Sounds Good, But Is It The Truth? (3)

 

 

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” John 3:16.

 

Is there a difference between John 3:16 and the radio spot I previously referenced?

 

“Nothing can separate you from the love of God. God loves you more than your parents, your spouse, your friends. No matter where you are in life, no matter what you are going through – God loves you and nothing can separate you from His love.” (Radio spot).

 

If there is a difference, does it matter?

 

Here are some elements of John 3:16 to consider:

 

God “so loved” the world that He gave His only begotten Son. While the giving of His Son is an expression of God’s love, it is a particular and unique expression – because the “giving” was a giving of His Son on the Cross, bearing our sins, bearing our sinful natures – and becoming “sin for us,” (2 Cor. 5:21), becoming the object of God’s righteous judgment so that we might have eternal life and not perish if we believe in Him.

 

God “so loved” us because we were, and are, in trouble; as a world we are perishing. The “so loved” points to His giving His Son, and the giving of His Son points to our condition of spiritual death and condition of perishing. When the radio spot tells the people of the world that nothing can separate them from the love of God, that just isn’t true – our sins and our spiritual death are separating us from His love – they are a barrier to us receiving His love in Jesus Christ.

 

Those who believe in Jesus Christ, who repent of (turn from) their sins and way of life and commit their lives to following Jesus Christ as Lord shall not perish, but have eternal life – they receive the love of God into their lives (Romans 5:1 – 11).The radio spot does not call on the listener to respond to God, but the Gospel demands a response to God – the Gospel is not ambiguous, it is not uncertain – that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

 

(Let me interject, that the idea that all we must do is to “confess our sins” and that we are then “saved” and can go our merry way is simply not true – confession of sins is not the same as repentance; in fact, 1 John 1:9 is often misunderstood and misquoted. I will, the Lord willing, touch on this in the next post.)

 

The radio spot is true in that God loves the listener more than anyone else, and that God loves the listener in what he or she may be going through. However, the radio spot does not tell the listener that God “so loved” him or her that He gave His only begotten Son. It does not tell the listener that he or she is perishing – for to be sure, “whatever you are going through” includes sin and spiritual death, it includes the fact that the listener is perishing. Nor does the radio spot call on the listener to believe in Jesus Christ so that she or he might not perish but have eternal life.

 

The radio spot carries with it the real danger that people will have a false sense of security and that they will ignore the true Gospel as encapsulated in John 3:16.

 

The context of John 3:16 is that we must “be born again,” that is, we must have the life of God within us through faith in Jesus Christ. The context is also, “He who believes in Him [the Son] is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18).

 

In the midst of our perishing, God loved us so much that He gave His only begotten Son – we cannot, and we must not erase the image of perishing from our message – that my friends, is simply evil – for it erases the Cross of Christ and the Christ of the Cross and it gives perishing people the opium of deceit rather than the wake-up call of the Gospel.

 

Does “evil” seem too strong a word? What might we call it should a physician give terribly ill patients sugar pills and tell them it is medicine…when medicine would cure them? Is that not evil? Is it not evil to see husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and children perish at the hands of a doctor dispensing the false for the true? Is not our opioid crisis evil? Is it not evil when doctors dispense opioids like candy with the support of pharmaceutical companies and others? If these things are evil, then certainly telling those who are perishing into eternity that “all is well” is evil.

 

Have we not created our own addiction? An addiction to avoiding the Word of God as it is written, and substituting it with self-oriented and self-pleasing messages to make us all feel good…at the expense of true and loving relationships with God in Christ, at the expense of eternal life? At the expense of the Cross?

 

“For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” (1 Cor. 2:2).