Amen. You turn within your Bibles, begin in John chapter 3 starting at verse 16:
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but 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.’
From there, we turn back to the Book of Genesis, chapter 15, beginning at the first verse:
‘After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Fear not, Abram, for I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’
But Abram said, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eleazar of Damascus.’ Abram said, ‘Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.’
And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: ‘This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.’ And he brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and number the stars, if you are able to number them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’
And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray:
Lord God, we thank you for your gospel, for the good news that you give to us, for the fact that it is not about what we do that we are saved, but that we are saved by faith in your Son, Jesus Christ. Help us to believe and count it to us as righteousness. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So this morning we’re going to delve into the most famous, beloved, and well-known verse in the Bible: John 3:16. However, in many ways, it is also the least well understood by many. Now, I presume that most of us know it as: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life,’ because that’s the way we all learned it growing up. If the King James was good enough for Paul, then it should be good enough for us, right?
But really, it is the poetic language of the King James which preserves its place as many people’s preference. Now, the King James, translated from the Greek, provides the best and truest rendition of John’s intended message and sense of this important verse.
However, there are several minor differences in grammar which can be major issues for interpretation by their implications. Please look at the sermon notes page in your bulletin. There you will find both the ESV and the King James versions printed; seeing them side by side together may be helpful here.
The first thing you should notice is the absence of the word ‘begotten’ in the ESV text. Although it’s missing, the same meaningful sense is implied by the translation. This is a sense describing the uniqueness of Jesus as God’s Son. The Greek term behind this is ‘monogenes,’ a compound word comprised of ‘mono,’ which means ‘one,’ and ‘genos,’ or ‘com,’ which means ‘to give birth’ or ‘beget.’
The second term is also the source for our word ‘generation,’ and this term is very special. We will more deeply examine the uniqueness of Christ and the importance of ‘monogenes’ for us at a later time.
The second thing you should notice is the subtle difference between ‘whoever’ and ‘whosoever.’ Ordinarily, this would not be such a big deal because the two expressions are functionally the same, but depending on what you already believe concerning the doctrine of predestination, when you read this, you can try and claim support for either the Reformed Calvinist view on election or that of the Arminians.
The Reformed reader will understand this as ‘whosoever is caused to believe in him,’ and that same understanding is implied within ‘whoever believes in him,’ because we believe that only God’s chosen elect will believe.
Whereas, an Arminian would understand this as ‘whosoever,’ as in ‘whosoever might one day choose to believe in him,’ and accept that ‘whoever believes in him’ carries within it an implied universal potential or contingent belief within every person.
So once again, we see English demonstrating itself to be an imprecise language, since the opposing directions of these two understandings can both be inferred from the verse when it’s considered alone. We need to consider the wider context in order to determine which view is correct; that context more greatly affirms the Reformed view of sovereign election unto faith over a human freedom of will and choice to possess Christ.
As we began to see when we examined Moses’s bronze serpent, this means that John 3:16 is the worst gospel proof text for that debate.
The third difference that I would like you to notice is ‘eternal life’ versus ‘everlasting life.’ Both terms are correct and appropriate, but ‘everlasting life’ is a more specific term while ‘eternal life’ is broad in scope.
The difference between them and why the distinction is important is twofold. First, God alone is eternal; there was no time when he was not. The Lord is ‘was’ and ‘ever shall be.’ He is the creator, whereas the human soul and human person were both created. There was a time when we were not, because we are creatures; we have a beginning, but God does not.
Our hope is that in Christ Jesus, through being united with him by our faith and trust in him, we will continue on and shall enjoy life unending. Second, this distinction preserves the critical difference between the Creator and his creation, the difference in power and authority between us — a relationship-defining difference.
This difference reminds us that God chose to make us because he desires for us to be with him and to enjoy him forever; that is why he made us.
And my fourth and last point concerning the translation of this verse is not actually readily apparent when reading it. The King James has actually done a slight disservice as regards John 3:16 to every English translation that follows it. Every version that I’m aware of begins with the word ‘for,’ a preposition. Something that my dad taught me: you never start a sentence with a preposition, that can carry a variety of meanings, but it usually seems to present the reason for a particular cause, like ‘for.’
The Greek term translated here is ‘gar,’ also a preposition which carries a cause justifying meaning. So, if we disregard the historical and emotional influence of the King James, then this verse would be better translated in context as, ‘Because God so loved the world,’ and also be united to the prior sentence and always read together as one cohesive whole:
‘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, because God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.’
Whereas, if this verse really did stand alone, independent from the surrounding context, since word order hardly matters in Greek, it might be better reorganized or translated as, ‘God gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life because he so loved the world.’
