This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I taught this session at Spring Creek Bible Church on June 4, 2017, as Part 5 of the Introduction to New Testament Exegesis class (the second of the three sessions on John 3:16). It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
This is John 3:16, part two. Last week we made it through step six, and we agreed to continue on through the rest of the process, hopefully finishing the remaining steps this morning. Let’s ask the Lord’s blessing. Father, thank you for the opportunity to gather. We love you, and we love your Word and are thankful for it. Thank you for minds to think and for the work you’ve done in our hearts. Help us as we attend to your Word—that we would see it as you intended, think about it accurately, and be stirred appropriately. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Step 7: Diagramming
The first thing to do when diagramming is to identify the main clauses. A main (or independent) clause has a subject and verb—and possibly an object—and can stand on its own as a complete thought. Here the kernel is “God” (subject), “loved” (verb), and “the world” (direct object). That’s the main clause.
Then we identify the other clauses and figure out how they relate. The next clause—“that he gave his only Son”—has “he” (subject), “gave” (verb), and “Son” (object). This is a dependent, or subordinate, clause: it’s introduced by a conjunction (“that”) and can’t stand on its own. If I walked up and said, “that he gave his only Son,” you’d be waiting for me to finish the thought. Next comes “whoever believes in him.” This is worth a note, because Greek and English differ here: in Greek it’s a single participle (“the believing one,” the believer), while in English it’s more natural to render it as a relative clause, “whoever believes.” That relative clause itself functions as the subject of the final clause—“whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”—which has a compound verb: “should not perish” but “have,” with “life” as the direct object.
A few things this exercise surfaces. The pronoun “him” (“whoever believes in him”) is masculine and singular in Greek and could grammatically point back to either “Son” or “God”—a Greek pronoun agrees with its antecedent in gender and number—so grammar alone doesn’t settle it; we look to context, and virtually everyone takes it as the Son. “Not” is an adverb modifying the verb “perish.” And why isn’t “perish” alone the verb? Because English adds a helping verb (“should perish”) where Greek uses a single word: Greek packs tense, voice, and mood into one word by changing its spelling—prefixes and endings—rather than adding separate words. A good example we hear at our Good Friday service is tetelestai, “it is finished”: one Greek word, with the reduplicated syllable on the front marking the perfect tense. Here the “should” reflects the subjunctive mood, signaled in Greek by a lengthened vowel.
Now let’s diagram it. In a sentence diagram, the main clause goes on the main line—subject “God,” verb “loved,” object “world.” The second clause, “that he gave his only Son,” hangs off the verb “loved” (dependent clauses typically connect to a verb). The third clause hangs off the verb “gave”: does “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” connect back to God’s loving or to his giving? It connects most directly to the second clause—God gave his Son so that whoever believes should not perish. Embedded within it is the relative clause “whoever believes in him,” which serves as the subject of that final clause.
The relationships matter. God’s loving the world is the driver, and his giving the Son is the result—because God loved the world, he gave his Son. The final clause expresses purpose or intent—God gave his Son so that everyone who believes would not perish but have eternal life. So the big picture is: God loved the world; the result of that love was that he gave his Son; and the purpose of giving his Son was that whoever believes would have eternal life. If a full sentence diagram feels tricky, there’s a simpler alternative called a propositional display: write out the clauses, use indentation to show what modifies what, draw connecting lines, and note in the margin which clause is the result and which is the purpose. That approach works especially well across a paragraph of several sentences, where a single-sentence diagram won’t reach.
One more thing this reveals that you’d miss in English: word order. Greek word order differs from English, and a writer often moves the word he wants to stress to the front of the clause. Here the verb “loved” (ēgapēsen) is pulled up ahead of both subject and object, giving it emphasis—John is stressing that love. (And though “loved” is past tense, referring to the historical act of giving the Son, that doesn’t mean God’s love has ceased; Scripture amply shows it continuing.) We’ll see the same fronting with “his only Son.”
Step 8: Grammar
Diagramming and grammar go together—as you work out how the pieces fit, you’re already thinking grammatically. A helpful first move is to identify the part of speech of each word. “For” is a conjunction (conjunctions connect: “and” in parallel, “but” in contrast, “for” in a dependent relationship). “God” is a noun (its function is subject, but its part of speech is noun). “So” is an adverb, “loved” a verb, “the” the definite article, “world” a noun, and so on. A caution on the word “that”: it can be several different things—there are four or five Greek words rendered “that”—so it doesn’t always do the same job; here it’s a conjunction.
Next, note the key connecting words and the logical relationships. “For” signals that there was a thought before this verse that it’s now explaining—a good reminder that reading John 3:16 as an isolated snapshot means missing the bigger picture; we should look back to see the connection. Then, as we said, the second clause is a result and the third a purpose.
