John 3:16 Was Never the Verse You Think It Is | Who Told You That? (Week 7) | Chad Belew

Who told you that? Is the name of this series? And I decided we're going to tackle the verse that we all know, John 3, 16. And most of us know it in like a good translation, right? Forgot some of the world that he gave his only begotten son, that hushua, right? What do you got Robert? Say it.

What do you got? How you say it? What's 3, 16? Yeah. What's 17? There you go, there you go. I know that's your favorite verse. Robert's a real Christian.

It's right. He's a Christian like Nicodemus. So we'll talk about that. I'm just kidding. So you've got the most famous verse in Christianity, like we've got to memorize, right? Most of us. You learned it young.

Some of you might remember there's a guy named Tim Tebow played for the University of Florida. He was a quarterback, a real dreamy guy. In 2019, he was a quarterback at the University of Florida. He wore John 3, 16 on his eye black underneath his eyes on national TV. And I'll be honest, when I was going back and looking this up, I didn't like talking about Tim Tebow.

In this picture, because the team that Florida beat in the championship game in 2009 was my Oklahoma Sooners. So it was a sad time for me. But the most famous display, think about the most famous display John 3, 16 in my lifetime is also permanently attached to one of the most painful nights of my fandom.

Anyway, thanks, Tebow. This became like a big controversy. And when he did this in the national championship game, they actually looked in the verse, John 3, 16 was Googled 94 million times. 94 million times. There's the number one search in the country during that game.

The display actually banned messages on the eye black. After that, people so-called the Tebow rule. I don't. But anyway, 94 million people looked it up. But here's what gets me. Almost everyone who was looking up that exact verse was looking up the exact version that we all assumed it meant that we've all been given.

The gospel tract version, the verse went viral, but it went viral in a very flattened reading of scripture. And I think a lot of us have been carrying around the same kind of flattened version of John 3, 16.

One that isn't quite what the verse actually says. So I want to ask the same question that we've been asking for like eight weeks pointed this time at the most familiar words in your spiritual life. Who told you? That's what John 3, 16 means.

And I'm not trying to take anything away from you. Like just the opposite I want to today hopefully like give us a better way to see this than we've been carrying around most of our lives.

So I'm going to introduce you to the man Jesus is actually talking to because once you know who he is, this whole thing kind of opens up. His name's Nicodemus and he only shows up in John's gospel. He was a Pharisee. He'd given his entire life to studying and keeping the Hebrew law.

He was a member of the Sanhedrin, which is like the highest religious council of the time. So high up religious leader in Jerusalem. He's wealthy. And Jesus actually in the conversation he has with him calls him the teacher of Israel.

Not a teacher. He calls Nicodemus the teacher. It's like a serious credentialed religious man.

People came to him for answers. And here's how chapter three opens. Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus, who is a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night. At night. It's pretty important here.

John, if you read through John's gospel, he doesn't just throw in details by accident. The whole gospel runs on the imagery of light and dark.

Jesus is the light coming into the world, the darkness. He's coming to overcome it all throughout John's gospel. And so when the most religious, most respected, most certain, like knows his stuff man in the room shows up at night when no one can see him, John is telling us something.

Nicodemus is hiding. And we've been here before in this series. We go on Adam and Eve. They were hiding from God in the garden. A few weeks ago, I talked about the psychology and physiology that are physiological, like way that the body learns to hide even from itself.

Last week, the older brother who kept every rule still felt like a hired hand and wasn't in the family, wasn't experiencing it.

And now here is the most religious man in the gospel of John. And the first thing we learn about him is that he came in the dark because he was afraid to be seen with Jesus. And watch what Jesus does.

If you look at the scripture, he doesn't shame him for coming at night. He doesn't scold him for hiding. He just meets him there in the dark and starts a conversation.

I like to think of this relationship. Nicodemus is like the first deconstructing Christian. He's like, "I got questions, but I'm not allowed to ask them, so I'm going to come at night."

And Nicodemus, when he's talking to Jesus, he opens up really carefully, like politely, the way you talk when you're trying to figure out who you're dealing with without like committing yourself.

It doesn't seem like from the reading of John that Nicodemus and Jesus had like a relationship. So Nicodemus comes to him and he says, "Rabbi, we know you're a teacher who has come from God because nobody could do the things you're doing unless you're in God.

