He Gave
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Since I have been with my wife Christina she has tried and tried to get me to love and enjoy some of the old movies, mainly the ones that are called musicals.
In fact, I can honestly say I enjoyed watching some of them with her and of course I have my own personal favorites, like “Singing in the Rain and of course a very popular one this time of year ‘White Christmas”.
Now one of Christina’s favorite movies that she enjoys watching is the 1960’s musical, “My Fair Lady”, in which Professor Henry Higgins takes Eliza Doolittle, a young flower girl from the streets of London and transforms her into a well-spoken and young lady who attracts the affections of others.
In the musical one young man is trying to woo the “new” Eliza with a beautiful, word-y song, when she interrupts him with a song of her own.
She says: “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words; I get words all day through,first from him now from you … Don’t talk of stars, burning above, if you’re in love, show me! … Sing me no song, read me no rhyme, don’t waste my time, SHOW ME!”
Here in John 3:16 we see that God Himself has a kind of real love towards us. His love for us was not just a mere feeling, It is a love that took action and showed us that He truly does love us.
Romans 5:8 says, “God demonstrated His own love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God “so loved”, that He DID SOMETHING: “He GAVE His only begotten Son.”
As Eliza Doolittle might say, He “SHOWED US” His love towards us.
Today we come to the central part of this great verse, and the heart of its message: the sacrificial gift that God made for our sins.
(Next Sunday we are going to look in more detail at the Person of Jesus who was, but today our emphasis will be on the giving of the gift: “For God so loved the world THAT HE GAVE...”
I. A Gift Was Needed
I. A Gift Was Needed
The first thing we need to understand is: why did God give Jesus?
Why was a gift even needed in the first place?
In the beginning, God created mankind to walk in perfect fellowship with Him in the Garden of Eden, as Adam & Eve did for a short time. We read about this in Gen. 1-3.
God had commanded Adam and Eve to obey, and not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil. He instructed them: “In the day you eat of it, you will surely die.”
Now this did not necessarily mean that they would die instantly — although that could have happened — but that they WOULD surely spiritually die and perish. But we will talk more about that in a few weeks from now.
So because of their sin, that sin contaminated all of mankind. It was passed down to every human being. We are all sinful by nature. The sin nature passes down to everyone Romans 3:23 - “For all have sinned.”
But your iniquities have separated you from your God;
And your sins have hidden His face from you,
So that He will not hear.
Mankind has separated ourselves from God by our sins; we need something that would reconcile us with Him.
In fact, we know this inherently. That is why throughout history, in virtually EVERY culture around the world, there has been some kind of “sacrifice” that is offered to the god or gods to appease the god of their choosing and make the people right with him.
If you were to travel to India you will perhaps witness thousands of Hindus, walking down to the Ganges river to offer what they call “puja” — sacrifices of food and fruit — to their gods.
This is common in religions all over the world. Virtually everywhere you go, they are offering sacrifices to their gods.
But this is common not only in the “Old World” of India and the Middle East, but in the Americas in the New World as well.
You can go and read about when the Spanish explorers came to the New World, they found that the Maya and the Aztec people were offering sacrifices to their gods. They found the graves of a number of 2- and 3-year-old children who had been offered up to their gods as human sacrifices.
They had made these same kinds of sacrifices in Israel also: the Old Testament prophets condemned the people of Israel for burning their little babies as sacrifices to Molech, a false god. It was horrific!
But the question is: WHY would they do this? WHY is it that in virtually every culture, in every age, in every part of the world, you find that people are making these costly sacrifices to their gods?
It is because mankind knows deep down in our hearts that we are NOT RIGHT with God, and we need some kind of gift, some kind of sacrifice, in order to make us right with Him.
It is man’s vain attempt to try to figure out some way to make a sacrifice that will “put us back right” with God again. But it never works.
It is just like Jacob in the Old Testament, who had cheated his brother Esau out of his inheritance and his birthright, and Jacob had left the country to avoid his wrath. After some years Jacob decided to go back home, but as he headed back with his family and all his possessions, he heard that Esau was headed in his direction with 400 armed men! So Jacob figured that Esau was still mad at him, and so he began to send all these gifts ahead of him to Esau: he sent ahead 200 goats, and then he sent 30 milking camels, and then he sent 40 cows and 10 bulls, and then he sent 30 donkeys — all these gifts and more, one after another, trying to appease Esau’s anger and make him right with him.
And that is exactly what mankind has been trying to do with God. We know that we have made Him angry because of our sins; we know that we are not right with Him, so we try to send all these “gifts”, these sacrifices, ahead of us to “smooth the way” with God and reconcile us with Him.
