“The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who rejects the Son will not see life; instead, the wrath of God remains on him” (John 3:36, CSB).
John 3 contains two Messiah-affirming stories of Jesus: (1) the secret meeting between Nicodemus the Pharisee and Jesus from which originates those iconic and rudimentary Christian propositions: “You must be born again” and John 3:16: “For God so loved the world….” and, (2) the defection of some of John the Baptist’s disciples to Jesus’ ministry, which John the Baptist acknowledges with a seeming air of expectancy, “He must increase but I must decrease” (vs. 30).
Then, the final six verses of Chapter 3 provide a theological recap of the case John is making through these two stories for the Messiahship of Jesus.
John declares that there is some metaphysical angst that accompanies unbelief in Christ’s divinity–the potential for eliciting the wrath of God. We often express this tension in the gospel message in terms like this: “If you believe in Jesus you go to heaven when you die, but if you don’t believe in Him you go to hell when you die.”
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