‘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’ (John
This verse is the best known verse in the Bible. It is the best known
verse because it touches on all the things which are most important for a
person to know. It has been called ‘the gospel in a nutshell’ for the same
reason.
God
It starts with God! The Bible starts with God. The message of the Bible
starts with God, and the thing which you most need to know start with God too.
Now I do not intend to give a long explanation about how we know that God is
God. We do not need to know that God exists, because the human conscience
knows it to be true. Whoever you are, and however loudly you may deny it,
the human conscience knows that God is. People look at the sky above; they look
at the creation around, and there is this consciousness which they have; there
is this sort of feeling of thirst for God. Everyone has a view of God even if
their view is that there is no God. A friend of mine had an atheist daughter in
law. One day she was so angry and said to my friend, ‘I hate your God. I do
hate him.’ At least she believed in God even though she hated him!
Everybody lives and dies with a some sense of
God. If you bother to be still- as sometimes wise people do- you will know that
God is eternal. You know that God is powerful. If you think hard, you will even
know in your conscience that God is the Judge. Everybody knows that God is.
So the Bible spends no time in telling us how we know that God is,
because we do know that God is. It is built into the fabric of our human
nature. Instead the bible kindly tells us what we do not know. It tells us
what God is like.
Now, friends, God is Spirit. He has no body. He
is not just in one place because He is in all places at the same time in the
whole fullness of His being. God tells us in His Word that He is very great. He
knows all things as if they are happening in front of Him all the time, past,
present and future. He can do all things which are consistent with His
character. He is eternal. We owe our existence to God. God owes His existence to
Himself. The teaching about God in the Bible is exceedingly great.
God, says the Bible, is unique. He is unique in the sort of Person He is
(because He is a Person). There is also such a thing as holiness which has cut
God off from all His creatures.
The Bible tells us that He is good. Although perhaps you yourself have thought
all sorts of awful things about God, may be you have used His name loosely, yet
He is actively good to you. The life you have, the food you eat, the water you
drink, the family life that you have, the clothes that you wear, the employment
that you may have. All these things are God’s gifts to people who, by nature,
are in fact His enemies!
Indeed God is love. He is slow to anger, and He is abounding in love. He
is wise. The supreme wisdom of God, we also find it in our text.
So this best known verse in the Bible, John 3:16- which are the words of
Jesus Himself- starts with God.
The world
The verse moves on to talk about the world. Let us think about the world
which we live in. We all admit that there is something wrong with it. If I
speak to you and ask, ‘what is wrong with the world?’ you will come up with all
sorts of reasons. Some of you will say, ‘war is the problem.’ Why do you think
war is wrong when as you read a book of history you cannot find a year in human
history without a war? Why do you say that war ought not to be so? Why don’t
you say that war is natural because there has always been war on our planet?
What is it about you that makes you say to yourself, ‘things ought not to be
like this’?
Some of you will say, ‘well it’s the young people.’ Others may say, ‘it’s
terrorism.’ Or some of you will say, ‘it’s the strikes.’ We live in a world
where there have always been rebellious young people. There have always been
strikes. All the trouble that you can find has always been there in human
history. They are catalogued in our history books. So why do you say that
things ought not to be like this; or like that? Why do we not admit that these
things are natural?
It is because in our human conscience we have a sort of inherited
memory. We act as if our race is able to remember
a time when there were no wars, no strikes, no terrorism, and no rebels. As though all was once perfect. Although we cannot remember
a day like that, yet we act as if we can somehow remember that things
were so different once. So we think that things ought not to be as they are now.
That is precisely the way it is, says the Bible. When mankind was made,
Adam and Eve walked with God. However, they thought that life would be better
without God. So although God had expressly revealed His will, and although God
had expressly told them that if they disobeyed they would be punished, and
although God had made it perfectly plain that if they obeyed they would live
forever, they disbelieved God and turned around and walked out on Him. All
these troubles have followed since. Family strife, death and the fear of death,
frustration, squabbles and even a person being at odds with himself;
as well as sickness and pain, and death itself. These are the result of the fact
that man no longer walks with his Maker.
Imagine an arch. An arch, as you know, has a keystone. All the bricks of
the arch lean on the keystone. Take out the keystone and the arch falls to pieces.
Man is God’s highest creature. God put him in the highest place in creation. As
long as he kept his place, everything in the universe held together and cohered.
Eventually man removed himself from this place and the whole universe is now
disorientated and out of joint. Every aspect of life has been affected. It is
all because man, as the highest creature, walked out on God.
