Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Sanctification and Growth from John 8
It’s Father’s Day. Amidst the family dinners and quiet thank-yous, most of us reserve a few moments to ponder quietly the father-son relationships to which we are most tightly tied. We ponder their joys, responsibilities, pains, disappointments, triumphs, and failures. We even think of their changing face as time marches on and the younger generation of sons becomes the new generation of fathers and of grandfathers, in some cases great-grandfathers.
Some elements of contemporary Western father-son relationships only go back about 150 or 200 years. That’s all. I won’t ask, but you could get at this very easily by asking for a show of hands, “How many of you men are doing vocationally what your fathers did?” Now when I have tried this elsewhere, it seems to be down to something under 5 percent.
When you ask women whether they are doing vocationally what their mothers did, that’s sometimes down even further. It wasn’t that long ago, that is, before the industrial revolution when we still lived in an agrarian handcraft society, that boys ended up doing what their fathers did in 95 or 98 percent of the cases.
If your father was a baker, you became a baker. If your father was a farmer, you became a farmer. There was very little mobility in society. Even in the New Testament, the one who stands in for Jesus’ human father, Joseph, is a carpenter. It’s not too long before Jesus himself, as he grows up and takes the load in the family, is actually referred to as the carpenter.
In other words, today sonship is bound up, first of all, with genes and chromosomes. Who’s the real father? Do a DNA test. But in the ancient world, sonship and being a father was bound up with self-identity in much more profound ways. There may have been in the ancient world some kind of small synagogue school or the like where boys (and sometimes girls, but more commonly boys) learned the basic reading and writing skills.
You were likely to learn your trade, you were likely to learn what skills would give you your living, and you would likely get your self-identity from being taught by your father, who was a farmer. He would teach you when to put in the seed, how to irrigate, how to make sure that there was appropriate fertilizer, and what to do under drought conditions.
If your name was Stradivarius, you learned how to make violins. You knew how to choose the wood and how to make the organic glue. You learned and you became identified with the entire clan heritage. Now this reality is what generates quite a few “son” metaphors in the Bible. Some people, for example, are called sons of Belial, sons of worthlessness. This is actually not a slur on your father; it’s saying you’re such a disgustingly worthless person that the only possible explanation is that you come from the worthless family. That’s your identity.
It can also work the other way. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” The idea is that God is the supreme peacemaker, and insofar as we make peace, we’re acting like God. That’s not telling you how to become a Christian or how to have eternal life. It’s saying insofar as you act like God, then you are showing yourself to belong to the God family.
But then again, in converse, you can flip again. In John, chapter 8, just a few chapters after the chapter that was read here today, Jesus is in conversation with some Jews who are disputing things with him. He claims that Abraham, who had been dead for 2,000 years, had actually borne witness to Jesus. They claim, “Listen, we’re the children of Abraham. We’re Israelites. We’re Jews. We claim that you are being ridiculous. You haven’t been alive even for 50 years. How could he bear witness to you?”
Jesus says, “You’re not really sons of Abraham at all, because he really did bear witness to me. If you don’t recognize me, this shows that you really can’t be his sons.” Jesus is not denying that genetically they are sons of Abraham. He’s saying they don’t adopt Abraham’s stance, and in that sense they’re disassociated from him.
So they up the ante and they say, “Well, actually, we’re sons of God.” Jesus says, “I don’t think so. I come from God and God knows me and I know him, and you don’t know me at all. You can’t possibly be sons of God. Let me tell you who your daddy is.” Then he says, “You are of your father the Devil, and the lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and you’re actually trying to bump me off. He was a liar from the beginning and you’re telling untruths about me all the time.”
Once again, it’s the functional self-identity that establishes the father-son relationship in that kind of heritage of language rather than just genes. Within this kind of framework in the Old Testament, God says some remarkable things about his sons. He looks at the Israelites in the Old Testament, the second book of the Bible, the book of Exodus, chapter 4, and he says, “Israel is my firstborn son.”
That is this covenant people from whom he saves from slavery. He says, “This is my son. They are to reflect my character. They are to show in measure what I am like. They are to show themselves belonging, as it were, to the God family.” Then sometimes in the ancient world the king, who was supposed to represent God’s justice and his integrity and his righteousness, was peculiarly thought of as God’s son, because he was supposed to reflect God’s character, his righteousness, his righteous rule. Now that brings me, then, to my first point.