See, this rendition gives us a cause: God gave, an effect: whoever believes, should not perish, and the reason: he so loved. God gave us Jesus to believe in so that we could have eternal life because he loves us, and that would be a very simple and easy gospel to accept; there it all is.
But it’s not alone. It would justify easy believism. Yet considered alone, it ignores the ‘why’ God needed to give and it ignores what we should do now that we’ve received it.
John 3:16 cannot stand alone; it must be considered with verses 14 and 15. When we considered them earlier, we saw that verses 14 and 15 describe the means, through type and antitype, by which people could be saved, healed, and thus live.
Verse 14 said, ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.’ There’s a cause in verse 15: ‘that whoever believes in him may have eternal life,’ and effect. So together these three verses tell one single united but parallel tale of cause and effect, where the first explains the second.
The type prepares us for the antitype. John 3:16 does not stand alone. Then we find that cause and effect is repeated here in verse 16 with the ‘why’ stuck between the two: ‘for’ or ‘because God so loved the world’ are why he gave his only Son, cause, ‘that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.’
Now it’s easier to see how these three verses are intended to work together rather than separately. They’re like a gospel aura.
So together, what do they tell us? God gave up his Son to be looked upon in faith. God gave up his Son because he loves the world, his creation, even though it fell into sinfulness. God gave up his Son so that those who believe, his children of adoption through faith, would not perish but will enjoy life everlasting.
See, John 3:16 is really teaching us that eternal life is God’s end goal for the elect, everyone who is born again, the regenerate.
For our salvation, our salvation was affected through the work of God’s Son by Jesus being lifted up on the cross. This effect is received as a gift from God through the faith given to us in our regeneration by looking to, believing in, and believing through him, just as the ancient Israelites looked through Moses’s bronze serpent to the Lord in faith.
This was all because God so loved the world.
I know it sounds crazy, but since the Holy Spirit says it, it must work. But how to better understand how we receive eternal life by believing in Jesus? We need to look back to Abraham. We must look back to Abraham to understand how active faith is the operative means for our salvation considering the cross.
We look back to Abraham, the Covenant of Grace, which the Lord made with him. God made a covenant with him for him, but God also made it for Abraham’s offspring, his descendants, according to God’s promise with Abraham as the covenant mediator.
See, he received this promise of grace for us as our federal head. The word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: ‘Fear not, Abram, for I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’
But Abram said, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eleazar of Damascus.’ Abram said, ‘Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.’
And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: ‘This man shall not be your heir; your very own son will be your heir.’
And he brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and number the stars, if you’re able to number them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’
See, God spoke very broadly to Abraham in his revelation of this promise of grace, making three distinct and obvious promises.
The first was that his reward shall be very great, a nonspecific promise subject to interpretation.
The second was that he would have a legitimate heir, a son to continue on after his life was ended.
And the third was that through this son, Abraham would become the patriarch of a vast and great people.
These promises were first fulfilled very specifically and distinctly in Abraham’s near present. Abraham became extraordinarily a wealthy man; he enjoyed prosperity according to the Lord’s providence, and that prosperity was received by his heir Isaac.
Isaac was the son of Abraham’s old age and his post-menopause wife, Sarah. He was born according to the promise of God, and through him, Abraham’s descendants became a great people as numerous as the stars.
But as with many biblical prophecies, these promises also have a later and greater fulfillment. Just as the bronze serpent was a prototype of the cross, so too the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham was a prototype of the greater fulfillment of his promises given to Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the offspring and heir of Abraham, the child of God’s promise, the Son of God, Son of David, and Son of Man. Through faith, through our faith in Jesus, we’re adopted to be God’s children with him as the church, and we are more numerous than the stars.
Our number includes people from all the world; the church contains people from every tribe, tongue, nation, and family throughout the past, the present, and all future history. We are a faithful remnant pulled out of the world, the cosmos, and drawn into the kingdom of God.
Jesus is the heir of all things; he is received and shall yet receive a far greater reward than Abraham ever imagined: a kingdom without end, glory, and a family bound by love—love for one another and love for the Lord, our Father.
So as his brothers and sisters, we are made fellow heirs in God’s promise of grace. Yet, that still doesn’t address the ‘how’ that described God’s promise, and the verses that follow we didn’t read describe the covenant-making promise.
So how did Abraham receive his reward? How did he receive the benefit of God’s promise? How did the Israelites receive healing from their venomous snake bites in the wilderness? How do we receive eternal life? Same way Abraham did.
Moses writes, ‘And he believed the Lord, and he, God, counted it to him as righteousness.’ Abraham believed the Lord. Abraham believed it, and he got it.
But how do we get from righteousness to eternal life? What is the connection? Both Moses and John are talking about the righteousness that leads to life—perfect righteousness through perfect obedience to God’s command.
