every verb has tense. In English, we speak of past tense, present tense, future tense.
There are many other tenses as well, perfect, pluperfect, imperfect. There's all kinds of different tenses.
But these are the ones that we think about and use most, past, present, and future. In English, we think of tense primarily in terms of time, past, present, future.
But tense in the Greek language in which the Gospel of John was originally written, tense in Greek is not primarily concerned with time but rather it's concerned about the kind of action that the subject makes or takes.
The verb, although it can express time when something occurred, its greatest concern is the kind of action that the subject takes within a sentence.
My old professor of Greek in seminary wrote these words, tense is the most distinctive element in the
Greek verb. Tense is concerned with the kind of action being performed.
In contrast to English usage, time of action is secondary in importance. The student, in other words, the
Greek student, must keep in mind that tense in Greek is concerned primarily with the kind of action.
And basically, there are three kinds of action that can be shown in a verb. First, and I only mentioned one of the three, by the way, because of time.
First, action may be shown as continuous or durative. Durative action is shown by the present and imperfect tenses.
Of course, we're addressing the perfect tense here. Imperfect just simply describes something that was happening in past time.
He was believing, that's imperfect tense. Present tense, believing, believes.
The word believes in John 3 .16 is a present tense verb which emphasizes durative or continuous action.
In other words, John 3 .16 does not support a one -time decision to accept Christ. What is stated is that the believer, in other words, the one who continues to believe, is promised that he will not perish but have everlasting life.
It is not so important when you first believed or the specific time that you believed.
What is critically important is that you're a believer today. I don't care what you believed 20 years ago.
Are you believing on Christ today? Will you be believing on Christ five years from now?
Will you be believing on Christ when Jesus returns? That's the emphasis of this verse, the one who believes.
And yet this verse commonly is used to argue a one -time decision.
If you accept Christ, then that's all that's necessary. You believed on Christ and you have salvation.
That is not supported by this verse. The same durative or continuous force, for example, is in the present tense verb in Romans 10 .13,
another verse that is commonly used to promote the error of decisionism.
Accept Jesus into your heart and you'll be saved. There we read, for whoever shall call on the name of the
Lord shall be saved. There the verb call is in the present tense. It doesn't say, for whoever did once call upon the
Lord he will be saved. But whoever calls on the name of the Lord, that's what believers do. They call on the
Lord. This is how they live. They've been calling on the Lord since they believed. They're calling on the Lord today.
They'll be calling on the Lord next year. They'll be calling on the Lord the day Jesus returns. Whosoever calls upon the
Lord shall be saved on that final day of judgment. And yet it's so terribly misused to substantiate, if you just pray this sinner's prayer, you've called upon the
Lord. I used to argue that when I was a young man, leading people left and right to accept Jesus.
Pray the sinner's prayer. They pray it. Now look at Romans 10 .13. Doesn't it say, whosoever shall call on the name of the
Lord shall be saved? Did you just call upon the Lord? Yes, I did. Are you saved or not saved?
Well, I'm saved. Complete misunderstanding of what that verse was teaching.
It talks about a continual calling upon the Lord. A believer has a relationship with his
Lord. He calls upon him every day, praying to him, asking for help, asking for forgiveness, asking for wisdom, asking for strength.
Jesus is his Lord. He calls upon the Lord every day. That describes the nature of a true
Christian. It does not in any way underscore this terrible errant decisionism that's existed since the days of Charles Finney in the early 19th century.
To summarize John 3 .16 in the light of its grammar, we can say that this is a declaration that God has been so loving to the world that he gave his only begotten son that any sinner anywhere, if he becomes a believer and continues to be a believer in Jesus Christ, he'll never perish but have everlasting life.
That's what Jesus was declaring to Nicodemus. Now let's stand back a little bit and let's consider what the
Holy Scriptures teach regarding God's loving action toward the entire human race. And we're going to have to condense and abbreviate as we work through this.
Clearly, God is a loving God, and therefore he is loving toward the entire human race.
But we must distinguish between this general love of God that he shows to all people and the special love of God that he has only for his people.
