John 3:16 - Part 5

I began this service by putting up the words "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG" in bold lettering via Powerpoint.

Don’t take that personally! The last time I saw those words they were among hundreds of provocative sound-bites being flashed up on stage at a U2 concert in front of 60,000 people

But as we draw this series in John 3:16 to an end, I know I’ve had to shed some wrong ideas as we’ve got beneath the skin of this most well known of texts.

Is God fed up of this world he’s made? John 3:16 says 'No' – he loves it with a passion.

Is Jesus just another prophet, another good man? No – he’s the only begotten Son – made of the same stuff that God’s made of.

Is ‘believing’ just agreeing to certain propositions about God? No – it’s far more than that. It’s about deciding to trust God with everything that you are.

And is the word ‘perishing’ a metaphor for the fires of hell? Well, when you actually look at it, Jesus doesn’t use the word hell even once in John’s gospel, and only a handful of times in Matthew. He speaks about judgment a great deal in all four gospels, but he uses a wide range of metaphors to describe it; and it’s the idea of decay and destruction that are to the fore rather than punishment.

So in that vein, it’ll come as no surprise to you today, as we come to consider the words Eternal Life, that they’re probably not about heaven, and they’re probably not about a life that goes on and on and on for ever.

Let me try and explain why, and then go on to suggest what these words do mean.

The words we translate ‘Eternal Life’ in the Greek are zoe aionios which means – quite literally – the life of the ages. There are several words for life in Greek: Bios, your physical life; Psuche, the life of the mind; Zoe – spiritual life – part of your being that’s in connection with God. Hopefully we get that bit.

But aionios is a wee bit trickier. Our words ‘eternal’ or ‘everlasting’ don’t really do the trick because as soon as we hear them we think of time and duration, But that’s not really the sense of the word in the Greek. Aionios is more about where something originates, than how long it goes on for.

It’s more about the quality of something rather than the quantity.

For example, in the letter to Jude, mention is made of the 'eternal fire' which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. But those fires aren't still raging! The fire is 'eternal' because it comes from beyond, from eternity, not because it goes on and on and on.

So the phrase ‘Eternal Life’ isn’t so much about a geographical place called heaven, as a kind of Life that God wants to bless us with. A life that has its origins in eternity.

There are other places in the gospels where Jesus talks directly about heaven – there’s a perfectly good Greek word for heaven – the word ouranos. But he doesn’t use it here.

And that’s because he’s not talking about heaven at this point – he’s talking about this life that has its roots in eternity, in God himself. A life that deep down we all long for, even if we don’t recognise it.

Hard to get your heads round, I know, but bear with me!

Now let’s think about that longing for a few moments.

If you pay a little attention to yourself and to the people around you, it isn’t long before you start noticing what seems to be a universal truth about human beings…

Earlier this week I was in the bank, and it was quiet enough for the teller to start chatting to the woman in front of me in the queue:

“Is that you just back from holiday” she said.

“Aye – we were in Bulgaria”.

“Did you have a good time?”

“Aye it was great – lovely and relaxing. But then you have to come back home again don’t you?!”

“Aye it’s always the same – you look forward to it for ages and then it’s over before you know it”.

We’ve probably all had that conversation! But what I want you to notice is the wistfulness behind the words. There’s a longing being expressed; a gut-level longing for things to be different in some way.

And when you start paying attention to yourself and to the people around you, you start noticing that same wistfulness cropping up all over the place.

A man takes himself outside to sit on the back porch and light up a cigar. It’s a solitary sacrament he reserves for a bad day. Under the open sky he sheds the claustrophobia that comes with too much talk, or too many misunderstandings. He sucks in the bitter smoke and then, in one breath, consigns it to the breeze. In his mind he cradles the angry glow of the exchanges that led him here, but in the cool night air they quickly turn to so much grey ash. He finds himself wishing that things could have turned out differently.

A woman wends her way through the kitchen, clearing up the mess that everyone else seems oblivious to. She unloads the washing machine, sticks on the second load of the day, all the while rehearsing the mental checklist which tells her the kids are ready for school – packed lunch, water, snack, homework, gym kit, waterproof jacket.

Horseplay in the hallway doesn’t improve her mood; sometimes it feels like they deliberately try it on when their dad’s offshore. She carries so much of the responsibility she feels like a single mother sometimes, albeit a married single mother.

