I’m reminded at the end of a Lord’s Day such as this one, and then a week such as this has been, of what the apostle Paul says in Romans chapter 10 – “How then will they call on Him on whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? How are they to preach unless they are sent?” And then Paul quotes from the prophet Isaiah, “As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.’” And there may be no more concise, familiar encapsulation of that good news than the one we will look at this evening. We will be looking at John chapter 3, verse 16, a very familiar verse. Let’s ask the Lord’s blessing on the reading and preaching of His Word.
Our great God and loving heavenly Father, we give You thanks this evening for Your Word. We thank You for this opportunity to hear it and to be instructed by Your Spirit. And we pray that’s what would happen. We ask for the ministry of Your Holy Spirit, convicting us and training us and equipping us and ultimately Father showing us the glorious good news of Your Son, our risen Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Father, give us open ears this evening. Give us soft and responsive hearts that it may be said of us that this evening we heard Your voice and we did not harden our hearts. Father, we ask these things in Jesus’ name, amen.
John 3:16. This is the Word of God:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Sometimes texts like this, which are so familiar to us, are often hardest for us to stop and reflect upon. I am reminded of the story that a friend of mine used to tell. In fact, he had the office right next to me for nine years. And he was from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado; that’s where he had grown up. And he told me that when he was a young child growing up, he was used to this setting, used to the scene in which he was raised. In fact, he said when he got his driver’s license at age 16 it would frustrate him whenever tourists were in the area because they would always be stopping and pulling into an overlook and looking at the scenery and he just waited to get from Point A to Point B. But then what happened was, after he went to college, his parents moved away and he went home to a different place and he didn’t go back to visit his boyhood home for some years; I think it was about 10 years before he went back to Colorado. And when he returned, he said, “I realized I had become one of those tourists. It was like I was seeing it all for the first time. I went to the home where I grew up and it looked like a postcard to me.” He was just staggered by the greatness and the grandeur and the beauty of this place that had once been so familiar to him.
And that can happen to us, I think, when we come to the Word of God sometimes. We come to a passage like this that we may have heard many times and we fail to take in the beauty, the grandeur of this text. Martin Luther called this text, John 3:16, “the Bible in miniature.” He said that all the great truths of Scripture actually converge at this point in this text – John 3:16.
Now what’s the context of John 3:16? Well there’s a context, a broader context from the Gospel of John. John presents Jesus as the Word made flesh, the true and living God who assumes human flesh and a human nature to bring light to the world and salvation to His people. And if you read the beginning of John’s gospel, he explains all that to us. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen His glory.” At the end of his gospel, he summarizes what he was trying to do in the book. He describes the way in which there could have been many things written about Jesus, but he said, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.” So that’s the broad context of the gospel of John.
The narrower context from John chapter 3 involves Jesus’ discussion with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. And as Nicodemus approaches Jesus to try to find out more about Him and about His message, Jesus confronts him with a very stark command, a very stark obligation. He says, “You must be born again.” And as you know if you’ve read that part of John 3, Nicodemus doesn’t understand what Jesus is saying; he doesn’t understand exactly what Jesus means. But Jesus is insistent that unless a man be born again he cannot enter the kingdom of God. And then Jesus goes on to describe for him just what it means to be born of God, to be born again, to be born by the Holy Spirit.
And that leads us, really, into this verse, this Bible in miniature that we have in John 3:16. And I want to suggest to you that the first major point, the first major heading if you will of this text, this very familiar verse, is the love of God the Father. “For God so loved the world.” Now today in our contemporary context, the love of God is actually a popular theme. In fact, many times people just simply assume that God loves them and that becomes perhaps the opening point for a further explanation of who God is. And some of that is driven by the fact that we live in a time in which we are very self absorbed and so the logic goes something like this – “I love myself and so God must love me.” And that’s the kind of thinking that we engage in today, but it is actually a surprising point that is made here about the love of God the Father. First of all, the terminology is not unique to this verse. John uses this terminology quite a number of times by my account in this gospel. Seven times he describes God the Father’s love for God the Son. Twelve times he describes how the God, the triune God revealed in Scripture loves Jesus’ disciples. Five times he explains how His disciples must love Christ. And at least four times the gospel of John speaks of the disciples’ love for one another.
But this, this is a shocking use of the terminology of God’s love because here he speaks not of God the Father’s love for God the Son, or God’s love for the disciples of Jesus, but God’s love, it says, for the world. Now why is this so shocking? Certainly in the immediate context it would have been shocking to the first readers. Someone like Nicodemus would have been very surprised to hear of God’s love for the world. In fact, we have contemporary Jewish writers who are in the same circles, the same schools as Nicodemus, and they said things like this – “The best of Gentiles should be killed.” Gentiles were often referred to by men like Nicodemus as dogs. In fact, you remember in the book of Acts when the apostle Paul is arrested in Jerusalem, he is arrested precisely on the charge that he brought a Gentile into the temple courts and so defiled the temple completely. So we might say contextually that this is a surprise because he doesn’t just say, “God loved the people of Israel. God loved His chosen people.” That would have been something the Old Testament made clear, but he doesn’t say that. He says, “God loves the world.”
