God so loved

I was walking through the woods the other day thinking about nothing in particular, when it occurred to me that the entire history of the world culminates in John 3:16. 

It’s probably the best-known, most-often-quoted verse in the entire Bible, and maybe because it all comes down to that one statement.

Think about it. The Bible starts with Creation—what God made on which day and how he said it was good. Then he created man and woman and said it was very good.

And immediately it all started going downhill.

Adam and Eve sinned and were cast out of the garden, the perfect paradise. They started having children and one killed the other. Serious parenting problems there.

Humans multiplied and were wicked, so God chose one guy—Noah—to build a big boat and save his family of eight and enough animals to repopulate the earth. After the flood Noah gets drunk and there’s a “situation” with his sons.

The population grew again and they decided they were going to build a tower that reached to heaven so they could show everyone how great they were and be like God. So God scattered them all across the earth and “confounded their language” so their world became chaos and they understood just how human they were.

Abraham got called out of his land and God told him he was going to make a great nation of him, God’s chosen people. They turned out to be wicked, selfish, and stubborn as ever—so much that, even though God saved them out of bondage in Egypt, they spent literal thousands of years being disobedient, turning to other gods and even creating other gods to worship, complaining about what they wanted and didn’t have, forgetting all the amazing things God had done for them and his multitude of mercies and his compassion. They thought they knew better than God how to handle things, they went their own way, and on it went. It’s been a millennia-long cycle of “be wicked, turn back to God, get mercy and forgiveness.” Rinse and repeat.

You can read the entire history of God’s chosen people in the Old Testament. If you read five chapters a day, it will take you 186 days—more than half a year to understand just how bad it was. Seriously, these people had so much opportunity for blessing, and they blew it time after time after time. History really does repeat itself.

God was at the end of his rope with them more than once, but his mercy saved their national hide.

The wickedness has continued for generations and we can see today that it’s worse than ever. We call good evil and evil good. Just when we think things can’t get any uglier, they do and we’re surprised by it. 

And yet … after all this, after how horrifically we’ve trashed the perfect world God created and wrecked all the good he intended for us, here’s what John tells us:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

“God so loved the world …” And not just his own people Israel—the WHOLE world. All of them. The good, the bad, the vilest of humanity. You, me, the murderer, the thief, the liar—the world.

God loved us all so much that he sent his Son to earth to live a perfectly sinless life and to take the punishment for our sins so we would not have to. One sacrifice for the all the sins of the whole world forever.

Isn’t that incredible? If you don’t get anything else out of this, know that it is evidence of God’s character. He does not love us begrudgingly or because he has to. He created us because he wants us. He desires our fellowship.

God SO loved the world …