After the usual brinkmanship and cajoling, the children are finally ready to go. She’s tired out before the day’s really begun. She knows her life is more than this, but there are times when she wonders.

And today, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, families in many countries are kneeling at gravesides, or wishing they had a grave to tend, because their loved ones were spirited away in the black clouds that rose as the towers fell, and they were never found.

We have to step lightly around their grief this morning; keep a respectful silence in deference to their anger and their regrets. But rising up within all of us on a day like today is the unspoken yearning to live in a world where such things no longer happen.

We live in an age that’s very sceptical toward any claims about universal truth. And yet here, in the heart of human experience we find just that very thing. A universal truth. And it’s this.

We all long to be in a better place.

We wish our workaday life was a bit more fulfilling.
We wish our relationships could always be plain sailing.
We wish we could have things back the way they were before age, or illness or death crossed our threshold uninvited.

Some of our wishes are noble and others are less so; but in different ways we all long to be in a better place.

What would your better place look like, this morning? It’s worth thinking about. Here’s a little tool to help you chew that one over.

How would you finish this sentence… if only I could…..

Go back in time and do things differently
Get that break I’ve been waiting for for so long.
Get out from underneath that responsibility
Become a different person..
Make him or her into a different person

You can fill in the gap for yourself. But there’s a gap to be filled in all of us, I think. We all long to be in a better place, in some way.

And there’s nothing new under the sun. It was just the same back in Jesus’ day.

Jewish thought held that there were two eras of time. Two ages. There was ‘this age’, or ‘this present age’ in which life was a constant struggle between right and wrong, good and evil. It was this age in which we lived and moved, and in which the story of salvation was being worked out.

And then there was ‘the age to come’, an age of glory and wonder when God would finally be all in all – when evil would be put in its place and the world would become what God had always wanted it to be.

One age characterised by dispute and dischord. One by harmony and joy. One by fragmentation and one by reconciliation. One now and one still to come.

And according to the Hebrew scriptures, the primary quality of life in the age to come is right relationships. Things get fixed between us and God, between us and each other, between us and the creation.

21 They will build houses and dwell in them – says Isaiah.
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
the works of their hands.

25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
but dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,”
says the LORD.

This is life in the age to come. And to a degree, it sounds like a fairytale.

But maybe that’s the thing about fairytales – maybe they keep popping up across cultures and generations because they’re an echo of a deeper truth that won’t be silenced. The truth that there is an age to come – an age marked by the joy, peace, meaning, loving and knowing that flow naturally when we finally experience God as our all in all. And when Jesus talks about Eternal Life - that's what he's talking about.

Life in the age to come, eternal life, heaven, whatever you want to call it, it all boils down to one thing - knowing God. And if you were listening carefully to this morning’s reading, you might have picked that up already. As Jesus prayed with his disciples on the night that he was betrayed he said:

“Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your Son, so that the Son may give glory to you. For you gave him authority over all humanity, so that he might give eternal life to all those you gave him. And eternal life means knowing you, the only true God, and knowing Jesus Christ, whom you sent."

Eternal life, at its simplest, is knowing God and receiving the life that he offers us.

And the twist Jesus brings to this story is to insist that that eternal life can start now, if you want it to. By the grace of God, you can bask in tomorrow’s sunshine today. You don’t have to wait for it. You can have it now.

What do you have to do? Jesus has already told us in John 3:16. Believe! Trust God with your life. Surrender. Then, as well as you can, develop the disciplines and habits that will keep you close to him: keep his life growing inside you. That’s what it means to really believe.


We started out by recognising that there’s something in each of us that wants to be in a better place. We all share that feeling in different ways. It’s part of the human condition.

But as I go on in life, I’m beginning to learn, ever so slowly, that very often the answer to that longing is not to give in to it. Sometimes it is, but often it’s not.

When I keep company with Jesus in prayer, I discover that although my desire is often to be in a better place, his desire is that I learn to be better in the same place.

If I live my life, following my desires I can end up like a fool, chasing the rainbow’s end. I never get where I want to be

But if I live out of his life, his age-to-come life, I grow. A little bit of the harmony and peace and love of the age to come spill over from the future into the now, and help transform it. A little piece of the kingdom begins to come.

The life of the ages would say to the woman in the bank queue

“Don’t pine for Bulgaria, darling! It sounds like you need to find a bit more peace and leisure in the life that you’re living”

“Don’t nurse your grievances, man on the back porch. You are forgiven. Now go and forgive and make things better”

“Your life is more than your tasks, busy mother. You’re far more than that, you know”.

