God Stories – Attributes of God
The Love of God
John 3:16, Rev 12
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
John 3:16 has almost become a throw away verse for people who have grown up in the evangelical church. Most of us can rattle it off like it is our phone number, and yet I don’t think that we will ever quite grasp the depth of meaning in this verse, the profundity of this action the immensity of this love that God has for us.
For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son…
If we pay any attention to this verse we often have dreams of a pristine, sanitized stable…No morning sickness, no labor pains (no crying he makes), halos around everyone’s heads., sweet smelling straw in a beautiful well crafted manger – as the Black Peter character says in 2000 Candles “we’re missing the point, the point is it is a step down.”
The God of the whole universe steps down and puts on human skin, flesh and bones. He doesn’t just drop out of the sky as a fully grown sinless man, but comes as a helpless baby – completely dependant on his mother and father for all that he needs – a teenage mother, and her carpenter husband who is too poor to find a place to stay in Bethlehem – the king of the universe has to be born in a barn. That was Bethlehem, if it was Toronto, he would have been born under the Gardner expressway where the bridges offer small shelter for the homeless people living there
When I walk the kids to School, there is a little patch of asphalt on the sidewalk right at the corner where we cross the street. The kids love to race to it – they don’t race each other, they race me, and they always beat me. Nicholas loves it the most. I hate it – not because they always beat me, but because there is a hedge there that I can’t see around and for a brief second, my Nicholas is out of my sight. I hate having my kids out of my sight.
At Nicholas’ nursery school, they’ve instituted a new policy of not bringing you kids right into the classroom, but giving them to the teacher at the front door. Nicholas and I had this great ritual of entering the class, hanging up his coat, getting the toy that he wants to show Doris out of his bag and then giving each other a big hug and kiss good bye as he goes to join the other kids. He knows he is safe and so do I. But now, I have to hand him off to someone else at the door. Nicholas was very unsure of this new ritual – and so was I – although the new policy is supposed to increase safety in the school, it doesn’t feel safer – the safest place for Nicholas is in my arms!
Jesus leaves the arms of his Father and enters, not the safety of nursery school, but he becomes a baby without a home in a land where the king wants to kill him, born to a young couple who can barely support themselves not to mention this baby with a price on its head.
For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son…to leave the splendor, majesty and intimacy of heaven, to be born worse off than the rest of us, without a home and without a hope of surviving the king’s death squads.
That is the physical reality of the incarnation – the spiritual is worse.
This is how John describes the birth in Revelations 12
“1A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. 4His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. 5She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.”
This is how Eugene Peterson describes the scene in His book “Reversed Thunder.” He begins with the scene in Chapter 11:
“The ear- splitting blast of the seventh trumpet has already pulled the sleeping world out of bed (Rev. 11:15). The roused world hears the victory song of the twenty-four elders and sees through a fissure in the skies the temple of God, its doors open so that the Ark, material evidence that God’s rule connects with our salvation, is plainly visible (Rev. 11:15-19). A fusion of lightning, thunder, earthquake, and hail marks a scene change (nobody leave your seats!) and a woman appears in the sky theater. She is dressed in a diaphanous garment woven from the rays of the sun, each thread lambent. Twelve stars, pulsating white and red fire, are a crown on her head. She stands on the moon. And she is pregnant.
This statuesque beauty rivets our attention and then collapses into the travail of childbirth. The robust hymn of the twenty-four voice al1-male chorus, its harmonies still echoing in the night, is drowned out by the cries of the woman in labor. Suddenly a dragon appears, ugly as the woman is lovely. The reptile is a crimson gash, violating the sky, its seven heads poised to devour the infant coming from the womb. The birth-giving woman and the death-dealing dragon are the light-year limits of the best and worst we can imagine. The moment the child appears, the dragon lunges. We shut our eyes, too terrified to witness the outrage. And then, at the last possible moment, there is rescue. The infant is seized and lifted to the throne of God. The mother escapes to a place of safety and is cared for.
In the split-second interval between birth and rescue, as the dragon is robbed of his prey, we recognize this child by means of St. John’s description, "one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron:”
If it is not enough to send your son to earth to be born in the danger of homelessness, God sent him to a place where the ruler of the day wanted him dead in his infancy. If this is not enough in the seen world – the unseen would is worse by far – we never see the devil painted into the manger scenes – but he is there, a dragon with seven heads, powerful enough to bring stars down from heaven, just waiting for the King of kings to be born so that he can destroy him.
Why would the Father through whom all other fathers get their name place his beloved Son in such a precarious position? How could he send him helpless into the greatest spiritual battle when the rest of us have a hard time dropping our kids at child care?
It is not that he hates his child, or that he should be given over to the Children’s Aid Society for neglect and abandonment; He sends his well loved Son into the world because he loves us.
I want you to get this – God sends his son into this the most dangerous situation that I could imagine, for one reason – because he loves us. 1 John 4:9-10 “God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” NLT
God send His loved Son from his throne to live in the middle of all our human sin and squalor, into the middle of cosmic spiritual battle, not just to live there, but to die there.
The verses that lead up to John 3:16 say this: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
It points to the fact that Jesus would have to die on a cross to bring us back into relationship with the God who loves us. God loves us – the whole world of us so much that he sends his son, not onto a battlefield where he had the chance of dying, but as a sheep is sent to the slaughterhouse, with no chance of survival.
