The Cross of Salvation... Sacrificial Love!

phenomenon that is caused by a stone being dropped into a pond.

The argument for causality is essential to our biblical understanding of creation, i.e., “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” The argument then being, God is the original cause of all causes and effects.

Similarly, our text today teaches us that Christian salvation originates with God.

When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. Romans 5:6-8

William Barclay reminds us that a biblical understanding of salvation is of “God acting, not for His own sake, but for ours.” (William Barclay, The Gospel of John, Vol. 1, p 128) In other words, we brought nothing to the table. We were utterly helpless. We were spiritually bankrupt. We did not have a leg to stand on. But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. Salvation originates with God.

A second truth about the nature of salvation is that it is vast in scope.

II. Expanse of Salvation… the world.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son… John 3:16

The love of God is nothing if it is not immeasurably vast.

The Love of God Verse 3
The third verse of the hymn, The Love of God, speculates:
Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Tho’ stretched from sky to sky.

The love of God is immeasurably vast!

When the Apostle Paul wrote of God’s love he used expansive dimensional terms as well. He wrote:

When I think of the wisdom and scope of God’s plan… I pray that you may have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high and how deep his love really is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it. Ephesians 3:14-19

The Vastness of the Earth
The earth is a vast chunk of real estate… It is not, as the popular Disney ride says, “A Small, Small World.” A string stretched around the earth would be 24,901.24 miles long. If you dug a hole all the way through the earth, that hole would be 7,917.5 miles deep. The surface of the earth is over 57.5 million square miles. Earth is massive with vast expanses of land and water.

It is true that God loves the earth and it is true, as it says in Romans 8, “All of creation (including the earth) anticipates the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.” To say that God loves the world, as in the earth, is a correct statement. However our text clearly links the “world” with “whosoever.” The word “world” refers to the people of the world.

The Vastness of People
This week I read an interesting article. It was originally published by the Population Reference Bureau in 1995, updated in 2002 and again in 2011. The article asked the question, “How many people have ever lived on Earth?”

The writer honestly observed, “Any such exercise, i.e., trying to figure out the answer to that question, is a highly speculative enterprise.” However, it is intriguing and of interest.

After all the prehistory and history