Looking To The Cross | Day 12 | John 3:16

There is so much meaning in so little a word: so. For God “so” loved the world. So, what does that “so” mean?

Is this verse telling us that God loved the world so much? It is certainly true that God’s love for us is great; so great that its breadth and length and height and depth surpass knowledge (Eph. 3:18-19). But that’s not what this verse is saying.

Rather, it is describing the way in which God loved. For God loved the world in such a way that he gave his only Son. Other passages communicate a similar idea where the giving of Christ is the ultimate lens through which we are able to see God’s love (Rom. 5:8; Gal. 2:20; Eph. 5:2; 1 Jn. 3:16). 

From this, a simple definition of love could be to give of yourself for the good of the one loved. This confronts our culture’s sentimentalized view of love where to love is to accept. The error that lies behind this thinking is that we’re all okay just the way we are. But, in this verse, the fact that we are not okay is the very reason the giving of Jesus was required. And it is love for the world that drove God to do it.

And so, in order to be faithful to the message of the most famous verse in the Bible, it is not enough to simply say, “God loves you.” For the world to see God’s love for them, we must also include an answer to the question, “How so?”