John 3:16
Melissa, my wife, loves fried pickles. (And I like them too, but it’s sorta been an acquired taste for me.) But Melissa has always loved fried pickles, and she especially loves them when she’s pregnant, and so more than a few times over the last 15 years, we’ve had fried pickles.
And one night several years ago, I was on a fried-pickle run, and it was later in the evening, about ten-minutes or so before the restaurant closed. I made it there just in time; chairs were already upside-down on the tables; I put in my order and I’m waiting for my number to be called.
Well as it turned out, I was the 316th order that day, and I had told the cashier my name is Jon, and so after waiting a few minutes for these fried pickles, I hear this guy call out “Jon 316!”
And that was me. And so I go to get my order, and then the guy said it again, almost like he was surprised that he recognized what he had said. He goes, “John 3:16, hmm” and he hands me the bag.
Now, it was truly a remarkable moment, because at the very least, this guy who had whatever kind of background he had, he knew that John 3:16 meant something, right? He recognized it. And my guess is that most all of us in here, whatever kind of background we might have, we know that John 3:16 means something. Whether we grew up in a Christian home or this is the first time you’ve ever been to a church, there’s a decent chance that we’ve all seen or heard something about John 3:16, and either way, my goal this morning is to tell you exactly what John 3:16 means.
And at one level, it’s not hard to tell you what this verse means because it’s so crystal clear. Take a look at verse 16:
For God so loved the world that be gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
If you’re 5 years old, or 25, or 85 — we can all track with that, right? So I don’t wanna overcomplicate this verse at all. It is simple. But it’s also profound, and I want to take some time here to look closely at this verse and highlight three truths here that show us the heart of the gospel. And I’m gonna put the three truths in a sentence that goes this:
1) We were all condemned, BUT 2) Jesus came to give us life, BECAUSE 3) God loves us.
We’re gonna look at each of these, but first let’s pray:
Father, with your Word now open before us and your Spirit at work, lift up Jesus, we ask, and show us your glory in your Son. We beg you to do this, in Jesus’s name. Amen.
1) We were all condemned
And this first truth makes more sense when we look at John 3:16 in its context. So we need to back out just a little bit and see what’s going on here in the Gospel of John overall.
Picking Up in Chapter 3
John starts Chapter 3 by introducing Nicodemus to us. Nicodemus is a Pharisee who is intrigued by Jesus, and one night — most likely because that’s when less people around —Nicodemus comes to see Jesus and to ask him questions. And the questions are about who Jesus is and what he’s been teaching, and Nicodemus is not hostile to Jesus, he’s curious.
And so he and Jesus talk, and as a Pharisee, Nicodemus is considered a “teacher of Israel” — that’s what Jesus calls him — which means Nicodemus is skilled in the Hebrew Scriptures, and yet he still doesn’t understand what Jesus is teaching.
And so Jesus tells Nicodemus, basically, that he will understand Jesus and his teaching more when Jesus is lifted up. This is verses 14–15, which really is the central, main idea of this chapter. Look at verse 14. Jesus says:
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
Now Jesus doesn’t have to explain to Nicodemus this reference to Moses, because Nicodemus gets it — remember he knows the Old Testament — and so right away when Nicodemus hears this, he would make the connection: Jesus is talking about the Book of Numbers, Chapter 21.
So timeout for a minute. Let’s think back to the Old Testament, Numbers 21.
The Story of Numbers 21
Who in here is afraid of snakes?
And if you don’t think you’re afraid of snakes, you are. I remember hearing stories in North Carolina of snakes hiding in bathroom, under the rim of toilets. So think about that. Snakes are bad news, and that’s what makes Numbers 21 a nightmare.
The story takes place after Israel had come through through the exodus. They were traveling in the desert, going around the land of Edom, and the people got impatient and started grumbling against God and against Moses — they were doing the whole “Why’d you bring us outta Egypt to die in the desert?” And God, as a judgment for the people’s unbelief and grumbling, he sent “fiery serpents” among the people, to bite them and kill them.