“You have so much love to give, dear families kneeling beside those graves. You were, and are, deeply loved. Are there others around you who now need the blessing of the love that you long to give?”

This is what happens when the life of the age to come starts to take root in us. Ever so slowly, perspectives, attitudes and behaviours begin to change.

Think back to when I asked you to finish the sentence, “If only I could….” What would it look like if God’s eternal life could come and fill that place within you that longs for things to be better? What would that mean for you, and for those around you? Because that's what God wants for your life.


Today the building work at Ground Zero will pause for a few short hours. Progress over the past decade has been painstakingly slow, but at last the outline of the new buildings is beginning to rise above the Manhattan skyline, filling the aching void left by the twin towers.

May God, who loves the world, fill the spaces where we ache, where we long for things to be better, with his own eternal life. And may that life teach us to be better, and live for his glory, right where we are.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.

John 3:16 - Part 4

To be honest, it wasn’t the kind of question I was expecting at the Going Bananas club, certainly not from an eleven-year-old. Amid the songs and games and colouring-in this young man accosted me in the corridor and said:

“So Paul - can people who don’t believe in hell get sent to hell?”

Luckily he had a second question about the big bang and evolution which – relatively speaking – was far easier to handle and I sent him off with one or two observations and questions to think about for himself.

But his first question is one that taps into a reservoir of unknowing and fear that many of us carry around with us. What does lie beyond the world that we know? Where will God’s judgment take us?

Well, an all age-service isn’t the place to begin a full blown exposition on heaven and hell, I feel. You can look forward to that some other day when I’m feeling especially courageous!

But the last line of the text we’ve been mulling over all summer, John 3:16, demands that we at least look in that direction today, because for many of us, when we hear the word ‘perish’ in this context, our thoughts turn towards the question of our eternal destiny. We’ll thin k about eternal life in a few weeks time. Today we’re thinking about what it might mean to perish.

Like all of us, I carry questions about these things with me all the time, and I’m reminded of Wittgenstien’s dictum: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.

All of us, to a degree, are in the dark about what happens after death and we need to take care when we speak about such things. But what light we have to go by is found in the Scriptures, and I’ve been intrigued for some time by what the Scriptures have to say – or indeed haven’t said – about heaven and hell.

The first thing you discover when you start doing a bit of research is that while heaven is mentioned very frequently in the Old Testament, hell as we’ve come to think of it - with fire and torment - isn’t mentioned even once. Instead, the Old Testament speaks about the grave, or Sheol – the place of the dead. The grave is where we all end up, the good and the bad alike, and there’s very little suggestion of any kind of life after death.

Now when we get to the New Testament, you could be forgiven for thinking that it must be loaded with teaching about heaven and hell. Well again, you’d be wrong.

The word hell occurs just 14 times in the New Testament, 7 of those in the gospel of Matthew, and only 2 outside the gospels.

The Greek word we translate ‘hell’ is Gehenna and Gehenna was a real place – a rubbish dump in the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem, where waste was taken to be burned, and things were left to rot and decay. It was somewhere people would have been familiar with. When Jesus spoke about the dangers of Gehenna, his hearers knew what that meant. Gehenna was a place, not of torture, but of destruction.

But here’s the really interesting thing. How much did Jesus have to say about hell? From listening to some preachers you’d think he talked about little else….

Well take a look at this.

This is what’s called a Wordle. You can have hours of fun with wordles! Wordle is a computer program on the internet that anyone can access and what it does is take text and turn it into pictures. And the more frequently a word appears in the text, the bigger it becomes in the wordle. The colours aren't significant other than to distinguish the words from one another.

And a wee while ago, I had a bright idea and I found a quick way of isolating Jesus’ words in the gospels, and making a wordle out of them, and what that does is give us a quick, visual way of getting to the core of what he talked about.

What you’re looking at is the essence of what Jesus had to say in John’s gospel.

The bigger the word, the more often he uses it. So in John, Jesus talks a lot about the Father, and the world, about life, about truth. He tells why he’s come and why he’s been sent. He wants us to know and to believe. These are the key themes.

Where’s heaven? It's in a small font just above 'Father'. And where’s hell? Well that word doesn’t occur in John’s gospel. Themes of judgment do – so often they can’t be ignored - but not using the language of hell.

