Although we shall shortly return to John 3 and the account of Nicodemus, I want to begin this chapter by reflecting a little more generally on the love of God.
Why People Today Find It Easy to Believe in God’s Love
If there is one thing that our world thinks it knows about God—if our world believes in God at all—it is that he is a loving God. That has not always been the case in human history. Many people have thought of the gods as pretty arbitrary, mean-spirited, whimsical, or even malicious. That is why you have to appease them. Sometimes in the history of the church Christians have placed more emphasis on God’s wrath or his sovereignty or his holiness, all themes that are biblical in some degree or another. God’s love did not receive as much attention. But today, if people believe in God at all, by and large they find it easy to believe in God’s love.
Yet being comfortable with the notion of the love of God has been accompanied by some fairly spongy notions as to what love means. Occasionally you will hear somebody saying something like this: “It’s Christians I don’t like. I mean, God is love, and if everybody were just like Jesus, it would be wonderful. Jesus said, ‘Judge not that you be not judged.’ You know, if we could all just be nonjudgmental and be loving the way Jesus was loving, then the world would be a better place.” There is an assumption there about the nature of love, isn’t there? Love is nonjudgmental. It does not condemn anyone. It lets everybody do whatever they want. That is what love means.
Of course, it is sadly true that sometimes Christians—God help us—are mean. Certainly it is true that Jesus said, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matt. 7:1). But when he said this, did he really mean, “Do not make any morally discriminating judgments?” Why then does he give so many commands about telling the truth? Don’t such commands stand as condemnation of lies and liars? Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves: doesn’t that constitute an implicit judgment on those who don’t? In fact, in the very text where Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged,” he goes on to say just five verses later, “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs” (Matt. 7:6), which means that somebody has to figure out who the swine are.
In other words, when Jesus says something as important as “Do not judge, or you too will be judged,” there is a context to be understood. Jesus, after all, cuts an astonishingly high moral swath through his time. So if people think “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” means that Jesus is abolishing all morality and leaving all such questions up to the individual, they have not even begun to understand who Jesus is. Jesus does condemn the kind of judgment that is judgmental, self-righteous, or hypocritical. He condemns such judgment repeatedly and roundly. But there is no way on God’s green earth that he is condemning moral discernment or the priority of truth. In any case, there is more to God’s love, to Jesus’s love, than avoiding judgmentalism.
That means that when we think of God’s love, we need to think of God’s other attributes too—his holiness, truthfulness, glory (his manifestation of his spectacular being and loveliness), and all the rest—and think through how all of them work together all the time. Sadly, precisely because our culture finds it relatively easy to believe that God is a God of love, we have developed notions of God’s love that are disturbingly spongy and sentimental and almost always alienated from the full range of the attributes that make God, God.
Five Different Ways the Bible Speaks of the Love of God
My little book The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God tries to lay out (among other things) five different ways the Bible speaks of the love of God. Let me quickly run through them with you. I hasten to insist that these are different ways that the Bible speaks of the love of God, not five different kinds of love.
1. There is love of God—I don’t know how else to say this—within the Godhead, within the Triune God. The Bible explicitly speaks of the love of the Father for his Son and the love of the Son for the Father. Two chapters back we noted that John’s Gospel, the fourth book in the New Testament, says that the Father loves the Son and has placed everything into his hands (see John 3:35) and has determined that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father (see John 5:23). Explicitly, then, the Bible says the Father loves the Son. It also tells us, equally explicitly, that the Son loves the Father and always does whatever pleases him (see John 14:31). Why Jesus goes to the cross is first of all because he loves his Father and does his Father’s will. This love within the Godhead (what people call God’s intratrinitarian love—if God can be referred to as the Trinity, then what we are thinking of is the love that flows among the members of the Godhead, of the Trinity) is a love that is perfect. Each person of the Trinity finds the others adoringly, perfectly lovable. It is not as if the Father says to the Son, “Frankly, you really are a hopeless case, but I love you anyway.” The Son is perfectly lovely, and the Father is perfectly lovely, and they love each other perfectly. This is one way the Bible speaks of God’s love.
