Advent 2020: Love

John 3.16

Introduction 

How many love songs have been written? I have no idea. I don’t think there’s a topic about which more songs are written than love. The Beatles said, “it’s all you need.” Elvis just couldn’t help falling in love with you. Diana Ross commanded us to stop in the name of love. And while Bob Dylan wrote, “to make you feel my love,” there’s no debate that Garth sang it.

Haddaway asked a question that people all over the world still ask today, “What is love? Baby don’t hurt me.” Remember the SNL skit with Christ Kattan and Will Ferrell? Night at the Roxbury. What is love? Is love blind acceptance? Is it a romantic feeling? Is it sexual attraction? How do you quantify love? I mean, when I say, “I love Bethany,” and “I love burritos,” am I saying the same thing? What is love?

We find ourselves at the last Sunday of advent together. We have anticipated the hope of the incarnation, the peace of the incarnation, and the joy of the incarnation, but the greatest of these is love. Advent is about love. Christmas is about love. On this last Sunday before Christmas Eve our text is quite possibly the most famous verse in the Bible. I would bet that, with the Lord’s Prayer, more Christians in the world have this verse memorized than any other passage. But what does it mean? And what does it have to do with Christmas?

Christmas is the happiest time of the year for many people. For others it is a time of depression. Loneliness, marriage issues, money problems, family strife, and global pandemics don’t take off for Christmas. And as Daniel Stern reminds us in Home Alone, “Santy don’t visit the funeral homes, little buddy.” But what if there were something that could make you ok in spite of all that? What if there was a love that brought hope, peace, and joy even in suffering? That’s what this verse is about. Let me show you.

The Object of God’s Love

The main clause in this sentence is God loved the world. The other two clauses are grammatically subordinate to God loved the world. Here we simply have a subject (God), a verb (loved), and a direct object (the world). God is the subject of this sentence and he is the subject of the Scripture. 

The Bible begins with the declaration, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1.1). The Hebrew word for God, אֱלֹהִ֑ים is plural. Scripture reveals to us that there is one God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The theological word Christians have used to describe the ontology of God is Trinity. This God is the subject of the Bible. The Bible is the story of God’s creation and redemption of his people and his world.

And Jesus says that this God loved. This is where we have to suspend our familiarity with Scripture to hear what Jesus is saying. We are so comfortable with the idea that God is love even to the abuse of that teaching. But people in the ancient Near East did not view their deities as loving. The ancient gods of Egypt and Babylon were not known for their love. Molech demanded child sacrifice. The Greek gods were not benevolent. They were petty, violent idols.

But Jesus says that the true God loved. And the verb tense clues us in that God’s love is constant. It’s called a gnomic aorist, which means that it wasn’t just that God loved at a certain time, but that God is in a timeless state of love. He is not a fickle idol like the Egyptian or Greek gods, who appear to be made in our image. But he is perfect love.

This is why the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christianity. God is love doesn’t mean that God wants everyone to do whatever they want without judgment. God isn’t the parent who buys beer for their high school kid because, “if they party at home at least we’ll know where they are.” God is love because the Father, Son, and Spirit have eternally loved and served one another. They have been in perfect community from eternity past. And Jesus is about to tell us about a fourth party that is brought into God’s love.

Jesus says God loved the world. The world is the object of God’s love. Let’s start with what this doesn’t mean: it doesn’t mean that God will redeem all humanity in the end regardless of what they believe. God loved the world does not mean that no one will be in hell. This verse does not teach universalism. The first rule of interpreting Scripture is that we interpret Scripture with Scripture and the Scripture is clear that those who reject Christ will spend eternity in hell.

So what does it mean? Remember the immediate context: Jesus is teaching Nicodemus, a teacher of Israel’s Law, about what it means to be born again. He’s telling him (1) the gospel is not merely that God loved Israel, but that God loved the world. Abraham, Israel’s patriarch was promised in his covenant that all of the nations of the earth would be blessed through his seed (Gen 12.1-3). Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. God has loved a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation that make up the church. That has been his plan from the very beginning.

