What Does “God So Loved the World” Mean? (John 3:16)

Why “God So Loved the World” Was So Striking

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an 18th-century Swiss philosopher and writer. He was also an atheist who did not believe the Bible’s teaching that human beings have sin inside of them. He believed that man is not fallen and not foolish, and that he does not need to learn anything from the Bible. Instead, he taught that humans are born innocent and have an innate wisdom, and that human nature is good — but societies tend to corrupt people.

That comes into play very strongly when you think about the work of missionaries, because of the myth that there were once wonderfully peaceful, idyllic societies until people came with the Bible and disrupted them. Disney has bought into that. If you’ve seen their Jungle Book movie, they actually turned what Kipling wrote back on its head — instead of being true to the book, they presented the animals and society as pristine and wonderful until man came in and ruined it.

That wishful thinking of atheists and evolutionists is shattered by the harsh reality of the level to which human depravity, cruelty, and violence can stoop. And that’s some of what we’re going to look at tonight. We’re going to the island of Tahiti, and we’re thinking about Henry Nott.

Henry Nott, Tahiti, and the Message of John 3:16

A Difficult Beginning

Henry Nott was born in Bromsgrove, England, in 1774 — southwest of Birmingham. In 1796, at the age of 22, he set sail on a ship called the Duff to bring the gospel to the South Pacific islands. He was one of thirty missionaries, along with six wives and three children, all sponsored by the London Missionary Society, headed for destinations across the South Pacific.

The Duff arrived in Tahiti in early March 1797. The Tahitians, though extremely violent, were not cannibals, and they received the visitors with great joy — because they viewed the Duff and its passengers the same way they viewed every other vessel that arrived in port: a source of material goods that white men could bring to the island.

Already living on the island was an English-speaking Swedish sailor who acted as an interpreter for Henry Nott, who conducted the first Christian meeting on Sunday, March 19, 1797. It would be nearly five years before one of the missionaries could preach a sermon in the vernacular — and that missionary was Henry Nott. He had been a bricklayer in England. He was the only man of that early group who obtained a complete mastery of the language, and he became the ablest and most popular preacher among the natives.

Those early years were extremely difficult. Eight of the seventeen missionaries soon wanted to leave; most left Tahiti two months later aboard the first ship that stopped there — a British vessel on its way to Sydney, Australia. Two of them had gone mad; one suffered a nervous breakdown. That left seven missionaries on the island. Later, when civil war broke out, all the married couples left, leaving Nott and three other single missionaries. Then, when Chief Pomare I was defeated and had to flee to a nearby island, Nott remained with the king and his people — and that tightened the friendship between Henry Nott and the king, which greatly assisted in the translation of the Bible.

As the missionary doggedly pursued this vital work of giving the people the Bible in their own language, missionary historian Ruth Tucker put it this way in her book From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: were it not for the perseverance of a stubborn, uneducated bricklayer who worked for sixteen years without any visible signs of success, the work would no doubt have been abandoned. As problems multiplied, other missionaries gave up — eleven leaving at one time — and Nott found himself left with three others, and even they spoke of going home. At one point, Henry Nott and William Henry were the last two remaining of sixty missionaries who had gone to the islands of Polynesia. All the others had left.

A Persistent Survivor

Despite numerous setbacks, Henry Nott continued to persevere in the work he knew the Lord had called him to. In England he was just a bricklayer, but in Tahiti his latent linguistic ability emerged, and on August 10, 1801, after years of studying the native language, Nott became the first missionary to preach publicly to the people in their own tongue.

Although some natives were quick to assent to the missionaries’ teaching, the evangelists laboured to see genuine conversions. In one of their records they wrote that they might have had a host of converts if, like others, they were willing to admit to baptism anyone who confessed that this God and this religion seemed better than their own — but until they saw people created anew in Christ Jesus and truly turned from darkness to light, they would not admit them to the sacred ordinances.

