March 18, 2012 John 3:16-18
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”
We are all well aware of the signs that are prominent in our town that talk about God’s hatred. They associate the death of soldiers with God’s hatred of America’s sin. They interpret a multitude of diseases and death as God saying to America, “I hate you.”
The natural response is to get angry at them and just say, “That’s idiotic and it’s wrong.” It’s easy to say the opposite, “God loves everyone.” But that doesn’t make sense to the world either. If God loves everyone, then why does everyone die? So how should we interpret death? Should we just leave God out of it and not try to explain it at all?
It might be safer, but the Scriptures do not tread so lightly. Romans 5:12 says, “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.” Death is a result of sin; not necessarily a specific sin; but just plain old sin. You can die slowly from a cancer or a disease or you can die quickly from a car wreck or a gun shot through the head. Under the curse God didn’t promise to always intervene or stop murderers from murdering or cancer from spreading or arteries from clogging, for then we would never end up dying. But no matter how you die it all goes back to the original curse. You don’t have to be old. It can happen to anyone; young or old; for they all are sinners.
What is death? It’s not just the physical deterioration of the body. Here is where the Scriptures explain how serious God was about His curse on sin. He talks about being both saved and condemned. Suffering does not necessarily end at death. Not all spirits return to God. Jesus warned of the eternal destiny of the soul in Matthew 13:40-42, “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
What percentages of people make it to heaven and hell? Matthew 7:13 says, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” Jesus spoke of ONE gate; and it is NARROW. In comparison with the multitudes that end up in hell; few end up in heaven for eternal life.
Even from a Scriptural standpoint this is offensively scary to people. He says that because of Adam’s sin we were all born under a sin that makes us ugly and damnable? He allows people to slowly die or to die at an early age and then assigns so many to an eternal place of torment where the torture never ends. This is so offensive to so many that they say, “Christianity just can’t be true. I just can’t believe in a God who would allow this or do this to anyone!” When people are even living in this world they pray against the suffering and death of their loved ones and they beg God to temporarily withhold the laws of at least suffering from their loved ones. Yet He doesn’t always give them the answer they want. So they grit their teeth and hate God all the more or tell themselves that this God just can’t exist. But this is true: sin causes God’s curse of death. God’s Word is not unclear on the matter. We can’t just throw out or ignore what we don’t want to hear or what we don’t like to hear.
Death: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
I. It has everything to do with it
It sounds depressing to start out a sermon with such facts, but we can’t forget that God’s Word has always been a heaven and hell proposition. Jesus didn’t come to earth just to give us happier marriages or better finances or good health. He has come to save us from hell. Christianity today would like to put God in a more neutral place; a more gentle place; someone who doesn’t really like sin and yet someone who likes everyone as they are. God is a God who wants to make your life easier and happier; not a God who wants you to rescue you from death and hell. God’s Word isn’t so kind. God has always been a God who has hated not just the worst of sins; but all sin. God doesn’t just threaten hangnails. He threatens death and hell. We need to take God’s Word seriously.
While admitting that He is the One who curses us with death and He is the One who sends multitudes to hell, He also gives us today’s Word; the Word that we love to quote. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Here is a completely odd thing; a thing that would seem to be completely foreign to the nature of God. Whereas God says that He is holy who hates sinners (Psalm 5:5) and that we are by nature objects of His wrath, (Eph 2:3) so that we should expect God to hate us, God does something that is completely un-natural. He loves us. His Word never explains WHY He loves us except by defining God as love. His love has nothing to do with who we are. It is only generated inside of Him; unconditional on anything in us. It is not an emotional love; it is a self-determined love and a self-giving love. With this special kind of love He GIVES us His only Son. Just as suffering and death and hell are real places and real consequences, so His love gives a real Person with real results.
What does that mean, to GIVE His Son? He gives His Son to humanity and brings Him into our world with flesh and blood. And what did we do with His Son? We mocked Him and accused Him of being a liar and a cheat. We spat at Him and mocked Him and crucified Him. And what did God do? Instead of standing up for His Son and defending Him against our accusations, He allowed His Son to go through all of our abuse. What is more? He piled on the abuse by using it as an avenue through which He would punish His Son for our sins. The amazing thing is that hidden under all of this abuse He was giving us something we all needed; a place for God’s wrath to go on instead of us; so that He could be punished as our substitute. He gave Him over to death; He put Him in our place; asked Him to become us and die as if He were us; so that He could give us His Son’s righteousness and His holiness in exchange. In this case, the curse of death on Christ was given as a blessing of life to us.