Now I’ve never seen the classic motion picture Snakes on a Plane, with Samuel L. Jackson, but I’ve seen the trailer. And from what I can tell, the movie is just hundreds of snakes on a plane biting people — and that’s what this is in Numbers 21. Snakes are popping up everywhere biting people and they’re dying, and so the people desperately come to Moses in repentance and Moses intercedes for them, and as mercy to the people, God provides a way out. God tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and put it on a pole, and everyone bitten by a snake, if they look to this bronze serpent lifted up, they’ll be healed. So that’s what Moses does, and it works.
All these bit people, under judgment, when they look to this bronze serpent lifted up, they live.
And Jesus says that just like Moses lifted up that serpent, Jesus himself must be lifted up, and in a similar way, all who look to Jesus — all who believe in Jesus — will live.
We All, Snakebitten and Doomed
Now what’s implied here in what Jesus says is really important. What’s implied here is that we’ve all been bitten.
We all are already under judgment. That’s stated clearly down in verse 18: Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn us, because we were already condemned. We already loved darkness rather than the light. Because of sin, we all step into our own stories already destined for wrath, already set against God. If we reject Jesus, verse 36 tells us, the wrath of God remains on us — because we already have it coming. And although this is not as obvious as a snake bite, deep down we all know this is true — we all know that we are broken and doomed and that we need a way out; we all know we need to be healed.
And if you don’t think we know this, just look at the market for false-healers and pseudo-saviors, which is pretty much every advertisement you see. Look at the lengths that people will go to change themselves. One of the most repeated messages in our world is that you need to change, and that message works because we all know that something is off. We all, as part of this world, are sinful, depraved, grumblers against God — that is natural to us as fallen humans — and therefore we are (we were) all condemned. That’s the first thing to highlight here: 1) We were all condemned …
2) But Jesus came to give us life.
This is the big exclamation point in the whole Gospel of John, and we see it here in verse 16 loud and clear. In fact, verse 16 marks a new section in Chapter 3. The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus ends in verse 15, and then in verse 16 John, the narrator, steps in to give his own explanation of what Jesus has just said.
Jesus said, verse 14, that he must be lifted up so that whoever of us snakebitten people believe in him may live. And then right after this, in verse 16, John gives us a glorious grounding for why that’s the case. It’s like verses 14–15 are the tip of the iceberg, and now John is taking us down deep to see more.
John is saying: Hey, what Jesus has said is true, because God loved the world in this way … and then what John says in the rest of verse 16 is the same as what Jesus says in verse 15. Most of verse 16 is a restatement. Let’s just compare the two verses for a minute. Look at verse 15.
Verse 15: “the Son of Man must be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Verse 16: “God gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
So in both verses, two things are happening: There’s the action of God, or what God did, and then there’s its purpose. Action and purpose. And we gotta look at both of these, starting with the action.
The first question is this: What is meant here in the action of “the Son of Man must be lifted up” and “God gave his Son?”
Do you see the parallel? These both are actions that have the same purpose, so Jesus in verse 15 and John in verse 16 must be talking about the same thing, but what exactly is it? What do these two phrases mean?
What Did God Do?
The answer is that Jesus and John are talking about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection as one gospel event.
The phrase “lifted up” is used three others times in this Gospel, and it has a kind of double-meaning (see 8:28; 12:32; 12:34). In one sense, it’s referring to the literal, physical lifting up of Jesus on the cross. (And that’s clear in Chapter 12, because when the people who heard Jesus say it, they knew he was talking about his death.)
But Jesus is also talking about his resurrection and exaltation. Jesus, will be lifted up, literally, in his death on the cross, and he will be lifted up by being raised from the dead and ascended and exalted and proclaimed by the apostles and the church as the only hope for all who are snakebitten.
So if you’re looking for an “exact parallel” here between Moses lifting up the bronze serpent and Jesus, there’s not really an exact-moment parallel, but it’s more like every moment of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was his being lifted up. The whole of what Jesus did in his living and dying and being raised — all of that — is the Son of Man being lifted up. And that’s what verse 16 restates profoundly as “God gave his only Son.”