Thankfully, there were instances of true conversion. Nott recorded the story of a brave young man’s martyrdom. So here we are in a favoured country like Canada — and if you were to be saved tonight, there would be people so thankful to God, talking to you happily about what happened. Here’s what happened to this young man when he trusted Christ: he was banished from his father’s house, and shortly afterward some of the natives decided he would make an acceptable sacrifice to their god.

It was his custom, toward evening, to visit a hill near his home and, under a clump of trees, close the day in prayer. On the evening before that pagan ceremony, while he was praying, he was surrounded and told to come down to the king, who wished to see him. He instantly realized what was happening, and said to them: “I know a ceremony approaches, that a human victim is to be offered. Something within me tells me that I am to be that victim, and your appearance and your message confirm my conviction. Jesus Christ is my keeper; without his permission you cannot harm me. You may be permitted to kill my body, but I am not afraid to die. My soul you cannot hurt — that is safe in the hands of Jesus Christ.” They murdered him on the spot, and his body, wrapped in the customary long basket of coconut leaves, was carried off to be offered to their god.

In those early missionary days, the Tahitians continued many idolatrous and brutal practices, including a cult devoted to killing children. Nott once asked a woman how many children she had. “Just this one, in my arms,” she replied. “How many children did you kill?” She said eight — of her own children. Another woman told him she had killed seventeen.

Eventually, the preaching of the gospel ended not only idolatry but much of this brutal behaviour. On May 16, 1819, Henry Nott baptized King Pomare II. In a short time, the Tahitians passed laws prohibiting cruel murders, and the islands began to experience peace. Nott wrote of the change: to those who had seen and experienced what these people were before, and now witnessed what they had become, the change appeared great.

The Change the Gospel Made

Missionaries were often hated by sailors, because gospel preaching turned the natives — particularly the women — into moral, honest people who no longer engaged in theft and promiscuity. But it was Charles Darwin — you won’t often hear this preacher quote Darwin, but he’ll do it tonight — who noted that however much sailors resented missionary influence in the Pacific, a shipwrecked sailor marooned on a South Pacific island would most certainly pray that the islanders had already received missionaries. It would be the difference between being cooked for dinner or being treated to dinner.

Through all the ups and downs, Henry Nott laboured on, devoted to giving the people the word of God in their own language. In 1835, that monumental task was accomplished. He wrote that the work was finished on Friday, December 18, 1835, at half past one o’clock, and rejoiced that he had been spared to accomplish a work of such transcendent importance.

Gerald Anderson, in the Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, called Henry Nott “a persistent survivor” — others leave, others become ill, but Nott just stays and works: translates the Bible, preaches the gospel.

When the London Missionary Society sent two men to report on the progress of the work, King Mahine, from a neighbouring island, addressed them this way — and if you want to know the change the gospel made on those islands, here is a king describing it: “We were on the brink of the fire of hell when the first English captain — Captain Cook — found us, and when the second came, we were all leaping down the precipice of death. The ship Duff, the missionaries, brought us the love of God and the message of mercy, but still we would not hear. He called us, and he made us to hear his voice. We old people know well what we formerly were: we hated, we hunted, and we killed one another. Through God’s love alone that word was brought to us by our kind friends and teachers, who leapt hither over the tops of the breaking waves to help us.”

One former member of that child-murdering society, saved by the grace of God, offered himself as a missionary to another island, the Marquesas — a former murderer, now a Christian, wanting to take the gospel to other islanders, knowing full well that going there ran the risk of being murdered himself.

Nott died in Tahiti on May 1, 1844. Writing of the many missionaries to the South Seas, Richard Lovett said they all found their labour easier — in some cases only found their work possible at all — because of the strong faith, the steady courage, and the invincible perseverance of Henry Nott.

That is a very small and quick overview. If you’ve had a chance to read the handout, you’ll have read some of the incredible, unspeakable violence — the murdering of the elderly as well as the children, and the brutality practised against an enemy.

