Faith in Jesus Christ ensures eternity with God, while never believing in Him ensures eternity apart from God.
Receiving His love in faith means receiving God’s kind of life, eternal life (3:16). “World” means people. “So loved” expresses the immeasurable quality of His love and the way He shows love. The love Christ offered (and offers) is sacrificial and unconditional in its perfect expression of grace. God’s love in Jesus has none other like it (“one and only,” NIV). His purpose (“that”) accomplishes its life-giving result through faith in Him.
Christ did not come to give us what we deserve but to give what His saving love alone could accomplish (3:17). His first coming focused on salvation, which must include an initial element of judgment on sin, but is not the finality of “passing sentence” (Phillips).
Faith spares believers from eternal judgment, but unbelief never changed ensures eternal judgment (3:18-19). Prior to creation God determined how He would proceed in condemning unbelief (3:18), so even a person’s “not believing” decides what will happen in his future. God in Christ is His singular offer of salvation.
Light reveals a reality for what it is - the truth God makes known about Himself and about the world (3:19; Isaiah 5:20). Condemnation awaits all who prefer not to be disturbed by the light of God’s truth in Christ: “On these grounds is sentence pronounced” (NJB). Thus, sin is a personal moral choice (3:19b), one that exactly contrasts God’s love. Just as God’s love for humankind reveals His character, how people show their love – or not - reveals their true character; God and humankind do what they do because of what they are.
Practicing the truth of Christ contrasts practicing hate of truth (3:20-21). Evil behavior refuses to “face up to” what the Light shows, “For the person whose life is false shuns the Light and won’t go near it (3:20, Jordan). The one who believes in Jesus produces the kind of life that honors the God who saved him or her; that is, he “makes a practice of coming to the Light” (3:21). This person faces up to what the Light reveals about him or her through the searchlight of Jesus’ presence.
Faith describes a personal relationship that deepens day by day: a believer “keeps on coming,” and does so for a purpose - that his works are acts of obedience to God.
Dr. David Moore can be contacted at dm5867se@outlook.com
