Excerpts from
3:16: The Numbers of Hope
by
Max Lucado
Thomas Nelson w
September 11, 2007
John 3:16 – The Hope
Diamond of the Bible
For 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.
A twenty-six-word parade of hope: beginning
with God, ending with life, and urging us to do the same. Brief enough to write
on a napkin or memorize in a moment, yet solid enough to weather two thousand
years of storms and questions. If you know nothing of the Bible, start here. If
you know everything in the Bible, return here. We all need the reminder. The
heart of the human problem is the heart of the human. And God’s treatment is
prescribed in John 3:16.
He loves.
He gave.
We believe.
We live.
The words are to Scripture what the Mississippi
River is to America--an entryway into the Heartland. Believe or dismiss them,
embrace or reject them, any serious consideration of Christ must include them.
Would a British historian dismiss the Magna Carta? Egyptologists overlook the
Rosetta Stone? Could you ponder the words of Christ
and never immerse yourself into John 3:16?
The
verse is an alphabet of grace, a table of contents to the Christian hope, each
word a safety deposit box of jewels.
God Accepts Your
Failures
God does for you what Bill
Tucker’s father did for him. Bill was sixteen years old when his dad suffered a
health crisis and, consequently, lost his business. Even after Mr. Tucker
regained his health, the Tucker family struggled financially, barely getting
by.
Mr. Tucker, an entrepreneurial
sort, came up with an idea. He won the bid to reupholster the chairs at the
local movie theater. This stunned his family. He had never stitched a seat. He
didn’t even own a sewing apparatus. Still, he found someone to teach him the
skill and located an industrial strength machine. The family scraped together
every cent they had to buy it. They drained savings accounts and dug coins out
of the sofa. Finally, they had enough.
It was a fine day when Bill rode
with his dad to pick up the equipment. Bill remembers a jovial, hour-long trip
discussing the bright horizons this new opportunity afforded them. They loaded
the machine in the back of their truck, secured it right behind the cab. Mr.
Tucker then invited his son to drive home. I’ll let Bill tell you what
happened:
“As we were driving along, we
were excited, and I, like any sixteen-year-old driver, was probably not paying
enough attention to my speed. Just as we were turning on the cloverleaf to get
on the expressway, I will never ever, ever forget watching that sewing machine
that was already top-heavy, begin to tip. I slammed on the brakes, but it was
too late. I saw it go over the side. I jumped out and ran around the back of
the truck. As I rounded the corner, I saw our hope and our dream lying on its
side in pieces. And then I saw my dad, standing next to me, just looking. All
of his risk and all of his endeavor and all of his struggling and all of his
dream, all of his hope to take care of his family was lying there, shattered.
“You know what comes next, don’t
you? ‘Stupid, punk kid driving too fast, not paying attention, ruined the
family by taking away our livelihood.’ But that’s not what he said. He looked
right at me. ‘Oh Bill, I am so sorry.’
And he walked over, put his arms around me, and said, ‘Son, this is
going to be okay.’”[i]
God is whispering the same to you. Those are
his arms you feel. Trust him. That is his voice you hear. Believe him. Allow
the only decision-maker in the universe to comfort you. Life at times appears
to fall into pieces, seems irreparable. But it’s going to be ok. How can you
know? Because God so loved the world.
Death Can Mean Life
As far as medical exams are concerned, this one
was simple. As far as I’m concerned, no exam is simple if it couples the word irregular with heartbeat. I knew I was prone to have an accelerated pulse. When I see Denalyn, my ticker ramps up. When Denalyn brings
me a bowl of ice cream, you’d think a Geiger counter had struck pay dirt in my
chest.
Such palpitations are to be expected. It was
the random rhythms that concerned the cardiologist. You won’t find a kinder
physician. He did his best to assure me that, as far as heart conditions go,
mine isn’t serious, saying, “When it comes to cardiac concerns, you’ve got the
best kind.”
Forgive my anemic enthusiasm. But isn’t that
like telling the about-to-leap paratrooper: “Your parachute has a defect, but
it’s not the worst type”? I prefer the treatment of another heart doctor. He
saw my condition and made this eye-popping offer: “Let’s exchange hearts. Mine
is sturdy, yours is frail. Mine pure, yours diseased.
Take mine and enjoy its vigor. Give me yours. I’ll endure its irregularity.”
Where do you find such a physician? You can
reach him at this number--3:16. At the heart of this verse, he deals with the
heart of our problem:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…”
A Problem With Sin
This generation is oddly silent about sin.