Mercy in the Face of Attack

There was an attack on the Christians once the king had become a Christian himself. They didn’t want to kill the people attacking them, but they defended themselves and won the battle, and the enemy fled to the hills. Any other time there had been a battle, the winners would raid the villages of the losers, kill their children, take their wives, and burn their huts. These attackers saw fires and smoke rising and were sure that’s exactly what the Christians had done. They crept down to see if they could rescue any of their family — and found all the huts intact. The fires burning were only cooking food. Not one child had been hurt; not one wife had been killed. The Christians had shown mercy.

One of the attacking men said that this spoke to them more than all the preaching they had ever heard — that Christianity had made such a difference in their people that they would show such mercy.

What Does John 3:16 Mean?

Now, I’ve read you John 3:16, because that was the first verse Henry Nott preached. It was a verse he constantly preached, a truth he thrilled to keep before the natives — that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

When I was a child, there was a tract that took this verse and broke it into an easy-to-remember pattern: God loved. God gave. And then: whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life — I believe, and I’m saved.

Tonight, I want to take that same fourfold breakdown and use it this way. Think, first, of an incredible fact — that God loved the world of sinners. An incomparable act — that God gave. That’s all about God: this incredible giving of his Son, this fact that God loved, this act that he gave. Then the last half of the verse deals with you and me: an intelligent act on our part — a sinner believing what God says. And finally, the indisputable fact — that person has everlasting life and will not perish.

An act on God’s part, a fact about God. An act about us, a fact about us as well.

God Loved: The Incredible Fact

“God so loved the world” is an incredible fact. What we take as common and ordinary — as in, who doesn’t know that? — would have mystified people in a past day. The Greeks would never think about a god loving them; gods were to be feared, to be terrified of, to be placated.

In the four thousand years, give or take, of recorded history we have, as far as we can ascertain, no one ever suggested there was a god who would love everybody. People had the concept of a god loving certain ones — a god who loved the warrior, a god who loved the poet, gods of city-states, gods of nations. But a god who loved everybody? As far as we know, that never entered a human mind until a carpenter from Nazareth, speaking to a Jewish rabbi one night in Jerusalem, said, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”

This is an incredible fact. This is preeminent love — that’s why the word “so” is used. This is the story of the ages. Mankind’s image of God, apart from Christ’s revelation of him, has always been of a being who is petty, vindictive, vengeful, flawed — just like us. When we have imagined what God must be like, we have simply taken human nature and projected it into a bigger being, so the gods of the ancient peoples were demanding, vengeful, and petty — they had emotions just like ours.

The Girl and a God Who Had to Be Appeased

If you’ve read Don Richardson’s book Lords of the Earth, you won’t have forgotten the little twelve-year-old girl in Irian Jaya. Let me pause the story to say this: wherever the Bible has gone, wherever Christianity has gone, women and children have been protected and cared for. Wherever it has not gone, women and children were nothing more than property.

Back to the story. A warrior was walking one day and spotted a splash of colour in an area sacred to their god, Kembu. He found a little girl there and asked what she was doing — women weren’t allowed on that property, only men. He took her down to the village and told her to go play with her friends, then went up into the long hut where the elders were talking. A decision was made.

The warrior who had found her came out, along with the girl’s uncle. The uncle went to the little girl and said he wanted to show her something. The two men took her up into the mountains, to a ledge overlooking a fast-running river far below among the rocks. “Step out here and look,” he said. She told him she’d be afraid if he weren’t there with her — and he stepped out to look with her, while the other warrior nodded at the uncle, as if to say: you have to do it.

As that little girl looked out over the river, her own uncle — for just a second she was clawing in the air — and fell to her death.

Why? Because Kembu needed to be placated. If he was angry, the crops wouldn’t grow, or the army would lose in battle. So they made their god happy by giving him a sacrifice.

