Mysterious Love

John 3:14-18 ESV

14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

Have you ever been in a situation where it seemed like you just weren’t getting it? I remember a time for me, when I was a child when that was certainly the case. But then after I finally “got it” I thought to myself “how did I not see it before?”!

I think that I was in fourth or fifth grade and we were learning division. I’ve never been the best at math; in fact, the highest level of math that I ever went to in school was pre-algebra, and so you can imagine the difficulty that I faced when I was presented with this new form of mathematics.

Whenever I learned multiplication a year or two before that, I struggled with that as well, but I eventually was able to catch on. But division was just so challenging for me, I just could not figure it out.

Then one day, my mom asked my babysitter’s husband, Jerry, who had a few college degrees in mathematics if he would spend some time with me and help me try to figure out what I was doing wrong. Suddenly, as he was instructing me, I realized what I was doing wrong. I was trying to solve my division problems the same way that I would solve my multiplication problems.

In multiplication, you start from the right and move towards the left when finding the solution, and that is what I was doing in my attempts to solve my division equations. But division is different from multiplication as in division you start from the left and work your way to the right. Once it finally came to me, I thought to myself, “How did I not know this before?!”.

Well, you know, throughout the conversation that Jesus and Nicodemus were having, Nicodemus was just like me, he wasn’t getting it. But what Nicodemus just wasn’t getting was much more important than arithmetic. What Nicodemus “wasn’t getting” is how one gains admittance into the kingdom of God.

Jesus has emphatically stressed to Nicodemus, the utmost necessity of the new birth, saying that a man cannot see the kingdom of God, cannot be granted entry into the society of the faithful unless he has first been born again.

Initially, Nicodemus misunderstood what Jesus was saying when He spoke of being born again, he thought that perhaps Jesus was speaking of a physical rebirth, but Jesus cleared up that misunderstanding when He revealed that this rebirth was a spiritual rebirth, doing so by highlighting a prophecy of Ezekiel as He taught Nicodemus.

And so, at this juncture, Nicodemus may have understood what the new birth is, what it consists of, after all, in what we read here in John, chapter three, we are just given small parts of what was likely a much longer conversation than what is recorded here, so we don’t know how exactly Nicodemus received the information that Jesus was passing along to him, but what we do know is that by the time that we reach verse nine of this chapter, Nicodemus still didn’t understand how the new birth is obtained, and thus, he asked Jesus, “How can these things be?”.

He says, “If one is to be born again, then how is that person born again? What does he need to do to be born again?”. He still wasn’t getting it, because it’s not what the recipient does, it’s what God does for the recipient.

For this reason, as we move on to our reading for today, we see how Jesus uses another scriptural example to fully reveal to Nicodemus what it is that he just isn’t getting.

We’re going to start by looking at the first three verses of our reading, verses fourteen through sixteen, which read:

John 3:14-16 ESV

14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

As was said, what we see, at least here in the first part of verse fourteen is a scriptural account that would help Nicodemus understand how one becomes born again.

Jesus says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness”. So, that we begin here with the word “as”, we know that the Old Testament account that is being given here is not the main point of the Lord’s teaching, but it is like a supporting text to explain His teaching.

The Old Testament text that Jesus is referring to is from the book of Numbers, chapter twenty-one, verses five through nine. There we read of how the Israelis, while traveling in the wilderness, had spoken against God and against Moses, griping and complaining, as they were very prone to do.

In response to this show of disrespect and irreverence, we read there that the Lord had sent fiery serpents among the people. Fiery serpents that would bite the people and kill them. Everyone who was bitten by one of the snakes would die without exception.

Well, seeing how they had sinned against the Lord and against Moses, the people professed their guilt and confessed their sins while begging Moses to forgive them and pray for them that they may be delivered from the snakes, which Moses did.

In response to his prayer, the Lord told Moses to make a bronze serpent and to set it on a pole in the midst of the snakes. God told Moses to tell the people that if one of them were bitten by one of the fiery serpents, if they would make their way to the bronze serpent on the pole and would look upon that bronze serpent, he would live.

And so, in that case, such a person who had been bitten by a fiery serpent and was at death’s door but nonetheless looked upon the bronze serpent and lived would surely say that he felt like he had a new lease on life, as though he had practically been born again.

Well, Jesus goes on to say that as that bronze serpent had been lifted up, “so” in like manner “must the Son of Man be lifted up”.

It was necessary for that bronze serpent to be lifted upon the pole for the people to live, and as that was so, so in like manner was it necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted upon the crucifix so that man may live and not perish.

And as every person who looked upon the bronze serpent in the wilderness and believed that God would spare them would indeed be spared, and they would live and feel as though they had been physically born again, so it is that all those who look upon the crucified Jesus and believe that what He has accomplished on the cross will spare them from eternal death, will not only be spared from eternal death, but will be given eternal life.