And it’s even more surprising in the context of the gospel of John, because earlier in the prologue of John’s gospel we are told something about the world. In fact, this is how John puts it in John chapter 1. “The world was made through Him and the world did not know Him.” So we can say this about this term, “God so loved the world” – we can say first of all that it speaks of both Jew and Gentile; there’s not an ethnic barrier here. And it also speaks of sinners, the kind of people who were described as those who were made by God and did not know God. In fact, if you look at what the Bible says about humanity, both Jew and Gentile, you see that by nature all of us are sinners. Paul puts it this way – “No one is righteous, no, not one. No one understands. No one seeks God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one.” He goes on to say that, “There is no fear of God before their eyes. There is no one righteous, not even one.” And yet here we have this description of God’s love for people without ethnic distinction, but perhaps more importantly, God’s love for sinners. These are the recipients that God speaks of here.
And yet the surprise, actually, goes even further because it says not only did God love the world but He so loved the world “that He gave His only Son.” It speaks not only of the recipients of the love of God but of the depth and the extent of the love of God for these sinners. He gave His only Son. Now if you are familiar with the King James’ Version, you’ll know that it translates this as “His only begotten Son.” And that language actually is important in understanding the Bible’s doctrine of the trinity. But I think there’s another important reference point here in the description of Him giving His only Son. That’s really the Old Testament context of this phrase. You see, when the New Testament wants to show us the fullest extent, the final proof if you will, of the love of God, it points to this reality – that God gave His only Son. Perhaps the best example of this is in Romans 8:32 where Paul says this, “He who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not together along with Him freely give us all things?” And it’s that description of God’s own Son, His only Son, that is remarked upon here in John 3:16.
You may remember the story from which this is taken in the book of Genesis. It’s a poignant account – Genesis 22. Abraham has been promised a son, a child of promise. It was a miraculous birth. And he’s finally given that son after waiting many decades for the Lord to fulfill that promise. He’s given a son, Isaac. His only son whom he loves. And you remember in Genesis 22 that the Lord appeared to Abraham and said, “Abraham, I want you to take your son, your only son whom you love and bring him to the place where I will show you.” So Abraham does that. He takes Isaac with him and goes to the mountain that the Lord had shown him. If you know the story, you know there’s this poignant moment that you can almost imagine, even though it’s only a verse or two in the Bible, where Isaac looks at his father at the base of the mountain and says, “I see the implements for sacrifice – the wood – but where’s the lamb? Where’s the burnt offering?” Of course Abraham says, “Well God will provide it.” And then they reach the top of the mountain and Isaac is tied down on the altar. Abraham is going to obey God’s command to sacrifice his son. The New Testament tells us he believed God could raise him from the dead. But as Abraham raises the knife and is about to drive it into his only son, the Lord stops him and says, “Now I know that you love Me because you did not spare your son, your only son.”
And you see, that’s the language that’s used here in John 3:16. The recipients of God’s love are sinners and the extent of God’s love is that He gave His only Son. I wonder when you consider the love of God for you if you consider this reality, if you think about the love of God and look at it through the lens of Romans 8:32 and John 3:16. This is the God who did not spare His only Son, who gave His only Son for sinners.
And you know, if all this verse taught us was that our Creator God, the one who made us, loved this dark world, loved sinners so much that He sent His only Son, if all it taught was the glorious mystery of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, if all we had were these astounding mysteries, then that itself would be an astonishing, a world-changing, a paradigm-shifting truth from the Bible. But in fact, what we see in this verse is that not only is the incarnation of the Son of God a display of God’s love, this ultimate display of God’s love, but it is also, according to this verse, the means of salvation from death and punishment and sin.
And that really leads us to the second major of the text. If the first point deals with the love of God, the second major point deals with the saving benefit given in this gift of love. How does this verse put it? It says, “whoever believes in Him should not perish.” There’s the removal of something as a result of what the only Son of God did. The removal of a curse, the removal of death. Now what is this about? Well the Bible, while telling us that by nature we are all sinners, also tells us that because we are by nature sinners, we are by nature objects of God’s wrath. This is the doctrine that you see not just in the New Testament but in the Old Testament as well. Even David himself, when he is confessing his sin, says, “in sin my mother conceived me.” We see it worked out from the very first pages of Scripture. We see in Genesis chapter 3 the fall of man and then the effects of sin just get greater and greater so when you’re reading through your Bible and starting in Genesis 3, you only have to go about two pages more in your copy of God’s Word before it will say, “The Lord God looked down from heaven and He saw that all the thoughts of man’s heart were always evil all the time.” And so there’s judgment.
And the Bible actually reveals that this judgment is not simply a judgment that is temporary but ultimately, ultimately for those who die in their sin, the Bible says they await a final judgment, what the Scriptures call “the lake of fire” or “the second death” or “hell.” Revelation 20 says this – we need to hear these words when we look at John 3:16 – “If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” And yet what does it say? “Whoever believes in Him should not perish.”
