This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I taught this session at Spring Creek Bible Church on June 11, 2017, as Part 6 of the Introduction to New Testament Exegesis class (the last 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 our sixth and final class in this study on New Testament exegesis. It didn’t go quite as I originally planned, but in the Lord’s providence it worked out well—with a newborn at home, it’s been an extra busy and sleepless season for our family. I’m grateful for the classes we’ve had and the chance to dig into God’s Word. Let’s ask a blessing on this last class. Father, thank you that we can gather this morning and open your Word. We ask your Spirit’s illuminating help as we think about what you’ve communicated through the apostle John; help our minds to think clearly, and stir our hearts appropriately to the truth of your great love for the world and the sending of your unique Son. In Jesus’ name, amen.
We planned to give one week to John 3:16; it spilled into two, and now three—but it’s worked out well to focus on a single text and give good attention to the exegetical method and how it transitions into looking theologically at the text.
Word Study: “So” (Conclusion)
Last time we were in the word-study section, working on the little word “so” (Greek houtōs), which we flagged because translations handle it differently—some “so,” some “so much,” some “in this way.” It’s capable of three senses: degree or extent (how great something is), pointing backward to what precedes, or pointing forward to what follows. One member raised a good point worth noting: the difference between translation and interpretation. A translation may specify an interpretation, but not always. More literal, word-for-word translations often intentionally choose renderings that don’t force a single interpretation—their aim is to give you the original wording and let you discern the meaning. So translators who use “so” here aren’t necessarily taking an interpretive position; they’re rendering the word plainly and leaving the force to the reader.
To recap my suggestion (and this is human opinion—I could be wrong): out of 207 occurrences in the New Testament, there are only about four where “so” clearly means degree. “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him” (Galatians 1:6)—how quickly? so quickly. “Are you so foolish?” (Galatians 3:3). “So terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear’” (Hebrews 12:21). And “so great was the earthquake” (Revelation 16:18, a different form of the word). In each, nothing is being pointed back to or forward to, and degree is the force. But that’s four out of 207. The word’s normal function is to connect what came before to the present statement, and in John’s writings it almost always has that backward-pointing force.
A helpful clue: the same word occurs nearby in John 3. In verse 8, “The wind blows where it wishes…so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit”—that points backward (what is it like to be born of the Spirit? it’s like the wind just described). And in verse 14, even closer, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”—not stressing how high, but drawing a likeness back to Moses and the serpent. Both are clearly backward-pointing. So my sense is that “so” in verse 16 carries its normal backward-pointing force; the “for” already ties us to what precedes, and “so” adds that there’s a likeness between what was just said and what follows. If that’s right, Jesus is saying that God’s love for the world is like God’s love for rebellious Israel—who were complaining and murmuring, whom God judged with serpents, and yet on whom he had compassion, giving Moses the bronze serpent so that those who looked and believed would be rescued. (One member helpfully clarified: “the Son of Man must be lifted up” is indeed a forward-looking statement; “so” isn’t doing that—it’s the connector tying that clause back to the Moses clause.)
This doesn’t fundamentally change the meaning; we already have two clear indicators of the greatness of God’s love—“loved” fronted for emphasis, and “his only Son” fronted to stress the greatness and uniqueness of the gift. I’m not diminishing the greatness of God’s love—it’s plainly in the text. But we shouldn’t assume every word must carry that same purpose, especially when this is an uncommon use of “so.” What the backward-pointing reading does is highlight the connection to Numbers 21 and draw a parallel between what happened there and God’s sending of his Son. Two payoffs follow. First, it colors how we picture “the world”: read in a vacuum, we tend to think of the world in neutral terms, but seen against Numbers 21, this is a rebellious, wrath-deserving people—not a group of lovely folks, but rotten sinners on whom God set his love. Second, it reinforces that “the world” here means Jews plus the nations—people from every tribe and tongue, in contrast to the Jewish people alone—which is one of the great transitions of the New Testament. Good people take different views here, so study it for yourself; I’m not dogmatic, but that’s the force I lean toward.
Principles for Word Study
We haven’t said much about how to do a word study, so let me offer some principles and then a process. First, we study Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic words, not English words. If you study the English word “love,” you may be flattening three or four different Greek words behind it and missing the nuances, so make sure your word maps back to a single original-language word. Second, a word means what its author intended it to mean in its context—not merely what a dictionary says. (Take “peruse”: many now use it for a quick skim, though it originally meant a careful, thorough reading—and because people use it that way, that’s becoming its meaning. We collectively shape what words mean, which is why the time of writing matters so much.) Third, words are flexible and dynamic; don’t latch onto a single meaning and force it into every occurrence, since meaning shifts across contexts and over time. Fourth, an author’s own body of writings is the best place to see the range of a word’s meaning—seeing how John in particular uses a word sheds light on his usage elsewhere. And fifth, lexicons (Greek and Hebrew dictionaries) are useful and should be consulted, but they’re written by fallible people. BDAG—the standard Greek lexicon—lists John 3:16 under the “degree” sense, but no one can be a master of all 5,000-plus New Testament words; it’s fine to differ with a lexicon after careful study, though it’s wise to check your conclusion against others.
