Immanuel Come - The Manner and Magnitude of God's Love

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! It is my joy to deliver our (short!) message this evening. For Advent this year, we have been focusing on the servant songs of Isaiah, and seeing the characteristics of the promised servant that will redeem the people of God. We’ve seen how the promised servant embodies hope, comfort, faith, and love, and we’ve seen how all of these songs point to the person of Jesus Christ.

Tonight we gather together in anticipation of not just his arrival, but also his return. And to help put words to that anticipation, I want us to turn to one of the most well-known passages of scripture for our message tonight: . We’ll be reading verses 16-19, and we’ll be spending most of our time on verse 16, before touching on the rest of the passage for applications and implications at the end.

English Standard Version Chapter 3

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. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.

English Standard Version Chapter 3

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. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

As a whole, the church is incredibly familiar with this passage. After all, it speaks of the incredible love that God has for the world, and how he sent his Son in light of that love. But if we only think about the magnitude of (or how big is) the love that God has for the world, then we are missing a key meaning of this verse. This meaning lies in the meaning of the word that is translated “so” in English (the adverb houtos). In modern English, “so” is generally an expression of magnitude (“I love you so much!”), and we therefore tend to read that as the primary meaning. Another possible translation of the underlying word (and indeed, another meaning of “so”!) is “in this way”. And what this means is that is an expression of both the magnitude of the love that God has for the world as well as a description of the manner in which God loved the world. It is these two aspects that we will be focusing on tonight.

Let us begin with the magnitude with which God has loved the world. I think that sometimes it has become a little bit trite to speak of the love of God. We have lost some of the scandal that would have been associated with this verse. We might have expected it to read, “For God so loved His chosen people, the Jews” - but it does not. We might then have expected it to read, “For God so loved His elect, those that He purposed from the beginning of time to redeem” - but it does not. It tells us instead that God so loved the world, that he send Jesus.

The apostle John uses the phrase “the world” a lot. He generally doesn’t use it for good things. The vast majority of instances where it occurs it is a negative thing. In fact, warns believers to not love the world due to its wickedness. And yet here, he is telling us that God so loved this wicked world that he sent his son.

D. A. Carson, in his commentary on John, says:

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to John 6. Extended Comment I (3:16–21)

God’s love is to be admired not because the world is so big and includes so many people, but because the world is so bad: that is the customary connotation of kosmos (‘world’; cf. notes on 1:9). The world is so wicked that John elsewhere forbids Christians to love it or anything in it (1 Jn. 2:15–17). There is no contradiction between this prohibition and the fact that God does love it. Christians are not to love the world with the selfish love of participation; God loves the world with the self-less, costly love of redemption.

Besides the scandal of loving the wicked, the magnitude of God’s love gives us a picture of the magnitude of God’s redemption. It is not just the souls of believers, but all of creation that will be made perfect and new again at the end of all things. God’s redemptive plan is bigger than just us - it includes fallen creation as well. God does indeed love the world so much that he intends to restore it to the way it was meant to be.

So what of the manner in which God loved the world? To understand this, we need to turn to verses 17-18, where Jesus tells us that God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but to redeem it. If God intended to condemn the world, he could have sent another flood. He could have sent a conquering army. He could have rained down fire and brimstone from heaven. He could have brought down his righteous judgement against a sinful people, but he did not do that. He loved the world by sending his Son to redeem it. God showed his love for the world by giving us hope in a newborn child. And in so doing, he showed us our utter inability to save ourselves. Our redemption required something beyond us - we’ve seen echoes of that in the sacrifices of the temple and the tabernacle; it required atonement for our sins. Verse 19 tells us of the sorry state of creation - that light has come into the world in the form of this promised child, but that we loved the darkness more than we loved the light. On our own, we could do nothing.

God loved the world by condescending to come down to us. All of the promises of the Old Testament prophets see their fulfillment in a manger in Bethlehem. All of the sacrifices of bulls and goats and lambs that could never actually take away sin see their fulfillment when the Son of God is ultimately lifted up as an atonement offering on our behalf.

So what does this mean for us, on Christmas? To celebrate Christmas is to anticipate and rejoice in the arrival of the Son - not just his first appearance, for that has already happened, but also his second appearance where he returns to judge the earth and to make all of the wrong things in the world come untrue. It reminds us that instead of condemning the world, our gracious, merciful, and loving Father has purposed instead to redeem it. It reminds us that in the midst of great darkness, there is hope - to simply believe in the work of the Son of God. God loved those He redeemed too much to let us remain in our sin - he made a way to himself through his Son. Light has come into the world, and the darkness has not, and can never, overcome Him.

Let’s pray.

Immanuel Come - The Manner and Magnitude of God's Love

Introduction

The Magnitude of God’s Love

The Manner of God’s Love