You know it’s more than simply this future judgment because the Bible says that the Son of God came in order to also remove us from living in the constant fear of death. And this too is part of what He does in taking away this curse. He comes so that those who are in Him would not face that second death and would not have to live now in the shadow of the fear of death all the time. “It’s appointed unto man once to die,” the Bible says, “and after that to face judgment,” but “whoever believes in Him should not perish.”
But there’s more because it’s not simply the removal of a curse; it’s actually, according to the end of verse 16, “should not perish but have eternal life.” Later in John’s gospel John records Jesus speaking to His disciples and He gives this wonderful promise. He says, “I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto Myself that where I am there you may be also.” The Bible describes an eternal life in heaven with Jesus in a place prepared for those who are His. That’s the eternal life that this is speaking of. We spoke earlier about this day of judgment – “It’s appointed unto man once to die and after that to face judgment” – and the Bible has much to say about that coming day of judgment.
But you know the Bible doesn’t simply have things to say about the judgment, the condemnation that some will receive, but about the glorious welcome that others will receive. One of my favorite sections of our Larger Catechism is question 90. And this is the question – “What shall be done to the righteous at the day of judgment?” – those who are in Christ. Here’s what it says. “At the day of judgment, the righteous, being caught up to Christ in the clouds, shall be set at His right hand” – and then listen to this – “and there openly acknowledged and acquitted by Jesus Christ” – not perishing but having eternal life.
But the Bible says that actually this eternal life has present consequences as well, just as this perishing has present consequences, because eternal life, according to the Scripture, is something that we begin to experience in some measure right now in our union with Christ. Peter says we are partakers of the divine nature. And earlier in this chapter, Jesus Himself has talked about being born again, born again by the Holy Spirit. One writer says, “To be born again is, as it were, to enter upon a new existence, to have a new mind, new heart, new views, new principles, new tastes, new affections, new likings, new dislikings, new fears, new joys, new sorrows, new love to things once hated, new hatred to things once loved, new thoughts of God and ourselves and the world and the life to come and salvation.” Not perish, but have eternal life.
What about you? Do you know these things to be true in your own life? Are these blessings of union with Jesus Christ, the removal of a curse and the giving of eternal life, new life that begins now, are these things that you can testify to for yourself? This is the life that comes from this great gift of love.
Now to whom does God give this? Who is it that receives this eternal life and should not perish? Well the text of course tells us that too. It’s right in the middle – “whoever believes in Him should not perish.” We already know from the beginning of this verse that the eternal life and the removal of a curse is not given and based on ethnic distinctions. We know it’s given to sinners. Nicodemus might have assumed that it was by works if he heard this, but no, it’s according to this verse by faith alone. It’s not given to those who perform certain rituals, to those whose good works outweigh their bad works as if we could judge that at all. It’s not given to those who merely call themselves Christians and do some Christian things or gather even for Christian worship. No, what it is, is to those who believe. This is the call that attaches itself to this announcement of good news, of the good news of God’s great love.
What is this faith in Jesus Christ? We might say that it is a receiving and resting upon Christ alone for salvation as He is offered to us in the Gospel. We see many examples of this actually in the gospels. We see it in the book of Acts as well. And we see that it involves understanding who Jesus is, understanding what it is that He says, and then attaching oneself to it; trusting in Him alone for salvation, committing yourself to Him, repenting of your sin and entrusting your forgiveness and your hope and your eternity to the Lord Jesus Christ. And then as a result of that, because you’re trusting in Him, you know that you need to trust Him and rely upon His Word for all of your life. You’re going to walk by faith and not by sight. “The life you live in the body you live by faith in the Son of God who loved you and gave Himself for you.” That’s how the apostle Paul describes his new life in Christ.
Now look, this is your only hope in this world. If you are not in Christ, if you’re not trusting in Him for your salvation, then the Bible is crystal clear that there is salvation found in no one else. There’s not a technique, there’s not another person, there’s not a new circumstance that you can place yourself in that will give to you this eternal life and will remove from you the promise of everlasting perishing. But if you are in Christ, what does the Bible say? “If anyone is in Christ, He is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come! All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” And so the apostle who writes that goes on to say, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
And that is the call of this verse. Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Come to Jesus. Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to Thy cross I cling. Wash me, Savior, or I die! And when we look to this Jesus, and if you are trusting in this Jesus, the Son of God, you can say, “The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son for me that I might not perish but have eternal life.” And when we look to Jesus and say that, when we know that to be true, when we know the words of this Bible in miniature to be true for us and to be true for all those without distinction who come to Jesus Christ in saving faith, we’ll say something like what the apostle Paul said when he reflected on this great work of God. He said, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how unfathomable His ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been His counselor? Who has given a gift to Him that He might be repaid? All of this we have by grace alone. What do you have that you did not receive?” And so then Paul goes on to put it this way – “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever, amen.”
Let’s pray.
Our great Father, we thank You for the love with which You have loved us. We thank You for the gift of Your Holy Spirit now and we thank You for sending Your only Son to die for sinners. O Father, we ask that we might revel even more in the work of Your Son on our behalf. Father, transform us from one degree of glory to another as we behold Your glory in the face of Jesus Christ. And we ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.