2. God’s love can refer to his general care over his creation. God sends his sun and his rain upon the just and the unjust. That is to say, it is providential and nondiscriminating. It is an amoral love (not an immoral love). He sustains both the godly and the ungodly. In fact, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus can use God’s providential love to draw out a moral lesson. He says, in effect, “If God sends his sun and his rain upon both the righteous and the unrighteous, then why should you be making all these terribly fine distinctions between who is your friend and who is your enemy, choosing to love only your friends while hating your enemies?” (see Matt. 5:44–47). So there is a sense in which God’s love generously extends to friend and foe alike. Here is a second way in which the Bible speaks of God’s love.
3. Sometimes the Bible speaks of God’s love in a kind of moral, inviting, commanding, yearning sense. So you find God addressing Israel in the Old Testament when the nation is particularly perverse, saying, in effect, “Turn, turn, why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (see Ezek. 18:23, 32; 33:11). He is that kind of God.
4. Sometimes God’s love is selective. It chooses one and not another. “I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated” (Mal. 1:2–3). This is very strong language. In remarkable passages in Deuteronomy 7 and 10, God raises the rhetorical question as to why he chose the nation of Israel. He ticks off the possibilities. Because they are more numerous? No. Because they are more mighty? No. Because they are more righteous? No. He set his affection on them because he loved them—that is, he loved them because he loved them. He did not love all the other nations just the same way. In the context, God sets his affection on Israel as opposed to the other nations because he loved Israel. It is his sovereign choice.
5. Once God is in connection with his own people—usually this means he has entered into a covenant-based relationship with them—then his love is often presented as conditional. Consider, for example, the second-to-last book of the Bible, a little one-page book called Jude. Jude, a half-brother of Jesus, writes, “Keep yourselves in God’s love” (Jude 21), which shows that you might not keep yourself in God’s love. In such passages there is a moral conditionality to being loved by God. Indeed there are a lot of passages in both Testaments where God’s love or Jesus’s love for us is in some sense conditional on our obedience. Even the Ten Commandments are partly shaped by conditionality: God shows his love, he says, “to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exod. 20:6). So there are contexts in the Bible where God’s love is cast in conditional terms.
Do you see how subtle this necessarily becomes? Inevitably one starts asking how these different ways of talking about God’s love fit together. It helps to think of human analogies. I could say with a straight face, “I love riding my motorcycle, I love woodwork, and I love my wife.” But if I put all three together in the same sentence too often, my wife, quite understandably, will not be pleased. And they really have different weight. Or again, I can say, “I love my children unconditionally.” I have a daughter in California who works with disadvantaged kids. If instead she became a hooker on the streets of LA, I think I’d love her anyway. She is my daughter. I love her unconditionally. I have a son who is a Marine, and if instead he started selling heroin on the streets of New York, I think I’d love him anyway. He is my son. I love him unconditionally. Yet in another context when they were just kids learning to drive, if I said to one of them, “Make sure you are home by midnight,” and they weren’t, they faced the wrath of Dad. In that sense my love was quite conditional on their obeying me and getting the car home on time.
In other words, despite the fact that we are dealing with the same kids and the same dad, the different contexts change the use of the love language. It was not that my love for them, in one sense, became less unconditional, for there is a framework in which that love remains constant. But there can be another framework where agreements and family responsibilities prevail—or, in biblical terms, covenantal obligations—and here the dynamics change somewhat.
Christians have been known to advance such clichés as “God loves everybody just the same.” True or false? It depends! There are contexts in which the Bible casts God’s love as amoral. He sends his sun and his rain upon the righteous and the unrighteous: in that context he loves everybody just the same. But there are other contexts where God’s love is said to be conditional on our obedience, and still others where it is grounded in God’s own sovereign choice. In such contexts, God does not love everybody just the same.
