Perhaps the best-known passage of Scripture is John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Usually this is taken to mean that God loves all people in the world and wants them to come to him and live forever in heaven. Of course, we know that God does not love sin, which is a violation of his plan for human life. So to the extent that human cultures practice and advocate conduct or doctrine that (based on the witness of Scripture) is clearly repugnant to him and therefore sinful, God does not love that culture. Indeed, he wants to free people from enslavement to sinful cultural values, and that is what repentance (metanoia, “change of mind”) in the New Testament is all about.
So, when John (or Jesus, depending on how you punctuate the originally unpunctuated manuscripts) says that “God so loved the world,” we understand this doesn’t mean that God loved a sinful world culture. But does it mean, instead, that he loved all people in the sinful world, as is usually taught? To approach this, we need to define some terms. What does “love” mean, in the Bible? What does “world” mean in the Gospel of John?
Usually, in our culture, we associate “love” with a feeling of attraction toward someone (or something — like money). But the New Testament word for “love,” agape, has a radically different connotation. It is based on the concept of chesed in the Hebrew Scriptures. The word is variously translated in English versions as “lovingkindness,” “steadfast love,” or simply “love.”
The Torah and the Prophets often speak of the Lord’s chesed toward his worshipers, and the way the term is used shows that it refers not to the Lord’s attraction to them but to his loyalty or faithfulness because he has entered into a partnership, or agreement, with them. This agreement is often termed the covenant, a treaty or contract in which the partners have a family bond and have mutual obligations. For example, the Psalmists sometimes appeal to the Lord for deliverance on the basis of his chesed, not because they deserve his help but because that is his fatherly responsibility in the covenant.
So chesed is God’s covenant love, his faithfulness to the agreement he has made with his people — that is, his family. Obviously, if there is no covenant and no family bond, there is no application of the Lord’s “covenant love.” If the New Testament usage of agape “love” has its roots in this important biblical concept (as I am persuaded it does), then it’s not correct to state that God “loves” everyone. He loves those who have become his partners and entered into his family, and to whom he therefore has a gracious obligation.
Then, what does it mean that “God so loved the world?” And here we have to look at what the term “world,” or kosmos, means in the Gospel of John. Today, when we speak of the “world,” we usually mean the globe of the earth. But certainly God doesn’t “love” the physical globe in the same sense that he would love his family members (although as Creator he surely has an attachment to what he has made). Ancient people knew the earth was a globe (Columbus didn’t invent the idea), but when they spoke of the “world” or kosmos they did not have the globe of the planet in mind. They were referring to the human culture of the globe’s inhabitants.
But, in John’s Gospel, this term has a specific reference to the community of ancient Judaism. We know this because of the way Jesus uses the term in John 18:20, speaking to the high priest. Scripture often uses the method of parallelism, where an idea is stated in one phrase, then restated in different words in another phrase. This style is why the Bible often sounds like the Bible and like nothing else. And in John 18:20 Jesus states, “I have spoken openly to the world [kosmos]. I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together.” By parallelism, Jesus is equating the “world” with the institutions of the Jewish community.
When John 3:16 states that “God so loved the world,” the meaning is that God was faithful to the people he had chosen to serve him in his call to their father Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3). In spite of their lack of faithfulness to that mission to be a blessing to all peoples, God provided a way for his people to be reconstituted as “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6:16) through membership in the risen Jesus, and through living out in their witness the kingship of God — the “new-creation” life, the eternal life (zoe aionion, “life of the [new] aeon or age”). This was always God’s plan for people made in his own image, that through Jesus his chosen family, his covenant partners, might be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
When Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, they often say that Jesus was born so that through his death and resurrection we have a way to “go to heaven” when we die. But this is “another gospel” (Galatians 1:6-7), a serious truncation of New Testament teaching, because the “Israel” dimension is left out. Jesus announced the kingship of God, was crucified, and was raised as “both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36) with specific reference to Israel. And through what he did the “Israel of God” was raised up as the renewed family of Abraham to fulfill that calling to bless all people, inviting them into Jesus’ new-creation life — a life available to people from “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9).