But what about Matthew’s gospel? I’ve already said that it’s the one that mentions hell the most. How does it look?

Well in Matthew, Jesus speaks a lot about his Father, about the Kingdom which is often called the Kingdom of Heaven. Interestingly ‘tell’ scores highly because of the scores of times Jesus says ‘You have been told, but I tell you....."

Lots of ‘tell’ but not much of ‘hell’. Can you see it?!

Now it's vital that you don’t get me wrong at this point. I am not saying hell doesn’t exist and I’m not saying it’s not important. Nothing could be more important than understanding the consequences of our actions in this life. What I am saying is that in the context of the gospels, it doesn’t seem to feature largely in Jesus’ teaching, which I certainly found surprising.

The language of judgement is there all the time, but rarely in the language of hell or fire or flames. And given the vivid images we’ve inherited, I think that’s an interesting observation.

With that little excursus behind us, let’s get back to John 3:16.

Lest I get accused of soft-peddling judgment, I want you to listen again to what Jesus says here because it’s vital. He says whoever believes in him (and remember that means loves, trusts, obeys) SHALL NOT PERISH. That’s good news.

But held in that promise is the terrible possibility that some shall perish. Jesus is telling us here that to perish, eternally, is a real option.

The word perish, appollumi in the Greek, has a range of meanings from being destroyed to being marred, and it’s used it the New Testament in a variety of ways – from people perishing at sea, to food perishing over time. One of the most memorable uses is in Proverbs 29:18 which says “where there is no vision, the people perish”. And the events that have played out in London over the past week show the truth of that claim all too well.

But the sense of that word is always the same – perishing means loss, waste and destruction.

I’ve told you the story about the poet Heinrich Heine on his deathbed. The parish priest who was attending him tried to reassure him by telling him that God would forgive his sins, and Heine replied: “Of course God will forgive me. That’s his job!”.

John 3:16 would tend to suggest otherwise. Nowhere in the Bible do we find a cosy universalism which baptises our indifference. Instead, time and time again we find an urgent appeal to men and women to decide for God now, before time runs out and the opportunity passes us by.

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” says the Psalmist.

And those same words reach us across the centuries in exactly the same way. We each have a choice – to listen and respond, or to harden our hearts. But the choice is ours.

I always remember a speaker I went to hear saying that we need to pay more attention to the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ of the Bible. He could easily have added the ‘whoever’s to that list as well. This promise of God is for WHOEVER believes. And he urges that response by the Holy Spirit in a thousand different ways that transcend race and culture and language. But we are always free to resist.

And what of those who hear but never make that choice? What does it look like to perish? Is this where fiery lakes and eternal torment come in?

Well it seems to me, and many others, that there’s not much in Scripture to support that view, however firmly it might be held. No less a leading evangelical than John Stott, who died recently, struggled to reconcile such a fate with the idea of a loving God.

For Stott, and many other leading Christian writers, a kinder end would be that those who have made no room for God in this life will find no room for themselves in the next.

With no Christ to cover them, they could not survive the fires of judgment. They would simply pass out of existence; and that fits well with the biblical narrative. Jesus tells parables where trees that produce no fruit are chopped down and destroyed in the furnace, and as we said earlier, Gehenna was known as a place of destruction, and not a place of torment.

All this is guesswork from the fragments that we have to work with in the gospels, and you can take it or leave it this morning. But what’s abundantly clear is that Jesus is teaching here that it’s possible to ultimately perish, though that’s a fate that God wills on no-one. Saint Peter reminds us that…

God is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

But if we choose to ignore God all our days, he will finally give us what we want. As CS Lewis said, "There will be two kinds of people in the end: Those that will say to God 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God will say 'Thy will be done.'

Which kind of person are you as you sit here today?

Which kind of person will you be at the end?

The choice is yours.

John 3:16 - Part 3

This service came at the end of our first ever Holiday Club at Belhelvie, which went really well.

We’ve had some good fun this week at Going Bananas. And we’ve had some terrible jokes too…..

What did the cookie say to his friend when he got run over? Oh crumbs!

Why did the banana go to the doctor? He wasn't peeling well!

What another name for two banana skins? A pair of slippers!

Well I have a slippery word that I want us to try and grab a hold of this morning. And it’s the word “Believe”.

Over the summer we’ve been looking at just one wee verse, but it’s probably the most famous verse in the Bible. And it’s John 3:16 which says

“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”.

