John 3:14-17 “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. 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. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Here Jesus introduces us to the Father’s role in our salvation: the Lover of the world, the Giver and Sender of the saving sacrifice. This is all rather astounding in light of the world he professes to love and intends to save. This is the world that in the last century killed between 300 million and 1 billion of its fellow citizens by war, crime, and genocide, depending on whose estimates you follow. This is the world in which 5.5 billion of its 8.2 billion people live in daily open defiance of his very first commandment, which says, “No other Gods.” This is the world in which at least half the Christians are Christians in name only, and every one of them maintains a foot in both God and the devil’s camps.

This is the world that killed God’s Son when he sent him. So we can lay aside any ideas that the world had charmed God into loving it or in any way earned and deserved his affection. No reasonable human would have worked to save a relationship with another person who treated them the way we had treated God. There would be talk of toxic relationships and maintaining proper boundaries and a safe distance.

God the Father so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. He sent him into the world to save it. This not only went against the treatment he had received from the people he had made. It went against every normal instinct of a parent who cares for his child, a father who loves his son.

Fathers are protectors. In January 2018, a Rhode Island father died trying to rescue his son from a burning home. In March of 2025, an Oklahoma father carried his son to safety through wildfires that swept through large portions of the state, but the father himself died from burns he suffered in the process. Over the Memorial Day weekend this year, a father in Denison, TX drowned while rescuing his son who fell out of the boat from which they were fishing. Headlines like this are not hard to find. You may have stories of men you knew personally who did heroic things to save their sons.

In God’s kingdom, the Father loves us so much that he makes his Son a gift. He sends him into our world, fully aware of what that world will do to him. When we come to believe in the Father’s great gift of love like this, we receive eternal life from him. We become the sons and daughters he has rescued. The price he was willing to pay is proof of his love.