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NASB | John 3:16 ¶ "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | John 3:16 ¶ "For God so [greatly] loved and dearly prized the world, that He [even] gave His [One and] only begotten Son, so that whoever believes and trusts in Him [as Savior] shall not perish, but have eternal life. |
Subject: Are we ever "worthy" of God's love? |
Bible Note: John, if you feel that yours is the stronger view in this particularly passage, that's fine with me: you have every right to vent your view. I do believe, however, that in order to arrive at the conclusion you hold on the matter, it is necessary to supplement what the passage actually says with certain presuppositions of one's own that do not seem to be apparent in the text. If a fairly discerning reader who had no theological axe to grind, being wedded neither to the doctrines of Calvinism nor Arminianism, were to read this passage, I doubt that it would ever occur to him to insert phrases of his own making into the text, as for example "of those ordained to salvation" after the word "all" in the phrase "not willing for any to perish but for all to come to repentence." Furthermore, John, truly I can't find cogent reason to go about mentally inserting the word "elect" after words such as any, all, every, whoever that appear in biblical texts unless it is abolutely, unimpeachably necessary to do it in order to make the passage intelligible, and I know of no passage where this is the case. "All" always means all unless there is a clear sense in the context that it is used in a more restrictive sense, such as meaning only all persons within a clearly defined group or genre, e.g., all Jews, all Romans, all believers, etc. In John 3:16, for instance, since the word "whoever" has no clear restrictions imposed upon its meaning, how then is it possible without corrupting the text to impose any meaning upon it than that since the plain sense of the verse indicates that the Apostle says whoever, chances are he means whoever, nothing more and nothing less?..... So, John, I'll close out my small part of this discussion with the observation that it seems quite worthwhile to sharpen our spiritual saws with other believers, but counter-productive to grind excessively the individual teeth of our saws! --Hank |