A Necessary Reminder

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16  NASB

So loved – Perhaps Job needed to have a conversation with John rather than with Eliphaz and Zophar.  Maybe we do too.  We’ve been plowing the ground of justice.  Like Job, we feel the angst of a world where evil triumphs and good suffers affliction.  We’ve stumbled over the argument that God’s transcendence shrouds any resolution to the dark mysteries of divinity.  And we’ve confronted our own Greek paradigm, the assumption that we should be able to sort out the rational principles of our universe.  We’re left wanting.  Uncomfortably.

For this reason, we need to listen to the apostle John in a new light.  Job’s story might leave us thinking that we are the victims of divine vacillation.  If God decides to play footsies with the accuser, then we bear the brunt until the divine game ends in His favor.  But John tells us something else—something vitally important for all of us who worry about being sacrificial pawns on the cosmic chessboard.  John tells us in no uncertain terms that God’s real motivation is love.  In fact, it’s not just love, it’s great love, overpowering love, motivating love.  John uses the Greek houtos ēgapesēn (the verb is agapáō).   In John’s sentence, the verb is aorist, active, strengthened by the preceding adverb (“in this way,” “thus,” “as follows”).   In other words, John tells us that God’s love for the “world” (kósmos) is so powerful that He gave His most precious gift, His chosen one, to rescue it.  Since the world is so full of elements antithetical to God’s sovereignty, such an act only demonstrates the intensity of God’s care.  He wasn’t willing to let it go.  He wasn’t willing to start over (as He did once before).  His care for the creation, not just us, pushed Him to the last limits of rescue.

We are so familiar with this verse that we have become immune to its implications, so we need to remind ourselves of the true meaning of this divine act.  On the heels of Job’s faith-driven cry for resolution, we may discover what we have so desperately wanted to know, perhaps not cognitively but certainly emotionally, that we are not, and never have been, victims of three-dimensional chess.  That assurance is bound up in two verbs, “loved” and “gave.”  The aorist tense of ēgapesēn tells us that this is a finished action in the past.   It’s the “never, never, never gave up” act of God.  From the moment of creation until a moment ago, God loved.  Job needed to hear this—and so do we.  God has not stopped loving.  Since John thinks in Hebrew terms while writing in Greek, we should notice that the Hebrew context is:

 . . . a spontaneous feeling which impels to self-giving, to grasping that which causes it, or to pleasurable activity. It involves the inner person. Since it has a sexual basis, it is directed supremely to persons; love for things or acts has a metaphorical aspect. God’s love is correlative to his personal nature, and love for God is love first for his person and only then for his word or law. Yet even in the extended sense love has an element of fervor or passion.^[1]

The use of houtos in the Greek emphasizes the intensity of God’s love.  To this we must add the rabbinic, second Temple development that affects John’s use:

For the rabbis love is the basic principle of the threefold relationship of God, the I, and the Thou. It must determine all dealings within this relationship, or the relationship is broken. As God acts with love, so must we, and by the same token, as we act with love, so will God. A basis is perceived here for assurance of the divine mercy, though not at the expense of the divine righteousness.^[2]

It is of some interest to note that prior to the LXX, the verb agapáō was fairly colorless.  “Strictly speaking agapáō means simply ‘to be content with something.’ . . As the LXX translators chose to render Hebrew words built from the root ‘hb by forms of agapáō, a Greek word which originally was not characteristic, quite clearly agapáō acquired its classical meaning initially through translation from the Hebrew.”[3]  Therefore, we must find the real meaning of agapáō in its Hebrew equivalent.  That results in noticing the “community-related character” of the term and the emphasis that “complete love . . . demands all of one’s energies.”[4]  “ . . . it includes a conscious act on behalf of the person who is loved or the thing that is preferred.”[5]

Job felt this mutual obligation.  He felt it but could not articulate it because the basic doctrine of divine protection had been so violated that he was left mystified about God’s mercy.  His faithfulness rode on the rails of duty despite the emotional baggage carried along.  John articulates God’s intention and motivation.  He does not answer Job’s cognitive dilemma, but he assures Job, and us, that goodwill is inherent in God’s character, so much so that it propelled God to give.

That verb, dídōmi, is also aorist: a gift given completely that affects everything since.  A gift that fits the character of the giver, a voluntary, explicit act on behalf of the loved thing.  Job’s great desire was not to know the secrets of good and evil but rather to be assured of God’s love.  John provides just that assurance.  Nothing is more important to God than to express His love toward the cosmos.

We might still wish we had cognitive satisfaction, but perhaps that is a function of our deep-seated paradigm beliefs.  What John offers, and perhaps what we really need, is this assurance, this emotional safety:  God cares—intensely—for me.

Topical Index: agapáō, love, care, give, John 3:16

^[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 5). W.B. Eerdmans.

^[2] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 8). W.B. Eerdmans.

[3] Gerhard Wallis, TDOT, Vol. 1, p. 103.

[4] Ibid., p. 104.

[5] Ibid., p. 105.