Many people have made up their minds about Christianity without ever having actually read any of the Bible. Other people have been exposed to bits and pieces but made their own assumptions about how it all fits together. While no one verse can adequately explain all the intricacies of a book that numbers more than a thousand pages, most Christians agree that John 3:16 summarizes the heart of its message.

It simply says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Consider the three parts of this verse.

1. There’s a God and His heart toward you is love

The Bible ascribes the full range of emotions to God. Like any parent, He’s grieved when His children turn their backs on Him and full of joy when they return home. But we’re not left to wonder how He feels about us. God loves you. He has compassion for you. He cares for you.

We tend to doubt God’s love because we measure His feelings by our comfort and our pain. “If God loved me, surely He’d make my life easier,” we tell ourselves. But this verse says that the primary way He shows us His love is by dealing with a more serious, more fundamental problem.

2. We’re facing death, and our greatest need is life

According to the end of the verse, God’s love has moved Him to somehow rescue us from death and give us life. In speaking of “eternal life” we get a hint that this is more than just an emergency room resuscitation. In fact, the word used for “life” here doesn’t just describe someone with a pulse. It speaks of the fullness of life, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. It’s a life connected to God and at home with Him (John 17:3). It’s a life that lasts forever but can start today.

Just as “life” in this verse is more than just a question of whether you have a pulse, death has more layers as well. Death points all the way back to the garden where God warned that sin would bring death (Genesis 2:17). In eating the forbidden fruit, something died in our innocence (Genesis 3:7), our relationship with God (Genesis 3:8), and our relationship with each other (Genesis 3:12). Without eternal life, we face eternal death. According to the Bible, this is our greatest problem.

3. Life and death turn on our faith response to Jesus

In the middle of the verse, God gives the gift of His Son as the solution to our problem. Jesus is the innocent one who died as a guilty criminal in order to take our place and receive the penalty we deserved. He took a bullet for us, literally. He’s the Saviour who pushed us out from behind an oncoming train. It cost Him His life, but Jesus purchased ours.

Eternal life, then, isn’t something we earn as a reward or achieve through good behaviour. It’s a gift we receive through faith in Jesus. Through faith, we submit to Jesus and stop living as our own God. Through faith, we receive God’s greatest act of love and begin a new life connected to Him and alive to His purposes. Through faith in Jesus, we move from death to life.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. – John 3:16

If this is new to you and you think it’s something you’d like to explore, I’ve written a free, 12-week course called The Unstuck Life that walks you through the essentials of Jesus’ teachings in daily, bite-sized messages that you can read or watch by video. To learn more, go to gracebc.ca/getunstuck.

In awe of Him,

Paul