For all the times I’ve quoted or cited John 3:16, until today I’ve never preached it as a focal text. So I pray for God’s help.
We’re talking about loving God, not in the verb sense but in the adjective sense—as a description of divine character rather than as a prescription for human behavior. Last Sunday we noted that while mankind has never been absent from God’s mind and heart His love for humanity has to flow from His love for Himself, since, unlike the uncreated God, we are God-created beings. And when it comes to divine self-love we can rule out all the nastiness of human self-love, because the God of the Bible is not a self-absorbed individual but rather a community of three perfect Persons existing in an eternal state of mutual harmony, worship, and love. And it’s into this perfect, eternal love between divine Father and Son that Jesus prayed in John 17 His disciples would be brought—along with all who would believe because of them. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” then derives from, “For God so loved His only begotten Son.” For eternity as the Father has gazed lovingly upon His Son He has gazed lovingly upon all His chosen sons and daughters who would be redeemed by His blood—including a man named Nicodemus.
The Context – A Private Conversation
Before we take John 3:16 apart, we should note that it isn’t part of a sermon; it comes to us in a private conversation. Going to Jesus alone at night was risky for Nicodemus, a man John calls a ruler of the Jews in 3:1. Most Pharisees had written Jesus off as just another preacher trying to make a name for himself; but not Nicodemus, who admits in v. 2 that Jesus is “a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs … unless God is with him.” Even though Nicodemus sees divine power at work in Jesus, Jesus tests his sincerity when He says in v. 3, “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The Pharisees were sticklers about law-keeping—they felt that was how to please God and get to heaven. But here Jesus names a requirement that Nicodemus can’t meet: he can’t be born again! And when Jesus explains that it’s a spiritual rebirth not a physical one, He tests him again in v. 8 when He says that only God’s Spirit can accomplish spiritual rebirth: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Nicodemus probably didn’t realize it at the time, but the truth is he wouldn’t have even come to Jesus if the Holy Spirit hadn’t moved him to do so. He asks, “How can these things be?” in v. 9. In v. 10 Jesus replies, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” He’s not trying to insult Nicodemus; He’s showing him that the deepest, most important truths of God can’t be grasped by intellect alone but only by faith. “Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.” Jesus switches from the singular to the plural ‘you’ here. Nicodemus’ eyes are being opened, but Jesus speaks to Pharisaic unbelief in general when He says four times in v. 12, “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” For Nicodemus, the other Pharisees, and you and I to truly KNOW and WORSHIP a God who is unseen, we must first BELIEVE that He is.
But believing in God isn’t the problem. According to Ps. 14:1 only fools say there’s no God. But we can’t really worship a God we don’t know. That’s why in Acts 17 when Paul saw the altar inscribed “To the unknown God” in Athens he seized the opportunity to tell them who that God was. To know God we must believe He is; to worship God we must know Him; and to know Him He must show Himself to us. Jesus says in v. 13, “No one has ascended into heaven except He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Nicodemus may not have believed that Jesus was the Son of Man but he certainly didn’t doubt that Jesus was claiming to be the Son of Man. So to further help Nicodemus connect the dots to see Him for who He really was, Jesus identifies with the Pharisees’ primary role model—Moses—when He says in v. 14, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…”
If you wonder where that image comes from, Jesus is alluding to a story in Numbers 21:4-9:
From Mount Hor they (the Israelites) set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way. And the people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.” Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. And the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you. Pray to the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.
Jesus used an earthly event from Israel’s past to speak of a future earthly event involving a heavenly Being—Himself—whereby, as He says in v. 15, “whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.”
So that’s the preceding context. Like an earthen ramp leading up to a bridge over a bay, Jesus prepares Nicodemus for what He’s about to say in v. 16. But there’s a descending ramp on the other side of v. 16. In fact, if we lift v. 16 off the page and slide v. 17 up under v. 15, Jesus’ thought flows smoothly from one to the next—especially since the tail end of v. 16 is almost identical to v. 15. Here’s how vv. 14-18 sound without v. 16 in the middle:
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
Without John 3:16 we still get a good description of salvation. We have the Son of Man being lifted up—that’s a picture of the crucifixion, the atonement that washes away our sins. Belief shows up several times—that’s essential. We’ve got God not condemning the world but saving the world through His Son whom He has sent. We’ve got God condemning everyone who doesn’t believe in His Son’s name. All the key components of salvation are here, even without v. 16.
The Missing Ring
Friday, as I sat writing this sermon, I took my hands off the keyboard and folded them in my lap to re-read the paragraph I’d just written, when my right hand noticed that my wedding band was not on my left hand. So I started searching my pockets and gloves, checking by the water fountain and in the bathroom, I went to my car—it was just gone. I didn’t stop being married to Deborah when my wedding ring came off. I didn’t stop loving her and she didn’t stop loving me. In fact, ironically, not five minutes after I noticed my ring missing, I got one of those texts from Deborah that I love to get just letting me to know I was on her mind and how thankful she was to be my wife. When I texted back that I’d lost my ring, she said I was more important than a ring.
Now I hope you’ve seen more evidence of my marital commitment to Deborah over the years than just a wedding ring. But guess what, even though I don’t need a ring to be married I still want to wear one! I want that visible, blatant, outward symbol declaring to the world that there’s a woman who has my heart. You know I love Deborah, and she knows it. But not everybody out there knows about it; and I want it to show.
