John 3:16 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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John 3:16

Comments

Christ uses the past tense. It is not as though God only started to love lost men and women when Christ came into the world or when that individual first believed. God in eternity past, seeing the rebellion and fall of man, had such mercy and such compassion that really our minds cannot take it in. In eternity past, he determined that a Redeemer would come to purchase a people for heaven. See the immensity of his love! It is ascribed to the Father. Yes, God the Father so loved the world. But what is said of the Father is true of the Son and of the Holy Spirit also, of course, because the three persons in the Godhead, though distinct and different and assigning to each other different tasks, nevertheless all think one and the same thing. It is a sacrificial love – God so loved that he gave. It is an extraordinary degree of love. It is eternal love, yes, but it is a love which will go to the extraordinary length of sending the Son to represent us, to be terribly humiliated, to suffer and to die in excruciating agony of soul and heart and mind as well as of body, to earn salvation for us.

Application

It is the Father’s love that would give the Son to be eternally changed for us, because from the time of the incarnation he would be everlastingly different in that he would wear human nature. How amazing that God the eternal Son, through whom the world was created, equal with the Father should take human nature eternally, to be my visible God in eternity and in glory.

Questions

Who is meant by the world? It refers, of course, to people. It refers to lost sinners. How could God love lost sinners? It was a love which took the form of pity and compassion. He could not love us as we were. He could not love our state as sinners, as rebels against him. He could not love our pettiness and smallness and our pride and our deceit. But he could pity us and have great compassion upon us. He could see what he could make of us, how he would put a new nature and a new heart in us, and how he would purify us in eternal glory. He could love us because he loved humanity, his special creation. Fallen though we were and defaced and ruined by the fall, yet we still had the power of reason. He loves every creature he has made in a sense, but man supremely, because he has been given the power of thought and reason, the power of creativity, the power of language, and the power to love in a deep and sophisticated way. He has given us moral consciousness, which he has not given to the animals. His desire was to restore humanity itself in Christ, with a people who were saved and forgiven and transformed. But it is particularly an individual love for people who he is determined to save that the verse speaks of.

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John 3:16 Commentary and Bible Study