As long as I can remember, John 3:16 has been preached as a contract.
I was building the rules for how the Berean Table's tools handle Greek. What a word is allowed to mean, and what it is not. To see if the rules would hold, I worked John 3:16 by hand, one word at a time.
What hit me hard is how badly that verse has been misinterpreted. I already knew that from reading it in Hebrew.
After hearing it preached from the pulpit as a very clear transactional issuance, Jesus died for me. I have to accept that, and then I'm saved.
Not the best example, because Sproul does not believe in free will, but...
I read/heard it as terms. I read/heard it as a deal. I read it as the fine print above the line where you sign. God loves the world this much; so he sends his son, you believe the right thing, you get the prize. A good deal. Still a deal. I think I actually raised my hand a few times to that speech.
That is how it reads, and how it's poorly preached in English.
The first word that stopped me was "so". For God so loved the world. I heard so as so much. A measurement. The Greek, however, can be read another way. It says how God loved the world, and the verse answers in the same breath: he gave his son.
How, not only how much.
The Hebrew for love is ahav. I read it as giving freely, providing. Read the verse that way and it stops sounding like a feeling with a price tag. God gave-freely-loved the world, and then it shows you what that looked like. The first time ahav appears in the Bible is Genesis 22:2. Take your son, your only one, whom you love. A father, a son, a mountain. Love and the giving of the son have sat in the same sentence since love was first named.
Then the word believe. In English it is something you do in your head. You can do it alone, at a desk, with the door shut. Aman is the root under amen, and it means to be firm, to hold. To believe in him, in that root, is to treat him as firm enough to bear your weight.
You cannot lean alone.
Now the objection. John's text comes to us in Greek. The Hebrew line I put under it is my own reconstruction, nobody's original. The lexicons give love for ahav, and the give-freely reading is a reading, not an entry. That is fair and I am not simply waving it off. But the Greek leaves room for the first half without my help. In this way. He gave.
Then perish. It sounds like a sentence handed down. The end.
In Luke 15 the same Greek word is used for one sheep out of a hundred, the one that wandered off. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine and goes after it. In the Psalm the Hebrew word is avad, and the psalmist says it about himself. I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, Psalm 119:176.
Lost is not small. A sheep that stays out there does not last. But the picture is a sheep, and the picture has a shepherd in it. A lost sheep is not on trial. It is missing.
Seek your servant.
John 3:16, the way it sounds in Hebrew.
Ki khakhah ahav Elohim et ha-olam, ad asher natan et beno et yechido, lema'an lo yovad kol ha-ma'amin bo, ki im yihyu lo chayei olam.
For in this way God gave-freely-loved the world: he gave his son, his only one, so that everyone who leans firm on him will not wander off and be lost, but will have the life of the age.
Achichem baMashiach
Sergio