It’s also worth tracking pronouns and their antecedents. “He” and “his” both point back to God. “Whoever” has no true antecedent (in Greek it’s a participle), but it connects conceptually to “the world”—the subset of people in the world who believe. “Him” points back to the Son, as almost everyone agrees. Antecedents can be tricky—when you see a “he” or “him,” it’s worth asking carefully whether it refers to the Father, the Son, or the Spirit, and Greek gives helpers English doesn’t. A good illustration is John 16:7–13, where Jesus speaks of “the Helper” (the Comforter) and then says “when he comes, he will convict the world.” That “he” is debated, because the pronoun is masculine while “Spirit” is grammatically neuter. Here’s the key: grammatical gender doesn’t convey real gender—in Greek a shoe might be feminine and a sock masculine, with no connection to actual gender. So we shouldn’t argue that the neuter noun “Spirit” makes the Holy Spirit less personal than the Father and Son—that’s not legitimate. Nor, I think, does the grammar support the popular claim that John deliberately “breaks” grammar with a masculine pronoun to stress the Spirit’s personhood. The Spirit’s personhood is true theology, but the simpler explanation is that the masculine pronoun points back a few verses to the masculine noun “Helper” in verse 7, which John keeps in view. It’s a good example of how an antecedent can sit several verses back.
Finally, watch for other significant constructions. We noted the fronting of “loved” for emphasis; the same happens with the gift: in Greek the clause runs, roughly, “that the Son, the only one, he gave”—“the unique Son” is pulled to the front, stressing the uniqueness and value of the gift. You’ll have a hard time seeing that in English, but commentaries and Greek tools will point it out.
Word Study: “So”
Earlier we flagged two words for study because translations handled them differently: “so” and “only/only begotten.” We’ve touched on the latter, so let me dig into “so,” which has some genuinely interesting things going on. In Greek it’s houtōs, occurring 207 times in the New Testament, related to the demonstrative pronoun houtos (“this”). The -ōs ending in Greek works much like “-ly” in English, turning an adjective into an adverb (“slow” to “slowly”). So it turns “this” into, if we could coin the word, “thisly”—for which English actually has a word: “thus.” So the word means “thus,” “so,” “in this way,” “like this.”
There are three main ways to take it here. The first, and the most common in translations, is extent or degree—how great the love is (“God loved the world so much”), the way you tell your spouse, “I love you so much.” The word can carry that sense, but it actually does so only about three to five times out of its 207 occurrences—so that’s not its normal function. The second view takes it as pointing forward: “This is how God loved the world—he gave his only Son.” That works conceptually, but it has a challenge: the following word (hōste, “so that”) doesn’t elsewhere in the New Testament pair with “in this way” to form such a construction, and it would turn the result clause into a noun clause (“the way God loved…namely, he gave”), which the grammar doesn’t really support.
The third view—the word’s normal function—takes it as pointing backward: “For in this way (that I’ve just described) God loved the world.” Look at the preceding context: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For in this way God loved the world, that he gave his only Son….” On this reading, verse 16 connects back to verses 14–15 (and the “for” already signals a connection): God showed his love to Israel by having Moses raise the serpent so that all who looked and believed would live, and in much the same way God shows his love for the world by having his Son lifted up so that all who look to him in faith will be saved.
I’m not trying to give a definitive interpretation—there’s plenty of discussion—but several things incline me toward “so” pointing backward, and not primarily stressing degree. We already have ample indication that this love is great: “loved” is fronted for emphasis, and “his only Son” is fronted too—the greater the gift, the greater the love. Many readers see that greatness and assume “so” must be doing the same work, but it may not be. Consider 1 John 4:10–11, which a popular Greek lexicon lists as a classic example of “so” meaning degree: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” But read verse 10 first: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Then verse 11 reads naturally as, “Beloved, if God in this way loved us”—pointing back to what was just described—“we also ought to love one another.” Even that “clear” example is debatable.
My main reason for leaning this way is simply that the “degree” sense is uncommon—only three or four clear cases out of 207 occurrences—so we should be inclined to read the word the way it’s normally used. And John himself arguably never uses it for degree; John 3:16 would be the lone example, with no other even questionable cases in his writings. Looking at how an author uses a word is a good check on our understanding. If John had wanted to stress degree unambiguously, common words were available (“God greatly loved the world”). A word like “so” is versatile—it can point backward, indicate degree, or something else—which is why less interpretive translations (like the ESV) choose “so” and let the reader decide, while more interpretive ones use less ambiguous wording.
We’ve shown pretty clearly that we can’t get through all fourteen steps in one week, so rather than jump to a new text, let’s finish the process here next time—we’ll pick up in the word-study section and work through the last several steps. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your great love for us, displayed in giving your Son—your only, unique Son, who was God himself, and who humbled himself to become a human being and die in our place for our sins. We’re humbled by a love we do not deserve. Thank you for stirring in our hearts belief and faith in this great gospel. Strengthen us in it this week, and help us to overflow with it into the lives of others you bring across our path. Bless us now as we gather corporately, in Jesus’ name, amen.