That is the world. It is a rebellious world. It is no good saying, ‘it’s Adam’s fault,’ because we have all done the same things
ourselves. Adam and Eve disbelieved God, so have we. They preferred to live
life without bowing at God’s feet, and so have we. They listened to lies about God, that is our experience as well. The world is a
rebellious world. The world is a suffering world. The world is a perishing
world! This leads us to our 3rd point.
Perishing
This verse tells us about God. It tells us about the world we live in,
and it talks about perishing. ‘God so loved the world, that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him, should not perish...’
Now think this through. God is infinitely Holy;
men and women are rebels. God is nothing but good; yet they walked out on Him. God
is kind and compassionate and loving; they have even preferred not to have Him
at all. God cannot be indifferent to sin. He cannot be indifferent to a rebellious
race which is His highest creatures who were made to walk with Him. Therefore
the judgment of God is upon the race. Punishment is certain. The Bible calls it
‘perishing.’
There are certain people who come around to your doors-they call themselves,
believe it or not, Jehovah’s Witnesses- and they tell you that when you die you
will eventually be annihilated, that is wiped out. When the Bible uses the word
‘perishing,’ it never means that those who offended God will be wiped out. It
never means that. The Bible uses deliberately a strong word to show us the
horror of being under the judgment of God. It never suggests, even for a
moment, that such people will just cease to exist. When we read the Bible we
find that the Lord Jesus Christ, more than anybody else, talked about hell. The
Bible gives us many descriptions for hell– none of them are nice; none of them
are pleasant to think about. People who walk out on God will be punished from the moment of death. After
the resurrection they will be cast into the eternal state of their punishment. It
is dying without hope. That is what perishing is. It
sounds horrible – so horrible that most people cannot bear to think that it is
real. It is a serious thing friend because
God is infinite and to sin against Him is to sin infinitely. Therefore any
punishment which He gives must be an infinite punishment.
This is how Jesus spoke. Here is a straightforward, simple, well known
verse in the Bible. Jesus started with God; He spoke about the world; and He
warned the world that without God it is perishing. The real issue is not the
standard of living however important that may be. It is not the style of living
however good that may be. The real issue is not education or achievement
however wonderful that may be. None of us are against these things. The real
issue is that men and women are alienated from God and are therefore perishing!
So the world is in rebellion against God.
The Son
Now the wonder of our text is this:
God could have ignored the world. He could have said, ‘the planet is in
rebellion, I will finish with it.’ God could forget the world. He could say, ‘I
have given them clear laws and, without exception,
they have all broken them. Not just the first man and woman, but every man and
woman who has lived since.’ God could easily put the world aside. He could
destroy the world. He could wipe it out. That is what you would expect the
Bible to say. But Jesus talks about the love of God which gave. He says, ‘God
so loved the world that He gave.’
Love is something which gives. God gave His Son. He gave His Son to this
planet for 33 years. He was born an ordinary Jewish boy. He went to an ordinary
village school. He worked in an ordinary carpenter shop in an ordinary village
street. He lived in an ordinary
Every morning as a boy, He woke up in fellowship with God. Everyday,
when He laid His head down to sleep, the fellowship was unbroken. So He went
from boyhood to adolescence and adulthood up to the age of thirty and beyond. His
life was perfect.
God gave to this awful world someone who lived a perfect life. The
wonder of the gospel is simply this: The life that I should have lived, the
life I ought to live, but the life I could never live, He lived for me. God
gave His Son!
There is more to follow. After 33 years they took the Lord of glory,
despite His miracles and wonderful words. The fact that He raised the dead by
the word of His mouth did not convince them that He was whom
He was. Even the people who lived in the same home, his half brothers and
sisters did not believe! He was mocked and spat upon. They crowned Him with
thorns and treated Him as the lowest of the low. At last they took the Lord of
glory, the very God Who made them, and they nailed Him like a common crook to a
Roman cross. There He died.
What they did not realise was that that event fulfilled over three
hundred scriptures which God had caused the prophets to write about in previous
centuries. As He hung on the cross, it was not just physical suffering. For
three hours the sky went black. The One who lived in perfect communion with God
was cut off from God and knew what it is to have God being angry with him.
The wonder of
At last the sky cleared and He who started the day by saying, ‘Father,’
closed the day by saying, ‘Father into Your hands I commit My spirit,’ and
dismissed His spirit once more in perfect fellowship with God. God announced to
the world that what Jesus had done was perfect in His sight by raising him from
the dead. For 40 days He walked with His disciples to prove that He was really
alive again before He ascended to where He came from. He ascended and returned to
heaven as a man.
