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FOR GOD SO LOVED… • Feb 15th 1973

The Love of God (Part 4) – Why Did God So Love the World?

Eternal Purpose Gene's Messages to the Church in Isla Vista, CA New Testament The Epistles The Gospels

What does “For God so loved the world” really reveal about the heart of God? In Part 4 of The Love of God, Gene Edwards explores John 3:16, the love of God, the Bride of Christ, Adam and Eve, Israel, and the extraordinary purpose of God revealed through Jesus Christ.

Beginning with creation, Gene considers Adam’s deep capacity to love and his discovery that he had no counterpart. When Eve is brought forth from Adam, Gene presents their relationship as a picture pointing toward something far greater: God’s desire for a people who will love Him and become His counterpart.

The message then turns to Israel. Through God’s relationship with His people, Gene explores the biblical picture of a God who desires wholehearted love: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Even when Israel turns away, God’s love does not disappear.

This leads to the heart of the message—and to John 3:16:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…”

Gene presents these familiar words within the sweeping story of God’s eternal love and His desire for a bride. Fallen humanity seems like the most unlikely place for God to find what He desires, yet His love reaches directly into the world.

Then Christ comes.

Jesus Christ enters humanity carrying all that God is—His life, light, purity, wisdom, power, and love. As Jesus comes from the Jordan and the Holy Spirit descends upon Him, Gene invites us to see Christ not merely as part of a familiar Bible story, but as the expression of God’s extraordinary love and eternal purpose.

This teaching offers a deeply personal perspective on God’s love, John 3:16, the Bride of Christ, Christian spiritual growth, God’s eternal purpose, and the life of Jesus Christ.

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For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Well, brothers and sisters, I am now really…I hope you can say that. God comes to get His bride.

Here is God, and He has finally said, “The hour has arrived.” The real, true hour has come after all eternity and thousands of years. I’ve come to get My bride. You never heard a love story like this. He was still spirit, invisible, unseen, unknown. If you gave me one solid year and met here every night, I could not describe to you the end of what it means to be incarnate. One of the most powerful things I ever heard in all my life was a sister in Tyler, Texas, talking about the incarnation, and she said that would be like a man becoming a roach.

There was desperation in God. This was not the one He had planned, was it? Is this where He had planned to get His bride from, this fallen race that had done this terrible, illegal thing? No, but the love and the desire to express that love, to have one whom He could love, drove Him. I want you to know something else: when He got here, He was still determined that what He wanted would be beautiful and be an equal counterpart.

Look at God. God is spirit. He didn’t surrender the fact He was God one bit when He became man. All that God was—all the emotion, all the feeling, all the purity, all the eternal wisdom, all the infinite experience, all the life, all the light—it was all still there with the love. And now it is inside the form of a human.

The Lord Jesus Christ stepped out of the banks of the Jordan River, and the Holy Spirit descended on Him, and the Godhead rested totally in Him. I want you to know that as He walked up out of those banks, He walked in power. He had all that God had of love in Him, plus all that man had in him.

Can you feel that? Can you feel it? He was alone again. Do you understand? Was He God? Was He man? Had God been alone? All alone?

(Continued in Part 5)

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