What Do You Observe?

We’ve talked about their authors, their contexts, and their roles in the overall story of the Bible. Now it’s time to open our Bibles and start studying! We’re going to practice making observations using John 3:16 and Acts 1:8.

Just as we would never open up the latest New York Times bestseller to a random page and start reading, the books we find in the New Testament are no different. When studying the Gospels or Acts, we should always start at the beginning. Before we move on to observation and interpretation, it can be tempting to skip past genealogies or jump to our favorite verses. But to truly understand the message and power of each book, we have to take the journey as it has been set before us.

John 3:16

Read John 1–3. Reading these chapters shows us that the immediate context of John 3:16 begins with John 3:1. Where does this section end?

The major characters in our section are Jesus and a man named Nicodemus. John gives us some important information about this man. For example, he writes that Nicodemus “was a man of the Pharisees” (3:1). What do you know about Pharisees? (If you’ve never heard of a Pharisee, take a minute to look it up. A simple Google search will suffice.) What else can we observe about him? How does he address Jesus?

By reading the sections that come immediately before our focus verse, we come to understand that John 3:16 is part of Jesus’s response to Nicodemus’s questions. What were those questions?

John 3:16 begins with the word “for.” This may be a little word, but it packs a lot of meaning. Here, it indicates that what comes after it provides an explanation for whatever came before it. What does Jesus tell Nicodemus in the verses immediately before verse 16?