“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”
John 3:17-21 (NIV)
The Jewish people believed that when the Messiah came, one of His main jobs would be to destroy the gentiles, and to exalt the nation of Israel to the heights that they had reached during the glory days of Solomon. But Jesus the Messiah, when He did show up, clearly taught that that wasn’t the case. And one of the main reasons for that NOT being one of His jobs was that God really doesn’t divide people up the way that we divide ourselves up!
In the Jewish worldview, the people of the earth were divided into two very unequal parts: the much smaller part was the Jewish people; the other part was “the nations” (or, using the Latin word, “the gentiles”). The general idea was that God had chosen the Jewish people for Himself, and had therefore rejected the gentiles. Of course gentiles could convert, go through all the ceremonies to become Jewish, but if they didn’t then they were totally rejected by God, and He really had no use for them except to destroy them at some point in the future.
But the worldview that Jesus was painting here for Nicodemus was very different. In this worldview, God actually loved the whole world (John 3:16), not just a small subset of humanity. And, because of that love, He sent His one and only Son, not to condemn the vast majority of humanity, but to save them. Far from wanting to destroy the people, He actually came to take their deserved destruction upon Himself, suffering the death and separation from God that they, both Jew and gentile, deserved for their rebellion against God.
The fly in the ointment, though, is a pesky little thing called “free will.” God gave us free will clear back when He created Adam and Eve in His own image. It is the part of us that makes us free moral agents, able to make decisions about what we will or will not do, and then fully responsible for the consequences of our actions. Some people have wondered why God didn’t just make people so that they would automatically obey Him. But imagine if you built a robot for yourself that, every hour on the hour would walk up to you and drone, “I love you!” Wouldn’t that just warm your heart and make you feel good all over? No, at least not for very long. After a while, it would even get old, because you know that it’s not real. The robot doesn’t really love you, it’s only doing what it was programmed to do.
It’s the same way with people. The thing that makes obedience to God’s commands so special is that we could just as easily choose to NOT obey. The downside of free will is that people can and often do choose to disobey God, to not love Him, to wander off into the far country.
Jesus taught that, at His coming, the people of the world were at a crossroads. Light had come into the world, and the people of the world were going to end up essentially judging themselves based on their response to the light. They could turn wholeheartedly to the light, in which case they would be saved; or they could turn away from Him, choosing to stay in the dark which cloaked their evil deeds, in which case they would end up condemning themselves to eternal separation from God.
The concept that God didn’t send Jesus to condemn the world, but to save the world is really good news! Indeed, it is THE Good News of the Gospel. But underneath this song of joy is a counter-melody in a minor key. God understood from the very beginning that way too many people would choose to live in their own self-imposed darkness instead of coming into the light of life, and they would end up dooming themselves by their choice. But that is most decidedly NOT what God wants. 2 Peter 3:9 (NIV) tells us, referring to the delay in Jesus’ return, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” That longing for everyone to come to repentance is the very heartbeat of God; the longing that moved Him to give His everything for us, so that we can ALL become His people.