These two instances are similar, but certainly not the same. For, it is important to recognize the eternal difference between the bronze serpent and the Son of Man.

You see, though the people would look upon the bronze serpent and be healed, it was not the bronze serpent that would heal them. There was no healing virtue in the bronze serpent itself, it was merely a “nehushtan”, which is Hebrew for “a piece of bronze”. That’s all it was, it was a piece of bronze that God chose to use at this time and for this purpose.

There was nothing special about it, and it certainly had no power to heal anyone. What healed the Israelites was the saving grace of God. But Jesus, the Son of Man is different, for in Him there is indeed infinite healing virtue.

In John 1:51, Jesus talks about the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man which reveals that Jesus, the Son of Man Himself, in being lifted up on the cross has indeed ascended by way of that cross and He now functions as the Ladder between heaven and earth, between man and God.

The Lord crucified is what bridges the gap. His suffering means my forgiveness; His death means my life. As Jesus said, this narrative from the Old Testament may be “as” the crucifixion of Jesus and the life that is given to the elect people of God, but the bronze serpent itself is not like Jesus, for unlike the bronze serpent, Jesus is indeed the object which gives infinite healing virtue.

This is why it is important to have a lexicon, a Greek to English New Testament if you can get ahold of one, for many times, you will see in a lexicon, how the English can’t always quite capture the full meaning of the text.

For example, this fifteenth verse, in the Greek, reads: “ἵνα πᾶς πιστεύων ἔχῃ αἰώνιον ζωὴν” (hina pas ho pisteuōn en autō echē zōēn aiōnion) translated as “so that whoever believes, will in Him have eternal life”. You see, our translation says, “whoever believes in Him will have eternal life”, the original Greek however, reads, “whoever believes, will in Him have eternal life”.

You see the difference there? Our eternal life is not established in our belief; our eternal life is established in Jesus Himself. He is the One Who heals. So, here is the answer to Nicodemus’s question of, “How can this be?” The new birth is experienced, the kingdom of God is entered, through, because of, the saving work of Christ, and this saving work of Christ being accepted and believed on through the faith that God gives to the one who He causes to believe.

And so, as we move on to the famous sixteenth verse of this chapter, we read “for” or, this took place, the crucifixion of Jesus took place, the crucifixion of Christ which serves as that ladder between heaven and earth took place because “God so loved the world”.

Why did God the Father send His Son? Why did He send Him to die in the worst imaginable way? And the answer is “love”! A love so profound, so infinitely great that it will never be fully understood. A love which manifested itself in God “giving His only begotten Son”.

He gave Him to bear the eternal consequence of sin in place of all those who would come to Him. And He gave Him not for Israel alone, but for the world, for people of every nation, of every race, of every tongue, God so loved the world, people from all over the world so that whoever believes in Jesus, whoever takes that ladder between heaven and earth, will not eternally perish, but will eternally live. For it was for them that God gave His Son.

And as we look at the final two verse of our reading, verses seventeen and eighteen, we see positive proof that God “so loved the world” where we see Jesus saying:

John 3:17-18 ESV

17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

You see, the first coming of the Son of God was not to judge the world, but to establish the Son as the ladder between heaven and earth, so that those who come to Him and access Him may be saved. For Jesus says that the purpose for which God sent His Son was so “that the world” so that all those from all over the world who come to Him “might be saved through Him”.

For this reason, Jesus says that “whoever believes in Him is not condemned” and is thus saved through Him. But then Jesus goes on to say that “whoever does not believe is condemned already”.

The man who depreciates Christ, or thinks Him unworthy of his allegiance, passes judgment on himself. And because he passes judgment on himself, he does not need to wait until the day of judgment; the verdict on him has been pronounced already. He is already condemned.

Indeed, there will be a final day of judgment, that day when the Son of God returns, but because the man who denies Jesus has already passed judgment on himself, that day when the Lord returns will serve only to confirm the judgment that he has already passed on himself.

And Jesus says that this condemnation is so because such a one “has not believed in the name of the only Son of God”. He does not trust and utilize the only ladder from earth to heaven, between God and man, the only way to the Father. Thus, such a one has already been self-judged and is condemned already.

Beloved, it is a wondrous reality it is that God so loved the world! What a wondrous reality it is that God loved the world so much, to such an extent that He would send His Son to a world filled with people who were born hating Him.

But though we are born hating Him, He loved us so much, to such an infinite, eternal extent that He would have His Son, His only Son, His eternally beloved Son die a shameful, lonely, excruciating death for the very ones who were born hating Him.

What an infinitely wondrous love that is!

How can we not now love Him in return?