Late-night talk shows don’t discuss humanity’s shortcomings. Some mental health
professionals mock our need for divine forgiveness. At the same time we rape
the earth, squander non-renewable resources, and let 24,000 people die daily
from hunger.[ii]
In these “modern” decades we have invented global threat, re-invented genocide
and torture. More people died in the wars of the 20th Century than
in all prior wars combined. From the Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians
in World War I to the 1990’s slaughter of three million people in Rwanda and Sudan.
Lurking between them: the Ukraine terror famine, Auschwitz, the rape of
Nanking, the Burma railway, Soviet gulag, Chinese cultural
revolution, Cambodian killing fields, Yugoslavian and Bangladesh
slaughters. Wars and genocides took 200 million souls in 100 years!
Barbarism, apparently, is alive and well on the
planet earth. Deny our sin? Quasimodo could more easily deny his hump.
Look to Jesus…and
Believe
Why did Jesus precede the 3:16 offer with a
reference to serpents in the wilderness?
Here is the back-story.
The wandering Israelites were grumbling at
Moses again. Though camped on the border of the Promised Land, and
beneficiaries of four decades of God’s provisions, the Hebrews
sound off like spoiled trust fund brats: “Why have you brought us up out of
Egypt to die in the wilderness?” (Num. 21:5 nkjv).
Same complaint,
seventieth verse.
Ex-slaves longing for Egypt. Dreaming of pyramids and
cursing the wasteland, pining for Pharaoh and vilifying Moses. They hate the
hot sand, the long days, and the manna, oh the manna. “Our
soul loathes this worthless bread” (v. 5 nkjv).
They’ve had all the manna burgers and manna
casseroles and manna peanut butter sandwiches they can stomach. And, God has
had all the moaning he can take. “So the Lord sent fiery serpents among the
people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died” (v. 6 nkjv).
Horror movie producers long to spawn such
scenes. Slithering vipers creep out of holes and rocks and serpentine through
the camp. People die. Corpses dot the landscape. Survivors plead to Moses to
plead to God for mercy. “ ‘We have sinned…pray to the
Lord that he take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people.
Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and
it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live. So
Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent
had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent he lived.’” (vv. 7-9 nkjv).
This passage was a solemn prophecy.
And it was also a simple promise. Snake-bit
Israelits found healing by looking to the pole. Sinners will find healing by
looking to Christ. “Everyone who believes in him will have eternal life” (Jn.
3:15 nlt).
The simplicity troubles many people. We’d
expect a more complicated cure, a more elaborate treatment. Moses and his
followers might have expected more as well. Manufacture an ointment. Invent a
therapeutic lotion. Treat one another. Or, at least, fight back. Break out the
sticks and stones and attack the snakes.
We, too, expect a more proactive assignment, to
have to conjure up a remedy for our sin. Some mercy seekers have donned
hairshirts, climbed cathedral steps on their knees, or traversed hot rocks on
bare feet.
Others of us have written our own Bible verse,
“God helps those who help themselves” (Popular Opinion 1:1). We’ll fix
ourselves, thank you. We’ll make up for our mistakes with contributions, our
guilt with busyness, overcome failures with hard work. We’ll find salvation the
old- fashioned way; we’ll earn it.
Christ, in contrast, says to us what the
rope-holding girl said to me: “Your part is to trust. Trust me to do what you
can’t.”
By the way, you take similar steps of trust
daily, even hourly. You believe the chair will support you, so you set your
weight on it. You believe water will hydrate you, so you swallow it. You trust
the work of the light switch, so you flip it. You have faith the doorknob will
work, so you turn it.
You regularly trust power you cannot see to do a
work you cannot accomplish. Jesus invites you to do the same with him.
Just him. Not Moses or any other
leader. Not other snake-bitten souls. Not even you. You can’t fix you. Look to
Jesus … and believe.
Pondering Hell Deeply
The hero of heaven is God. Angels don’t worship
mansions or glittering avenues. Neither gates nor jewels prompt the hosts to
sing…God does. His majesty stirs the pen of heaven’s poets and the awe of her
citizens.
They enjoy an eternity-long answer to David’s
prayer: “One thing I ask of the Lord…to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord” (Ps.
27:4). What else warrants a look? Inhabitants of heaven forever marvel at the
sins God forgave, the promises he keeps, the plan he executes. He’s not the
grand marshal of the parade, he is the parade; he’s not the main event, he’s
the only event. His Broadway features a single stage and star: himself. He
hosts the only production and invites every living soul to attend.
He, at this very moment, issues invitations by
the millions. He whispers through the kindness of a grandparent, shouts through
the tempest of a tsunami. Through the funeral he cautions: “Life is fragile.”
