Tag Destiny

For God So Loved the World

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If you asked a random non-Christian to cite a Bible verse, not quote, but just cite a chapter and verse, there’s a good chance they’d say John 3:16.  It’s as good a summary of the gospel as one verse can provide, and it’s one of the verses I’ve quoted the most on this blog.  In response to a reader suggestion, I’ve figured out what Bible verses I’ve used the most and am writing a series about those verses.  Today’s post is #3 of the series, covering the verse quoted the 3rd least out of the 10 most quoted:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Reading back over the posts where this verse has appeared, I see three ideas I tried to share: what God’s love means for us, what love has to do with “eternal life”, and what “world” God loves.

The first idea is that we would all be eternally lost if not for God’s love.  Since we all fall short of God’s standards, what we deserve is to be banished from God’s presence forever.  In His holiness, He can’t be near us, and in His justice, He must judge our sins.  However, Romans 5:8 tells us: “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  Without God’s love we would always be sinners, but because of His love, we have a way back to a right relationship with our God.  In one post here, I wrote “Christianity is not judgement, but the only way of escape from it.”

Second, what is this “eternal life” that we can have because God loves us?  I’ve written that “If man had not rejected love, Christianity wouldn’t be necessary; but also, if Christianity does not restore mankind to agape love, it’s pointless.”  When we are brought back into a right relationship with God, it puts us on an inevitable course toward a new world where we will all love perfectly, as Jesus loved perfectly.  Unless heaven is going to be full of loving people, it’s not going to be the perfect place that God is preparing for us.  So, “eternal life”, given to us because of God’s love, is our future, perfect selves living with God for eternity.  The possibility of this is so amazing that God decided it was worth dying for!

Last, I’ve also written that “when I’m struggling to face the world as I see it, I ask about [John] 3:16, ‘Exactly which world did Jesus love enough to die for?’  The answer is this one.  The world He died for is the one where sex, anger, bitter tribalism, and political partisanship sells.  The one with a lot of sarcastic, angry, and bitter people.  The one with a lot of people who are more like us than we’d usually like to admit.”  God didn’t love a world full of His people because without His love, He would have no people.  He loved a world full of sinners, as Romans 5:8 told us.  If God had decided that this world was hopelessly lost, He wouldn’t have bothered to send Jesus to give it hope.

This is the same world that God calls us to love, and to bring hope in the name of Jesus.  While we are in this world, God is already making us like Him, more loving, and in sharing that love with others we share a hope in a world where love is all there is.

So, remember, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Do You Want a Perfect Government?

Todd R 1 Comment

Immediately after beginning His public ministry with His baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus was led into the desert to be tempted by the devil three times.  One of those temptations went like this:

“And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.  If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”” – Luke 4:5-7

As you probably know, Jesus did not succumb to this temptation but suppose Jesus had decided to take authority over all the nations of the world in this way. He would have decisions to make.  What form of government would He choose for “all the kingdoms of the world”?  There are so many to choose from, and certainly He’d have the wisdom to pick the right one, right?

Here in the United States, technically a federal constitutional republic, people often just call it a democracy.  For many, it’s a good form of government, and as Winston Churchill said, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”.  Churchill was saying that no system of government is perfect, but regardless we should choose the best.  The best available option is what we should aim for, right?

However, Jesus refused to succumb to the temptation of accepting authority over the imperfect nations from the devil (and under the devil), and we should be very thankful He did.  To us, it seemed like a very enticing offer, but from Jesus’ perspective, was it as attractive?  Was it attractive at all?  How does the Bible describe God’s attitude toward the world’s nations that Jesus was tempted to rule?

In Psalm 2:4, Jesus “laughs” at all the worldly kingdoms and “holds them in derision”.  In that Psalm, He sees all of mankind’s attempts to govern themselves as laughable!  Isaiah 40:17 perhaps takes this even further:

“All the nations are as nothing before him,
            they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.”

From His perspective, “all the nations” are “less than nothing and emptiness.”  Why rule these kingdoms that are laughable and empty?  Kingdoms that are infinitely less than perfect?  Therefore, Jesus wasn’t overcome by the devil’s temptation because His objective was a perfect kingdom made up of perfect people.  Being offered “all the kingdoms of the world” was not at all attractive to Him under those circumstances.

If it wasn’t tempting to Him, why should we be tempted by it?  Why is worldly power so attractive to us, and why do we sometimes act like a perfect government can exist in this world?

We might act like this because we believe the perfect system can overcome the imperfections in each person’s heart.  Therefore, we focus on the political system; the form of government instead of the nature of its people.  However, all the power of earthly kingdoms can’t heal the human heart; only God’s can.  Any system made up of imperfect people is inevitably imperfect.  Jesus’ mission was to create a new people willing and able to live in a perfect kingdom absolutely ruled by Him.  Perfection can be achieved no other way.

Fortunately for us, instead of falling for the devil’s temptation in the desert and forming an imperfect government of imperfect people, Jesus’ response was:

“And Jesus answered him, “It is written,
             “‘You shall worship the Lord your God,
                        and him only shall you serve.’”” – Luke 4:8

Whatever system of government we live under, that government is temporary and will inevitably be abolished by the kingdom of God that already should rule in His people’s hearts.  Therefore, “worship the Lord your God” and pray for the culmination of His kingdom, while faithfully loving God and loving our neighbor, regardless of our form of government.  God’s rule of love is relevant everywhere and will outlast all the kingdoms of this earth, proving each of them to be “less than nothing and emptiness.”

