“For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son.”
When you hear it enough, you can take it for granted. It can start to sound like the beginning of a Shakespeare play or the Pledge of Allegiance. Or maybe an alarm. Or a voiceover for Communion. You know the words have meaning, but in their repetition, sometimes they lose their edge.
But recently, I’ve found myself fixated on the verse. I can’t remember why or how I found it reverberating through my conscience, but it’s been happening for weeks now.
“For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son.”
I started thinking about sacrifice.
There are a lot of people that would be willing to give their lives for something they loved, or something they believed in. But there aren’t a lot of people that would be willing to watch their child die for any reason.
Abraham was willing. I don’t know if I’ll ever understand what was going through his mind as he climbed that mountain, following God’s commands. I wonder if He felt a serenity of full surrender and trust in God’s plan and goodness that superseded his circumstances. Maybe on some level, He knew that God wouldn’t make Him wait so long for a child just to take him away. Or perhaps He had just believed so deeply in the character of his Creator that he never doubted that what he was being asked to do was necessary.
He could have felt dread or anger as he made his way upward, wondering why God would put him through this after all his waiting, but was humble and obedient enough to never express it. But I guess all that mattered to God was that he was willing. God spared him from a tremendous, inconceivable pain – and loved us so much He was willing to endure it Himself.
Even if God had commanded Abraham to go through with it, he could have made it swift and as gentle as possible. But God watched Jesus in hours of unrelenting agony. And Mary watched Him at the cross. Her faith and submission in this crushing despair should strike awe in every Christian, but what sets her apart from God is that she was powerless to stop it.
God could have ended it all in an instant. But He watched it unfold, never allowing His sorrow to overwhelm a restraint born out of His mercy for mankind.
I remember reading something on Instagram along the lines of, “you don’t truly understand love until you become a parent, because you experience a fraction of the love God has for us.”
I think the original take was something about how all consuming and unselfish a parent’s love is for their child, but the more I thought about it in the context of Christ on the Cross, the more depth it took on.
The way a parent looks at a newborn and sees their nose, their spouse’s eyes, their grandmother’s chin, God saw a Son that was a perfect reflection of Him. He heard Him laugh as an infant. He saw Him run as a toddler. He saw Him joke as a teenager, and work as an adult, knowing how it had to end.
While most parents end up conceiving based on their biological urges, whether rooted in lust or legacy, God had no such impulse. But He loved His children so much, He bore a Son for the sole purpose of saving us.
God isn’t easy for us to understand. Every time we try to fit Him and His ways into what makes sense to us, we end up confused and frustrated.
We wonder why He would create us in the first place if He knew how fallible and foolish we would be. We wonder why He would give us free will, when we clearly don’t know what to do with it. We wonder why after thousands of years of the same predictable patterns, He wouldn’t throw His hands in the air and end what could easily be written off as a failed experiment.
I won’t pretend I have the answers.
But I think God’s love is so sacred and so infinite that it defies the bounds of human logic. I think God created us similarly to a mother and father, knowing that we would inevitably disappoint Him, but with limitless affection. I think He gives us volition in spite of our nature because true love can’t exist without choice. And I think He gave us chance after chance that we didn’t earn because He had too much compassion to ever truly abandon us.
Some of us wonder why or how He could allow what happened to Jesus – especially as the ultimate authority on heaven and earth. Why He couldn’t just wipe the slate clean by speaking a word or waving His hand.
But God is just. And while we’d like to think of that as someone rewriting the rules when it’s convenient, that’s not what justice is. But even in His righteousness, He was determined to redeem the irredeemable, and rescue us from the damnation we deserve.
He didn’t send His Son and appoint Him for a cruel, brutal and innocent death haphazardly. He did so with all of the care in the world and beyond it. He created a pure extension of Himself in flesh and bone, that bled and cried and broke like we do. Not because it was an easy solve, but because it was the only way to save us from ourselves. And in doing so, He subjected Himself to a heartbreak and devastation that we will never fully comprehend.
God heard His Son’s quiet plea of desperation. “If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.” And He denied Him, not because He wanted to, and not because He had to, but because it was the only way we could be free. He watched His Son betrayed, beaten and blasphemed – and let it happen not because He was indifferent to it, but because that’s how much we meant to Him.
It wasn’t that He took Jesus’s death lightly, but that giving us a path to eternal life was more important to Him than His own suffering.
“For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son.”
God’s love can feel like a platitude. It can feel like something people say just for the sake of saying it.
And sometimes, it doesn’t feel like enough.
When you’re told God loves you but you’re struggling to find evidence of that in your life, it can feel like you’ve been given monopoly money when you have real bills to pay.
But God’s love for you is more concrete and more permanent than any of your circumstances.
He loves you – not abstractly, and not from a distance, but with so much intensity and so much depth that He did what no one else would even think to.
He loves you more than your own parents, your own spouse, your own children, your own siblings. He loves you today, He loved you yesterday, and He will love you tomorrow. He knows every mistake you’ve ever made and every mistake you ever will.
He knows what you’re capable of, for better or for worse, and still chooses you every minute of every hour of every day.
And while we’ll never be worthy of that choice, we need to ask ourselves if we’re living like we know how much He loves us, or How Much He gave.
“For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son.”
Don’t let its popularity numb you to its power. It’s arguably the most important sentence ever written, and we should feel the full weight of it every time we hear it. Let it remind you of who God is, who you are to Him, and how much you really owe Him.
what do you think?