Now here is the truth: God loved the world
that He gave. He did not give Jesus just to live a life that we should have
lived, but friends this is the wonder of the gospel: The death which I deserve
to die, the infinite punishment which I deserve to bear, He died and He bore! It
had to be a man who suffered because it was mankind which had sinned. It had to
be God who suffered because an infinite punishment had to be borne. Jesus was
the substitute, bearing the shame. In my place condemned He stood, sealed my
pardon with His Blood. ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son.’
The everlasting life
So the gospel is about God, the world, perishing and the gift of the Son
of God. We read now about the everlasting life or what is called, ‘eternal life.’
What is eternal life? It is the very life that God has. What I need, if I am to
be right with God, is righteousness. I do not have any because even my best
moment in His sight is like filthy rags because He is Holy.
What I need from God is forgiveness. Because even if I could live
perfectly this evening, what about the sins of this morning and yesterday and
the years that have gone? I need forgiveness. What I need from God is
acceptance.
That is why God gave His Son. The righteousness which I could never attain
is mysteriously put into my account. The death which I deserve to die, is mysteriously put to His account. This is a
mysterious, wonderful, saving exchange. The one who was
condemned to die, lives. The one who is without
God, comes to know God. The one who has no hope is filled with hope. The one
who is damned lives. Everlasting life is measured, first of all, and primary,
in terms of acceptance with God. How does it become mine? Listen to the
word of Jesus, ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believes in him...’
Some people teach today that if you pray enough, or pay enough, or
attend church enough or read the Bible enough or live well enough, God will
give you eternal life. They say, Do your best and hope
wish for the best! The problem is that our best is not enough in the sight of
God.
Jesus says, ‘whoever believes.’ Now friends,
believing is a very simple thing. It has three parts. First of
all it means that I hear the truth. You have heard the truth as your have read
this article. Secondly, it means that I ascent to the truth. I believe
that what I am reading is the truth and then I rest upon what I know to be
true. Believing is not just filling your mind with the truth. Believing involves
an approach to Jesus Christ. It involves the admission that my sins have cut me
off from God. It involves the admission that I have no righteousness which will
make me right with God. It involves an approach to Christ. It involves asking Him
for mercy, asking Him for righteousness; asking Him for salvation; asking Him
for acceptance.
Whoever
We have not finished. This text is about God; it is about the world; it
is about perishing; it is about the love of God which gave his Son; it is about
everlasting life; it is about believing. But the word which we rejoice in is this
‘Whoever’.
‘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.’ Often when the gospel is preached, some people say, ‘it’s alright for
him; it’s alright for them; but not for me.’ Sometimes people are overcome by such
a sense of sin that they say, ‘it’s not for me.’
Let me tell you about the first few days that followed Jesus’ death on
the cross. The first person that Jesus appeared to after He rose from the dead
was a no-body! Her name was Mary Magdalene. She had once been demon possessed.
Presumably she had lived the worst sort of life as a result. She was a no-body,
but Jesus met her. Why? Because Christ has time for no-bodies.
Later that day- Jesus appeared to a failure! Peter had denied him three
times in one night although he said he would not. Yet Jesus met him, because Christ
has time for failures.
He appeared on the same day to people who were confused. They were
walking on the Emmaus road, and they could not understand the events which had
happened in the last few days. How could this person whom they loved so much be
crucified? They had heard reports that He was raised from the dead and they
were totally perplexed and confused. Then Jesus walked with them, because He
has time for people who are confused.
Also there were 10 disciples who were so afraid that they locked the
doors. Jesus did not unlock the door; He just came in where they were even
though the doors were locked. Why did He meet them? Because He
has time for fearful people too.
Then, there was one who could not believe that Jesus was raised from the
dead. So what was Jesus’ reaction to that? To say, ‘I’ll finish with you’? No,
no! His reaction was to go and meet him, because Jesus Christ has time for
doubters!
Then there was a cynic, a man who lived in the same house as Jesus in
Also, there was one man, who did not meet Jesus at that time however. He
met him a little later; he was such an opponent to Christianity that he was
even willing to kill Christians. Do you know what Christ’s reaction to His
opponent was? It was, that as this opponent was going
on a death mission to
That is what the Bible means when it says ‘WHOEVER.’ There is no class
of people for whom Jesus Christ has no time. This means that when you hear the
gospel, God is addressing it to you, whoever you are.
‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever
[and you can put your name right here,
right now] believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’
Will you seek the Lord while He may be found, and call upon Him while He
is near? Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let
him return to the Lord; He will have mercy on him; and to our God, for He will abundantly
pardon.