God created us to love us and be loved by us to live in close-knit relationship with us, but instead we decided to go another way and we have done things to break that relationship. In fact the bible tells us that because we have done what is wrong, we deserve death.
God sends his son not just to teach us how to live right, but to die in our place – that it how much he loves us.
The love that the Father and Son have for us becomes so clear to me in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is about to be arrested, tried and put to death in one of the worst ways possible. He prays in the Garden, “is there another way?” He asks “is there another way to bring people back into relationship with you?” He never says “they aren’t worth it.”
God loves us so much that he would send his one and only son to die in our stead.
There is a youth poster that says “I asked Jesus how much he loves me and he said, “This much,” and he stretched out his arms and died on the cross.”
If it is not bad enough that the glorious one who sits on the Throne of heaven would take on human form and come to earth as a helpless baby, as an adult he goes to the cross even though he has committed no crime, even though he is perfect in every way and sinless. He is born homeless in a wretched barn and he dies the death of a criminal on a cross that smells of the death of all the ones who have hung on it before him.
God’s love for us is seen most plainly in the incarnation and death of His Son Jesus, but it doesn’t end there. God is not like the husband who says to his wife. “I told you I loved you when I married you, and if it changes I’ll let you know.” No, God is constantly telling us again how much he loves us.
God does not perform one fantastic act of love for all time, and leave it there, he continues to love us. And he keeps us in his love
Romans 8:31-39
What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died – more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?…
"37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Holy Spirit
God the Father does not stop with sending his Son to do battle in the cosmos here on earth to win us back from the power of death. He comes and abides in us to do battle for love with in us. He does the exterior work of love in the stable and on the cross, he comes within us and does the interior work of love through his Spirit.
On the cross, he dies for us so that we can be his children, but even with that work done we still have a hard time knowing that we are loved, that we are truly children of God. We can sing with Van Morrison “Some times I feel like a motherless child, long way from my home.” We work hard to find the perfect love that we haven’t received from our own families – we chase after false intimacy, or strive to make ourselves perfect and lovable, but we cannot stop from the feeling of being orphaned. So God comes down again, and inhabits our very being and gives us the Spirit of adoption
Gal 4:6-7
6Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father." 7So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.
We say that we feel motherless, fatherless, but the Spirit is forever whispering to our souls “I love you, I made you, I redeemed you, you are mine, you are the child of God, you are precious in my sight, it will be all right, I am here, you are my beloved child…”
Paul prays for the Christians at Ephesus that they might have “I pray that you being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the Love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph.3:18)
I have the same prayer for those of us gathered here today. No matter how much I explain, no matter how many stories I tell, it is a work that God will do in or hearts to “teach” us this love that is unknowable – a love that surpasses knowledge. It is a love to know in the heart more than we know in our heads.
Barriers to receiving God’s Love
1) feeling unlovable – I think we all have these nagging doubts – we may have good friends and good family, but there is something inside that says, “If they really knew me, they wouldn’t love me so, in fact they may hate me.” We may feel shame for things we have done, things we do, or for just not matching up. Maybe we’ve spent too long listening to the interior voices, or the exterior voices that say we are not worth loving to be able to here the loving whispers of the Spirit.
I remember reading a Peanuts cartoon strip in which Sally(?) comes up to her brother Charlie Brown and does something that is very unusual for her. She says--I love you. But Charlie Brown keeps responding by saying: no you don’t. And each time Sally answers a little louder: yes I do, I really love you. But Charles Brown has been rejected so many times he keeps saying: it can’t be true. So in the last square, Sally has reached the limit of her patience and she screams out in a loud voice: Hey stupid, I love you.
There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me. There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow-men do not see (and I am glad!), and that He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose. - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 37
If you do not feel like God should love you, that’s great, because that is just the kind of person that God loves! 1 Timothy 1:15-17
15Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners--of whom I am the worst. 16But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life. 17Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.
2) Believing God unloving
It may be that your experience in life is not that of a loving God, whether that me through your own hardships, or vicariously through painful awareness of other’s hardships. We say things like, ”If God is loving how could he allow this to happen to me, how could he allow this to happen to them…”
There are great books written on this problem – how is it that God is loving when there is so much pain and trouble in his world. Even when we have done our best to serve Him, we end up going through pain to great to bear. How can he be loving? Some of those books may have answers to your questions, and I might help your brain to get over the questions if we chat over coffee, but in the end receiving Love from this God of love end up being a move of faith in our lives. There are times when our faith requires us to believe against all the evidence. So Like Anne Frank who at the end of her time imprisoned in a home hiding from the great evil of Nazi Germany, she writes that when all said and done she believes that humanity is basically good. There arte times that we need to believe in the love of God, not because it is our vast experience, ut because it is our only anchor in the storm, and we will believe against all the evidence that our God is loving, and we will choose to hear the whisper of the Spirit above the Storm, and we will choose to see the very Son of God in the muck of the stable and the pain of the cross as a bright light of love in all the darkness.
One day C. H. Spurgeon was walking through the English countryside with a friend. As they strolled along, the evangelist noticed a barn with a weather vane on its roof. At the top of the vane were these words: GOD IS LOVE.
Spurgeon remarked to his companion that he thought this was a rather inappropriate place for such a message. "Weather vanes are changeable," he said, "but God’s love is constant.”
"I don’t agree with you about those words, Charles," replied his friend. "You misunderstood the
meaning. That sign is indicating a truth: Regardless of which way the wind blows, God is love."
We need God’s help in this – his love surpasses knowledge! Stand with me to pray.