Because God was with him." And like this is a big statement from a Jewish leader in the Sanhedrin to say, "I know you came from God because that was the whole thing. That's what God Jesus killed. They were trying to figure out what is he doing."

So this leader is like, "We know that you did. We know you did this because nobody can do what you're doing unless God was with them."

And Jesus in this conversation just cuts straight through the small talk and he says, "Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again."

This is John 3-3.

Now, here's where this whole thing gets interesting to me. I love like diving into this stuff. Some of you maybe don't like that I do this, but it's fun for me.

It gets interesting here because it comes down to a single word in the original Greek in that verse, the phrase that we translate "born again" in the Greek.

The Greek word is anothin, anothin, and it has two real meanings in the Greek. It can mean "again" like a second time, or it can mean "from above".

Both are legitimate ways to translate this word. Both are ancient ways to translate this word.

And I'm not up here like trying to tell you that one is right or one is wrong because genuinely this word, anothin carries both of these meanings.

But here's what scholars noticed. Everywhere else, this word, anothin, shows up in John's gospel. It clearly means "from above".

There are five verses in John's gospel that use this word in the Greek. Every one of them, except for this one, it's translated from above.

Later in this gospel, he's talking about authority, where it comes from. Jesus says, "You would have no power over me if it were not given to you anothin from above".

Same word from above. It happens again in a few verses later describing a robe woven from the top. Same word.

So in three places in John, John uses this word other than the conversation that Jesus is having with Nicodemus.

Three other places he's using it, the meaning is clearly "from above". Only here in the Nicodemus conversation do the translators switch to "again".

And this isn't me trying to just parse words. This isn't like a hot take. This is what the scholars who actually work in the Greek have been saying for a long time.

Evangelical scholars, Catholic scholars, just academics. It just rarely makes it from like seminary and academia to like sermons.

I think part of it is we try to do sermons that are just like easy. Let me just give you a little bit and keep you excited.

But there's so much to this. And when we try to say the Bible is clear to try to end an argument, when somebody tells me that when I'm having a conversation with them about Scripture,

the Bible is clear. I'm like well, you're not an actual academic person that's going to even give a shot to looking at this.

You have just chosen what you believe this means and that is it. Because the Bible is not clear on so many things and I'm going to show you why that is in some places.

So, this isn't a hot take. I'm just showing you what academia has said. D.A. Carson, he's one of the most respected evangelical New Testament scholars alive, says the primary meaning Jesus intends here in this verse is from above.

The Ignatius Catholic study Bible says flat out that the word always means from above elsewhere in John. And the N.E.T. Bible, it's a translation that is done by a team of Greek scholars, puts it in their footnotes about as directly as you can.

The double meaning is a favorite technique of the author of the fourth gospel. John likes to do this. And the primary meaning intended by Jesus here is from above.

So evangelical Catholic academic scholars all landing in the same place. And watch what happens in real time. Those same scholars have a name for that.

It's this thing that John likes to do. So if you look at the actual literary work of what John is doing, he's doing something that he loves to do. And it's called the misunderstood question.

I think Jesus operated in this. Did you see when he asked questions or says something? There's always quite like, what are you talking about?

I think John is just showing how Jesus works. But John has Jesus say something with a double meaning. Somebody hears the wrong half and that misunderstanding becomes the doorway for Jesus to explain what he actually meant.

He does it all over this gospel. And it happens right here. Jesus says an oath and Nicodemus grabs the again meaning.

And pictures the absurd version because Nicodemus says, how can someone be born when they're old? Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother's womb to be born.

Duh.

A grown man climbing back into the womb, like he heard again, physically again. And that misunderstanding is exactly the opening that Jesus uses in this conversation. He leans into the other meaning.

He's like, no, no, no. I'm talking about being born of the spirit from above, from God.

A whole new kind of life from a whole new place. Like it's not this physical thing you're thinking of, the deeper meaning that Nicodemus can't quite catch yet.

So verse three, very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again or from above.

Now, here's a part that I kind of find fascinating in this whole like translation stuff and maybe a little troubling.

That word again, when reading it in different translations, you start to see what happened.

This grabbing on to born again isn't new, is an evangelical thing. It goes way back all the way back to the Latin Bible. The Western church read this Bible for over a thousand years.