There's a sense in which God loves generally all that he's created because when he created everything, it was good.
It was a reflection of who he is and what he's like. And so God loves everything he created.
That is, there is an affinity toward it. There's an attraction toward it because he made them.
But God delights particularly in the intelligent creatures he made, both angels and people. They are objects of God's attention, concern, protection, provision.
God has a general love to all men because they are his creatures, his offspring, and the work of his hands.
For in him we live and move and have our being, as certain as also of your own poets,
Paul declared to those Athenians there on Mars Hill, for we are all his offspring.
And so God is loving not just to his people, but he's loving in his treatment of all people.
We're not talking about love of affection here. We're talking about his loving action because there's an affinity that he has for everything that he has made.
And again, we talked about that earlier, what it is. Even God loves his enemies. You ought to love your enemies in order to be like your father who is in heaven.
Well, how is this general love toward all the world manifest? And I've cited a number of ways, and we're going to run through these quickly and then close.
First, God's general love for sinners is seen in that he's gracious to sinners. Every day
God allows a sinner to continue in his world is a day of grace and mercy, isn't it?
That God puts up with some people for decades and decades in their defiance and rebellion.
It's a manifestation of God's mercy and grace toward that individual. It's a manifestation of God's grace that he sustains our nation.
Isn't that right? In the light of who we are and what we become and what we do, it's
God's grace toward us. He has shed his grace upon us, clearly. And this is his general grace.
His general love of sinners and that he's gracious to sinners. It's not because of who we are, we're sinners.
And I listed ten descriptions from one of Arthur Fink's books. This is how the Bible describes us.
This is how the holy God views us as sinners. But he's a loving God, and so he's even gracious to great sinners.
Secondly, God's general love for sinners is seen in that he is merciful to sinners.
Again, if we received what we deserve immediately outside of Christ, we wouldn't last throughout the day, would we?
But it's due to the mercy of God that we continue. And yet he continues to be gracious.
He gives life. He gives family. He gives friends. He enables us, gives us strength.
He gives health. He restores health to us. He preserves us from injury. Some of you might have noticed this gash over the top of my eye.
It's maybe not very apparent. It happened this week. Skill saw.
Bang. And it could have been really bad had it been an inch lower. Mercy.
Thank you, Lord, for your mercy. His mercy is manifest every day.
Things could happen to us, but he spares us. Milliseconds in driving could result in terrible tragedy, and the
Lord spares us. You get momentarily diverted, and then all of a sudden you look up at that moment just in time to break.
It's all due to the mercy of God, and it's manifested to all people everywhere alike because God manifests his loving action to all people.
Thirdly, God's general love for sinners is similarly in that he is slow to anger.
God's love for sinners is manifest in his patience toward him. Jesus declared this regarding Jerusalem, didn't he?
How often I would have gathered you as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not.
And then he declared to them, Behold, your house is left to you desolate, which was in anticipation of the
Roman destroying Jerusalem in A .D. 70. And so God is slow to anger.
He desires people's well -being, even those who are not Christians. He is slow to anger with respect to them.
And yet we should recognize that a lack of responsiveness to God's patience dealing with people compounds their guilt and aggravates their condemnation.
Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! Woe to you, Capernaum! If the works that I've done among you would have been done back in Sodom, they would have repented long ago.
They were more guilty because they had greater privilege. What kind of privilege do we have in these days?
With all the resources we have, all the abilities he's given us in a free society, our responsibility before the
Lord is great. Fourthly, the general love of God is shown as that he's abundant in loving kindness.
He gives life to people. He gives them families, rich families.
He gives them, again, health and strength. He preserves people.
He preserves nations through his general love, his providence. We have a stable society.
Go down and try and exist in Venezuela this week. They're all fleeing into Colombia. Other nations of the world, they're fleeing to get somewhere where they can raise their families in safety and security, and we enjoy this day after day and perhaps take it for granted.
But it's all due to God's loving kindness toward us, not because we're better than those people down in Venezuela or anywhere else for that matter, but again, the responsibility is therefore greater upon us for what we do with these wonderful gifts that God has given us.
