God's Love Through Jesus Christ, His Son

God's Love Through Jesus Christ, His Son GOD’S LOVE THROUGH JESUS CHRIST, HIS SON
By W. B. West, Jr.

Brother Smith, Brethren, and Friends: An introduction, particularly of the type which Brother Smith has given, is always embarrassing, but I do want to assure him, Brother Morris and members of the faculty of Abilene Christian College of my appreciation for the invitation to participate again in these annual historic lectureships. Nothing affords Mrs. West and me more pleasure than to return to the campus of Abilene Christian College where in other days, as students, we received great blessings which continue to mean much unto us. But particularly fortunate are those of us who are able to return at a time when opportunity is presented to associate and have fellowship with hundreds of brethren from various sections of the country with whom we are comrades in the greatest cause on earth. This evening I have a story to tell you. It is very simple and familiar, yet beautiful and meaningful, especially in days like these in which we are living. It is the theme of the entire Bible expressed in one verse which has been called the most wonderful sentence over written. It is John 3:16, which reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” For weeks it has been my constant prayer to be able to present to this congregation tonight, the story of God’s wonderful love through Jesus Christ his Son.

I. God So Loved the World.
1. “God.” The Bible and nature tell us much about God, the Bible speaking of him about three thousand times, and in nature we behold God in every observation of the eye and in every sound of the ear, but only once is God defined and that is in 1 John 4:8, where the writer said, “God is love.” It is true that attempts had been made prior to .this definition to define God. The Jews whose history reached back through the millenniums unto Abraham had come to think of God as the expression of law. The Greeks whose civilization developed along the lines of architecture and painting, in their groping for God, thought of him as beautiful, and the Romans who were led by the Caesars on a hundred battlefields to victory, with the boast that the Roman eagles never turned backward, said that God is strength. But it was left to him who sat not at the feet of Socrates, Plato, nor Aristotle, nor at the feet of the Stoics, nor the Epicureans, nor even at the feet of Moses, but at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ to give a definition of God as he had seen him revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, that is, as love.

We may think of many expressions of God’s love, as the creation of the world, the leading of the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage, his nursing them as a father in the wilderness for forty years, his leading them across the river Jordan into a land flowing with milk and honey to eat of vineyards they did not plant, his raising up prophets as Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to lead them back to God after they had wandered from him, and his blessing Israel in a thousand ways and loving them with an everlasting love, but it is not this love of which we read in John 3:16. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

2. “So loved.” Love is greater than faith and hope and without these we could not exist. Love is greater than oratory, however important it may be, or prophecy, regardless of how much it may be coveted, or the giving of all of one’s goods to feed the poor or the giving of one’s body to be burned. It is the greatest thing in the world or in heaven. But God not only loved, but so loved. This little adverb, “so,” should be spelled with capitals for thus is it emphasized in the Bible. “I have not seen so great faith, no not in Israel”; “Let your light so shine”; “If God doth so clothe the grass of the field”; and “We love him because he so loved us.”

3. “The world.” The measure of love is indicated by its object. Jesus said: “God so loved the world.” The world which God loved and loves included and includes all the nations of the universe and the races of the earth, with the more than two hundred billion that have been and the unnumbered billions to be, if God postpones sufficiently long, the arrival of the Saturday evening of time. His great arm of love reached around the globe to every nation and every race of every clime and of all time when he gave his only begotten Son. In loving the world, God loves individually. We say, referring to preaching the gospel to them, we love the Chinese but we mean as we would speak of the trees of a forest so far as the aggregation is concerned. But that is not the way in which God loves. He loves every Chinese, every Japanese, and every Englishman, and everyone in the world individually. And as the beams of the sun come pouring down into every eye of a group of people looking up to it, so the love of God comes down, not upon a crowd as an aggregation, but upon every single soul that constitutes the group.
It is easy to see how God could love some people as Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, John, and Paul, but it is hard to understand how he could love Cain, Jezebel, Judas Iscariot, and Hitler, yet he loves them. In fact, the word world used by John usually signified sinful men—men separated from God. And Paul said: “Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” And Jesus said: “I came not to call the righteous but sinners.”

