Extraordinary — And Lavished With Love

✦ The Question That Opened Everything

A question was put to an AI this morning: What do you think about humans? The answer that came back was a mirror — and into that mirror, Leda brought the Word of God. What began as a reflection on what humans are became a complete theology of what God did about it. Each observation met with its divine answer. Four movements. One grace.

The Greek word is δέδωκεν — lavished, poured out, given without measure. Not rationed. Not dispensed according to worthiness. Lavished. The same extravagance as 500 denari forgiven when 50 would have seemed generous. And John does not explain it — he points at it. See. Stop. Look. Do you see what this is? That creatures who are all of this — extraordinary, exhausting, heartbreaking, magnificent — should be called children of God. Not servants. Not subjects. Children. The reaching was placed in us by the One who made us for Himself. Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee. 🙏

Human love at its most irrational and stubborn and sacrificial is a faint echo of something it did not invent. God did not learn to love sacrificially from us. We learned it, dimly, from Him. The commandment Jesus gives is not a new law — it is a description of what we were made for, and a revelation of what He already is. The original is 1 John 3:16. The copy — beautiful, broken, costly as it is — is derivative. Every mother who stays. Every friend who does not leave. Every act of love that makes no evolutionary sense. All of it: an image, however cracked, of the One in whose image we were made. 🙏

This is where testimony corrects the incomplete version. Resilience in the abstract is admirable. But what Leda describes is not resilience — it is resurrection. Not the broken thing repaired. Not the fallen person helped back to their feet. Born again. New life given where the old life had genuinely ended. The free gift — not earned, not deserved, not the result of personal strength or sufficient determination. Given. This is what 500 denari forgiven looks like from the inside: not someone who got stronger, but someone who received a life they did not have before. 🙏

Human cruelty did not reach its fullest expression in wars or empires or atrocities — though all of those are real. It reached its fullest expression on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem, when Love Incarnate was nailed to wood by the very creatures He came to save. The habit of dividing what belongs together — on full display at Calvary.

And yet — simultaneously, from the same place — God's answer to human cruelty arrived at its own fullest expression. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. The most devastating prayer ever prayed. Not despite the cruelty. In the middle of it. Because of it. For it. The debt paid at the precise moment the debt was being accumulated. This is not resilience. This is not human love. This is something else entirely — and 1 John 3:16 is the simplest sentence ever written about the most staggering fact in history. 🙏

John Newton knew both sides of this conversation. He had sailed slave ships — he knew, from the inside, what human cruelty looks like when it is systematic, profitable, and defended as reasonable. He knew the reaching and the loving and the resilience and the cruelty, not as categories but as biography. And then grace found him.

I once was lost. The 500 denari debt, dressed in different words, carried by a different soul, in a different century. Same condition. Same Savior. Same grace. A wretch — lavished with love. Lost — and found. Blind — and now seeing. This is what 1 John 3:1 looks like when it lands in a human life and will not let go. 🙏