Day 206: John 3:16–21

For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life (v. 16).

One of the most astonishing statistical comparisons between the Gospel of John and the three synoptics is how much more God inspired him to tell us about the world. Based on a word count comparison, Matthew mentions the world ten times, Mark five times, and Luke seven times. The Gospel of John? A whopping seventy-three times! In fact, the totality of John’s New Testament contributions informing us about the world constitutes almost half the mentions in the entire New Testament. Obviously we will miss a very important concept in John’s Gospel if we overlook what he tells us about the world.

Perhaps the most overwhelming is a concept to which we’ve grown inordinately casual: Jesus was sent by God to the world.

John 17 tells us that the Father and Son had fellowship and shared glory before the world even existed. Jesus said, “Father, glorify Me in Your presence with that glory I had with You before the world existed” (John 17:5 hcsb). In fact, I am absolutely convinced that mankind exists out of the holy passion of the Trinity to draw others into their fellowship. Thus, the plan of salvation was already completely intact before the creation of the world. Then when the Holy Trinity was ready, each member participated in the creation.

Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Stay with me here. The Word of God delineates between one little planet He called the earth and the entire rest of the universe. We have no idea what is out there. What little science documents and hypothesizes makes Genesis 1:1 inconceivably impressive.

Our solar system is in a galaxy called the Milky Way. Scientists estimate that more than 100 billion galaxies are scattered throughout the visible universe. Astronomers have photographed millions of them through telescopes. The most distant galaxies ever photographed are as far as 10 billion to 13 billion light-years away. The Milky Way’s diameter is about 100,000 light-years. The solar system lies about 25,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy. There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.46 Imagine, 100 billion stars estimated in our galaxy alone, and Psalm 147:4 tells us God “counts the number of the stars; He gives names to all of them” (hcsb).

Impressive, isn’t it? In the beginning God created the sun, the moon, every star, all their surrounding planets, and the earth. You and I have no idea what God’s activities may have been elsewhere in the universe, but according to the Bible and as far as He wanted us to know, He picked out one tiny speck upon which to build a world. Our world. And He picked it out so that when the time had fully come, He could send His Son (Gal. 4:4).