II. That He Gave His Only Begotten Son.
1. “That he gave.” The Greek should be translated “gave up” his only begotten Son. The measure of one’s love is his gifts. If you will tell me how much one gives, I will tell you how much he loves. A gift is not to be measured in its amount but in cost. Millionaires who have given millions for philanthropic purposes have usually sacrificed nothing for themselves nor their families in their benefactions. The widow who crouched in the shadows of the temple until all the millionaires had given their thousands, and then untied her little handkerchief and silently slipped in her two little mites, which was all she had, into the treasury, and slept that night on a bed of straw, gave more than all the millionaires who cast into the treasury that day, for what she gave cost her everything she had.

2. “His only begotten Son.” In Php_2:5-8 Paul says: “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.” Think of it, Jesus in the bosom of the Father as his only begotten Son before time from all eternity and “emptying himself, taking upon himself the form of man, becoming obedient unto death, yea, even the death of the cross.” It has been said that a number of things could have been done by God to show his love for the men of the world. He could have created other worlds, worlds of beauty, happiness, and purity, put to have done this would have cost him nothing. A thousand Grand Canyons, Niagara Falls, and Alps with a beautiful and gorgeous sunset for every evening in every locality could have been made but these would have cost him nothing. Ten thousand archangels and twenty thousand angels could have been sent to the world in the interest of mankind, but these would have cost him little. To redeem and to save man God knew he must send to the men of the world his most precious gift— his only begotten Son. The story is told that one day years ago the keeper of a drawbridge over a large river, heard the coming of a train, and as he did, bis little boy, playing by his side, fell down the steep bank of the river into the angry stream below. He saw if he plunged to rescue his little son he could not close the drawbridge, and all the passengers on the train would be plunged to their death. He hesitated a moment, then slowly swung the bridge out to its place, and plunged into the river and pulled out his dead son. He was unable to save both his son and the passengers on the train, and it cost him only what a father who has lost a son whom he has idolized knows, to save the passengers. So God could not save the world and his Son at the same time and he only knows what it cost him to save us.

III.The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus.
In the fulness of time God sent his Son into the world, his coming into history and not out of it. He was begotten of the Holy Spirit, conceived by the Virgin Mary, and born in Bethlehem of Judea. He spent thirty years of his life on earth in Nazareth and three years in public ministry, always in the service of others. In Nazareth he grew up as one of a number of children in a simple home in which Jewish religion was honored, its feasts and festivals observed, and the Hebrew scriptures were read and committed to memory. At the age of thirty, he said to his mother goodbye at the door of his earthly home in Nazareth and went out into the world to serve and to redeem mankind and to show them what the eternal things are and their value. First, he went to the river Jordan and was immersed by John the Baptist to fulfill all righteousness and that the Father might announce from heaven that he was his Son in whom he was well pleased. Then Jesus was led up by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil so that he might be made there and elsewhere like unto his brethren and be tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. After forty days he returned to Nazareth and entered into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, the book of the prophet Isaiah being delivered unto him, which he opened and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor: He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovering of sight to the blind, To set at liberty them that are bruised, To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18-19). Upon this reading he declared: “Today hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears,” upon which an attempt was made to throw him headlong over a cliff of the city. Upon this he moved to Capernaum, the crossroads of the Jewish world, and a cosmopolitan city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. From Capernaum, his new home, Jesus began his life’s work. When it came to its close, he was able to say, “I have finished the work which thou hast given me to do, and it is finished.” Different from this, millions across the centuries have been forced to acknowledge failure. As a teacher Jesus taught as one having authority and not as the scribes. He spoke as man had never spoken. His words were words of power which calmed tempestuous Galilee, healed the sick, and raised the dead. In his teaching he emphasized sincerity, with its implications to practice what one teaches and to know that heart and not lip service is acceptable to God. His teaching was of such character that the authorities tried to silence him, his own countrymen drove him out of their cities, and even his family wondered if he were beside himself. He wrote no books, yet his teach mg' has set in motion more, pens, typewriters, and presses than all the teachers of the world combined. Millions across the centuries have been richly blessed, made blissfully happy, and given eternal security by his teachings. To many a person on the storm tossed sea of life he has met, saying to him as to the frightened disciples on Galilee in the long ago: “It is I, be not afraid.” The supreme message in the teaching of Jesus was the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth which to him was the rule (if God m the hearts of men. From the beginning to the end he dreamed and worked for the coming of the kingdom. He knew this would place every relationship of life on the right basis, that of husband and wife, father and son, mother and daughter, employer and employee, friend and friend. He saw the time when the knowledge of the Lord would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea and the kingdoms of this world would become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ.