That’s what we’d miss without v. 16. John 3:16 is the wedding band on the ring finger of John chapter 3. In all these other verses we’ve got plenty of evidence of salvation, but here we get the sparkle, the shine, the gleam, the glow. What we assume without John 3:16, John 3:16 says plainly. What’s implicit in its surrounding context is explicit here. God’s means of salvation (the atoning sacrifice of Jesus), His mode of salvation (belief in Christ), His method of salvation (rebirth by the Holy Spirit)—they’re all here in other verses. But in John 3:16 we get His motive: “For God so LOVED the world…”
The Bridge
That’s why we’re going to put v. 16 back on the page. Love is the bridge that connects the two ramps; it’s the bridge that spans the bay. That God wants to save sinners is clear in other verses in this conversation; but why He wants to save those sinners isn’t. That God sent His Son is clear in other statements by Jesus; but the nature of that sending isn’t. Why does God want to save sinners? Because He loves them! How did God send His Son? As a loan? As wages? No. As a gift! “For God so loved the world that GAVE his only Son.”
John 3:16 has three parts, each containing something that isn’t stated anywhere else in this chapter: 1) For God so loved the world… 2) that He gave his only Son…, and 3) that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Let’s look at them one by one.
God’s Love
First is God’s love. Nowhere else is God’s love mentioned in John 3. Man’s love is mentioned in v. 19: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.”
Loving is natural for God. John says famously in 1 John 4:8, “He who loves not knows not God for God is love,” and a few verses later, “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” God doesn’t have to muster up love for the world when He’d really rather not. Don’t make the mistake of some who see Jesus as the loving member of the Trinity who came to the earth of His own desire, and that the Father changed His mind about mankind when He saw how much His Son loved us. The Trinity has always been united in love for the world.
But what does Jesus mean by “the world”? He literally means everything and everyone. John says in John 1:3 that Jesus (the Word) created everything; and Moses says in Genesis, God saw that everything He created was “very good.” So there’s nothing and no one that God doesn’t love in it’s original created form and purpose. Yes, sin has perverted everyone and everything in God’s creation, and God certainly doesn’t love sin; but God has always had a plan to deal with sinners: faith, redemption, and life for His chosen ones; obstinance, condemnation, and death for everyone else. And what’s more, God has always had in view the total restoration of the world to its original beauty and purpose. And His view of the redeemed, restored world—a new heaven and a new earth—has always been seen through the lens of the cross. Which of course brings us to the second part of the verse: God’s gift.
God’s Gift
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” We have the Son of Man descending from heaven in v. 13. In v. 17 Jesus says, “God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” In v. 19 Jesus refers to Himself as light: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light…” You can’t read John 3—even without v. 16—and miss the fact that God is sending His Son into the world. But lots of things can be sent. All kinds of things are sent to you in the mail: bills, payments, junk mail, advertisements, coupons… But what moves your heart the most? And, more importantly, what kind of ‘sent thing’ shows you the sender’s heart the most? It’s a gift, right, something bestowed upon you out of a heart of deep kind and compassionate, affectionate love.
It’s really important that Jesus doesn’t say, “For God so loved the world that He gave eternal life…” and leave it at that. Of course God does give us eternal life, as Paul says in Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Sadly, many see eternal life as the end-all/be-all of God’s love; they see eternal life as the gift, and Jesus as merely the packaging in which the gift arrives. What many really want is eternal life, and how they get it isn’t all that important. Some people think they get it by blowing people up in the name of their god. Some people think they get it by being kind and generous to others. Some think they get it by following all their religion’s rules. And yes, some believe they get it by believing in Jesus.
If you picture heaven as giving Jesus a curtsy at the pearly gate where you politely thank Him for dying on the cross for you before you set off into an eternal life of bliss into the flowery meadow of a heavenly paradise, you’ve got it all wrong! Jesus IS the gift! Eternal life is the packaging, the unending heavenly context in which Jesus—the GIFT—is to be enjoyed. And you do not want to miss out on that enjoyment, which brings us to the third unique feature of John 3:16.
God’s Pledge
I noted earlier, the last part of v. 16 is almost identical to v. 15. The only difference is the phrase in v. 16 ‘should not perish.’ Nicodemus (and we) could assume from Jesus’ statement in v. 15 that earthly life isn’t forever. We’ve all been to enough funerals and driven past enough cemeteries to know that nobody lives forever on earth. But Jesus isn’t talking about dying physically; He’s talking about a spiritual perishing. And because He puts it right next to ‘but have eternal life,’ He wants us to know that it’s also an eternal perishing. To die without believing in the Son God sent is to die forever. And by that Jesus doesn’t mean—like the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe—that we simply cease to exist. He means to endure consciously in a state of eternal dying. Think about perishable food items; when they go bad there’s no bringing them back. You and I have all gone bad in sin, and God offers to bring us back by a spiritual rebirth through faith in Jesus Christ. But once the expiration date is passed and the physical body ceases to breathe, if we have not received God’s loving gift by faith, there’s no possibility of rescue.
That is true condemnation: to eternally miss out on God’s love, God’s Gift, and the eternal life packaging in which God’s love and gift are to be enjoyed is a fate infinitely worse than physical death. And it is supremely tragic in that it can be so simply avoided. Simply does not mean easily—confessing your sins and believing in the grace of an unseen God and Savior is not easy. By ‘simply’ I mean it’s not complicated.
If you’re here today you’ve ascended the ramp; and now I urge you to cross the bridge over the bay of sin and eternal death into the land of no condemnation. Gaze into the gleaming golden bright wedding ring of God, and embrace your heavenly Groom who’s been given to you. And if you’ve done so, urge someone else to do so.