Commentaries:
No entry exists in Forerunner Commentary for John 3:18.
John 3:17-21
Excerpted from: John 3:16 in ContextNow what about this section after, verses 17 through 21, I think we can get this fairly quickly. This is an explanation of the difference between those who believe in Christ and those who do not.
It is kind of telling to me that nominal Christians do not mention these verses with the same breathless amazement as verse 16. Here, Jesus makes a very precise distinction between those who believe in Him and those who do not.
God sent His Son as a human being to make salvation possible for human beings. His sacrificial death, as well as His teachings and His example, provide what a person needs once God calls him to Jesus Christ. So you have the calling and you have Jesus' instruction; you have His example, and you have the commentary by the apostles that help us to put it all together. And combining this with Jesus Christ's sacrificial death, these are all things that we could not do for ourselves. We could not supply Jesus' example. We could not supply Jesus' teaching. We could not supply His death. And then God's forgiveness and grace and gift of the Holy Spirit. All those things had to be provided for us.
So, what He is saying here in verse 17 is God prepares the way of salvation for us and He is calling these various ones out of the world to have these advantages that He supplies and then work with them.
Verse 18 tells us that because he has believed in Jesus Christ and he has accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. He is no longer under the condemnation of sin. That has been wiped away. Sin has been forgiven. So once a person believes and repents, Christ's sacrifice and God's grace lift the penalty. Now he is living freely for the first time in his life with the help of God's Spirit in him, plus all the instruction plus Jesus' example to live the right way, to be like Christ.
But the unbeliever, on the other hand, remains condemned. He does not have access to the forgiveness of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ because he does not believe in the Son. He has not been called. He has not been regenerated through God's calling and the gift of the Holy Spirit and so he is exactly what he once was. Under condemnation.
Verses 19 and 20 are the crux of the matter in terms of the difference between the two groups. The unbeliever keeps on practicing evil. That is, he lives a life of habitual sin.
Verse 21, then, gives the other side of this. The believer, on the other hand, practices, does, He says, or accomplishes or observes the truth in his life because he wants to please God. This is the change that takes place that people can see later on because before he did not want to do anything that God wanted him to do.
John 3:16-21
Excerpted from: John 3:16 in Context (Part Two)Now this third section explains that salvation and eternal life come through God's gift and the sacrificial work of the Son. God gave His Son, and what did His Son do? He gave His life for our sins. Also, it explains, especially in verse 16, that this salvation and eternal life is not just for Israelites. He tells Nicodemus that right away.
He does not say, For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that the Israelites who believe in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. No, He makes it very general, whoever. Whoever believes in Him. And that He would expand the possibility of salvation out to the whole world—to everyone. But they had to believe in the Son.
Now the distinction that He shows here between those who are saved and those who are condemned is belief, not ancestry as the Jewish peoples, Jewish leaders and teachers thought. They thought if you came from Abraham and you were circumcised, you were going to be saved. You were part of the righteous people, and that is pretty much all you needed. You would be part of the Kingdom of God.
But Jesus punctures Nicodemus' balloon on that point and makes sure he understands that it is not anything physical, it is this enigmatic belief, believe in the Son of God. And what He goes on to say here as we go into the later parts of this particular section is that belief is not just intellectual or emotional. It is not just agreement with a certain set of laws or a statement or whatever. But He goes on to make sure that Nicodemus understands, or at least gets witnessed to at this point, that it is the doing or the practicing of the truth that separates those who believe from those who do not believe.
You have to believe intellectually and emotionally, but you also have to then practice the truth. "Everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen that they have been done in God."
Other Forerunner Commentary entries containing John 3:18:
Matthew 13:47-50
John 19:38-40
Acts 4:10-12
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