A Process for Word Study
Here’s a five-step process. First, identify a word worth studying—good candidates are words translators handle differently, and words that recur prominently in a book (a sign of their importance to its message). Second, identify the original-language word behind the English. Before computers we used Strong’s Concordance, which assigns a number to every Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic word so an English reader can find all its occurrences; that still works, as do Bible software tools. You want the lemma—the dictionary form—not just the particular tense, voice, mood, person, or number in which it appears. Third, locate every occurrence of that word in the Testament you’re studying. (For a rare word, reach further—the Septuagint, or contemporary writers like Josephus and Philo—but a common word gives you ample instances in the New Testament itself.) Fourth, read every passage in context, discern the meaning in each, and sort them into buckets by shades of meaning, making your best guess where you’re unsure and circling back. Fifth, test your categories: go back through and try the alternative senses in each passage to confirm you landed rightly (you may not have discovered a meaning until halfway through). Only then open a lexicon to check your work—seeing whether it found the same senses and how it classifies the passages. Done this way, word studies are a richly fruitful path to deeply understanding key words of Scripture.
Finding Prominent Words
One of the best ways to find a word worth studying is to spot words that occur prominently in a given book. You can sense that a word matters by reading and noting it, or you can run a quick search. “Love,” for instance, occurs 114 times in the New Testament—37 in John’s Gospel and 28 in 1 John. If you normalize by book length (occurrences per thousand words), 1 John rises to the top given its small size, but love is clearly a major word for John. Do the same with “world” and you’ll again find John’s Gospel dominating. This is a great tool for uncovering a book’s themes—just as the words a preacher repeats most (beyond “the” and “and”) signal his core message, a biblical author’s repeated words flag his central themes. Working through John 3:16 this way, I find that love, world, giving, believing, and eternal life all stand out—so a summary of John’s message should include at least those themes.
Word Study: “World”
Let me spend a couple of minutes on “world,” which is especially fruitful. It occurs 185 or 186 times (depending on the Greek text), with 105 in John’s Gospel and most of the rest in 1 John—it appears only about 15 times in all the other Gospels combined, so it’s strongly Johannine. Studying it, I find four categories: the world as the created order (the world as a thing); the world as a place (often a synonym for the earth, where people live); the world as people (with several shades); and the world as a fallen system (emphasizing not the people but the beliefs, values, and ideologies opposed to God). There are further nuances—in 1 Corinthians 4:9, for example, “world” even includes angels: “we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men,” where “angels and men” unpack what “world” means there.
Another observation: “world” is often not globally exhaustive. Jesus says, “I declare to the world what I have heard from [the Father]” (John 8:26), and “I have spoken openly to the world…in the synagogues and in the temple” (18:20)—yet he hadn’t traveled the whole globe; “the world” was the world of people around him. In John 12 the Pharisees complain, “Look, the world has gone after him.” Many come to John 3:16 wanting “the world” to mean every human being who ever lived or will live, but when you read the occurrences, it rarely if ever carries that fully exhaustive sense; it’s usually broader, collective, and generic rather than specific to the individuals composing it. So in John 3:16 we’re not talking about the world as a created thing, or a place, or the fallen system (God doesn’t love that); it’s people who are in view—the third sense. But we must be careful not to read our theological systems in and make “world” mean either “every individual who will ever live” or “the elect.” Both, I think, force meaning the author didn’t intend; that’s eisegesis. What Jesus and John intended was to emphasize the world as a collective group of fallen, sinful people—like those Israelites in Numbers 21 on whom God had compassion.
There’s a helpful hint in the surrounding verses. Verse 17: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Here “world” carries different shades even within a few verses—the place he came into, and the people he came to save. And notice: Scripture doesn’t teach that Jesus came to save every single human being; it says he came to save his people from their sins, and that he came for his church. His intent wasn’t that every individual be saved—otherwise we’d have a failed intent—so “world” here is neither “the elect” nor “every individual,” but the sinful mass of humanity that God loved and out of which he would redeem all who believe. When we later come to systematic theology, we harmonize texts and ask, “Does this mean the elect? Everyone?”—but in exegesis we want to draw out what John and Jesus meant without forcing our theology onto them. The big emphasis is “world” as Jews and Gentiles, all the nations, people without distinction. We use language this way all the time: if I say “I like all food,” I don’t mean every morsel that has ever existed—including what my daughter spit up yesterday—I mean all kinds of food. Language carries that flexibility, and we mustn’t let our theological presuppositions force a word to mean more than it should. (As one member noted, we also interpret Scripture by Scripture: even where the author’s intent is unclear, the rest of the Bible marks the boundaries—so we know “world” here can’t mean universalism, because Scripture is consistent.)