Through a sickness he reminds: “Days are numbered.” God may speak through
nature or nurture, majesty, or mishap. But through all and to all he invites:
“Come, enjoy me forever.”
Yet many people have no desire to do so. They
don’t want anything to do with God. He speaks, they cover their ears. He commands, they scoff. They don’t want him telling them
how to live. They mock what he says about marriage, money, sex, or the value of
human life. They regard his son as a joke and the cross as utter folly.[iii]
They spend their lives telling God to leave them alone. And, at the moment of
their final breath, he honors their request: “Get away from me, you who do
evil. I never knew you (Mt. 7:23). This verse escorts us to the most somber of
Christian realities: hell.
No topic stirs greater resistance. Who wants to
think about eternal punishment? We prefer to casualize the issue, making jokes
about its residents or turning the noun into a flippant adjective. “That was a
hell of a steak.” Odd, that we don’t do the same with lesser tragedies. You
never hear: “My golf game has gone to prison.”
Or “This is an AIDS of a traffic
jam.” Seems a conspiracy is afoot to minimize hell.
Some prefer to sanitize the subject, dismissing
it as a moral impossibility.
“No person…” defied atheist Bertrand Russell,
“who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”[iv]
Or, as is more commonly believed, “A loving God would not send people to hell.”
Religious leaders increasingly agree. Martin Marty, a church historian at the
University of Chicago, canvassed one hundred years of scholarly journals for
entries on hell. He didn’t find one. “Hell,” he observed, “disappeared and no
one noticed.”[v]
Easy to understand why. Hell is a hideous
topic. Any person who discusses it glibly or proclaims it gleefully has failed
to ponder it deeply. Scripture writers dip pens in gloomy ink to describe its
nature. They speak of: “the blackest darkness” (Jude 13); “everlasting
destruction” (2 Thess. 1:9); “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Mt. 8:12). A
glimpse into the pit won’t brighten your day, but it will enlighten your
understanding of Jesus. He didn’t avoid the discussion. Quite
the contrary. He planted a one-word caution sign between you and hell’s
path: perish. “Whoever believes in
him shall not perish but have eternal
life” (Jn. 3:16).
Hell of A Choice
There will be no atheists in hell (Phil.
2:10-11), but there will be no God-seekers either.
But, still we wonder, is the punishment fair?
Such a penalty seems inconsistent with a God of love--overkill. A sinner’s
rebellion doesn’t warrant an eternity of suffering, does it? Isn’t God
overreacting?
A man once accused me of the same. Some years
ago, when my daughters were small, we encountered an impatient shopper at a
convenience store. My three girls were selecting pastries from the donut shelf.
They weren’t moving quickly enough for him, so he leaned over their shoulders and
barked, “You kids hurry up. You’re taking too long.” I, an aisle away,
overheard the derision, and approached him. “Sir, those are my daughters. They
didn’t deserve those words. You need to apologize to them.”
He minimized the offense. “I didn’t do anything
that bad.”
My response? That verdict was not
his to render. Those were my daughters he had hurt. Who was he to challenge my
reaction? Who are we to challenge God’s? Only he knows the full story, the
number of invitations the stubborn-hearted have refused and the slander they’ve
spewed.
Accuse God of unfairness? He has wrapped
caution tape on hell’s porch and posted a million-and-one red
flags outside the entrance. To descend its stairs, you’d have to cover
your ears, blindfold your eyes, and, most of all,
ignore the epic sacrifice of history: Christ,
in God’s hell on humanity’s cross, crying out to the blackened sky: “My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46). You’ll more easily capture the
Pacific in a jar than describe that sacrifice in words. But something akin to
this occurred. God, who hates sin, unleashed his wrath on his sin-filled son.
Christ, who never sinned, endured the awful forsakenness of hell. The supreme
surprise of hell is this: Christ went there so you won’t have to. Yet, hell
could not contain him. He arose, not just from the dead, but from the depths.
“Through death he [destroyed] him who has the power of death, that is, the
devil.” (Heb. 2:14 nkjv)
Christ emerged from Satan’s domain with this
declaration: “I have the keys of Hades and death” (Rev. 1:18 nkjv). He is the warden of eternity.
The door he shuts, no one opens. The door he opens, no one shuts (Rev. 3:7).
Thanks to Christ, this earth can be the nearest
you come to hell.
But apart from Christ, this earth is the
nearest you’ll come to heaven.
A friend told me about the final hours of her
aunt. The woman lived her life with no fear of God or respect for his Word. She
was an atheist. Even in her final days, she refused to permit anyone to speak
of God or eternity. Only her Maker knows her last thoughts and eternal destiny,
but her family heard her final words. Hours from death, scarcely conscious of
her surroundings, she opened her eyes. Addressing a face only visible to her,
she defied: “You don’t know me? You don’t know me?”
