John 3:16

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

In the first part of this chapter, Jesus explained to a religious leader, Nicodemus, the spiritual change which must take place for a person to see and enter the kingdom of God. This is shown in how a person must have a rebirth from flesh—or sin—to spirit through the Holy Spirit. Then Jesus explained how this is done. He told Nicodemus that he must first accept the earthly reality—that Jesus is God and He would die on the cross and be raised from the dead—before he could understand the spiritual reality. In this last section of this conversation, Nicodemus will not speak again. Instead, Jesus will go into why God was doing this.

This one verse breaks down very simply but at the time it would have been profound for someone like Nicodemus. The first point is that God loved the world. God did not just love a specific people group or a specific type of person. He loved the whole world. This love motivated Him to send Jesus into the world—a person of the same essence as God the Father, being God also. This was done as was mentioned in the last passage that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. This idea of “perish” is not just a physical death. It is more like a spiritual death as John has already made clear in the passage.

Jesus has taken Nicodemus from an understanding of rebirth in the Holy Spirit to understanding that it must culminate in belief in Jesus and finally the revelation that this rebirth will have an eternal aspect to the person who believes. This was something Nicodemus would understand being a Pharisee. Jesus was talking about the resurrection and spiritual matters as they believed in this. Even though the body might die, the spirit will live eternally, and that means to be eternally with God. This comes full circle in the verse because those who can receive that eternal life must love God to have a desire to live eternally with Him, so Jesus showed you cannot have God’s love without eternal life, but alternatively you can’t have eternal life without God’s love.

For Christians, we have to meditate on this fact day and night. God loved us enough to save us even when we act like hypocrites. This should motivate us not to stay in our sin but to move forward and when we fall we fall into the arms of the loving Father who lifts us back up, and through the strength of the Holy Spirit to keep moving forward. This has to be done in a relationship with Him and prayerfully listening to God. We do this by confessing our sin and making sure to call on Him when we feel those temptations rising again. We also read our bibles so we might always have His words in our minds when those troubles arise.

For non-Christians, God loves you, not in a superficial way that you are used to but in a way that is deeper than can be expressed in words. God loved you so much that He sent the only one like Him…in a human body…to Earth…to die and be raised from the dead so that what you have done to violate His laws might be forgiven. He is calling you now to accept that so that you might also have eternal life with Him and never again die spiritually. He calls you to abandon anything else and come to love Him so that you might be free from yourself and the world.