Another Look at John 3:16 John 3:1-21

Everybody knows John 3:16, but do you know John 3:14 or 15?  Or John 3:17, 18, 19, 20, or 21?

Any time you quote a Bible verse, you always want to know the verses around it.  That usually helps you to better understand the verse you’re quoting.

¹⁴ “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; ¹⁵ so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life. 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.”

John 3:14 refers back to Numbers 21:4–9

⁴ and the people became impatient because of the journey. ⁵ The people spoke against God and Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this miserable food.” ⁶ The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. ⁷ So the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, because we have spoken against the Lord and you; intercede with the Lord, that He may remove the serpents from us.” And Moses interceded for the people. ⁸ Then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live.” ⁹ And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard; and it came about, that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.

The people in the story about Moses who needed to look at the serpent on the pole were dying.  A person who does not have Christ is dying.  The Bible speaks about people as being dead in their sins, but this is a picture of people who look all fine on the outside, but in God’s eyes, they are dying. 

People today without Christ have an incurable disease that is killing them, and they don’t even know it.  What disease is that?  We’ll get to that in a minute.

So Jesus says that the Son of Man, or He, Jesus must be lifted up.  I see this as a play on words.  The expression lifted up can mean just that, lifted up, or it can also mean exalted.  And I think He has both meanings in mind here.  Being lifted up refers first to Jesus being lifted up on the cross to die for our sins.  But then Jesus will also be exalted to sit at the right hand of God. 

So whoever looks to Jesus on the cross or to Jesus exalted to the right hand of God will be saved, or have eternal life.

Let’s look further here.

John 3:14–20

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. ¹⁷ “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. ¹⁸ “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. ¹⁹ “This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. ²⁰ “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light that his deeds not be exposed. 21 “But he who does the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been done in God.”

People who don’t know Christ, or maybe I should say, people who don’t want to believe in Jesus or even believe in God, the problem is not an intellectual one.  It’s a moral one.  They don’t anyone telling them how to live their lives.  That’s the main reason people are atheists.  They don’t want anyone telling them what to do.  You believe in God, then you believe in somebody who is over you.

 

In the verses just before these verses, Jesus told Nicodemus that a person had to be born from above to see the Kingdom of God.  That could be translated born again, but born from above is the more obvious way to understand it.  If you saw the word by itself, that’s what you would think it meant.

Nicodemus saw it as a rebirth, and Jesus explains further.  Unless someone is born of water and spirit, they are unable to enter the kingdom of God.

What Jesus meant has perplexed people ever since then.  They understand the being born of the Spirit part, but what does being born of water mean?

Water has already been referred to 6 times in the book of John.

Three times it refers to John the Baptist baptizing in water, and 3 times it is mentioned when Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding feast.

Nicodemus would have known about John’s baptism, which was a baptism of repentance, turning from your old ways to God’s ways, but the reader would also see a connection to the water turned into wine.  The water was changed into the best wine, which is also the figure of the Spirit.  The water was transformed.

So being born of water would signify the repentance which changes one’s orientation to life, your choice to follow God, and the Spirit is the power of God to transform the inside of the person.

A natural person, one who has never accepted Christ, who has never been born from above, born of the Spirit, never had his inner person transformed by the Spirit of God, when he dies and sees God, he will cower in fear and will want to run away.  It’s like looking at the light of a thousand suns that makes him want to turn away and run.

But for a person who has been born of the Spirit, when he sees God after he dies, he will want to run to Him, worship Him and sing His praises.

John 3:16 is God speaking to dying people.  I want you to live.  Look to Jesus, and you will have life in the fullest sense possible.