1. God has a unique Son.
I went and switched the Bible readings this morning and threw everybody into a tizzy. I actually wanted people to start reading at verse 16 instead of verse 17. John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son …” His unique Son. In the context, Jesus, God has a unique Son.
What is said about him in this respect.… It’s not an obvious expression, is it? God has a son? Muslims find this sort of expression bizarre. On the street, many Muslims think that Christians believe that God copulated with Mary to produce Jesus, and that’s the Trinity: God, Mary, Jesus. They think it’s bizarre. So do I. That’s not what the Bible says, either.
Then there are Hindus who say, “I have no problem with the idea that Jesus is God’s son. All religious teachers are God’s sons. In fact, in some measure, aren’t we all? We’re all on a kind of sliding scale of sonship.” That’s not quite what the Bible says, either, because again and again we’re told that Jesus is God’s son in a unique sense, even in this verse. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.”
In fact, two chapters later, in chapter 5, we read these strange words, verse 19, “ ‘I tell you the truth,’ Jesus says. ‘The Son …” He’s referring to himself. “ ‘The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing …’ ” That is, there’s some kind of functional subordination? That’s the way father-son relationships work in the ancient world? “ ‘… because whatever the Father does the Son also does.’ ”
Now that is a shocker. If your name is Stradivarius it’s not a shocker, because eventually Stradivarius’ father shows Stradivarius Jr. everything that the father does. He wants the tradition to be passed on. If your father is a farmer, then it’s not a shocker because everything that the farmer father knows, he wants to pass on to the farmer son. For Jesus to refer to himself as “the Son” and say, “I’m the Son. I do what the Father does. In fact, I do whatever the Father does,” that’s a shocker.
You see, you might be a son of God in the sense that you make peace. Isn’t that what Jesus says? “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” In some measure, I can reflect God, but I can’t possibly stand up and say, “I’m a son of God. I do everything God does.” For a start, I haven’t made a universe recently, but the New Testament insists, this Book insists that when God made the universe, he made it through his Son.
A little farther on in this chapter we’re told at the end of the age there is a final judgment, and the Son is as much the Judge as the Father. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does. At the end of the age, the Bible insists there is a resurrection from the dead. That’s a God activity. I’m certainly not going to be doing it. Neither are you, but nevertheless, the Bible insists, Jesus will be doing it.
This is so remarkable. Whatever the Father does, we’re told Jesus also does. Now we’re stepping on the very edge of the mysteriousness of God himself. The Bible everywhere insists that God is one, and yet he is a complex one. In eternity past, in this one God, the Father (we’re told) loved the Son, and the Son loved the Father.
The Father sent his Son. Not son in some procreated sense, but Son in precisely the sense that there is a perfect reflection of the Father as can possibly be imagined. All that the Father is and says and does, the Son also is and says and does. Then in the fullness of time, this Son of God becomes a human being. That’s the Jesus who’s presented in the Bible. It is stunning language. Now we’re told that God so loved the world that he gave this unique Son.
2. The measure of God’s love for us is the gift of his Son.
We only begin to see how powerful this is when we think a little bit about this word world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son …” What’s the world? Just the created order, this planet? People use the word world in different ways depending on the context, but John has a habit of using world to refer to this moral order that God has himself made in rebellion against God. It’s the world that God has made thumbing its nose at God.
For example, elsewhere he writes in his first letter, “For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, the boasting of what he has or does—comes not from the Father, but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”
Now if you come from a churchy background, as I did, and if you’re coming close to my age, you may remember a time when Christians spoke about worldliness. We don’t talk about worldliness very much anymore, but when I was a boy, Christians were terribly concerned to avoid worldliness.
It was summarized in a lot of different ways. “Never drink, smoke, swear, or chew, and never go out with girls that do.” This was not considered the apex of all godliness, but it was definitely a way of avoiding worldliness. The chew, in case you didn’t get it, wasn’t gum. It was chewing tobacco, so it perhaps made even more sense at the time.
But that’s too shallow a notion of what’s in the world from John’s perspective. From John’s perspective, the world is bound up with a kind of rebellion that doesn’t recognize it’s made by God and owes him. So in addition to this passage I’ve just read, which depicts what is in the world as “the cravings of sinful men and the lust of the eyes, the boasting of what he has and does,” reflecting a kind of rabid independence that almost wants to be God, we find the same thing here, do we not, in this passage.