But what does it actually mean to believe in something or someone?

When people in our part of the world hear the word ‘believe’ or ‘beliefs’, straight away we start thinking about the mind and the opinions that we hold.

When people ask you whether or not you believe in God, or whether you believe we’ve got through the worst of the recession, or whether you believe Craig Brown will last another year at Pittodrie, they’re really asking “what do you think? what’s your opinion, given the evidence we have to go on?”

Now is that the kind of believing that John is on about here?

Is all he’s asking of us that we believe in God’s existence, or Jesus’ existence?

Statistics show that if you walk down a typical high street in Britain and ask the folk there if they believe in God, something like 70% of them will say ‘yes’.

And very often it’s a kind of gut-level belief. They wouldn’t be able to give you much in the way of evidence, but on balance, they think there’s probably some kind of divine being at work in the universe.

And many of them would feel the same way if you asked them whether ghosts exist, or whether there’s life on other planets.

And people often assume that that’s all God wants from us. He wants us to believe that he exists. And of course, if we call ourselves Christians, it goes without saying that we have to believe that God exists!

But I’m pretty sure that’s not the whole story when it comes to believing.

You see, I believe in health and exercise.

I know that these things exist. I’m sure about it!

Doctors tell us that if we eat sensibly and take at least 5 pieces of fruit and veg a day; if we don’t drink to excess, and don’t smoke; and if we take three 30-minute spells of exercise every week, we’ll be in good health.

And I for one, believe that 100%

But my belief won’t change a thing, unless I’m allowing those beliefs to shape the way I live. Unless I start eating those 5 pieces of fruit and veg, and taking those 30 minutes of exercise, my belief won’t do me one bit of good!

It’s not enough to simply believe that God exists. The question is – how is that belief changing you? Has it filtered through to your heart and will and soul? Is it changing how you choose to live your life?

If I could I’d change that word ‘believe’ in John 3:16 because in some ways it’s not helpful. It’s become all about the mind, when the root of that word in our language has much more to do with the heart.

If you go back into the roots of our language, the word believe used to be be-love, and its original meaning was ‘to hold dear, or to love something or someone”

Believing, in that sense, has much more to do with loving or trusting someone than simply believing bare facts.

In John 3:16, John is asking us not just to believe in Jesus’ existence; he’s asking us to trust him with our lives.

I was trying to think of a way to illustrate that and then I had a brainwave……

(at this point I showed a short video clip of a pole vaulter making it over the bar)

Sitting in front of the telly watching the athletics in the comfort of your own home, you or I might believe intellectually that a sufficiently bendy pole could hold our weight and throw us over a 5 metre bar.

But it’s a very different thing to pelt down the track, ram the thing into the ground, bend it half double and throw yourself into the air, in the faith that this piece of plastic is going to do what it’s been designed to do.

It’s a leap of faith, quite literally for the pole vaulter, but also for the person who’s beginning to think about what it means to be a Christian.

We live in times when if you do believe in that second kind of way, you’re going against the flow. There are so many other ways you could live your life, many of them far easier. It’s not a popular choice to be a person who believe with some passion. Why would you bother?

I can’t answer that question for you. All I can say is that for me, it was a slow realisation that the God I’d been taught about from childhood, had flirted with through adolescence and had walked away from in my later teens, was knocking on the door of my heart. And I took that leap of faith. I drew back the bolts, and asked him in.

And though I’ve regretted more than a few things in my life, I have never once regretted that decision. It set me on a pathway that’s engaged all of me, body, soul, heart, will and mind. And though the more I come to know this God the less I realise I know, what I do know is more than enough to make it worth the risk of believing.

And what do I know?

Well in the themes we’ve picked up on this week with the kids – I know that I have value – to God I’m special. I know the measure of his love for me by the height and breadth of the cross, and I know that he works through ordinary people like you and me, even when we find it hard to believe.

That’s what I know. That’s how I believe. And if that makes me bananas, then I’m glod to be so.

John 3:16 - Part 2

In 1937, a man by the name of John Griffiths found a job tending one of the railway bridges that crossed the Mississippi River. Every day he would control the gears on the bridge that allowed the barges and the ships through.

One day John decided to allow his eight-year-old son Greg to help him. He and his boy packed their lunches with great excitement and went off to work. The morning went quickly and at noon they headed off for lunch, down a narrow catwalk onto an observation platform about 50 feet above the Mississippi.