Have you ever gave something before? Not a trick question, just think about. Have you ever given anything? You know what that’s like. You have something that is yours. It belongs to you. And then you give it. You say “here.”
God the Father gave Jesus.
God gave Jesus in his incarnation and life;
he gave Jesus in his suffering and crucifixion;
he gave Jesus in his resurrection and ascension.
And that’s a simple little one syllable word, “gave,” right? But its glory is in what he gave. God gave his only Son.
And “his only Son” is meant to register for all peoples at all times that this is something precious. You don’t give your only son. Nobody does that.
I read this verse and I think: I’ve got four sons and I would’t give any of them for anything. — “Well what if it meant saving thousands of people?” — Too bad. They’re my sons. I’m not giving my son.
And we’re all supposed to think that, see. This is meant to signal preciousness to us, and yet still we don’t even come close to understanding what is said here, because John is emphasizing the wonder of the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. And that’s a topic Jesus talks about a lot in this Gospel:
Chapter 3, verse 36: The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands;
Chapter 5, verse 20: the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing;
Chapter 10, verse 17: the Father loves the Son and has given him authority over his life to lay it down and to take it back up again;
Chapter 15, verse 9, the Father loves the Son and the Son abides in his Father’s love;
Chapter 17, verse 24, the Father loves the Son as he has eternally loved the Son from before the foundations of the world.
We cannot fathom the relationship between God the Father and God the Son — because we’re talking about the Son here who is the only begotten, the radiance of God’s glory, the exact imprint of his nature, the object of ultimate joy and love. And God the Father gave him.
God gave him to live and to suffer and to die on the cross bearing the judgment that we sinners deserved.
That is the action here. That is what it means for Jesus to be lifted up. That is what it means for God to give his only Son. And God did that … for what?
What Is the Purpose?
This is the purpose stated in both verses 15 and 16. It’s easy to see. Look at verse 15 again. The purpose for what God did is so that, verse 15, “whoever believes in [Jesus] may have eternal life.” John says the same thing in verse 16: “so that whoever believes in [Jesus] should not perish but have eternal life.”
So the purpose of Jesus’s death and resurrection is to give life to whoever believes.
Everybody see that?
Now it’s important to get this clear: The purpose of Jesus’s death and resurrection is not to give life to everyone, but it’s to everyone who believes.
Every snakebitten person doesn’t just get life now because of what Jesus did, but it’s only the snakebitten persons who look to Jesus — it’s whoever believes in Jesus.
Those who believe in Jesus are those whom Jesus saves, and those whom he came to save.
And there is more we could talk about here related to the nature and wonder of the atonement and what is says about the glory of Jesus, like:
Jesus never died to save someone who will not be saved, because Jesus is not a failure.
Jesus never paid for the sins of someone who will pay for their own sins in hell.
Jesus is not a coupon, remember? — he doesn’t get you part of the way and leave the rest up to you.
Jesus is the whole Savior and so Jesus gets the whole glory!
We can talk about that — I love talking about that — but eventually here we get to the question of: how do I know that Jesus died for me?
This is the question we all have to ask one way or another. How do I know if God gave his only Son for me? How do I know if Jesus died to give me eternal life?
Well … do I believe? Do you believe in him? Because if you believe in Jesus — if you embrace Jesus and you look to Jesus for life — then you are precisely the one Jesus came to give life to.
See, John 3:16 confronts us with that question: Do we believe in Jesus?
And right now, all across this room, we’re asking that question, right? And if you don’t believe in Jesus, you know you don’t, and I wonder why not.
If you don’t believe in Jesus, what is keeping you from putting your faith in him? I would sincerely love to talk with you after the service if you’d be willing, but also, I need to say that whatever has kept you from trusting in Jesus before, it doesn’t have to keep you now, because now this is a new invitation. Right now, in this moment, turn from your sins, turn from your trust in false saviors, and right now, trust in Jesus Christ. Put your faith in Jesus and have eternal life.