Verse 19: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world …” God’s revelation, God’s self-disclosure. God’s sending his son. Who God is. What he’s come for. “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”
In other words, very often the primary reason why we really don’t want to come to Jesus and come to his word, is because we so love our vaunted independence that we are unwilling to acknowledge any god over us, including the God who has made us and to whom we must one day give an account. It’s a horrible betrayal. It’s the heart of everything the Bible means by sin. It’s the heart of everything the Bible means by idolatry.
Idolatry is not necessarily having a little goblet of stone or wood or precious metal. Idolatry in the first instance is displacing God, choosing something other than the God who is there as the primary object of our love and our affection and our devotion, of our obedience, our loyalty. The Bible insists that God made us. We owe him! Instead, if we de-God God, we have sunk into idolatry so that when God discloses himself to us, we’re just embarrassed by him.
We go our own way. We call it freedom. We fail to see that it’s a kind of sad darkness. “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light …” Verse 19 “… because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.”
The remarkable thing is that God loves the world anyway. Now love is such a tricky word, isn’t it? What do we mean? If I say, in the same sentence, “I love my wife, and I love woodwork” I’m in big trouble. Not from the woodwork, I hasten to add, but I’m in big trouble because, transparently, love had better not mean the same thing in the two cases.
Suppose Mike and Sue are going for a nice walk on the beach. It’s the end of the university year, and they’ve been getting friendlier. The wind off the waves is ruffling their hair, they’ve kicked off their flip-flops, they’re walking along, he takes her hand and he says, “Sue, I love you. I really do.” What does he mean?
Well, he could mean quite a lot of things. He may simply mean that his hormones are very active and he wants to go to bed with her forthwith. He may mean no more than that. If we assume there is a modicum of decency in him, let alone Christian fidelity, then the least that he means is something like this. “In my eyes, you are so lovely I can’t imagine life without you. The sunlight in your hair, it dances. I’m entranced. The happy tinkle of your laughter, I’m intoxicated by it. I look into your eyes and I see forever. Your sense of humor, your personality. I love you!”
Because in part when he’s saying, “I love you,” he’s saying, “You’re lovable to me.” Usually when we say, “I love you,” it’s a declaration of our estimate of the person’s lovable-ness. Mike does not mean, “Quite frankly, my dear Sue, you have the personality of Genghis Khan. Your halitosis would drive away a herd of rampaging elephants. Your knees remind me of a crippled camel. But I love you anyway.” He doesn’t mean that, does he?
So now what does God mean when he says, “World, I love you?” Does he mean, “Ah, world, you’re so charming! Your conversation is scintillating! I can’t imagine eternity without you! I love you and you’re so lovable! How could I possibly live without you? World, I love you!” Is that what he means? No, not by John’s use of the word world. In John’s use of the word world, morally speaking, we’re the people with the Genghis Khan personalities and the halitosis and the crippled knees, and God loves us anyway.
That’s the marvel. What a love is it! In eternity past, God was not solitary. He was one. He always has been one. Before anything else was, he wasn’t lonely. The Father loved the Son. The Son loved the Father. This is a very different and more complex notion of God than Allah. For in eternity past, God was not only God and perfectly content, but the Father loved the Son and the Father loved the Spirit. There was this tri-unity, this complexity in God and other orientation even within God. He was perfectly happy, perfectly holy. God. Fulfilled, content, rich.
Now God makes us, and in our rebellion and self-love, we de-God God and become really quite ugly to him, and he loves us anyway because he’s that kind of God. Not because we’re so supremely lovable. What does it mean for the Bible here to say, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son”?
In fact, the only way you can see what that means is by teasing out the story of this entire gospel of John. It doesn’t just mean that he gave him so that he entered this world and became a human being. It does mean that, but it means more than that. If he had just come and become a human being and then a great teacher who taught a lot of wonderful truths, that still would’ve been a wonderful act of condescension.
Why should the Creator join with the creation? In John’s gospel it means so much more than that. He gave his Son not only to become one of us but to die in our place. Because of our rebellion, we do stand under his just condemnation, under his just wrath. God could, with perfect justice, wipe us out. Instead, he sends his own Son to bear our penalty. That’s what the cross was about. He gave his Son.
The Bible is full of ways of talking about these things 700 years before Christ, words like this: “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquity.” A little later in this book, in John, chapter 11, the high priest at the time, who doesn’t understand any of these things, wants Jesus bumped off because he sees him as a political threat.