“You can’t do anything to make God love you any more.” True or false? It depends! In some contexts this is gloriously and absolutely true, because at the end of the day you cannot earn God’s love. Yet there are different contexts in which God’s love is spoken of as conditional. The main lesson to learn at this juncture is that we must be careful not to make silly mistakes as we read the biblical text by taking one verse out of its context, universalizing it, and remaining blind to the wonderful diversity of ways in which the Bible speaks of God’s love.
At this juncture we must return to the report of Jesus’s encounter with Nicodemus.
John 3:16–21
In the last chapter we worked our way through the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus over the new birth. We saw that toward the end of it, Christ claimed special revelation: he could speak authoritatively about our need for this new birth and about the powerful, transforming effect it has, reconciling us to God and reorienting our lives, precisely because he himself came from heaven. Moreover, to provide an explanation of the basis on which people are reconciled to God, Jesus provided an analogy drawn from the Old Testament—Moses lifting up the bronze snake on a pole—showing that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. That brings us to John 3:16–21, which tells us of God’s own motives in pursuing men and women with such regenerating power:
16For 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. 17For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20All those who do evil hate the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21But those who live by the truth come into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
John 3:16–21
Let me draw some inferences from this passage and related ones.
1. In the Bible It Is Simply Astonishing That God Loves Us
By and large this is not the way we think, but the Bible delights to marvel at God’s love. The reason we do not think this way is twofold: not only do we think that God ought to love (it is the one thing widely accepted in our culture) but “he especially ought to love me because I’m nice and neighborly and maybe even cute. I don’t beat up on people. I’m a pretty decent bloke. Of course God will love me. I mean, there’s nothing in me not to love, is there?” But this is already so far removed from the storyline of Scripture that we have to rethink it again. Let me come in from the side door, using an illustration I have sometimes used with university students.
Bob and Sue are walking down a beach. It’s the end of the academic year. The sun has made the sand warm. They kick off their sandals and feel the wet sand squish between their toes. He takes her hand, and he says, “Sue, I love you. I really do.” What does he mean? He could mean a lot of things. He may simply mean that his hormones are jumping and he wants to go to bed with her. But the least that he means is that he is attracted to her. He certainly does not mean that he finds her unlovely but loves her anyway. When he says “I love you,” he is in part saying that he finds her lovable, and if he has any sort of romantic twist, this is when it is likely to come out. “Sue, the color of your eyes—I could just sink into them. The smell of your hair, the dimples when you smile—there’s nothing about you I don’t love. Your personality—it is so wonderful. You’re such an encourager. You’ve got this laugh that can fill a whole room with smiles, it’s so contagious. Sue, I love you.” What he does not mean is this: “Sue, quite frankly, you are the most homely creature I know. Your bad breath could stop a herd of rampaging elephants. Your knees remind me of a crippled camel. You have the personality of Genghis Khan. You don’t have any sense of humor. You’re a miserable, self-righteous, narcissistic, hateful woman, and I love you.” When he declares his love for her, in part he is declaring that at that moment he finds her lovely. Isn’t that correct?
Now God comes along in John 3:16: “God so loved the world.” What is God saying to the world? “World, I love you”? Is he saying, “World, your scintillating personality, your intelligent conversation, your wit, your gift—and you’re cute! I love you! I can’t imagine heaven without you.” Is that what he’s saying? In other words, when God says, “I love you,” is he declaring the loveable-ness of the world? There are a lot of psychologists who use the love of God in exactly that way. If God says, “I love you,” it must be that “I’m okay, you’re okay; God says we’re okay. He loves us; it must be because we’re lovable.”