That is the purpose for why Jesus came. That is why Jesus died and was raised. It was to give life to whoever believes.
So 1) we were all condemned, but 2) Jesus came to give us life; because 3) God loves us.
3) Because God loves us.
This is the first thing said in verse 16, and we’re gonna end here because it’s most stunning thing said ever.
“For God so loved the world…”
The “for” means “because.” This is why Jesus will be lifted up to save all who believe. And the little word “so” means “thus” or “in this way.”
Here’s how it goes together:
Jesus says in verses 14–15: the Son of Man must be lifted up to give life to all who believe.
And John comes right after him to say: Yes! This is because God loved the world in this way!
Now in what way? “God so loved the world” or God loved the world in that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
So this settles it, right? This means that anytime now that we think about the death and resurrection of Jesus, we know where it comes from. We know what that is. It is the love of God. Look at the cross, look at the resurrection, look at Jesus lifted up and know that this is the way that God loved the world.
And when we read “world” we should think “sinners.” That’s what John means. This is the way God loved those who don’t deserve his love. This is the way God loved the grumblers, the snakebitten — which is why it’s so stunning.
And we gotta stay here a minute.
One of the things I come across a lot, in conversations with people (and in my own heart at times) is that we can struggle to really believe that God loves us. Which is a critical situation. Because the Bible teaches that the most important thing in the Christian life is to be assured of God’s love, it’s to know God’s love for us — Ephesians 3 — and so when our felt-reality is that God does not love us, that’s not good, and so what do we do with that?
Well, a lot of times, in my experience, the times when we don’t feel loved by God are when we are especially aware of our unlovability. There’s a sense of shame we might have. We’re aware of our deficiencies and brokenness and weakness and sin, and when that stands in the way of our knowing God’s love for us, one option for how we might try to work our way out of that is by saying: you’re not deficient; you ARE enough; you ARE worthy of God’s love.
And the problem with thinking that way is that it just contradicts what the Bible says. If you feel like you don’t deserve God’s love, guess what? You don’t. We don’t.
If you think you don’t deserve God’s love, you are at least halfway biblical. You wanna know the other half? God loves you anyway.
See, that’s where we have to get. If we struggle to know God’s love for us, we don’t come to grasp his love by convincing ourselves how lovable we are, but by seeing how glorious HE IS!
Hey, God loves me. I want you to know that about me. God loves me. I want you to think that for yourself; I want you to say to yourself, church, God loves me. And I want you to know that there’s nothing prideful is saying that and thinking that because God’s love for us is not a statement about how great we are, but it’s about how great he is.
What kind of God is he to love people like us?! What kind of God is he to love us in this way: that he gave his only Son for us, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life — which means life with him.
See, it’s really all about God.
The eternal life that Jesus gives us is the life of God’s love that is eternal. To know the love of God is to know the glory of God, which is what’s behind everything. This is what Jesus has known from before the foundations of the world; it’s what we were made for; and it’s what, now, because of Jesus, we are welcomed into when we believe in him.
* * *
So I’m in that restaurant years ago, waiting for those fried pickles, and the guy says to me, to my face, he says “John 3:16.” And at the time I was just — I dropped the ball — but if it ever happens again, this is what I’ll say … so go back …
I’m waiting for the fried pickles, and he says to me “John 3:16” and I say:
Hey, that’s a verse in the Bible. Do you know it means? It means we were all condemned, but Jesus came to give us life, because God loves us.
This is a simple verse, but it’s also profound. We see here the glory of God, and we should praise him, adore him, give him thanks.
Which is why I invite you to this Table.
The Table
This Table is the symbol of God giving his Son for us. The bread represents the body of Jesus; the cup represents the blood of Jesus — which have been given for all who believe. So this morning if you’re here and you’ve put your faith in Jesus — if you look to Jesus as your only hope — receive the bread and cup and give him thanks!