We still do this today. Whether consciously or subconsciously we say:
— “God, look, I’m putting money in the offering plate!”
— “God, look at how often I go to church now!”
— “God, look, I’ve cleaned up my language!”
— “God, look at all the ‘religious’ stuff I am doing now!”
— “God, look at all the things I am giving up for You!”
BUT IT WILL NOT WORK! NO sacrifice we can give is enough to pay for our sins and make us right with God.
Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.
There is no sacrifice we can make that can atone for our sins and make us right with God.
Only GOD is able provide the ultimate, priceless, sacrifice that would save us — and that is exactly what He did: “For GOD so loved the world, that He GAVE”!
II. The Gift Was Provided
II. The Gift Was Provided
“He GAVE His Only Begotten Son”
God provided the sacrificial gift which we could not provide for ourselves.
In fact the entire OT is the story of how God was preparing us to understand the idea that He would make the sacrifice that would save us.
A lot of Christians these days just see the Old Testament as a bunch of unrelated stories:
we have the story of Adam & Eve, and Abraham & Isaac, and the Exodus, and the prophets — all these “stories”.
These stories point to a great truth. A truth that is so often missed. It is the truth that God is Love and that He Himself provides the sacrifice for our sins.
The Old Testament is ONE all-connected story: of how mankind sinned in the beginning, and how God promised that He would do something to atone for our sins and make us right with Him.
— In Genesis 22 God told Abraham to go and offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice on the mountain. As we have seen, many of the peoples of the land did this for their gods, so Abraham was ready to do for his God what other peoples would do for theirs. So he took Isaac, and tied him up, and reached out his hand for the knife — when God stopped him, and showed him a ram caught in the thicket, and he offered up that ram to God as the sacrifice instead.
And the Bible says that Abraham called that place; “Jehovah Jireh”, which in Hebrew means, “The Lord will provide.”
What we need to understand is, that’s not just a “neat story”; God was teaching Abraham — and all of us who would read this word, that HE would provide the sacrifice that we need to make us right with Him.
Nothing that we can offer — not even our best-prized possession, or our best-loved son, would be enough to pay for our sins.
But HE would provide the sacrifice that we need, one day in the gift of Jesus.
Genesis 22 was just getting us ready to understand John 3:16, that “God so loved the world that He GAVE”
And so it is with the whole Old Testament:
— Genesis 22 shows us that GOD would provide the sacrifice
— Exodus 12’s Passover Lamb taught us that it had to be the blood of a perfect sacrifice that was shed for our sins.
— In Leviticus all the sin sacrifices of the Law pointed to the sacrifice that Jesus would make one day for our sins.
— Last week I shared with you about Numbers 21 that tells the story of how when the people of Israel had been bitten by poisonous snakes, God told them to put a bronze snake on a pole, and whoever believed and looked at that serpent on the pole would be healed. Again, that’s not just an interesting story. It is teaching us the idea of looking up with faith to the sacrifice that was raised up to save us.
This is why Jesus referenced to this very thing here in John 3:14-15, when He said “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life”
— and it was THEN that He spoke those famous words: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”
See, John 3:16 didn’t just come “out of nowhere.” Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers — we could go through the whole Old Testament and see how it all points to this: that GOD was going to provide the sacrificial gift that we couldn’t make for our sins.
Fast forward from the OT to NT we see that God DID provide the sacrificial gift that would save us, when Jesus died on the cross for us:
who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.
Jesus said,
For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time,
Again Jesus Himself said in
just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
God paid for our sins once and for all with gift of Jesus’ death on the cross for us.
The Christian message is that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.”
For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
which scriptures is Paul referring to here.
Its not the NT because the NT hadn't even been written yet when He said this. He was referring to the OT.
So the Christian message is this, “that Christ died for our sins”.
— The Christian message is NOT “you need to go to church.”
— The Christian message is NOT “don’t drink or smoke or gamble.”
— The Christian message is NOT: say a bunch of prayers, give a lot of offerings, and make enough sacrifices so that God will love you.
NONE of those things is the Christian message.
THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE IS NOT A LIST OF THINGS THAT YOU CAN DO FOR GOD; THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE IS THE STORY OF WHAT GOD DID FOR YOU.
The Christian message is THIS, RIGHT HERE:
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.
The Christian message is that “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.”
The gospel is that we are all sinners, and that NONE of our religious works and deeds and sacrifices will ever make us right with God, but that GOD loved us so much that HE provided the sacrifice that we needed in the Person of Jesus Christ, and that whoever trusts in Him will be saved.
I John 4:10 sums it up:
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
“For God so loved the world, that He GAVE …”.