Biblically that is a load of nonsense. The word “world” in John’s Gospel typically refers not to a big place with a lot of people in it but to a bad place with a lot of bad people in it. The word “world” in John’s Gospel is this human-centered, created order that God has made and that has rebelled against him in hatefulness and idolatry, resulting in broken relationships, infidelity, and wickedness. That is why already in the first verses of this Gospel, in a passage we looked at two chapters back, the so-called prologue of John’s Gospel (John 1:1–18), we read, “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him” (1:10). It is why we read in this passage, a little farther on, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (3:19). That is, with the coming of Jesus comes God’s gracious self-disclosure, his revelation, light that is good and clean and pure—but people love darkness instead of light. People do not want to be exposed to that kind of light. All it does is show the dirt.
But the text says, “God so loved the world”—this broken and fallen world. It is as if God is saying to the world, “Morally speaking, you are the people of the crippled knees. You are the people of the moral bad breath. You are the people of the rampaging Genghis Khan personality. You are hateful and spiteful and murderous. And you know what? I love you anyway—not because you are so lovable but because I am that kind of God.” That is why in the Bible, this side of Genesis 3, God’s love is always marveled at. God’s love is wonderful, surprising, in some ways not the way it ought to be. Why doesn’t he just condemn us instead?
2. The Measure of God’s Love for Us Is Jesus
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16). You must understand that John’s Gospel is rich in expressions that talk about the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father. There is a wonderful chapter, John 17, that is sometimes called “Jesus’s high priestly prayer,” where there is a kind of extended meditation on the fact that in eternity past the Father loved the Son in a perfection of love. And in return, the Son loved the Father in a perfection of love, past our wildest, most generous imaginations.
We have already seen that the God who is there does not need us. He exercised and enjoyed a perfection of love in eternity past. Then when he did make us, we thumbed our noses at him and wanted to become God ourselves. God chooses to love this lost and self-destructing “world” (to use one of John’s favored expressions) in a yearning, inviting way. Elsewhere John can talk about God’s peculiar relationship with his own people, speaking of them as those the Father has given to the Son (see for example 6:37–40). We have already seen that the Bible can talk about God’s love in a variety of ways. In this immediate context, the object of God’s love is the “world”—men and women, every ethnicity, Jews and Gentiles, but all lost in our wretched determination to cut ourselves off from the God who is there—and he loves us in any case. It is astonishing. And the measure of this love is Jesus, this Jesus who, before he became Jesus, as the eternal Son, the eternal Word, was already one with the Father in a perfect circle of love in eternity past. Now the Father gives his Son for us. That is how much he chooses to love us. God in essence gives himself.
Indeed, when we say that the measure of God’s love for us is Jesus, we really mean two things:
First, what did giving Jesus cost the Father? You who are parents, would you gladly give your child so that others might be spared death? Even such love is the exchange of a child for a peer, a fellow human being. But God the Father gives his Son over to death for the benefit of mere creatures, ungrateful and self-centered creatures at that.
Second, what love does Jesus himself show? The measure of God’s love for us is Jesus. If you want to see the full measure of God’s love, watch Jesus.
Let me remind you of half a dozen instances in Jesus’s life, reported in other texts in the New Testament that speak of God’s love or Jesus’s love.
You find him with a heart as big as eternity as he looks out on a crowd that seems leaderless, spiritually empty, and lost. He calls them sheep without a shepherd, and, the text says, he has compassion on them (see Matt. 9:36).
You find him playing with little children and even setting up little children as a kind of model for what his own disciples should be: childlike in their approach to Jesus. Little children do not come to someone who is angry. Yet in the Gospels we find them playing with Jesus and jumping all over him, and he says, “Let the little children come to me” (Matt. 19:14).
Or there is this wonderful passage in Matthew 12. He quotes some words pertaining to himself from the prophet Isaiah (over seven hundred years earlier):
18Here is my servant whom I have chosen,
the one I love, in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him,
and he will proclaim justice to the nations.
19He will not quarrel or cry out;
no one will hear his voice in the streets.
