John Three Sixteen
This is copied from the bulletin of Calvary Baptist Church on 472 Ocean Road in Portsmouth NH 03801 (603) 436-7736. The bulletin is dated April the 6th of 2025.
JOHN THREE SIXTEEN
by Arthur Pierson
Now first notice that there ten prominent words: "God, World, Gave, Son, Whosoever, Believeth, Perish, Have, Life."
1 - God the Father, and God the Son
2 - Two words describe the activities of God.
3 - Two words describe the objects of His loved: World and Whosoever.
4- Two words describe the activities of the believer toward God, Believeth and Have.
5 - Two words describe the opposite extremes of destiny: Perish, the result of rejecting, and Everlasting Life, the result of acceptance.
Now with regard to the first pair, it is a common misconception of the plan of redemption that God represents wrath, and the Son represents mercy; and the Sone comes between God and the sinner, very much as Pocahontas came between Captain Smith and his executioner; there is no word here about the love or self-giving of the Son. But here it is God the Father who is represented as "loving and giving", and our conception of the Son is our conception of God the Father.
A great many Christians say, "I wish I could understand the Father as I do the Son." The answer to that is in the words of our Lord, "He that hat seen me hath seen the Father".
(Joh 14:9) Many, I believe, have a great difficulty in regard to the person of the Godhead; it seems to me that there is no real difficulty in the trinity. Take, for instance, the passage of
John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." That puzzles is a great many people. Take it this way, In the beginning was the stream, and the stream was wit the spring and the stream was the spring. That is perfectly plain. Well, something of the relationship of the stream flowing from the spring is taught in the first verse of the chapter of John, in relation to the Father and Son.
This introduces the second pair: God "Loves" and His "gave". There are various kinds of love. There is the love of complacency, there is a love that finds pleasure in its objects; that kind of love is intensive, partial, and exclusive. Then there is the love of benevolence, which is impartial, and universal. That kind of love always give, and give all that it has got. You cannot imagine such love as that, that does not give. If God "love" of course He "gave" for its is natural for that kind of love to give and give all.
Now the third pair. The first "world" is collective and has reference to the mass; the second word "whosoever" is distributive and refers to the individual. We have another instance of these in our Lord's command, "Go ye into all the world" , that is the collectively universal; "and preach the gospel to every creature ... " (Mark 16:15) that is distributively universal, having reference to the individual. You and I sometimes forget the individual, in the mass of people. God never forgets the individual. He means the gospel for you and me.
John Newton used to say, "It is better for me the word "whosoever" should be in that verse than that my own name should be there; for if it read John Newton instead of "whosoever" there might be a good many John Newton, but I know that "whosoever" means me."
Continued in the next bulletin of Calvary Baptist Church"
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