This week we are opening The Core series with a message on God's love. Yet like many such big ideas it can be hard to define or understand. Often we define them by pointing first to their opposite, stating what they are not. In of the most famous passages on God’s love, John 3.16, John the Apostle does this in two ways.  

First he states the object of God’s love as ‘the world.’ When we hear this we generally take it as a way to talk about people. God loves all people. This is certainly true, but not the primary meaning of this term in Jesus day. The term as John would use it in other places does not refer to people but to the world system, so to speak. A system in organized rebellion against God and his ways (see John 1.10). The ‘world’ did not merely discount God’s Son they murdered him.

Yet to this ‘world’ God moved and acted. He pursued us knowing rejection was the likely outcome (Romans 5.8).

Knowing how strange this would sound to his first readers John followed with a second contrasting statement, verse John 3:17. God DID NOT come to give us what we feel, in our rebellion, we deserved. Judgment.