John 3:16-21

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."