20A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out,
till he leads justice to victory.
21In his name the nations will put their hope.
Matthew 12:18–21
Can you envision these images? A candle: the flame goes out, and instead of squeezing out the smoldering wick, he fans it back into flame. Or we have a reed by the side of a lake, a place where red-winged blackbirds flock, and it is bruised—not very strong; yet he does not snap it off; he builds it up. These are powerful ways of saying that his love is gentle, edifying, compassionate.
Even when he is denouncing people for their sins, sometimes in very strong language (he actually says to some people, “You hypocrites! You blind guides! You snakes! You brood of vipers!” in Matt. 23:15–16, 33), at the end of his denunciation you find him weeping over the city. There are some preachers in literature like Elmer Gantry who are quick to denounce, but they are hypocrites. There is a kind of moralizing preaching that denounces and criticizes and is upset by moral decay, but it is always angry. It is never characterized by tears of compassion. That heartlessness never characterized Jesus.
One of the really wonderful things about the demonstration of Jesus’s love is the way he addresses individuals where they are, without some mere one-size-fits-all formula. A rich young man whose money is his god is told he must sell all he has and give the proceeds to the poor. But that is not what Jesus tells a Samaritan woman he meets at a well. He tells her to fetch her husband, and of course she cannot do it, for she has burned through five husbands and is currently living with a man who is not her husband: she must address the barrier of her broken relationships. The Gentile leader with a child whose life is threatened, the broken woman who washes Jesus’s feet, the apostle who publicly disowns Jesus—in every case the Master’s love is not only profound but pointed and shaped to address personal needs most accurately.
Equally wonderful is the way Jesus comes to those bowed down with the cares of life and says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28–30, emphasis added). A theme of rest traces its own trajectory through the Bible. As God “rested” at the end of creation, as God commands in the Ten Commandments a Sabbath day for his people to rest, so the ultimate rest is secured in Jesus—a theme greatly expanded later in the New Testament (see Hebrews 3–4). This rest that God provides is a function of God’s love for his people.
Then you find him on the cross. Did you see the film by Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ? A lot of the physical suffering was pretty accurately depicted. Whipped and beaten and broken, Jesus cries, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). And that physical torment was not in any sense the whole of his suffering: as he bore the guilt and punishment of others, he experienced the deepest sense of abandonment by his heavenly Father (see Matt. 27:45–46).
For some of the New Testament writers, so moving is this love of God as shown in Christ Jesus that it is not uncommon for them to break out in delight at the theme. They may be describing something in precise theological expressions which make them think of the cross, and then they suddenly burst out with another joyful reiteration of their awareness of his love. For example, in one of Paul’s letters, a letter to the Galatian Christians, he works through some deep material on what the cross achieved, what “justification” is (something we’ll pick up two chapters from now), and then, as he mentions Jesus’s death, he breaks out, “who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Elsewhere, when he is praying for another group of believers (this time in the city of Ephesus), the apostle Paul tells them what he prays for them, what he asks God for on their behalf. He mentions one or two things, and then he adds that he prays that they “may have power, together with all the Lord’s people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:18), using spatial metaphors to depict its limitless dimensions. Then he uses paradox: “to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:19), that is, to know this love that is not knowable, that is past finding out, that is past knowledge—to know it, to experience it. The reason why Paul prays for this, Paul tells the Ephesians, is “that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19)—that’s an expression that means, roughly, “in order that you might be just as full as God will make you, perfectly mature; you cannot be a genuinely mature human being until you are richly aware that you are awash in the love of God expressed in Christ Jesus. And that’s what I pray for you.”
The measure of God’s love for us is Jesus.
