John 3:17 is the poor country cousin of Bible verses.
Everybody knows John 3:16. We’ve seen the crazy guy with the multi-colored wig at the football games with his big sign often enough to know that John 3:16 is important. Even Luther called it the gospel within the gospel. ““For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” It’s all there, everything that’s important to faith: the love of God, the sending of the Son, the end of death and the wide open door to heaven. A simple saying.
But the implications, oh, the implications. They’ll get your every time.
Which is where poor old 3:17 comes in. It is one thing to speak the tender and pleasant word of grace. It is whole other thing to be confronted directly with the full outcome of grace, to face what it really means, to be called to preach it boldly and live it wholly and allow it to change your beliefs and your actions. It seems well enough to say that God loves the world, that he gave us Jesus. But what if that actually meant something?
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” After the warm and fuzzy thoughts of verse 16, it seems that this grace stuff may not be as good a deal as we had originally hoped. No condemning? None at all? Because we need judgment. Judgment gives the world order, allows it to make sense. Please, we hope, we plead, at least a little judgment, at least a little punishment, at least a little wrath. For who will hold in check the forces of evil that surround us if we take condemnation completely off of the table!
Such need for judgment surely underlies the recent events in Wichita. For what else would oblige a man to enter a church (of all places) and boldly and take a gun and end a life? Because it was deserved, one would say. Because it was just. Because it was necessary to end the other wrong, the greater wrong. Let us consider that an argument could be made for such judgment, such condemnation. Dr. Tiller was an abortion doctor, even a late-term abortion doctor. Shall we just stand idly by as such acts are committed? Are we just spectators in God’s world, or is our calling to discipleship serious?
We need judgment, do we not? Shall evil reign freely?
But it is, of course, that same zeal which turns our condemnation back upon us. If not always as dramatically, we encounter our own destruction in the judgment of others. Judgment is our festering swamp, the quicksand that oozes us toward the oblivion of our own end. We are judgment addicts, living from one condemnation fix to another. But the joke is on us, for this is the painful truth of John 3:16 – there is no judgment which can redeem this world. There is only one path to freedom, the product of grace which is the Son. It is not just a nice thing. It is the death of condemnation, and, as such, of us.
The true tragedy of Wichita sleeps beneath the horror of a cold-blooded killing in the house of God. It is the death of faith, the repudiation of grace, the denial of the consequence of salvation. Yes, there is an end to the atrocity that is abortion in our world. But it must be God’s end, it must be an end found in the same grace that brought us Christ. For God has sent us this new day, not for our condemnation, but that we might all be saved.
It says so in John 3:17. Give it a read sometime.
Everybody knows John 3:16. We’ve seen the crazy guy with the multi-colored wig at the football games with his big sign often enough to know that John 3:16 is important. Even Luther called it the gospel within the gospel. ““For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” It’s all there, everything that’s important to faith: the love of God, the sending of the Son, the end of death and the wide open door to heaven. A simple saying.
But the implications, oh, the implications. They’ll get your every time.
Which is where poor old 3:17 comes in. It is one thing to speak the tender and pleasant word of grace. It is whole other thing to be confronted directly with the full outcome of grace, to face what it really means, to be called to preach it boldly and live it wholly and allow it to change your beliefs and your actions. It seems well enough to say that God loves the world, that he gave us Jesus. But what if that actually meant something?
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” After the warm and fuzzy thoughts of verse 16, it seems that this grace stuff may not be as good a deal as we had originally hoped. No condemning? None at all? Because we need judgment. Judgment gives the world order, allows it to make sense. Please, we hope, we plead, at least a little judgment, at least a little punishment, at least a little wrath. For who will hold in check the forces of evil that surround us if we take condemnation completely off of the table!
Such need for judgment surely underlies the recent events in Wichita. For what else would oblige a man to enter a church (of all places) and boldly and take a gun and end a life? Because it was deserved, one would say. Because it was just. Because it was necessary to end the other wrong, the greater wrong. Let us consider that an argument could be made for such judgment, such condemnation. Dr. Tiller was an abortion doctor, even a late-term abortion doctor. Shall we just stand idly by as such acts are committed? Are we just spectators in God’s world, or is our calling to discipleship serious?
We need judgment, do we not? Shall evil reign freely?
But it is, of course, that same zeal which turns our condemnation back upon us. If not always as dramatically, we encounter our own destruction in the judgment of others. Judgment is our festering swamp, the quicksand that oozes us toward the oblivion of our own end. We are judgment addicts, living from one condemnation fix to another. But the joke is on us, for this is the painful truth of John 3:16 – there is no judgment which can redeem this world. There is only one path to freedom, the product of grace which is the Son. It is not just a nice thing. It is the death of condemnation, and, as such, of us.
The true tragedy of Wichita sleeps beneath the horror of a cold-blooded killing in the house of God. It is the death of faith, the repudiation of grace, the denial of the consequence of salvation. Yes, there is an end to the atrocity that is abortion in our world. But it must be God’s end, it must be an end found in the same grace that brought us Christ. For God has sent us this new day, not for our condemnation, but that we might all be saved.
It says so in John 3:17. Give it a read sometime.
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