He thinks Jesus is getting so powerful that if he attracts any more people, the Roman army might come in, the regional super power, and crush the little nation. So he says, “It’s much better for this man to die than for the nation to die.” He wanted a substitutionary death. Instead of the nation dying, let Jesus die!
In John, the writer comments, “Actually, he was speaking better than he knew. God was using him to say a deeper truth. He would die as a substitute for the nation, not only for the nation, but for all the people that would be drawn to him from all over the world: Jews and Gentiles, people from all over the world. He died as a substitute, all right, so that the wrath of judgment would not fall on them, but on him. God so loved the world that he gave his unique Son.”
3. God’s purpose in giving his Son is that we might have eternal life.
“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. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world …”
In other words, he could have sent his Son to the world simply to speak triumphantly and say, “You bunch of rebellious idiots! May you perish as you deserve.” But that’s not why he sent his Son into the world. “He sent his Son not to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already.”
That’s the same thing that is said at the very end of the chapter in verse 36. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.” In other words, it’s not as if God comes to us in Jesus and says, “Ah, you’re a goody-goody. I’ll take you. Oh, you’re a bit of a baddy-baddy. I won’t take you. You’re sort of on the fence. Maybe if you suffer for a while, then we’ll clean you up and then maybe I’ll consider you.”
That’s not what he does. In the Bible, we have Jesus the Son of God pictured as the One who comes to us in our lost-ness, in our rebellion when, because of our unbelief and our rejection of God, we’re already under the wrath of God. He comes, instead, to give us eternal life. Now it’s true that when Christianity really does go into full-flowering, you build better citizens. You build more stability, but God didn’t send his Son to make nice for Australians or Canadians or Americans or anybody else. He sent his Son in the first instance to give us eternal life.
That is, life to the full, not only now, but for all eternity, at the end of the age, reconciled to God, knowing him and delighting in him forever. That’s why he sent his Son. Another way of putting this is that he sent his Son in order that we might become sons. Not exactly like Jesus. Jesus, we’ve seen, is the unique Son, but already in the first chapter we read this Jesus, this God-man was in the world, chapter 1, verse 10,
“Though the world was made through him, the world didn’t recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own people didn’t receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” In fact, in chapter 3 in the preceding verses of the passage that we’ve been looking at, we’re told that we become sons of God ourselves through regeneration
It is a kind of new birth by which God’s Spirit comes on us and connects us with the Father, gives us a new origin, changes us. All because God sent the Son to take our guilt and all of these blessings are poured out upon us so that we might have eternal life. God gives his Son so that we might become sons of God. That’s the truth.
4. The way we receive this gift is through faith.
Back to verse 16. “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.” It doesn’t say that whoever has an adequate IQ or a decent theological training or tries hard and is really quite a moral, upstanding citizen, or who raises his or her family successfully.
It doesn’t say any of those things. It says those who believe in him. This is not just a matter of believing certain propositions. You believe that two plus two (in a base 10 system) equals four. It’s more than that. It is trusting him entirely, abandoning ourselves to him because he has borne our sins in his own body on the cross.
Our acceptance before God, our confidence before God, our recognition that God loves us and our experience that he does transform us, change us, by pouring out his Spirit on us within, all of it comes out of this simple self-abandonment to him and this recognition that we are loved by God, known by God, and saved by God because of what Christ has done on our behalf. We trust him. We accept this promise. We accept his word. We accept his invitation. We believe in him. We trust him.
How could it be any other way? Granted, the complexity of our motives, even in our own families. The good things we try to do are so easily corroded. Are we really going to offer ourselves to God and say, “Well God, you really got a hot one with me. I’m so glad for you.” No, no, no. God sent his Son, his unique Son, that we might have life by entrusting ourselves to him. That’s why the end of the chapter again is put this way. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life for God’s wrath remains on him.”
O was ever a heart so hardened,
And can such ingratitude be
That one for whom Jesus suffered
Will say, “It is nothing to me”?
This unique father-son relationship in God, as mysterious as it is, is our only hope of becoming sons of God ourselves, joint heirs with Jesus Christ, reflecting so far as human beings can something of the character, holiness, and joy of the heavenly Father. I implore you, if this is strange to you, in the quietness of your own heart, lift your mind and heart to God and say, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. Have mercy on me, a sinner.” Let us pray.
This is so simple and so profound, heavenly Father. It is wonderful past finding out that your own dear Son bore our sins in his own body on the cross. Open our eyes, all of our eyes, that we may believe him, trust him for life now and for eternity. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