Come to the Bible, and it blasts all of that away and tells us what God is actually like. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. That’s love for a ruined world. You’re a sinner, but he loves you. We’ve rebelled against him, but he loves you. He sent his Son, and we rejected Christ and put him on a cross — but he loves you, and sent his Son for that very purpose.

This Love Is Personal

While we’re talking about a love that is for every human being in the world, this is a personal thing. If nobody else were in this hall — if every other chair were empty and it were just you — the same thing could be said directly to you that’s being said to the whole room tonight: God loves you.

The God who is there, who is upholding the universe, knows all about you — every problem, every grief and sorrow, every disappointment and heartache, every sin you’ve committed, what you long for, what you wish for. He knows all about you. He loves you, and he wishes your well-being.

This isn’t a fleeting feeling that comes into God’s heart every time he happens to look your way, scanning across billions of people on this speck of dirt called planet Earth. When the Lord Jesus said “God so loved the world,” he was telling us there is, in the heart of God, a settled, changeless desire for your well-being. He wants you in heaven. He does not want you to perish, to lose your soul, to face the Lake of Fire or the Great White Throne judgment. He wants you tonight to get your first taste of real life by having Christ as your Saviour.

The man to whom the Lord Jesus originally said these words must have had the doors blown off his sectarian thinking — because he believed God had a special interest only in his own people. But God’s love isn’t reserved for a certain ethnicity, a certain religion, or a certain kind of person. It doesn’t matter tonight whether you believe there’s a God or not, whether you go to church or never have, whether you’ve read the Bible or never cracked it open. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter where you’re from — God loves you.

This is an incredible fact. It led to an incomparable act on his part. If there were nothing more to tell you tonight than that God loved you, that would already be amazing. But there’s more: the God who is there was willing to sacrifice his Son so that you could be saved.

God Gave: The Incomparable Act

If your immediate reaction is that it isn’t fair — that an innocent person like God’s Son shouldn’t have to suffer for guilty people — you need to back up and realize this was the plan all along. It was God’s plan. Not that the Holy Spirit would come down and become a man and die; not that the Father would come down and become a man and die. It was determined by the triune God that it would be the Son who became a man.

He couldn’t come by the birth that involves a human father, because that would make him a sinner — so he came instead from a woman, virgin-born. But he came as a man, not a woman, because it was a man who caused the wreckage of sin. Just as a man, Adam, brought sin into the world, the Lord Jesus, as a man, would deal with sin at Calvary to provide salvation for you.

To understand the weight of “he gave his only begotten Son,” you have to grasp the seriousness of sin — that in all the universe, no one else could accomplish this work except his Son. Throughout history, when God wanted to accomplish something on earth, he looked to earth. When he wanted to deliver his people from Egypt, he looked down and found Moses, and asked what was in his hand. A rod — a piece of stick. That was enough. When he wanted to bring relief from the Philistines, he empowered a man named Samson. When he looked for a judge, he found a woman named Deborah. Again and again through Scripture, God looks earthward, finds someone, and blesses them with usefulness to help others.

But when it came to your salvation, God could not look down, because the only person who could ever save you was already right beside him. And God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.

A Father’s Sacrifice

Years ago, meetings were being held in Newington, Connecticut, when a storm hit. It merely inconvenienced that town — one night cancelled, icy roads — but in other parts of Connecticut it was a genuine blizzard, including in a city called Norwalk.

After the storm stopped, a man named Felix took his little boy, Louis, sledding. School was cancelled, the snow and ice were still everywhere, and they went to a hill called Aiken Hill. Father and son would ride the sled down together, then laughing and joking, pull it back up the sidewalk to do it all again. Walking up the hill one more time, chatting together, they went over the crest — and a car, careering out of control as if tracking them by radar, was heading right toward them.

Felix had time to do just one thing. He pushed Louis out of the way, calling his son’s name as he did — and the car struck him instead. He died.