(2) I think an implication of God loving the κόσμον is that God loves the physical world that he created. When he created the world he said that it was very good (Gen 1.31). The beauty of the incarnation is that God himself became creation. God is not a gnostic. That’s why he gave wine to gladden the heart (Ps 104.15) and made double beef whoppers taste so good. It’s why it’s so enjoyable to give presents on Christmas! God values his physical creation so much that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1.14).

The Manner of God’s Love

Jesus doesn’t only tell us of the object of God’s love, the world, but he also tells us the manner of God’s love. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Many of you have memorized the verse this way: For God so loved and it leads you to think John is talking about intensity. Like, God loved the world SO much! And it’s true that it conveys intensity, but that’s not all it conveys. The word so is the Greek word Οὕτως, which can be translated, “so, thus, in this way.” For God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son. You see God’s love for the world is not an undefined love. God’s love isn’t the bumper sticker of different religious symbols that says, “Coexist.”

How does God love? He gave his only Son. In eternity past the Father made an eternal covenant with the Son to redeem the church and advent is about the Father sending the Son. Every year during advent we celebrate at church and then Bethany and I come home and celebrate with our kids. We read the Bible, pray, light the candle, and then we give them a gift each week. We tell them they get gifts for advent because God gave his only Son.

This is the second verb in the sentence performed by God. God loved and God gave. God loved by giving. He was under no obligation to give his Son. The Father, Son, and Spirit could have lived forever with each other without us and they would be perfectly fine. But God loved so he gave.

God gave his only Son. I’m sure, like me, many of you have memorized only begotten Son. That’s a little misleading because John is not talking about metaphysics here. He’s not teaching about the eternal generation of the Son. There are other pericopes that deal with that. No, John is talking about uniqueness. 

Jesus is μονογενῆ. John uses this word to mean, “one and only; special; unique.” In the same way that Isaac was the “only son” of Abraham. Abraham had other male children, but Isaac was the son of the promise. In the same way, Jesus is God’s unique Son. He is the Son of the promise. 

He gave his only Son is a summary of the Christ event. Advent means Jesus is coming. The Father sent the Son to be conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He sent him to live a sinless life securing righteousness. He sent him to die in the place of sinners and to resurrect on the third day as the head of the new creation. This is the good news we call the gospel. This is the meaning of Christmas.

The Result of God’s Love

The object of God’s love is the world: the elect from every nation that make up the church. The manner of God’s love is that he gave his son in his life, death, and resurrection. And the result of God’s love is that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. This clause begins with the conjunction ἵνα, which means, “In order that.” God gave his only Son in order that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

ἵνα introduces a conditional clause. Should not perish and have eternal life are subjunctive verbs, which means they may or may not happen based upon a condition. All who believe have eternal life. That is the condition for eternal life. Faith in Christ alone is God’s requirement for eternal life. The alternative is to perish, to be destroyed.

I’ve already given you the knowledge that you need for this faith: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now what it means to believe (πιστεύω) is to ascent that it is true and to fully trust or rely on Jesus to save you. Repent of your sin and rest in the person and work of Jesus and you will find the love of God.

I also want to spend a moment on the phrase eternal life because Christians have inherited an unbiblical gnostic view of eternal life. I can’t tell you how many funerals I’ve been to where I’ve heard Christians go on and on about how their loved one is in heaven with the pearly gates and the streets of gold. And how they’re reunited with grandma and they’re crocheting with Jesus. The Bible does not teach eternal life as your spirit in heaven forever. We were not made to live in heaven. 

We were created to be both body and soul on earth forever. Eternal life means being resurrected on the last day and living with Jesus and his people in the new creation. The phrase eternal life in Greek is actually better translated life in the age. In his 2nd advent Jesus Christ will return to raise the dead, judge the world, and make all things new. This eternal life will be for all who are believing in him.

Conclusion

So what is love? This is the way that God loved the world: that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not die but live forever in the new world. And this love is all you need.