All of this He defines as evidence of His love.
II. It is a gift of His love to believe in
The Word of God says to you, “Do you wonder if God is a God of love? Turn your eyes away from whether you’re popular or good looking. Do not measure God’s love by how much money you’re making or how well behaved your children are. It is the nature of living in a cursed world to feel the curse. Here you will only end up feeling as if you’ve been cursed, even as you are blessed! Death only would appear to be a curse. Instead, measure God’s love by the man on the cross. Look up there. He gave His only Son to death and hell so you would not have to fear that somehow your sins haven’t been paid for. He gave His only Son so that He would have a reason to allow your soul into heaven and resurrect your body to eternal life. Jesus didn’t just pay for some of your sins. He paid for all of your sins; the sinner that you are and the sins that you commit from conception to the grave. He gave His Son for everyone, and the beauty of it is that you don’t owe Him anything for it. That’s why He calls it a GIFT.”
Love in the Word is a strange thing; something that is odd to us. If you ruined your neighbor’s fence, and the father of the household took his son out on the street and started beating him in front of you and said, “I’m going to beat Him instead of you because I love you,” we would probably say to him, “Knock it off. It’s just a fence, what’s the big deal? Leave the poor kid alone. He didn’t do it. I don’t want your love.” This is the response of the world. They don’t want God’s version of love. They call it hate. They’d rather He spare His Son, because they don’t think sin should be that big of a deal.
In a comparison that John draws, they refuse to look at the bronze snake. John draws us back to the snakes in the desert. They complained to God over the fact they were dying of thirst. They thought they had every right to complain. But God didn’t think so. When God became angry with the Israelites He admittedly sent the venomous snakes to bite them. When they were dying, they asked Moses to pray for them. So God had the bronze snake put up on a pole and promised remedy to anyone who looked to the snake. Many of the Israelites who hadn’t been bit perhaps thought the snake on the pole was a ridiculous proposition. Who would buy that cure? But when the poison was running through their veins and they were the ones dying from thirst, their attitude would have probably changed very quickly. That foolish snake probably looked pretty inviting, foolish as it was, and it was already up on the pole, and it didn’t cause them any work. If mere looking would give the cure, why not believe?
This is what suffering and death tends to do to people. It makes them desperate to believe anything! They’ll turn to witch doctors and holistic gurus who tell them all sorts of things to do to make themselves whole again. They’ll try to convince themselves that suffering is only an imaginary thought process. They’ll even love to hear that there is no god and that death is just the end of everything where we just return to worm food. They’ll believe that with the right program they can become their own gods and earn a place where they have their own wives and their own creative worlds. They’ll believe in anything but what God’s Word says.
God’s Word points us to what might be considered the strangest place of all; to a man hanging on a cross two thousand years ago. When the Israelites looked to the snake they received immediate healing from death. The promise of the Word attached to Christ is a little different. The Word says, “Here is your God – dying for your sins. Salvation is immediately of the soul and eventually of the body at the resurrection through His death and resurrection. This has all been done for you for free!” Faith clings to this message. It thrives on the death of Christ and says, “Yes, I believe that. The poison of sin and death is corrupting my body. I am suffering under it. Yet I will look at the man and God on the cross and trust that His suffering and death has paid for my sins. When I die I will have relief from my pain. My soul will go to heaven because I have forgiveness in Christ and my body will be raised from the dead just as He was. My death will bring me relief from my curse.” Others listen to that message and mock it with all their might. “How could you believe such nonsense? Boy, it sure is handy to have relief AFTER you die – to have a faith in something that can’t be proven!”