Remember the Lord; he promised Adam life upon condition of his obedience. That is the covenant of works, which time carried one single stipulation: ‘but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in that day you eat of it you shall surely die.’
Keep the Lord’s law and live, or disobey and die. Moses also affirmed that those who are obedient to God’s law receive the benefit of life, writing: ‘Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days.’
King Solomon also commended obedience to God’s Torah in the Proverbs, saying: ‘Keep my commandments and live.’
More importantly, the prophet Habakkuk proclaimed the Lord’s intention: ‘But the righteous shall live by his faith,’ a thread picked up and carried onward by Paul in Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3.
So you see, righteousness does lead to life. The righteousness of Jesus Christ is the cause by which all who are born again shall live—the effect—and we may only receive it through faith.
But how do we receive it? How do we get this free gift of God’s grace and mercy? Since regeneration, our being born again is not the consequence of our actions but is the sovereign work of God, the Holy Spirit. Our believing also cannot be our work through which we’re made righteous; therefore, eternal life can also only come through the sovereign work of God.
Which means that God does while we are done to, as with Abraham. So too with us. ‘God counted it to him as righteousness’ means God credited to him, reckoned it unto him, assigned it to him, imputed it to him.
So the answer to the question of how do we get eternal life that we’ve been trying to answer is imputation. God does it for us, and God does it to us, putting it onto us, leaving us to respond faithfully afterward.
When we given God the Son, Jesus Christ, he lived righteously, and he earned righteousness. God the Holy Spirit gives us the faith to believe in Jesus through regeneration, and God the Father counts the righteousness of Christ as ours.
The Lord imputed the righteousness of Christ to Abraham because he had faith in the Lord; he was given righteousness unto life. And so this same righteousness is imputed to whoever believes in him.
Through our faith in Christ, God imputes Jesus’s righteous obedience to us along with his eternal resurrection life while God imputed all of our sin and wickedness to him so that we can be washed clean, forgiven.
We call this the divine transaction, a spiritual accounting where righteousness is first debited from Jesus’s infinite account and credited against our deficit, while our wickedness is debited from our account and credited against his surplus, thus making him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
So when we say that God gave his only Son, this is what we mean: Jesus was born to live righteously for us, and he died upon that cross for us as the propitiation for our sins, as a sacrifice of atonement to justly put our sin to death, and so that we may then justly live.
Even still, although we stand to gain such a great benefit from this, our human minds reel at the thought of this, and our whole reason still screams out: why? Why would God? Why would Jesus willingly suffer and die for sinners like us?
Because God so loved the world. The Lord gave us his Son because he agaped the world—he loves us self-sacrificially and gives himself to us as God the Son—and gave up himself as God the Son.
God the Father, in giving us God the Son, cost the Father his Son. That is something often and easily forgotten by Christians. God has bought us from himself for himself, and he paid the highest price possible—himself—for you are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
Therefore, since each and every person is valuable to God, we ought to consider everybody just as valuably; nobody is worthless.
This drives our love for neighbor, loving them as the image of God, and loving them because they are loved by God. Furthermore, since we cannot know whether someone belongs to Christ, if we’re to live in obedience, then we must act as though everyone does.
Because you do not know whether the kindness and love that you show them in Jesus’s name will be what God uses to draw them to himself. This is the gospel that should drive our lives: God’s sacrificial love for us inspires us to respond to his mercy by sacrificially loving others—all because God so loved the world first.
Because God so loved the world, he made promises to Abraham for Christ and for us. Because God so loved the world, he delivered a people from both bondage in Egypt and from our sin. Because God so loved the world, he gave us his holy law, his Torah, so that we would recognize our sinfulness and become obedient children.
Because God so loved the world, he gave the Israelites the bronze serpent to look through to him in faith so that we could know to look to God when we saw the Son of Man lifted up.
Because God so agaped the world, he gave his righteous Son to stand in the place of sinful humanity from across the whole cosmos—his elect children of adoption.
So we look to him in faith, surrendering and placing all of our hope and confidence in him alone, surrendering our self-righteous self-confidence and our self-reliance, because there is no hope in ourselves. For now, we shall respond to his grace and mercy with love.
In love, all Christians, every one of us, are evangelists in the world proclaiming through word and deed that Jesus loves you and that Jesus wants what is best for you. So turn to him in faith, repent of your sin, believe him, and then obey him.
Then you shall be like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and that in all that you do, you shall prosper for God’s glory and your own good. Amen.
Please stand and say with me what we believe using the words of the Apostles’ Creed:
‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended to hell. The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended to heaven and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.’
Our closing hymn is number 450: ‘Lift High the Cross.’