For God so Loved the World

John 3: 14-21, page 752
Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
For God so loved the world that he gave the one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he or she has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his or her deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what has been done has been done through God.”
Sermon
John 3: 16 may be the most familiar verse of the Bible – and In a society of increasing Biblical illiteracy, I think it’s important to take notice of one verse that most people actually know.
In many ways that familiarity is a good thing – this is the verse that Martin Luther, the man who laid the foundation for the Protestant reformation, a movement of which our Presbyterian tradition is an important part, called John 3: 16 the gospel in miniature; and a few hundred years later, Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish thinker who has influenced the modern church as much as anyone else would write that this passage actually tells you everything you need to know, and that it would be to the church’s benefit to save money by printing only this. All you need to know he said is that – Christ is God – he came into the world to save you – but we put him on the cross – that’s something that had to happen, and after three days he rose again.
These great minds inspired many people to take John 3: 16 out into the street, the baseball field, the football stadium, showing some very big audiences that the key to salvation is actually here in one simple verse: “For God so loved the world.”
Hear these words, and be saved, they say.
But what if someone doesn’t only read John 3: 16, what if they decide to start reading in verse 14 – “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.” Now here is a verse that I had to look up in a couple of books because I had no idea what it was talking about.
I think it’s amazing that the most familiar verse in the whole Bible, John 3: 16 comes right after a verse that virtually no one understands: Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.”
Here the author of John’s gospel takes you back to the book of Numbers – one of those books we all know is there but we never take the time to read – the snake is not Moses’ staff that he turned into a snake to amaze the Pharaoh, that story is in the book of Exodus, this one is a bronze snake God told Moses to make and to lift up before the people to heal them from the venomous serpents that God sent on them after they complained about leaving Egypt for the hundredth time.
There is a way of thinking now – that we shouldn’t really get into the hard questions with people who are just getting into Christianity, that we should take it slow and stick to “For God so loved the world” before we get into, God sent venomous snakes on the Israelites, but that’s obviously not how the author of John’s mind worked because right before we read the most simplified version of our religion, we come face to face with one of the most challenging concepts of our religion.
The passage in Numbers is one of those passages where we don’t really understand this God who we worship – as we don’t really worship a God who sends venomous snakes do we? We worship the God who saves us – right?
Don’t we worship the God who brings salvation – who answers our prayers by sparing us hardship, by delivering us from oppression, by saving us from those venomous snakes of life – and not the force that puts that suffering into our lives?
It is a strange thing to realize that in Numbers our God is both in the same – the God who saves the Israelites from the snakes is also the God who sent the snakes there in the first place.
If we think about this Numbers passage for too long then the next thing you know you start to wonder if you really know what on earth John 3: 16 means, as in light of John 3: 14 it doesn’t quite mean what we thought it did – thinking about God from the perspective of Numbers makes God different – and next thing I know I start to wonder if salvation means what I think it does.
I think that is how my father-in-law must have felt walking down the street in Knoxville, TN back when he was in graduate school. He moved to Knoxville from Colombia, South America to study architecture at the University of Tennessee. He’s a brilliant guy really, so he hit the English books hard before he went, and certainly had a book knowledge of English; but a book knowledge of English is not the same thing as a street knowledge of English, especially in Knoxville, TN.
As he was walking down the street a couple of women walked up to him. They asked him, very plainly and right off the bat, “Have you been saved?” Like I said, he had a book knowledge of English and not a street knowledge of English, so after considering the word “saved” he responded, “Yes, I have a checking, and a savings account at the bank.”
This story is funny because we think of “being saved” as an issue completely different from our savings accounts, especially when our savings accounts may be having a particularly hard time. We separate our lives out, looking for God in church and in the miracles of life, but our eyes have to be open to the fullness of God, the fullness of salvation that is a work in progress encompassing our entire existence.
We see God in good things, but isn’t our God at work in all things?
Following John 3: 16 we read the words, “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
In light of the passage from Numbers we might well read, “For God did not send the snakes on the Israelites to kill them there in the desert, but to save them from turning around and going back to Egypt.”
And today, we might examine our own lives and hear the words, “For God did not send the United States into a financial melt-down to condemn the United States, but to save us all from a way of life that is unsustainable.”
We want to know how God could let it happen, or where God went: How could God have sent those snakes, where was God when the stock market fell – we ask these kinds of questions all the time – where was God on 9/11, where was God when Pearl Harbor was attacked – we ask these questions whenever tragedy strikes and the God who is supposed to watch out for us seems no where to be seen - but these questions also bring us right to the central symbol of our faith – where was God when Jesus was lifted up on the cross?
The ones who don’t believe see punishment, suffering, or condemnation. The ones who believe in a cosmic struggle between the god of good and the god of evil see one battle lost in the war for eternity, but those of us who believe hear familiar words and know that even in the worst of times their deliverer is working – for God so loved the world.
These are the words that make us different. These are the words that count, they say it all, and they make all the difference – John 3: 16, for God so loved the world, God took the greatest tragedy of human history and made it the sign of our salvation.
We are a the children of the God who works for good in all things – and whether we are rich or we are poor – you can take heart in the truth that God is at work in your life that you might be saved through him.
-Amen.