Within recent years attempts have been made to show that Jesus was not original in his teaching—the claim advanced that in contemporary Judaism, in the Old Testament, and contemporary religions of Jesus’ day, his teachings in essence can be found. We believe chese attempts have been subjective and know the claims are not established. But it is significant that these critical scholars without hesitation and in great reverence, affirm Jesus to have been and to be the most unique and greatest character of all time, and that his uniqueness and greatness consist in his life—the fact that he practised what he taught. The question of Jesus: “Who can convict me of sin?” has not been answered in the affirmative and the verdict of Pilate: “I find no fault in him,” has not been reversed through nineteen centuries of history. And when he hung on the cross, he did not pray God to forgive him of any sin he had done, for he had committed none, but he asked the Father to forgive those who had crucified him. On one occasion Jesus said: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat: All things therefore whatsoever they bid you, these do and observe: but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” (Matthew 23:2-3). Through the centuries a number of great teachers have arisen but none have practised what they taught but Jesus alone. When Jesus taught humility, he took a towel and girded it about himself and washed his disciples’ feet, saying, “If I then your Lord and Master have washed your feet, so ought ye to wash one another’s feet.” When he taught forgiveness, he forgave many. When he said: “A man’s life con- sisteth not in the abundance of the things he possessed” Jesus practiced this principle by a life of selfdenial, and of service to others, and no man ever gave himself so unselfishly for others as he, exemplifying the truth he taught: ‘‘Whosoever shall lose his life will find it.” Many a teacher goes to teach giving up everything but the teacher. Many a preacher goes to preach giving up everything except the preacher. And, even, many a missionary goes to the foreign field giving up every-thing.except the missionary. But. Jesus came into the world ..emptying himself as. Paul expresses it and. lived and died completely for others, revealing the heart of the Father. From the beginning of his ministry Jesus knew that his teaching and his manner of life would not be accepted and that churchmen would at last crucify him on a cruel cross. If he had desired Jewish and world church acceptance at the sacrifice of principle and truth, an escape of the cross, and to have lived to a ripe old age, he would have joined the Jewish Sanhedrin. But he chose the way of the cross to show men the fullest expression of the love of God for them and to demon-, strate the greatest principle in heaven and on earth (John 12:24-25). Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit. He that loveth his life loseth it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. In the parts of Caesarea Phillippi Jesus announced to his disciples his approaching death at Jerusalem and steadfastly set his face toward it. Sometime thereafter, arriving in Jerusalem triumphantly welcomed by shouts of praises from those who one week later cried “crucify him.” On Thursday night he ate the last passover with his disciples, announcing to them that one of them should betray him.

Judas went out into the blackness of the night on his still darker errand while Jesus and the eleven remained in the upper room and Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, thereafter departing with them for Gethsemane to pray. He stationed eight of them at the entrance of the garden, taking Peter, James, and John farther into the garden with him, requesting them to wait while he went a short distance to pray, for his soul was exceedingly sorrowful even unto death. He went about a stone’s cast and fell upon the ground and prayed three times: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me; nevertheless not my will but thy will,” returning each time to find the trusted three apostles asleep. Someone has said it must have been harder for Jesus by taking the three into the garden with him. The New Testament says his sweat was not water but blood and let us remember this was Gethsemane and not Calvary. We shall ever know the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane with the shadow and the loneliness of the cross in bold outline before him, with three bosom disciples asleep and one outside betraying him. The ordeal must have been unbearable for Jesus, for God dispatched an angel to strengthen him. About that time Judas led his mob of churchmen to Gethse- mane to arrest Jesus and to carry him to the house of Caiaphas for a Jewish trial.

