Grace Thoughts
GraceLife Thoughts: Love and Wrath (Part 1)
What is the world’s most popular Bible verse? If you said John 3:16, you are correct.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
How do I know that’s true today? Because of a digital survey by World Vision done about two years ago. However, John 3:16’s popularity is nothing new. I remember reading about it being ‘most popular’ and ‘best known’ back in the early 1970s.
Favorite Verse
John 3:16 was certainly one of my favorite verses and it was a verse I often quoted when sharing God’s love with non-Christians. It was one verse that presented God’s supreme love for the world, His gift to the world of ‘only begotten Son,’ and the promise of everlasting life for ‘whoever believes in Him.’ That included the fact that people did not have to ‘perish’ if they believed in Christ.
I used to think of John 3:16 as ‘the Gospel in a nutshell,’ meaning everything I needed to share with an unbeliever was available in this one verse. I learned many other Bible verses as a young Christians that were helpful in explaining God’s gift (e.g. Ephesians 2:8-9; Romans 6:23), but I almost always used John 3:16 in every discussion. I still do.
Context
I am most grateful for learning about the importance of reading and studying the Bible ‘in context.’ I now refer to it as ‘text within context, from original language to original readers.’
- Text – “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
- Context – Entering the Kingdom of Heaven through the New Birth
- Original Language – Spoken in Hebrew or Aramaic, Written in Greek
- Original Readers – Spoken to Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews – Read by Greeks and Jews
God sent His ‘only begotten Son’ from Heaven to earth for a particular purpose. What was that purpose? That ‘whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ That has a nice ‘ring’ to it, but the verse raises so many questions about God, His love, His Son, belief, perishing, and having everlasting life. Where do I go to get answers to my questions? Context.
The context includes everything said between Jesus and Nicodemus in what we know now as John 3. Without the context, we can only guess at what Jesus was saying in verse 16. The word ‘perish’ is a key to our understanding. More about that in Part Two.
[Listen to a Podcast of this study by clicking this link.]
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Published by gracelifethoughts
Founder & Director of GraceLife Ministries View all posts by gracelifethoughts