John told his son stories about the ships as they passed by.

Suddenly, they were jolted back to reality by the shrill sound of an engine's whistle. Looking at his watch, John realised to his horror that it was 1.07pm that the Memphis Express was due any time and that the bridge was still raised.

He calmly told Greg to stay put and then ran back to the controls.

Once there he looked beneath the bridge to make sure there was nothing below and as he looked down he saw something so terrible that his blood froze.

There, lying on the gears, was his beloved son. Greg had tried to follow his dad to safety but had fallen off the catwalk.

Immediately, John realised the horrifying choice before him: either to lower the bridge and kill his son, or to keep the bridge raised and kill everyone on board the train.

As 400 people moved closer to the bridge, John realised what he had to do. Burying his face under his arm, he plunged down the lever. The cries of his son were instantly drowned out by the noise of the bridge grinding slowly into position.

As the train passed by a conductor was collecting tickets in his usual way. A businessman was casually reading a newspaper. Ladies were drinking afternoon tea. Children were playing. Most of the passengers were engaged in idle chatter. No one saw. No one heard the cries of a heartbroken father.


Now I don’t know for certain if that’s a true story – the little bit of digging I did on the internet didn’t turn up any confirmation – but it’s definitely gut-wrenching. You’d need a pretty hard heart not to be gripped by the tragedy of that father’s awful dilemma. To kill his own son, or to spare him and see hundreds of others die.

I first read that story in a book of illustrations for use in worship, and it’s there because the authors wanted us to get a feel for what God the Father must have gone through in watching his Son Jesus dying on the cross: one innocent man dying so that the many might be saved. And sure enough, just as in the story, most of the many coast through life blissfully unaware of the immense sacrifice that was made on their behalf.

But there are aspects of that story that leave me very uncomfortable if we’re meant to take this as a picture of what was happening in the events around the cross. Not least the fact that the boy who died didn’t choose his own fate. It was imposed upon him. There’s a world of difference between dying involuntarily in a terrible accident, and choosing to die so that others might be spared. One is tragic, the other’s heroic.

And in this story, both the father and the son seem like powerless victims of circumstance. But is it ever right to think of God as powerless? Doesn’t the Bible portray the cross as part of God’s purposeful plan of salvation rather than a drastic contingency dreamt up to stave off disaster?

Again, some tough questions. And hopefully John 3:16 will shed some light on them this morning.

Last Sunday we spent some time in the first clause:

For God so loved the world

Today we’re taking in the next few words which say:

He gave his one and only Son.

And before we get into the whys and wherefores of Jesus being given to us, let’s spend a moment thinking about those words ‘his one and only Son’.

Why ‘one and only Son?’’ There are plenty of places in the Bible where ordinary believers are called ‘sons of God’ or ‘children of God’. In one sense we could think of the whole human race as God’s family.

What’s special about Jesus that makes him ‘God’s one and only Son’?

Well the Greek word John uses here is monogene which literally means only begotten. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, and that’s probably how many of us learned this text when we were kids “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten son”.

But what is begetting?

Well CS Lewis reminds us that there’s a big difference between begetting and creating.

When I create something, I make something different from myself. I create a song, or a batch of scones, or a piece of furniture.

But when I beget, I beget something of the same kind as myself. A tiger begets tigers; a donkey begets donkeys; a human being begets a human being, and God begets…… God.

God has many created children – the whole human race, and within that those who belong to the family of faith. But he has only one begotten Son.

It’s a bit early for Christmas carols, though with the weather we’ve been having…..! But I’m sure you’ll remember these words from O Come All Ye Faithful

God of God, light of light. Lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb
Very God, begotten not created….

Christian orthodoxy has always held that this Jesus is of a different order. He is fully human, but at one and the same time, he is fully divine as well.

And that is so important to grasp.

Not least because in the context of the story we heard earlier on, we realise that what’s going on on the cross is not a father forcing an innocent third party to die for our sake. That would be tragic and unjust. Cruel, even.

No - It’s God himself, in the person of the Son, going to the cross on our behalf. For your sake and for mine.

So many of us think of God as the one to fear, who’s angry with us and our messed up ways until Jesus steps into the breach and convinces him to change his mind. That’s bad theology.

Remember what we said last week– for God so LOVED the world, he gave his one and only Son. God loving, God giving, God coming, God living, God dying, God saving. It’s God, God, God, from beginning to end. No third parties.

