« In a sermon on John 3.16, included in the volume The Saviour of the World, that eminent theologian Benjamin B. Warfield insisted that « the world » in John 3.16 must be qualitatively rather than quantitatively. (…) The point, then, is not that the world is so big that it takes a great deal of love to embrace it but that the world is so bad that it takes an exeedingly great of love to love it at all.
John 3.16 makes an unimaginable declaration. It reveals the greatest marvel of history, an unfathomable mystery. It is that the holy God, in whose presence the very seraphs cover their faces with their wings because they cannot behold His resplendent holiness and, while doing so, cry out to one another : Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts : the whole earth is full of this glory (Isa. 6.2-3), loves sinful men, afflicted with spiritual leprosy, covered with leprosy from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet.
(…) The love of God wich lies at the very heart of the evangel is sovereign. And that means that the divine love, unlike human love, is not dependent on its object. »
Makarios 