1/10/26 The Basis of the World View

Last week we started a series to start the year off right with a proper biblical world view. John 3:16 is the most popular Bible verse but it simply does not stand alone. As taught last week V16 is a relational verse, but the understanding of that relation is key to understanding why it cannot stand alone. This is why to have a proper worldview based on Biblical teaching the following verses must be taken into context & applied to our values & understanding of who saved us, what we are saved form & how this applies to our daily existence in life.

John 3:16-21¹⁶ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. ¹⁸ Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. ¹⁹ This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰ Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. ²¹ But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

Like it was in V16 the basis of the verse is God, supreme deity who showed love through self-sacrifice. God sent a gift to humanity to achieve something in a similar fashion that hopefully someone in your life has done for you when they have been looking out for you, giving you options in order for you to improve, or giving you direction hoping to keep you from harm. The same God who spoke the world into existence, the same God who built the earth to sustain the level of destruction mankind would pour out upon it. The same God gave mankind the responsibility to manage it, gave the gift mankind would need when the time of flesh & blood would expire that would draw them back to him. There is a problem though.

The gift is misunderstood. Here John inserts the misunderstanding of this verse which is the purpose of the gift. Last week we were able to set the reasoning that is added that those who have faith of the gift would not perish but have ever lasting life, in that by gaining this those individuals would be saved, through the Son of God. This is what we are going to investigate this week because many seem to be misunderstood as to what that means.

God in his sovereignty, in his mercy gave us access to something that we did not have access to before. Despite creating the earth to sustain human physical life with air, food. Water, and possibilities to create housing, clothes after the fall and more provided access to rectification with him since the fall in Eden. Send is the verb, meaning that he took action to bridge the gap between his righteousness & our fallen nature. This is a GR word that has a strong continuity in the word of God. Apostelló This verb is used of closely connecting the Lord (the sender) to the believers. It is where we get the word apostle from, which are individuals who meet specific qualifications in order to be such.

The gift did not come to condemn the world. Condemn, that is a legal term. In the original text it is, condemn is not used. It is that he would not judge the world. Again, it maintains legal context. Condemnation krinó in the GR typically refers to making a determination of right or wrong (innocence or guilt), especially on an official (legal) standard. Recognize this is not why he was sent. The gift is not serving to render judgment, the gift is the conduit of the goal to save. Do we need saved?

The Son is the gift to bridge the gap because we cannot pay the debt. It is an offense before our creator & we are victimized at birth by a generational, cultural curse called the sin nature which shows itself as we develop moving from ignorance to knowledge. Too many times although in fallen cultures we have seen the moves away from the word of God from generation to the next & that following generation is not taught the balance between righteousness & wretchedness. They are taught survival of the fittest which tries to put the self on the throne of everyday affairs with a broken mindset to lie cheat & steal.

If the Son is the means to be saved that makes him the Savior. This is for those who recognized the need to be saved first off. The narrow minded view has cost humanity since the fall that all that matters is this life. The narrow minded view that your ego is fed by getting over on others & profiting. That mindset doesn’t acknowledge the spiritual realm, doesn’t acknowledge the things of God & doesn’t acknowledge the truth of the benefit of helping people rather than taking from them. Because it does not acknowledge there is a life ending penalty for devouring others rather than recognizing our need for a Savior.

We are saved from separation from God. This state moves the estate of the lost to a place called hell. This penalty you cannot hustle, you cannot bargain & you cannot escape from. You have no hope, you have no fall back, no networking will save you. Your guilt is written in the heavenly Tabernacle of Testimony & confirmed as a witness to the all-knowing all-seeing supreme deity that does not want you in his presence because you chose yourself over choosing the gift of his Son.  Hell (last wk.) exists & it is real, God sent the Son to do you the favor of avoiding it. Only the righteous can be before God, enter into eternity & dwell with him because heaven isn’t a gathering of perfect people, it is a gathering of the family of God joined in the blood of the gift of God who did the work for you, who paid the debt for you, who came to destroy the works of the adversary of God, the devil.

We can walk in the state of being saved from separation & Wrath from ourselves which is judicial condemnation. God set us apart from the rest of creation including all the spiritual entities in that we are made in the image of God, but capability wise are lower than the other spiritual creations. He invested self sacrificially only for mankind, no other form of creation has this been done for.

Saved because God sent the Savior you need to do what you could not & change you when you cannot change yourself!