3. The Purpose of God’s Love for Us Is That We Might Have Life
Look at the language of John 3:16–18:
16For 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. 17For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
John 3:16–18, emphasis added
Notice the pairs: (1) shall not perish versus shall have eternal life; (2) not to condemn the world versus to save the world. These are the opposites. The purpose of God’s love for us is clear and directed. Occasionally some people have depicted the love of God in Christ Jesus as if it was somehow self-sacrificing without a purpose: Jesus dies on the cross to prove how much he loves us. But so what? More than a century ago, some wag in Britain countered this by saying, in effect, “Would it make any sense for someone to run down Brighton Pier and yell, ‘World, world, world, I love you! I will show my love to you!’ and then jump off the end of the pier and drown?” Would that prove love or that the fellow had lost it? Sad, maybe, but scarcely an example of love.
But Jesus doesn’t go the cross because he is a victim of fate. He does not go to the cross as an abstract lesson. He does not go to the cross as a mere example (though he is an example). He has a purpose in going to the cross. It is to save people from condemnation that is already hanging over them. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them” (3:36, emphasis added); “whoever does not believe stands condemned already” (3:18, emphasis added). We are back to the Bible’s storyline. Jesus does not come to neutral people and arbitrarily condemn a few here and save a few there. Rather, he comes to people who are already condemned. We stand this side of Genesis 3. We are already under God’s judgment. We are already a lost and ungrateful brood. The purpose of his coming and his death on the cross is not to condemn but to save the world (see 3:17).
This passage does not describe at great length how Jesus accomplishes this. Other passages in John’s Gospel make that pretty clear. One powerful example is John 6. In it, Jesus says that he is the Bread of Life and unless we eat him we will die. At a superficial level, the notion of eating Jesus might sound jolly close to cannibalism. Or those of us who are more religiously inclined might think, “Maybe it’s the sacrament of holy communion or something like that.” Originally, that was not what Jesus meant at all. We must not forget that in the ancient world just about everybody worked with their hands or on farms, so they were much closer to nature than we are today. If you ask a five-year-old or a seven-year-old today, “Where does food come from?” they will reply, “From Jewel-Osco” or whatever grocery store chain is in their region. But if you were to ask anybody in the first century where it comes from, they would reply, “From plants, fish, and animals.” They have grown or caught this food themselves. So anybody in the first century knows that you live because the chicken died. You live because the carrots have been pulled up and killed. All of this organic material that we feed ourselves with—which we must have or we die—has given its life for us in substitution. Either we die or it dies.
Perhaps in the near future you will stop at a fast-food restaurant and pick up a hamburger. What will you eat? Dead cow. Dead lettuce. Dead tomato. Dead barley. Dead wheat. Everything you eat in that meal once lived and is now dead—except for a few minerals like salt, of which there may be too much. That is what you will eat. All of it has given its life for you. Either it dies or you die. Now, of course, the cow did not volunteer. Nor did the lettuce. The point is not the voluntary nature of such substitution but the reality of it. Either you die or something else living dies so that you may live. Jesus picks up on that language and says, “Unless you eat my flesh, you will die. I die so that you may live.”
For the burden of the New Testament is that Jesus dies a substitutionary death. He does not deserve to die. But when God sent him to do his Father’s will, to go to the cross and die, it was with a purpose: to die our death so that we do not have to die, so that we may have eternal life. That is what the text is saying. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. . . . For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (3:16–17) so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. We do not ingest physically this Christ. We believe in him. We trust him and discover that his life becomes ours as our death becomes his. His life becomes ours! And much of the New Testament is given over to unpacking precisely that point.
4. The Means by Which We Come to Enjoy This Love and Life Is Faith
Look one more time at these verses:
16For 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. . . . 18Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already [i.e., the verdict has already been passed] because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
John 3:16, 18, emphasis added
Two chapters from now I shall talk about faith at greater length. For now it is enough to recall we have come across this theme before: we saw it already in the last chapter. Just as the people were saved by simply looking at, by trusting in, by believing in the bronze snake that God had provided, so also we believe in Christ and find life (see 3:14–15). What Jesus wants us to do is not impress him, try to gain his attention, or try to pay for our own sins. What he wants us to do is trust him.