Was she hearing the pronouncement of Christ?
“Depart from me, I never knew you” (Mt. 7:23 esv).
Contrast her words with those of a
Christ-follower. The dying man made no secret of his faith or longing for
heaven. Two days before he succumbed to cancer, he awoke from a deep sleep and
told his wife: “I’m living in two realities. I’m not allowed to tell you. There
are others in this room.” And, on the day he died, he opened his eyes and
asked, “Am I special? Why, that I should be allowed to see all
this?”
Facing death with fear
or faith, dread or joy. “Whoever believes in him will not perish…” God makes the
offer. We make the choice.
The 3:16ed Life
“Free
flight: Rio de Janeiro to Miami, Florida.”
I wasn’t
the only person to hear about the offer, but one of the few to phone and
request details. The courier service offered an airline ticket to anyone
willing to carry a bag of mail to the States. The deal was tantalizingly
simple:
Meet the company representative at the airport,
where you’ll be given a duffel bag of documents and one ticket. Check the bag
when you check in for the flight. Retrieve the bag in Miami before you make
your connection. Give it to the uniformed courier representative who’ll await
you beyond customs.
No company
makes such offers any more. But this was 1985--years before intense airport
security. My dad was dying of ALS, airline tickets expensive, and my checking
account as thin as a Paris supermodel. Free ticket?
The offer sounded too good to be true.
So I walked
away from it.
Many do the
same with John 3:16. Millions read the verse. Only a handful
trust it. Wary of a catch, perhaps? Not needy
enough, maybe. Cautioned
by guarded friends?
I was.
Other Rio residents saw the same offer. Some read it and smelled a rat. “Don’t
risk it,” one warned me. “Better to buy your own ticket.”
But I
couldn’t afford one. Each call to Mom brought worse news.
“He’s back
in the hospital.”
“Unable
to breathe without oxygen.”
“The doctor
says it’s time to call hospice.”
So I
revisited the flyer. Desperation heightened my interest.
Doesn’t it
always?
When he
asks for a divorce or she says, “It’s over.” When the coroner
calls, the kids rebel, or the finances collapse, when desperation typhoons into
your world, God’s offer of a free flight home demands a second look.
John 3:16 morphs from a nice verse to a life vest.
Some of you
are wearing it. You can recount the day you put it on. For you, the passage
comforts like your favorite blanket:
God
so loved…
believes in him…
shall not perish…
eternal life.
These words
have kept you company through multiple windswept winters. I pray they warm you
through the ones that remain.
Others of
you are still studying the flyer. Still pondering the
possibility, wrestling with the promise. One day wondering what kind of
fool offer this is, the next wondering what kind of fool would turn it down.
I urge you
not to. Don’t walk away from this one. Who else can get you home? Who else has
turned their grave into a changing closet and offered to do the same with yours?
Take Jesus’s offer. Get on board. You don’t want to miss this chance to see
your Father.
I didn’t. I
called the company and signed up. Denalyn drove me to the airport. I found the
courier employee, accepted the passage, checked the bag, and took my seat on
the plane, smiling like I’d just found a forgotten gift under the Christmas
tree.
Do likewise. You don’t
need to go to the airport, but you do need to make a move. You need to give God
your answer: “Christ will live in your heart as you open the door and let him
in” (Eph. 3:17 msg). Say yes to
him. Your prayer needs no eloquence, just honesty.
Father, I believe you
love this world. You gave your one and only Son so I can live forever with you.
Apart from you, I die. With you I live. I choose life. I choose you.
If you
aren’t sure you’ve told him, you haven’t. We can’t get on board and not know
it. Nor can we get on board and hide it. No stowaways permitted.
Christ-followers go public with their belief. We turn from bad behavior to good
(repentance). We stop following our passions and salute our new captain
(confession). We publicly demonstrate our devotion (baptism).[vi]
We don’t
keep our choice a secret. Why would we? We’re on our way home for Christ’s
sake.
Thanks to
the courier folks, I was present at my father’s death.
Thanks to
God, he’ll be present at yours. He cares too much not to be. Believe in him and
you
will…
not…
perish.
You
will have life, eternal life, forever.
# # #
3:16 – The Numbers of Hope
By Max Lucado
Available September 11, 2007
Thomas Nelson Publishing
Hardcover, ISBN NUMBER, $22.99
256 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Religion/Christianity/Christian
Life
Review copies and limited
interviews are available upon request.
Contact Heather Adams, Thomas
Nelson, 615-902-2224, hadams@thomasnelson.com