And then fifth, God's general love for sinners is seen in that God relents from doing harm.
He's patient. Remember, he was going to wipe out Nineveh. He told Jonah, you go announce to that city, you know, that in 40 days it's coming down, and yet they repented.
He relented from judgment upon them, and he relents from other people, from people in this land, in this world, because of his general love that he manifests, because God is loving, not because people are lovable.
And then, of course, lastly, the epitome of God's general love towards sinners is he gave his son to die so that sinners might be saved.
Anywhere, everywhere in the world, any sinner, if he believes the gospel, he can be saved from his sin and have everlasting life.
And yet we know because of the nature of sin, no one would come. We came because God purposed,
I'm not going to let the world perish. I'm going to save a people unto myself, and he's going to be one, and you're going to be one.
And so in due time, we came. The apostle Paul wasn't looking to be converted.
He was looking to persecute those who were converted. He went forth from an edict from the
Sanhedrin in Jerusalem to capture, enslave, and even kill Christians, and the
Lord converted him, not because Paul was willing, not because Paul was less sinful.
Paul said, I'm the greatest of sinners. And in fact, he says, God saved me in order to be an example to everybody in the world that you can't be worse than I am, and God can save you too, which is a glorious and wonderful thing.
And so the general love of God is manifest in all these wonderful ways. And yet realize that the nature of God's love, general love, actually aggravates the condemnation of unbelievers with every act of ungratefulness or every failure to respond to the loving action of God will result in accountability on the
Day of Judgment. All of the privilege, all of the blessings accrued over a lifetime, and we're going to be asked, give an account on that final day, what have you done with it?
And so it will actually aggravate the condemnation of sinners on the Day of Judgment.
But let's recognize this general love of God for sinners is insufficient to save sinners.
The general love of God for sinners that makes salvation for anyone secures salvation for no one.
Only those who are the objects of his special covenant love that he has determined, he sees them in Jesus Christ from eternity.
He says, I will save them. Jesus in John 17 said to the Father, you've given them as gifts to me.
And basically Jesus is saying, Father, you sent me out to get them, and I've done it.
And now I'm returning to you. He saved his people because God had given them.
God the Father had given them to his son as a gift. And if you're a believer in Jesus Christ, or if one day you become a believer in Jesus Christ, it's solely due to the grace of God, the sovereign grace of God.
God the Father chose you out of fallen humanity. Not because you were less sinful, more lovely, or anybody else, not because you were more willing, but he chose you to demonstrate in you his love that's in Christ Jesus in saving you from your sin.
And it ought to cause every Christian to be, you know, to be wonderfully grateful and sincerely humble before the
Lord. There's no basis of boasting whatsoever as a Christian because it's all of God's grace and mercy and covenant love.
Is that not right? And yet it should give us confidence too. God's got a people out there, and he's saving them through the gospel.
And we're to pray that the Holy Spirit use the gospel. And the
Lord delights in surprising his people on who he saves. It's a remarkable thing.
You know, we've got Leo in jail, about ready to be sentenced to prison, and began listening to our radio program.
He converted to Christ now. He's an avid reader of the Bible, daily listener to our radio program, and loves
Christ. A year ago, he wasn't in that position. There are others here we could speak of.
Myself, you know, all of us at one time were in this condition.
But God loved us with an everlasting love, and therefore he drew us onto himself. And next week, we're going to talk about this special love that God has for those that are in Christ Jesus.
Thankfully, let's pray. Thank you, Father, for your word. We thank you for your loving action,
Lord, toward this world in so many ways. Each and every day, your loving action toward our nation and toward ourselves as individuals.
Help us, our Lord, to be mindful of your kindness to us. And help us, our
God, to be responsible to that action, that loving action through faith, repentance from sin, and the desire, our
God, to do your will through Jesus Christ. Bless us, our Lord, and help us to go forth from this place loving others as you've commanded us, our
God, that we might be like you, our Father, who art in heaven. For we pray in Jesus' name, amen.