All the disciples forsook Jesus except John, Peter following afar off and denying him at the trial, when Jesus needed him most. Jesus was condemned to death by the Jewish court, but the power of the execution of a death sentence having been taken from them, they had to go to the Roman governor, Pilate, with the case of Jesus. Pilate found no fault in him but yielded to the populace and the Jewish church leaders in their demand for his crucifixion. In mockery of his claim to be king, a scarlet robe was placed on his body and a crown of thorns on his head, and a reed in his right hand. They spat on him and took the reed and smote him on the head and compelled one of Cyrene to bear the cross to Golgotha where Jesus with two criminals was crucified. There with nails through hands that had always helped others, he hung with all the weight of his body suspended upon those nails, each move of his body tearing wider the wounds and adding to the torture. Cicero tells us that the most horrible of all deaths was the cross and that no Roman citizen should die upon one. As Jesus hung on the cross the mob came by and railed at him saying: “He saved others, let him save himself.” One of the early church fathers tells us that they turned up their noses at Jesus. But Jesus looked upon them out of the great compassion of his soul and asked his Father to forgive them.

About the sixth hour darkness was over land until the ninth hour.
Well might the sun in darkness hide,
And shut his glories in,
When Christ, the Mighty Maker, died For man, the creature s sin.

Jesus cried: “My God, my God, why hast thou for-saken me?” Oh, the loneliness of Jesus in that hour. All had forsaken him except John, his mother, and a few women and now it seemed God had left him. But soon Jesus said: “It is finished,” and commended his spirit unto God. He was taken from the cross and buried in Joseph’s new tomb. Caiphas, Pilate, and even his disciples thought all was done—Christ had died in shame and his work was a failure, but not so for on the third day by the power of God he was resurrected from the tomb, regardless of the Roman seal that had been placed on it and the Roman soldiers that had guarded it. He spent forty days and nights after his resurrection with his disciples, speaking unto them the tilings concerning the kingdom of God, ascending to heaven from Olivet's brow as wondering disciples looked on, having told them in Matthew 28:18-20 : “All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe, all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Some of you may be thinking, why the cross for Je-sus? It is true that thousands had died upon Roman crosses before Jesus, but practically all of them had died because they were worthy of death. But Jesus had done nothing worthy of crucifixion. He had committed no sin. Why should the Son of God die? We may think of the cross of Christ as representing two roads, the first of which is a long road, thousands of miles in length in which men through sacrifices and through burnt offerings sought reconciliation with God. The second road which the cross of Christ represents is the road of atonement, the road of God coming down in the very person of his Son as a manifestation of his immeasurable love unto the sons of men. Jesus Christ died upon the cross of Calvary for your sins and for mine. The story is told some years ago on a train was a young man in his late twenties. He was exceedingly nervous. He crossed one leg and then the other one, biting his fingernails, moving from one side of the seat to the other. Then he would get up and walk up and down the aisle of his coach. A minister was sitting near who observed that something was wrong, so he went over and attempted to talk with the man. Sitting beside him, he said, “My friend, I believe something is wrong. Will you tell me?” The man closed up as a clam. The minister said, “My friend, I am a minister. I am interested in you. I wish you would confide in me.” And the man closed up tighter. They rode on a little distance, the man no longer being able to refrain from telling his life story and his agonizing experience. Sq jbe.said/to the.preacher. ....“Years ago., over..the protests of'my father and mother, I left-home. I went into a life of sin and disgrace. Many months ago I became tired of it all and wanted to go back home, back to mother and dad, so I wrote a letter home asking dad if I might come back. Day after day, for months, I waited. No reply came from dad so one week ago today I wrote a letter to mother asking if I might return, but in the letter, I said, ‘Mother, I’m not going to wait for an answer, I’m boarding the train and if you and dad will let me come back home please place a white rag on a limb on the old crab apple tree in the old orchard by the railroad track.’ ” The man said, “Mr. Preacher, just around the curve is the old orchard and I’m frightened to death that there may be no rag on that crab apple tree.” The minister placed his arm around the man and said, “Close your eyes. I’ll look for you.” As the train went around the bend, and the preacher’s eyes caught just the glance of the crab apple tree, he said to his friend: “Why, my friend, look, there’s a white rag on every limb of that crab apple tree.” My friends, that was what was done on a large and world-wide scale by God in the long ago when Jesus hung on Calvary.