And I'm not telling you that the translators did this on purpose to try and like drive something home. I don't know what they were thinking back then.

But I do want to notice that this what this choice sets up to choose again and how it's translated.

The very next thing Jesus says in that conversation is born of water and the spirit. And honestly, I think when he's saying water, he's probably just talking about like physical birth.

Nicodemus literally just asked about climbing back into the mother's womb and a physical birth involves water, right? Like the water.

So Jesus would be drawing a contrast here. You've been born once, ordinary way of water, as we all are.

Now you need to be born another way of the spirit from above.

But watch what the church did with it. So over the centuries, born of water got increasingly read as baptism.

So they changed it. A ritual, the church administers. And once you pair that with born again, instead of born from above, look what the verse quietly becomes.

A second birth, right? A ritual. Something you receive through the institution. Something the church hands out.

But if the word is from above and if water is just the ordinary birth, we'll all already, that we've already had, the new birth Jesus is describing as something God does directly from above.

The spirit, like the wind blowing where it wants. Not something the institution controls. Not something anyone administers to you. That's a gift straight from God.

So again, leans toward a thing that the church gives you from above leans towards a thing God does for you.

And for a thousand years, the reading that won was the one that put the church in the middle of it.

I'm not saying anyone sat in a room and schemed that. I'm saying that reading that...

The reading that survived was the one that happened to reinforce the institution's role.

And I think it's worth noticing. That's kind of how I, like, interrogate things. Like, okay, well, let's notice this.

Because I can't prove it, but I've got questions.

Because the question of this whole series has been, who told you that? And sometimes the answer is someone who intentionally or not benefited from you believing it.

Here's the irony. A thousand years later, the Protestant reformers who are trying to pull everybody away from the Catholic church and saying the Catholic church is wrong.

The ones that left the Catholic church, they grabbed, born again, and then they made this saying an anti-institution phrase. Like, you don't need the church's rituals, you need a personal new birth.

And then that hardened into its own formula, the altar called a sinner's prayer, are you born again?

As this new gatekeeping question.

The same word keeps getting flattened into a checkbox by whoever's holding it.

Which should make all of us a little more humble about, do we actually know what this is saying? And maybe a little more curious.

If a word, this central, got narrowed down this many times, what else have we inherited without ever going back to check?

So I went back looking.

I wanted to know how people actually read this verse before all the gospel tracks and altar calls, and I'll be honest with you about what I found.

Because some of it surprised me. I'm not, again, I'm not going to claim that the early church wrote like sermons on John 3 16 saying exactly what I'm about to say, that's not what this is.

They didn't, but they lived inside a completely different framework than we do than the one that most of us inherited.

Where the cross was never mainly about God punishing his son.

Where salvation was actually healing rather than legal payment.

Where eternal life started now, not when you die.

So I'm going to show you that the voices that you can read for yourself. There's some right now, so we can start with NT right.

The most respected New Testament scholars alive right now, he's an Anglican bishop about as mainstream as you can get.

Wright has spent his career on the phrase we translate eternal life.

The Greek word zoe eonios eonios.

His point over and over in his studies is it doesn't mean endless time after you die.

He's the life of God's coming age, breaking into the present, something you can be living inside of right now.

It's not where we're going, it's what we're doing now.

Then David Bentley Hart, he's an Eastern Orthodox teacher, scholar, he taught at Notre Dame.

He published his own translation a couple years ago of the New Testament that he translated directly from the Greek that he did in like 2017.

And on the word that we translate in this sentence parish, Hart says reading it as eternal damnation is flatly indefensible.

This is wrong.

It means lost, ruined, wasted.

And eternal points to a quality of life, the life of the age to come, not a length of time.

But the Irish in the Greek is actually the same word that's used in Jesus' stories about the lost coin, the lost sheep, the lost son, the prodigal.

It's the same, none of them died and were eternally tormented.

They were all just lost and then found.

It's a very different way to look at this.

He wrote a book called A More Christ Like God, also a Greek Orthodox teacher.

He traces this exact shift in the church moving from seeing the cross as God's loving entry into human suffering to seeing as God collecting a payment.

So you can see how he traces through history where this shift happened.

And there's another teacher, Baxter Kruger, he's a Trinitarian teacher.

He puts the older view simply, the good news isn't that God's anger finally got satisfied so he could love us.