Conclusion
Let me end this way. If all of this is true, and I believe with every fiber of my being that it is, then the first response to it ought to be gratitude, contrition before God, thankfulness for what he has done, and frank faith. But there are loud voices in our world who argue that thankfulness before Jesus shows what an inferior, sappy, emotional, weak religion Christianity is. For example, Bishop Spong, a recently retired Episcopal bishop, writes,
What does the cross mean? How is it to be understood? Clearly the old pattern of seeing the cross as the place where the price of the fall was paid is totally inappropriate. Aside from encouraging guilt, justifying the need for divine punishment and causing an incipient sadomasochism that has endured with a relentless tenacity through the centuries, the traditional understanding of the cross of Christ has become inoperative on every level. As I have noted previously, a rescuing deity results in gratitude, never in expanded humanity. Constant gratitude, which the story of the cross seems to encourage, creates only weakness, childishness and dependency.[1]
That is a very common stance today. One of the best brief responses to it I have seen is by John Piper, who says,
“Yes,” Bishop Spong, “a rescuing deity results in gratitude.” That’s true. We cannot stop the mercy of God from doing what it does. He has rescued us from our selfishness and its horrible endpoint, hell. Our hearts cannot stop feeling what they feel—gratitude.
You say this encourages “weakness.” Not exactly. It encourages being strong in a way that makes God look good, and makes us feel glad. For example, Jesus said to the apostle Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul responded, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. . . . For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9). So his dependence made him stronger than he would have been otherwise. He is strong with the strength of Christ.
You say this “constant gratitude” produces “childishness.” Not really. Children do not naturally say thank you. They come into the world believing that the world owes them everything they want. You have to drill “thank you” into the selfish heart of a child. Feeling grateful and saying it often is a mark of remarkable maturity. We have a name for people who don’t feel thankful for what they receive. We call them ingrates. And everyone knows they are acting like selfish children. They are childish. No, Bishop Spong, God wants us to grow up into mature, thoughtful, wise, humble, thankful people. The opposite is childish.
In fact the opposite is downright cranky. C. S. Lewis, before he was a Christian, really disliked the message of the Bible that we should thank and praise God all the time. Then everything changed. What he discovered was not that praising and thanking made people childish, but that it made them large-hearted and healthy. He said, “The humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds praised most while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least.” That is my experience. When I am ungrateful, I am selfish and immature. When I am overflowing with gratitude I am healthy, other-oriented, servant-minded, Christ-exalting, and joyful.[2]
You see, we finally close with Christ. God is the kind of God who pursues us, and therefore we close with Christ. So many Christians across the centuries have testified to the way God pursued them. There is a wonderful poem by Francis Thompson that talks about God as if he were the hound of heaven, chasing him down. Some of its lines follow:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”[3]
That is the God who loves. He is the hound of heaven. And he is the one who finally gives us meaning as we are restored to the living God. Our meaning does not come from being independent. That is what may destroy us. Our meaning does not come from being rich. That may destroy us; in any sense it is godless and will eventually damn us. Our meaning comes from basking in a right and ordered relationship to the living God, peculiarly and overwhelmingly loved by him. The alternative is death—not always as dramatic as what another poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, describes, but certainly of the same order:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, “Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king, And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.[4]
As Thompson said, “All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
Or again, the testimony of Malcolm Muggeridge, who was a cranky, brilliant, eccentric journalist whose interests and comments ranged all over the map. He was creative, blasphemous, victorious, defeated, and had a spectacular career. He converted in his old age and wrote,
I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets—that’s fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue [i.e., the British IRS]—that’s success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions—that’s pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time—that’s fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing—less than nothing, a positive impediment—measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are. What, I ask myself, does life hold, what is there in the works of time, in the past, now and to come, which could possibly be put in the balance against the refreshment of drinking that water?[5]
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16).