Now with that firmly established, I want us to think a little about the business of Jesus’ being given.

For God so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son.

So why did he give him?

Well given what we’ve been saying, it seems glaringly obvious, He gave him so that he could go to the cross for our sake - that’s beyond dispute.

But I want to argue in closing that that’s not the whole story.

I did a wee study in John’s gospel as I was preparing for today and though Jesus rarely says that he’s been ‘given’ by God he often says that he’s been ‘sent’ by God, and I spent some time looking at those verses to try and find out what he thought he had been sent to do.

And what I discovered was really interesting – to me anyway! 34 times in John’s gospel alone, Jesus says that he has been sent from the Father. 34 times! And yet not once, in those passages at least, does he say that he has been sent to die. He says it elsewhere, but not in those passages. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

He tells us that he’s been sent to bring light and life to the world, to bring judgment, to preach the good news of the kingdom, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and recovery of sight for the blind, to elicit belief in those who see and hear him, to speak a word that leads to life; on occasion, to even bring division. But in these verses at least, he does not speak of his death.

And that tells us something, I think. It tells us that Jesus wasn’t only sent to die. He was sent to show us how to live.

Humour me for a moment.

I want those of you who are old enough to picture an image from John F Kennedy’s life......


Now raise your hand if you’re imagining his assassination.

That’s what we remember about Kennedy, isn’t it? Maybe those of you who are older or have done some reading know his politics or a bit about his private life, but many of us know precious little about the man or what he stood for. We just know that he was shot in a cavalcade in Dallas in 1963.

Sometimes I wonder if, in rightly focusing upon the significance of Jesus’ death, the church across the centuries has minimised the importance of the way he lived his life.

We gladly share his body and blood in bread and wine, we hope to share his salvation. These are the fruit of his death.

But are we as eager to share in the fruit of his life? His poverty; his selflessness; his hospitality; his passion for God? His detachment from material things, his commitment to prayer, his acceptance of the outsider?

Do we do him justice if we seek to profit from his death without seeking to imitate his life?

In the New Testament, Jesus death is often portrayed as both the ultimate sacrifice and the end of sacrifice. But St Paul reminds us that there is one form of sacrifice still left – “Offer your bodies as living sacrifices” he says, “holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship”. In other words, worship is about how you choose to live, not where you are at ten or eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

For God so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son: not solely that he might die, but that he might show us how to live.

And that same Son, as he prepared to leave his disciples, commissioned them with these words which echo down the centuries to you and me today. “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you”,

May God give us the wisdom and the grace to go and live well, for his sake and the sake of this world that he loves.

John 3:16 - Part 1

Whether they smuggle them into the stadiums under their jackets, or walk in boldly holding them high for all to see, I’m not sure. But at some point in the proceedings, the homemade banners are draped over advertising hoardings or held aloft for the worldwide TV audience to see.

And "John 3:16" is all that they say. And I guess the hope is that a few curious souls, realising this is a Bible text, will go and hunt it down to find out what it means and just maybe find themselves pondering the meaning of life.

So why this verse, out of the tens of thousands that could be chosen?

I guess it’s because for many people there’s no better summary of the message of the whole gospel:

“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”.

It’s all there – the Father, the Son, the problem, the solution and the promise. And that’s part of the reason this particular verse has become embedded in the Christian psyche.

But like everything that’s become over-familiar to us, we can become immune to its real meaning. So over the next few weeks we’re going to live with this verse and unwrap each clause slowly to see what Jesus is really saying through these words that John has recorded.

“For God so loved the world.”

Those six words will do us for today.

Does God love this world, do you think?

It’s a fair question. Looking around at some of the things that go on in the world we might wonder what on earth God is making of it all. And we probably know enough of the Old Testament to be familiar with the image of an angry God standing in judgment against the nations, including Israel, for living godlessly.

Does God love the world? It’s not an easy question to answer, and Christians answer it in different ways.

Go into any church and listen discerningly to the choice of hymns, and the prayers, and the sermon and you’ll pretty soon work out where they’re coming from. Is the world something to celebrate, or something to tolerate as we make our way to heaven? Is the world the object of God’s love or God’s wrath? Arguments can be made either way from Scripture.

Some religious communities seem determined to get through this life with as little contact with outsiders as possible. Is that what God wants from us? Is that how to be authentically Christian?

