FROM THE TREE TO THE CROSS

this verse of John 3:16 that declares the love of God shouldn’t be taken out of context and manipulated to mean that God has only love for the world because it is very relevant to your understanding of God’s love and what defines the world, I would like to expound upon this even further by asking, would you say that God loved the “world” when he destroyed it with a flood?

Would you say that he loves everyone when he destroyed Sodom or told the Israelites to utterly destroy the cannanites and to spare no one, not even the animals?

Would you say that he loves everyone when he returns and will destroy this world along with the wicked in it ?

These are hard questions to ask and to find the answers to, but it is expected of us to read his word looking for the truth and not just the nice smooth and easy things to ponder like God’s unconditional love no matter what I do or how I live that some people seem to see in it.

So first off let me just say, yes , by every definition of the word God does indeed love everyone, but he does not, and can not love sin because sin is anti love and leads only to death and destruction. When people choose sin over God’s love then they are ignoring his love and choosing themselves instead. God is patient and forgiving and waits for them to relent and return to him, but he will not force anyone to love him back or to choose not to sin.

The other aspect of this that people have a hard time grasping or taking into account is the simple fact God is beyond time and has seen every angle of this. He has already seen and knows the outcome of every aspect of our little time bubble of existence that we call life and this is why he created the way for our redemption through himself who is his son and it was set in stone from the beggining of time itself, just like the victory in the end nothing can change it.

If you can partially let this concept sink in then add to it the fact that he seen the ego and perversion of man controlling others at the tower of babel and Sodom and Egypt, he felt the corruption of his law and people when they built poles and altars in his temple and sacrificed their children to other gods. He even witnessed how men would use religion In order to destroy and control others, all of this he saw before our time even began. And yet he loved us anyway, explain that one because I never will be able to.

But when you do take into account Gods timeless and eternal nature along with his love for us, then hopefully you will begin to see the irony in the fact that God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac In the same place that they would later sacrifice their sons and daughters to molech and baal, and later became the same place that they would sacrifice Jesus, yet God stopped Abraham because he did not desire or require the sacrifice of innocent children like the false gods they had created did.

There simply must be some form of irony here in that he seen them sacrifice their sons to fake gods that had no capability to love or even live, but God chose to become a child in the form of his son Jesus and to let them sacrifice him to themselves as proof of his love and redemption of our sin for those who would one day see his love because of his sacrifice and turn from evil.

So to me the meaning of John 3:16 is this. For God so loved everyone of his creations that despite everything we would do and the sin we would embrace he chose to display and prove to us his love by becoming mortal and allowing the pride and sin of men to hang the creator of everything on a cross naked and in shame even till death, all so that if anyone who chooses him and his love over themself can be saved from the eternal death that sin required.