A few days later, a writer for the Hartford Courant described the scene and asked: when Louis grows up, what will his recollections be of his dad? Will he remember that the last thing out of his father’s mouth was his own name, as his father gave his life to save him? The writer closed the article with words that have never been forgotten: it was an uncluttered act of love, almost otherworldly in its character.

There are a lot of fathers who would hope they’d do the same for their own son or daughter — that’s natural love. But here is otherworldly love: we fought against God, broke his laws, ruined his world, rejected his Son, hanged him on a cross, spit in his face, crowned him with thorns — and God loves you, and wants to save you, and Christ died to make that possible. He suffered on that cross so that you could be saved. That is incomparable. There will never be any action to match what happened when the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.

We Believe: What Faith in Christ Means

As has often been said, the first twelve verses of John 3 deal with God — God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. Now listen to the rest: whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Here is what would be an intelligent act on your part. Using the analogy the Lord Jesus himself used, it would be wisdom to drive a stake into the ground tonight and say: that’s it, I’m not ready for eternity, and I’m not going another night until I’m sure I’ll be in heaven. The Lord Jesus says it’s the wise man who builds his house on a rock, because he looks ahead and sees what’s coming. It’s the wise person who makes sure there’s oil in the lamp, who foresees evil and hides from what’s coming, who considers his latter end.

Here, then, is an intelligent act for a human being in this world: to believe what God says — to respond to truth, to facts. That’s one of the things to love about the gospel: it simply puts the facts in your hands and says, accept them and you’ll be saved; reject them and you’ll perish.

Here are the facts: God has spoken. He is truth; he cannot lie. The Scriptures cannot be broken. He has said: you’re dying in your sins; my Son died to save you from your sins; believe on him and you will never perish.

If we were being asked tonight to believe something merely because a church had taught it for thousands of years, how would we ever know it was dependable enough to risk our souls on? Instead, the God of heaven is giving you his own word, and telling you to believe what he says — this authoritative, powerful, eternal book. The Lord Jesus said heaven and earth will pass away, but his word will not pass away.

Everlasting Life: What John 3:16 Promises

That’s what God is giving you tonight. Is it wise or foolish to believe the God who cannot lie? Is it wise or foolish to believe a book that will outlast the universe? Whosoever believeth in him — notice this indisputable fact — should not perish, but have everlasting life.

So, simply, as this meeting closes: the God whose word is reliable, eternal, and authoritative — the God who is all-powerful — is the one who says, “I have everlasting life because I believe on his Son.” A little logic, then: if that’s what God says, and his word is reliable in everything he says, then I know, right now, in this world, where I’m going to be when I die. I know that because that’s what God says. If his word is authoritative and powerful, then nobody can defeat him, nobody can contradict or overrule what he says. It isn’t a situation where God says you have everlasting life and will never perish, and then some more powerful person says otherwise. We are talking about the God who is Almighty. If his word is eternal and unchanging, I will be saved forever, because his word never changes.

“Throw Your Whole Weight on Him”

Another missionary who could very well have belonged in this story is John G. Paton, who was translating the Bible for the people he worked among in the New Hebrides. He was working on the New Testament, and — as linguists often do with certain words, just as Bible translators for the Waodani people in Ecuador once struggled with a single word — he was having trouble with the word “believe.”

He was working on John 3:16, and had gotten as far as “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever…” — and there he was stuck.

One very hot day, one of the local workers came into the hut where Paton was working and said, in his own language, that he was so exhausted he just had to “throw his whole weight” onto the couch — that was the phrase used for lying down. Paton asked him to repeat it, and the man said it again: he had to throw his whole weight on the couch.

And Paton had his word. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever throws his whole weight on him should not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s what it means to believe: to put the salvation of your soul, for eternity, into the competent hands of the Son of God. If he can fail, you can perish. If he can be defeated, you can be lost. But he says not one person will ever be plucked from his hand.

You can have that confidence tonight — that if you trust him, you will not perish, you will have everlasting life. How could you ever know that? Because God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but — right now — have everlasting life.