IV. The Meaning of Jesus for Today.
1. Why present conditions?
In our present world of chaos, confusion, sin-sickness, and a world which has been described by George Bernard Shaw as “the lunatic asylum for the other planets if they are inhabited,” what place has Jesus? Many men and women today are saying, “Why does God permit such a holocaust of war as the one in which the world is enveloped tonight? Was not the sending of Jesus Christ, his Son, into the world to bring peace to the sons of men, a failure? Is not God being defeated in his purposes?” Still others are saying, “Why doesn’t God do something about it?” He is, my friends, but not in your way and mine. He is doing it in a spiritual way. We all may be assured that he is far stronger than Mussolini, than Hitler, than Hirochito, or all three of them combined. His plans will materialize whatever those plans may be. It is reported that Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, America’s most famous pulpiteer, has said that the axis powers are being used by God to punish the democracies for their sins. Whether Dr. Fosdick is right, we are not here to discuss, but in other days Sargon II and Nebuchadrezzar were used to punish the children of Israel for their sins.

2. The verdict of history is that right will win and that the eternal things will abide.
“Truth though crushed to earth shall rise again The eternal years of God are hers.”
In that ancient civilization, out of which Abraham came, Hammurabi was a great king, and a man of tremendous power and importance, but it was not he, but Abraham who has lived through the centuries, and whose faith has been a stimulus to millions. Rome, in all her powers, came and went, but the humble Galilean whom it crucified, lives on.“Our little systems have their day They have their day and cease to be They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, 0 Lord, art more than they.”

3. Christ, the only hope of the world.
I submit to you that the only hope of the world tonight is the love of God which was manifested in the coming of Jesus Christ to the world and what his coming has meant. The problem is that Jesus has not been taken seriously. Theologians have been busily engaged arguing in theology, and not living the principles of Jesus. If the principle of the Golden Rule, “doing unto others as you would have others do unto us,” were prac-tised by the nations of the world, war would be no more. If the principle of the second mile, “Whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him two” were prac-ticed what a revolution in our conduct would come to pass. And if the admonition of Jesus to love our enemies could be fulfilled in our hearts, what a wonderful peace would fill our hearts and our homes. On the horizon, tonight, it is true there are dark clouds, clouds of war and clouds of hatred, yet I can see in the not- distant future, the passing away of those clouds and standing m their place the Prince of Peace with outstretched arms, saying, to the war-worn, war-torn nations of the earth, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls.”

After the close of World War No. I, Lloyd George said, “It is Christ, or chaos.” When World War No. II shall have come to a close, we shall feel more than ever the significance of the statement of Lloyd George. All shall share with Bernard Shaw who is reported to have said some years ago: “After reviewing the world of human events for sixty years I am prepared to state that I can see no way out of the world’s misery but the way Christ would take were he to undertake the work of a modern statesman.” Struthers Burt, one of our contemporary poets, has expressed the mood of our time in these lines:

“Out of the dark we come, nor know
Into what outer dark we go.
Wings sweep across the stars at night,
Sweep and are lost in flight,
And down the star-strewn windy lanes the sky
Is empty as before the wings went by.
We cannot brook the wide sun’s might,
We are alone and chilled by night;
We stand atremble and afraid
Upon the small worlds we have made;
Fearful,-lest all our poor control
hould turn and tear us to the soul;
A dread, lest we should be denied
The price we hold our ragged pride
So in the end we cast them by;
For a gaunt cross against the sky.

Nineteen centuries of experience are compelling men to turn to that “gaunt cross against the sky” and to the one who hangs upon it.