Jesus knew what He was doing when rejecting the world’s kingdoms and He wants us to follow His example.

A Surprising Conversion: History for January 6

Todd R 3 Comments

The following is quoted from Warren Wiersbe’s Be Alive commentary on John 3:14.

“On January 6, 1850, a snowstorm almost crippled the city of Colchester, England, and a teenage boy was unable to get to the church he usually attended. So he made his way to a nearby Primitive Methodist chapel, where an ill-prepared layman was substituting for the absent preacher. His text was Isaiah 45:22 – “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” For many months this young teenager had been miserable and under deep conviction, but though he had been reared in church (both his father and grandfather were preachers), he did not have the assurance of salvation.

The unprepared substitute minister did not have much to say, so he kept repeating the text. “A man need not go to college to learn to look,” he shouted. “Anyone can look—a child can look!” About that time, he saw the visitor sitting to one side, and he pointed at him and said, “Young man, you look very miserable. Young man, look to Jesus Christ!” The young man did look by faith, and that was how the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon was converted.”[1]

[1] Wiersbe, Warren.  Be Alive (John 1-12) (1986).  P. 55.

Forgetting What Lies Behind

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Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians from a Roman jail, to encourage them to continue forward in the faith.  In it, he wrote: “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made [Christs righteousness] my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”[1]

In Paul’s life, “what lies behind” includes overseeing the stoning of Stephen recorded in Acts 7:57-58, and “ravaging the church, and entering house after house, [dragging] off men and women and committ[ing] them to prison.”[2]  We all have different shameful things in our past, but God forgets them.  His purpose is to always make us more like Christ, even when we struggle to move forward.  The prize is worth it, therefore we “press on toward the goal,” even if our current situation is discouraging and seems hopeless.

After all, Paul knew that even prison was temporary and God could wash away all the sins of his past, present, and future to make him righteous like Christ.

[1] Philippians 3:13-14
[2] Acts 8:3

Jesus was Born to Overthrow King Herod, but How?

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The story of Herod and the three wise men is familiar to most who celebrate Christmas.  After the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the wise men came looking for Him, having seen a star they believed signaled His coming.  Arriving in Jerusalem, they asked “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”[1]  Word of this search made it to Herod, the then-current king of that region under Rome’s authority, and his first instinct was to eliminate what he saw as a threat to his own power.  In Herod’s eyes, only he was king of the Jews.

Herod came up with a simple plan: to use the wise men to help him find this threat.  “And he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him, bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.’”[2]  However, the wise men were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, so they went home after visiting Jesus.  “Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.”[3]

Herod believed so strongly in the necessity of the power of Rome and of his place in it that he was willing to commit mass murder.  If he couldn’t find the one child he wanted, he’d just kill them all.  He feared Jesus (or His followers) would overthrow him as king, and he was right but in the wrong sense.  Jesus would overthrow Rome.  He was born to overthrow every earthly kingdom – that is inevitable.

Much of Rome is already in ruins. Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash

Isaiah 40:17 proclaims that “All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.”  The word “emptiness” here is the Hebrew “bohu,” part of the phrase “tohu va’bohu” translated as “without form and void” in Genesis 1:2.  This phrase represents empty things with no eternal value or purpose.  So, while Isaiah doesn’t use the whole phrase from Genesis, he uses “less than” for emphasis instead.  When compared to God’s eternal purposes, all that every nation has ever devised and achieved is less than useless.  God has nothing to learn from our political and economic visions – He transcends them all.  No nation can or will accomplish what God has accomplished and will accomplish.

Therefore, Jesus’ other mission was to overthrow Herod’s dominion over Herod.  But Herod was determined to resist.  His heart was so hard that he preferred to hang on to a government willing to commit mass murder to preserve its own self-centered ways.  He thought he could preserve the façade of “Pax Romana,” the idea that worldly government can solve all of our problems, even while he, as an agent of Rome, was killing innocent children.  Herod saw it as in his own best interest, and in the interest of Rome, but this is one of many examples of “a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.”[4]

Jesus can overcome death only by overthrowing our views of our own “best interest” and what “seems right.”  He was not born and did not die and rise again just to overthrow Rome, but He came so we would have a way to overthrow ourselves and death itself.  Jesus will establish the only government that will matter in eternity: His Kingdom.  The soul of Herod, and of all of us, will outlive every society that ever existed, and ever will, on this earth.  The nations are all “accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.”  While Herod could find hope in Jesus if he wanted to, Rome itself never had any hope.

Therefore, the question Jesus asks all people is: Will we let Jesus overthrow us or will we, like Herod, go to great lengths to resist Jesus and try to preserve a world that is doomed to fail?

Isaiah 9:6 says “and the government shall be upon his shoulder.”  His Kingdom will be the only government we need, and He alone is uniquely qualified to establish and rule it.

“For to us a child is born,
            to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
            and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
            Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

[1] Matthew 2:2
[2] Matthew 2:8
[3] Matthew 2:16
[4] Proverbs 14:12, 16:25