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.
Background
While the rest of the New Testament writings were written in about the 10-30 years after Jesus’ death, John’s writings were not written until around the 90s AD. The earlier New Testament writers did not emphasize Jesus as God because many of the readers were witnesses to His life and would been aware of the signs, miracles, authority and wisdom He displayed. They had a strong belief that Jesus was God. But John wrote about 60 years after Jesus went back to Heaven. Many of the readers would have been 1 or 2 generations after the original readers and various rumors and doubts about Jesus’ deity and actions would have started come into conversations. It was time for some re-emphasis on who was Jesus and what He had done. John was well respected and Jesus had hinted that John would be kept around longer for a special purpose as recorded in John 21:20-22 when Peter asked what plans Jesus had for John.
The “gospel” of John is one of four gospels (biographies of Jesus’ life). Each gospel targeted a different audience. Matthew, for example, targeted the Jews as is clear by it starting with the genealogy of Jesus. It was important to them because the Messiah needed a lineage from Abraham through David. The first 3 gospels are called the synoptic gospels because there is significant overlap in the topics they cover. This would be expected because most of the readers had confidence of Jesus deity and the letters strengthen their faith by reminding them of things Jesus had done.
While John’s gospel covers a variety of topics important to the readers, there is an emphasis through the letter of Jesus’ deity. John 3:16 is broadly quoted because it is the core message of the whole Bible – the story of what God is doing in this world.
What it meant to the original audience
These second and third generations of Christians needed a foundation refresh so that their understanding of Jesus and their faith in His promises could be strengthened. Especially important to that foundation was what Jesus’ death on the cross accomplished — the unconditional love of God and the promise that they that they will be with Him in Heaven for all eternity.
For us today
There are several important concepts packed into this short verse:
- God loves us and has good plans for us: People have a wide range of ideas about God from loving parent, to disengaged, to someone just waiting for us to do wrong so he can punish us. John made it clear that God loves us very much and is executing a plan that puts those that trust Him in a very wonderful place.
- Parental love is given because of unconditional love, not by us earning it (e.g. not because of being a basically good person): In Bible terminology, because of grace, not works. Many people think that God is evaluating whether we are worthy based on how good we are. That would be the equivalent of a parent communicating to their child they will only love them if they are good. Like a good parent, God’s love for His children is unconditional and His actions toward us are designed with loving purpose of maturing us. He made it clear that He was not focusing on our faults by clearly redeeming us them through Jesus. He wants us to focus on trusting Him as a loving and wise Heavenly Father and so He made sure that we felt that we could approach Him. He wants us to feel fully known and yet fully loved.
- We focus on now – God focuses on now and eternity: The part most people miss is that God is looking at our full life (now and eternity) while we tend to only focus on “now” and “self”. A wise and loving parent would like their child to be happy now, but knows that sometimes the end goal is more important. See the word picture of a 6-year-old for more on that in the Trilogy video on why God let’s bad things happen.
God loves us very much and had great plan for our full life (now and in eternity). But it is up to us listen, trust and follow His wise and loving counsel.