III. It is the object of faith to trust in
This is the nature of faith, my friends. It is not enough just to know the story of Jesus. Faith is not just knowing there is a chair there. Neither is it believing that the chair COULD hold my weight. It involves also going to the chair and sitting on it and trusting that it will not collapse under my weight. God tells us to spiritually rely not on a chair but on the cross; to recline our sinful selves in His wounds and believe that God does not hate us, even though He should. He Himself tells us to take refuge in our baptism and believe that in this sprinkling of water we were claimed by God to be His own. He tells us to race to the Lord's Supper and trust that His body and blood comes to us, giving us forgiveness of sins and eternal life; connecting us to the same Christ who died two thousand years ago and is now ruling in the heavens.” Faith doesn’t just believe that the Holy Spirit is in baptism or that Christ is in the Lord's Supper. Faith doesn’t just believe that God died in the cross. Faith trusts that Jesus died for me; that baptism made ME His child; that the Holy Spirit was given personally to me; that the Lord’s Supper truly gives me complete and full forgiveness; that I am completely holy in God’s sight from head to toe. Faith is confident that the same God who hates sin and sinners will not hate you on Judgment Day; simply because you have Christ on your side.
Faith in Christ does not believe that God is holding some righteousness and forgiveness back; it doesn’t worry that Christ somehow hasn’t covered all of your sins; that there’s something left for you to do to make God really love you. Faith simply clings to Christ and trusts that even with all of the sins and the pain you feel; God still loves you. Faith trusts that with all of the guilt you have over who you are and how you’ve failed; God still loves you and you are always forgiven.
Faith is all important because of the object of our faith. It isn’t just faith that saves. I could have faith in a rock, but that won’t save me. God’s Word directs you to a real and actual place for forgiveness; a living and breathing Person who can make good on His promise to take you home to heaven. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
There is so much talk today about faith being a journey. How good it is to ask questions! They say that faith doesn’t need to be boxed up and confined to specific dogmas and teachings. Question all you’ve been taught and find your own truth. You don’t have to feel threatened by scientific theories that are opposite of what the Bible says. Faith, in this aspect, is all about questions and not defined by the answers. You can come up with your own answers by what you feel and what you’ve experienced; where you find the answers that make sense to YOU and are meaningful to you.
The Bible says, “That is not the nature of faith.” God’s Word has never told you to define your own answers and come up with your own truth. The Bible has always pointed to Christ, immediately after the Fall. Through the call of Abraham and the line of David and the womb of Mary; it has always been about Jesus’ death and resurrection. David predicted it clearly one thousand years before Jesus was ever born! God has established a bed rock truth for you to stand on; a promise to hold to – a promise that says that ALL has been done and paid for in Christ and is GIVEN through FAITH. “Whoever believes in him is not condemned.” This is God’s promise to sinners, and God does not lie.
This is not arrogance. In reality, it is true humility. For before I will believe in who God says HE is, I have to first of all believe what God’s Word says I am. If I am not the rebel and the sinner, I will not need the Savior and the Saint. God has placed all of the truth of His words and promised in this One Son. When you say, “That can’t be true” or “that’s too easy for us,” then you are calling God a liar and you are calling Christ a fraud. So even though He loves us and even though He has died for everyone, God will not jam Christ down the spiritual throat of someone who absolutely hates what He stands for and who He is. If God provides salvation, but people don’t want to stand under Him and His cross, then the result is inevitable. Whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
The sad fact of life is that even though Jesus has died for the sins of the world, and even though God wants everyone to have and believe this; the Gospel is either too easy or too offensive for a majority of the world. They would rather trust in horoscopes or the sun or elephant men or in nothing than to believe in the plan of salvation in God made flesh, dying on the cross. They would rather focus on what they can temporarily see and enjoy and trust in it rather than to hope in a future and a past that they’ve never seen.
Death always will be a prominent thing. People will always want to know the answer “Why?” Does God hate sinners or does God love sinners? Does God hate America or does God love America? Are we under a curse or a blessing? Whose side should we take in the debate? Does God love everyone or hate everyone? Should we dare to answer?
The answer is found in the middle. Death happens as a result of God’s angry curse on sin. That’s what a holy God threatened to do and is expected to do. But the unnatural thing is that God also chooses to love sinners. He loves us in the strangest way you could think of. He loves us through and in the curse of death – on HIS ONLY SON. We dare not speak of God’s love apart from His Son’s death. This is God’s remedy to His hatred, in His own strange kind of love; divine kind of love. Call it foolish if you will. Call it strange. But do not deny it. Do not reject it. Believe it and be saved. It’s that profoundly simple. Amen.
