God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.
Abraham had once told Isaac, his only-begotten son, that God himself would provide the lamb of sacrifice. God had indeed stayed Abraham's hand in order to spare Isaac. God desired from Abraham only the disposition that made him willing to offer even that which mattered most to him for the sake of the God whom he loved. But the sacrifice of Isaac would not have been sufficient for salvation unto eternal life. What God sought then was only the willingness, and it was this that paved the way for future blessings of Israel.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
God did not merely want to exercise his rights toward the world vis-à-vis justice. Rather than coming to condemn the world for not offering to God what was his due, rather than coming to lay claim by destructive force to that which was his be right, God chose instead to give to humanity an offering sufficient to what they owed and what he deserved, his only begotten Son. Even the relatively good among the peoples of the world throughout history didn't have anything to offer that they hadn't first been given and that hadn't been tainted by some degree of sin. Only Jesus himself could offer himself freely and fully to the Father. Only his infinite value as true God from true God could be sufficient for salvation of the world unto eternal life.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,
because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God.
We should see that the condemnation that is the result believing in Jesus is not God being arbitrary or mean. He sent to the world a rescue operation, a mission behind the enemy lines of a world in the grip of sin and the Devil. To each person, some awareness, however vague, of the choice to surrender and be rescued, or to stubbornly perish with a sinking ship is given. To those to whom that awareness is given more clearly a more definite response is necessary. But some response is necessary in all cases. To ignore Jesus is to choose to continue on the ship even as it begins to submerge beneath the seas.
We were given free will as a gift from God, in order to be able to freely choose to love him, or, God forbid, to live apart from his love forever. Only such a destiny makes sense of this gift of free will and of the existence of time itself. For without this ultimate direction all choices are finally arbitrary, directionless, and valueless. No other narrative accounts so well for the freedom which we instinctively recognize in ourselves, nor the fallenness in our hearts that we all sense if we are honest, nor the thrill of hope when we discover that our lives may again be rightly directed and aligned with God's purpose, that we may yet choose in accord with the very reason we can choose at all.
And this is the verdict,
that the light came into the world,
but people preferred darkness to light,
because their works were evil.
To believe is not merely to accept a set of data about divine revelation. It is a change of paradigm so dramatic as to be called an enlightenment. It results, not in mere knowledge, but in conviction about sin, righteousness, and judgment (see John 16:8) as God himself understands those things. The risk of coming into the light is that we balk when we see what it reveals about ourselves, we whose "works were evil", and whose works even now aren't as improved as we would wish.
But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,
so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.
This call to live the truth is analogous to the call of Jesus in the Synoptics (see for instance Mark 1:15) to repent and believe the Gospel. It is a call to stop seeing ourselves as the center of the universe and think about our reality with a fresh new spiritual way of thinking that is God-given. This means that we must care more about coming to the light, and receiving the light of faith, than we fear whatever it may reveal about us. When we come to the light it not only reveals our shortcomings. It reveals still more how near God is to us, the heights and the depths of just how much he so loved the world. It enables us to do works that are no longer merely are own, but, when done drawn from our faith, are done in God himself, empowered by his very life within our souls. This can happen and becomes possible only if we are willing to vacate the throne at the center of our lives and favor of the one who is himself the light of the world and the source of all truth.
“We found the jail securely locked
and the guards stationed outside the doors,
but when we opened them, we found no one inside.”
What prison is preventing us from taking up our place in the temple area and telling people everything about this amazing life we have found in Christ? Whatever the walls, the chains, and the guards, however securely locked the doors, the Lord himself desires his message to go forward. Let us avail ourselves of the help of those unseen friends, angels and saints, when we feel too stuck or too trapped to move forward. For, as Paul said, "I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound!" (see Second Timothy 2:9)
When the poor one called out, the LORD heard,
and from all his distress he saved him.
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