Biblical Theology
Biblical theology—an admittedly poor name for the discipline—views the Bible as one progressively unfolding story. “Story” is the key word. It works at multiple scopes: the biblical theology of a single book, of the New Testament, and of the whole Bible (many books by many authors, yet one overarching Author and one unified story). The exercise is to grasp the narrative flow and theological message at each level and see how your text fits. Starting with John’s Gospel: gathering the prominent themes into a statement, I’d put it something like this—Jesus, the divine Messiah and unique Son of God, was God himself; he existed eternally in deep, loving intimacy with the Father, who sent him on a mission of love to save the world; and that salvation consists in entering the same deep, divine love, also known as eternal life, which comes through faith in Jesus. Others put it more concisely—one summary is simply, “Jesus the Messiah gives eternal life to everyone who believes in him,” and another, “Jesus is the Son who came from the Father to reveal him and returned to the Father to open the way to life for his people.” John 3:16 fits beautifully into the theme of John, of the New Testament, and of the whole Bible—a key text at every level.
For the whole Bible in a sentence, there’s a great online post—search “the message of the Bible in one sentence”—where Gavin Ortlund asked some thirty scholars to summarize it; it’s worth five minutes of your afternoon. Andy Naselli and Jason DeRouchie, who once did “the Old Testament in ten minutes” and “the New Testament in ten minutes,” boiled the whole Bible down to, “God reigns, saves, and satisfies through covenant for his glory in Christ.” Tom Schreiner’s is good, and there are many others, each from a different angle. Another biblical-theology exercise is to trace a theme across Scripture—the tree in the garden, Jesus hanging on a tree, the tree in the new heavens and new earth—following one thread through the one unified story.
Historical Theology
Historical theology considers how exegetes and theologians have interpreted and applied a text across church history—the early church, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the modern era. You wouldn’t do this for every text, but it can be rich (for a topic like the clarity of Scripture, seeing how each era wrestled with it in light of its debates and challenges yields real insight into applying the Bible in our own time). Doing it briefly with John 3:16: Martin Luther used it as an example of the kind of teaching absent from the Roman Catholic Church of his day—this message of God’s love received through faith in Jesus, a hidden truth and wisdom that, he said, “inexperienced men cannot grasp.” John Calvin used it to correct the notion that the Father is merely an angry God who must be appeased by a loving Jesus: the text shows it is the Father, in his love, who sends his Son. Yes, God has wrath toward sinners, but it was the Father, moved by love along with the Son, who acted to rescue the world.
Systematic Theology
Systematic theology takes a text, discerns what’s true in it, and harmonizes it with the rest of Scripture—which texts teach the same thing, and which seem to be in tension? Here it’s good to gather supporting Old and New Testament texts and then wrestle with any that seem to pull the other way. First John naturally sits close to John 3:16: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9)—almost a restatement. And then the tension: this says God loved the world, while other texts say Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify a people for himself. Systematic theology grapples with how these fit together so that Scripture’s teaching is consistent, not contradictory.
Practical Theology
Practical theology asks what we should do with the text. A good first question is: what does the text describe versus what does it prescribe? Sometimes the Bible describes things that don’t directly apply to us—Jesus gave specific instructions to his apostles (take a bag, take a sword); reading that, I shouldn’t hop onto Amazon, buy a big sword, and think I’m obeying God today. John 3:16 describes God’s love-gift of his Son to save the world, Jews and Gentiles, through faith; it doesn’t directly prescribe anything, but indirectly it calls us to believe in Jesus and receive eternal life. This is one of the most universal texts in Scripture—there’s nothing limiting it to its original audience; the application is the same for us as for them. Our sins may take a slightly different shape, but we’re sinners just as they were, the remedy is the same, and Christ’s atoning work is timeless.
So what should this text stir in us—as church members, spouses, parents, children, employees, employers, friends, and citizens? First, gratitude—it’s hard to read this and not respond with thankfulness for the amazing love-gift of God’s unique Son. Second, belief: “whoever believes” is our part—and not just the one-time believing that saves, but the ongoing, persevering faith in Jesus that the rest of the Gospel emphasizes, worked out through the challenges of our jobs, homes, and neighborhoods. Third, sharing this message—both with fellow believers (we all need it every day; let’s not think we’ve moved past it) and with the lost around us who haven’t yet heard of God’s great love in his Son. And finally, a personal take-action step: perhaps the Spirit presses on your heart that you’re not living in constant awareness of God’s love—so make a plan. Too often we hear good truth, even think about how it should change us, and then get swept back up in the busyness of life without being changed. Put yourself in the counselor’s seat: you wouldn’t just hand someone a verse; you’d lay out concrete steps that might take weeks to work into a life. Do that for yourself—memorize a passage you can call to mind, or ask a friend to pray with you—so that God’s Word actually shapes your daily life.
Let’s close. Father, thank you for your great love—for loving the unlovely world of which we’re all a part. We deserve your wrath and judgment; we rebelled against you and wanted nothing to do with you. Yet in your great love you gave the greatest gift possible, your own unique Son, to be born as a human being and crucified for us and our sins, and you invite us to receive salvation and eternal life through simple faith in his work. Thank you for awakening us and giving us faith; strengthen and encourage it. Help us to apply your Word to our lives, to speak it to others in ways that encourage, and to be a testimony to the world around us, sharing your love. In Jesus’ name, amen.