And how do we reconcile the parts of Scripture which seem to set God in opposition to the world with the parts that speak of his love for the world?

Well as I puzzled over that this week I found myself drawing an analogy with my studies in chemistry from days gone by.

When you first start doing chemistry you’re told that the atom is a bit like a mini solar system. In the middle there’s the nucleus with the protons and the neutrons and orbiting around them on the outside are the electrons. It’s all black and white – nice and simple.

Once you get that into your head, they start telling you that you that the electrons don’t move in nice circular orbits, but buzz about so quickly that you can’t know where they are at any one time. If you were able to plot the movements of an electron around the nucleus it would look more like a cloud than anything else.

Then they tell you that most of an atom is actually space, that protons, electrons and neutrons are incredibly small compared to the size of the atom, and then they blow your mind by telling you that within these particles – which you’d been told were the smallest that exist - there are even smaller subatomic particles called quarks. And it’s some of the more elusive quarks that the scientists at CERN in Switzerland are trying to detect with their Large Hadron Collider.

Now it’s not that the simple model of the atom we were taught at school didn’t have some truth or value in it. It explained a lot and it was our way in to the science. But the simplicity of that model hid a far more wonderful set of truths that we just weren’t ready for. We needed to walk before we could run.

Sometimes I wonder if we should carry that thinking with us when we read the more black and white passages in the Old Testament which seem to suggest God loves Israel and hates the nations, or God loves the good people and hates the bad people. Nice and simple, maybe, but we know there’s much more to the story than that.

As you read through the Old Testament and into the new it’s clear that the writers are becoming more aware of the wideness of God’s mercy – that God has designs not just on Israel, but on the whole of creation.

And in these words that we have before us today, we hear categorically from the mouth of the Son of God the most amazing, beautiful truth, spoken with the authority of the only one who really knows for sure. And He says “For God so loved the world”.

Whatever else we might need to say about judgment or sin, and there’s much to be said, God’s fundamental orientation towards this world in all its ambiguity, is love.

For God so loved the world.

Now - think about someone or something you love for a moment. Could be a person, could be a place.

Could be the land you farm, a pet who’s been in the family for a long time. Could be a spouse or a child, a parent or a friend.

Ask yourself this: Why do I love them?

At its simplest, isn’t it because, in some sense, you belong to one another? You’ve worked that land; you’ve cared for that pet; you’ve shared your life with that person? You belong to one another, for better, for worse, for richer for poorer.

And what do you will for them as a result of that love?

Isn’t it peace, contentment, purpose; the hope that your relationship with them will grow and deepen?

And will your love fail when things go wrong?

Well, sometimes hard things have to be said or faced up to. And it isn’t always possible to make things work – that’s in the nature of love, it has to flow both ways – but as Shakespeare once wrote – ‘love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’. Love toughs it out. It always hopes, always trusts, always protects, always perseveres as the apostle said.

This is how God loves the world he formed, and saw was good; and he will not rest until that goodness is set free from everything that constrains it.

And in the mystery of God’s grace, this divine love is set on everyone and everything. The word translated ‘world’ in the Greek is kosmos, from which we get our word ‘cosmos’! John is telling us that God loves the cosmos – the whole created order.

Willie Barclay puts it this way: “It was the world that God so loved. It was not a nation; it was not the good people; it was not only the people who loved him; it was the world. The unlovable and the unlovely, the lonely who have no-one else to love them; those who love God and those who never think of him, those who rest in the love of God and those who spurn it – all are included in this vast inclusive love of God”.

Even those who think they are beyond the pale, or whom others think are beyond the pale are included.

I love the old story about the soldier with a troubled conscience who goes to visit a monk to make his confession: “Can God ever forgive me for all the wrong that I’ve done?” he asks.

“Tell me” said the monk. “When your cloak is torn, do you throw it away?”

“No – I mend it and I use it again” he said.

“If you’re that careful with your cloak” said the monk “don’t you think that God will be just as careful with his creatures?”

God is careful with his creation. God loves what he has made.

Easy to believe that as you look out over the white beaches and turquoise sea on a sunny day in the western Isles. Harder to believe when you watch the news, or find yourself in the company of someone who’s making life difficult for you. But it’s no less true.

For God so loved the world says Jesus. The cosmos. The whole thing. He loved it so much he wills its redemption.

Whether it will let itself be redeemed is another story. But more of that in the weeks to come.