It's that the Father always loved us and gave us a son so we could see it.

Which is, word for word, what this verse actually says.

God so loved the world that he gave.

The love came first, the giving was love expressing itself, not a transaction to make love possible.

This is a moment where we're seeing what God was doing for us.

Nowhere in John 3 or even through this conversation, does 316 have anything to do with a cross?

Or death?

We've mistranslated a lot of it, like that's not what this meant.

We turned it into a thing where it's like you must check this box.

Nicodemus wouldn't have seen it that way.

That wasn't the conversation they were having.

And I can show you, there's some like, this isn't a new shift in this verse.

Go back to the earliest verses we have, Erenaeus writing around 180-80, not long after Jesus is gone, barely a century after John.

He described what Christ accomplished like this.

The word of God was made man, that he might destroy sin, that he might conquer death, and that he might free man from the slavery of the devil.

Destroy sin, conquer death, set people free, not pay a debt.

So there's nothing happening there where we have to appease God.

This is language that we use, it wasn't even in the air back then, when Erenaeus was speaking.

And then Athanasius, which I've quoted quite a few times, I love Athanasius writing, he's around 318-80.

He gave us one of the most famous lines in Christian theology that says, he became what we are, that he might make us what he is.

Salvation as God joining us, so we could be joined to God.

It's healing, it's not a quittle, it's not a trial.

So for the first thousand years, the dominant way that the church understood the cross wasn't a courtroom at all.

Scholars call it Christ's Victor, that's what NT Wright would use, it's Christ entering the whole human condition, even death from the inside, defeating the things that hold us, a rescue, not a payment.

So it's a shift in this whole relationship.

So how did it change, what happened?

How did we go from God so loved the world that he entered it to God so loved the world that somebody had to be killed before he could forgive it?

You might remember a little while back, week four, I talked about a man named Anselm.

Around the year 1098, almost a thousand years after John wrote his gospel, Anselm sat down and wrote a book proposing a brand new theory of the cross, sin offended God's honor, a debt had to be paid, only a perfect God man could pay it, therefore the cross, he called it the satisfaction theory.

1098, thousand years after John, this is his new theory, and after Anselm, the verse got reread through the new lens, God gave us his only son, which the church had read for a thousand years as God lovingly entering a broken world.

It quietly became, God gave his son to be killed as the payment.

500 years later, Calvin sharpened it into what we now call penal substitution, the son absorbing the punishment that we deserved.

And over the next few centuries, that became the air that the American church breathed, and what we've taught, the gospel tracks, the altar calls, the sinner's prayer, the guilt, the shame.

It becomes like the mission, how do we get people saved, born again so that we can get them into heaven, even if we're just jerks to people, it doesn't matter because we can get them somewhere.

And the detail that gets me is the Greek word for "gave" in this, like again, another word in this sentence, in John 3, 16, it just means "gave", bestowed, sent.

When the New Testament wants to describe Jesus being handed over to be killed at the betrayal before Pilate, it uses a completely different word, and it's a long one, that one.

Peridodomi, handed over, betrayed, John 3, 16 doesn't use that word, it just says God gave. The giving is the whole arc of God moving toward us, the manger teaching, healing, cross, empty tomb, not a transaction, it's a rescue.

The verse hasn't changed in 2,000 years, but the framework that we read it through changed about 900 years ago, and we inherited that framework like it was always there.

Ah, I always have so much more. Let me finish Nicodemus's story real quick, because John doesn't leave him in the dark talking to Jesus, he shows up two more times in this Gospel.

And here's this beautiful, he never says a center sprayer, he never walks an aisle, he never fills out a card, what he does is much slower and honestly much more real.

A few chapters later in John 7, the religious leaders are scheming about how to get rid of Jesus, they're in the room, they're arguing it's the Sanhedrin, the religious council, the leaders, and from inside that room, inside the very council that is plotting against Jesus, one quiet voice pushes back.

John 751, does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he is doing?

This verse is Nicodemus, still cautious, still not all the way out, but he's starting to move.

The other Pharisees, in fact if you read the rest of that scripture and I'm not going to get into it right now, but they mock him, they make fun of Nicodemus and he takes it.

And the last time we see him is the one that gets me.

