Fresh Look at John 3:16

John 3:16 is one of those highly recognized and memorized scripture throughout the Christian Society. It’s almost like a mantra that they have instilled in themselves or you could see it as a motto for them. Even myself I have known this scripture for most of my life and thought probably like everyone else that we knew exactly what this scripture meant, never thinking that there could be more to this scripture then what we were brought up believing about it. I want you to take another look at John 3:16 with an open mind and try not to let what we have always been told to block out a fresh look.

Let us read it again together, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. It seems pretty straight forward at first glance. The part of this verse that I want to focus on is the line that reads, “…that whosoever believeth in him should not perish”. Who is the “him” that is mentioned here? I would think the majority if not all Christians would say that it is speaking of Jesus himself. I couldn’t blame them because that’s what we are told or we may assume. It wasn’t till God should me another scripture not too far from this one that answered who this was speaking of. If you read John 5:24 you will get to see the answer yourself right from Jesus’s own mouth. Jesus states here that those that believeth on Him that sent him has everlasting life.

Even though these scriptures are not far from each other I had not been able to connect the dots till God showed me. Looking back it should have been plain to me, but like a lot of things God likes to hide things in His word and reveals them to us as we search. I compare it to hidden treasures that we can only find if we take the time to dig into the scriptures or like an archeologist that is digging through layers of earth and when they come across a small hidden piece of history it becomes that much more precious to them because of the time and effort put into finding it.

This brings me to another interesting tidbit I came across as well. There are two scriptures that bring up an interesting point. Matthew 11:27 states that no one knows either the Son or the Father except for themselves, but we can know the Father IF Jesus reveals Him to that person. Then look at John 6:44 where it shows that no man can come to Jesus unless his Father first draws him to Jesus.

For us to learn to know God truly we are first drawn to Jesus by his Father and once we come to Jesus he will reveal to us his Father. There are a couple of things we learn from this. If we are not caring to know the truth or wanting some kind of relationship with God we won’t be drawn to Jesus and for us to know the Father we need to be faithful servants of Jesus or we will not get the chance to learn of and know God. This all comes back to Jesus’ main point of his ministry and that was to get people to turn from their sinful ways and return to his Father, which has been lot since you will seldom hear of God, which goes back around to Jesus’ ministry of preaching about his Father and our repentance (turning from our sinful life and not making accuses for it and using Jesus’s sacrifice as a broad brush to keep doing exactly what you had been doing before you turned your life over to him).

Let our goal be to learn and build our relationship with Jesus’s Father since that is what he has wanted for us from the beginning.