In John 19, Jesus has been crucified, the disciples who walked with him for three years have scattered into hiding and right then in broad daylight, when it cost him the most, and there's nothing left for him to gain, Nicodemus shows up.

John 1939, he was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of mirror and alloys, about 75 pounds, so Nicodemus shows up to help bury the body of Jesus.

And he brings 75 pounds of burial spices, and if you look at the history of this, scholars say that that's about a year's wage is worth.

So the man who came at night, he comes back in the daylight to help bury Jesus. He hid in the dark and then he came out of the open. The man who whispered his questions showed up carrying almost 100 pounds of love in public for a dead man when everyone else had run.

I don't believe Nicodemus got converted through this. I think he came out of hiding. His eyes were open. He understood the difference between religion and relationship.

And that, that is what being born again from above actually looks like. It's not a transaction. It's not a one-time decision at an altar. I used to get in trouble, and you've maybe noticed this if you've been here. I don't ever do an altar call.

I think in the 10 years that we've been the arsenal, I've done one altar call. And it was because I was getting pressured. Like, why are you doing this?

I don't think that's how you come into a relationship. Do you come into a relationship with anyone else like that? I guess I'm in. I meet my Jesus. Get to know him. John says, later in one, you don't know Jesus. You don't know my God. If you don't know love.

It's not a one-time decision. It's a slow, costly, in-the-day light return to who you actually are.

It took him the whole gospel of John. But he got there.

Let's skip. Let me skip. Let me skip.

Amartia, parish, eternal life.

Gehenna. Hell never shows up in the gospel of John. I have so much, guys.

We built this entire thing around this gospel about a threat of hell, right?

The tracks, the altar call, where will you spend eternity question? It's not in John.

Paul, the man who wrote nearly half the New Testament, 13 letters, never once uses the word.

Not Gehenna, not Hades, not Hell, not once.

To be fair, Paul talks about judgment and consequences. I'm not telling you it was all sunshine with Paul, because we've read Paul's letters.

But the word we made the engine of the whole fear machine, the apostle who wrote most of the New Testament, never says it.

Neither does the gospel that gave us John 3.16.

It should at least make us wonder how it ended up at the center of our faith.

I'm going to give you this. Okay, let me give you this. Let's see.

I can't wait. We're going to have to just do this next time.

All right, here we go. There's just so many, guys. It's so much. I write too much in these.

So there's a part in this scripture where we're talking about knowing God, right?

And there's two different words in the Greek for knowing to know.

To know about something, like facts, information, the way we know that the swears are going to win the championship. That is like knowing, right?

And then there's gnosco, which is to know something by experience, relationally.

It's the same word the Greek Old Testament uses for intimacy between a husband and wife.

Not knowing about someone, like knowing someone.

And when Jesus defines eternal life, he defines it as knowing God.

The word is gnosco, not have correct information about God, not pass the doctrinal test. It is experience God.

And the N.E.T. Bible scholars, they flag it differently.

So I'm trying to read the verses being about like secret knowledge. It was this whole thing, the Gnostics.

And the translators push back. They say, "For John, this knowledge is not intellectual, but relational.

It involves being in relationship." So if you think back to Nicodemus, because we just watched all this stuff happen, right?

He shows up as the ultimate Oeda man, like knowledge. He knows, he is the teacher of Israel. He knows this stuff.

All the credentials, all the right information about God. And Jesus tells him, "It isn't enough.

You have to be born from above. You have to gnosco."

And it took him the whole gospel. But by the end, he's not debating theology in dark anymore.

He's out in the daylight, kneeling in the dirt, pouring out a fortune of spices over the body of a man he loves.

That's not Oeda anymore. That's gnosco. He finally knew what this was about.

And once you see eternal life this way, a kind of life that starts now, a relationship you live inside of, you start seeing it everywhere throughout scripture.

Everywhere. And when you do that, then you start to look like Jesus. And you start to love people well.

I'm going to end here, because they're hot in the back. I've got more, but my last question, I'll put it up on the screen.

What's one thing about God? You were handed a long time ago that you've never actually gone back and checked.

And we go do that. We're looking for love. We're looking for relationship. We're looking for what it looks like to love people well.

Because I think at the end of the day, Nicodemus learned it, and that's what we get to learn.

So Arsenal, I love you. We'll talk more about this next week.

Go love people well. It's who you're meant to be. And go Spurs, go.