"16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God."
John 3:16-18
These are probably the most wonderful verses in the whole Bible. Luther was surely justified in calling 16 the Bible in miniature. Some have liked to lay alongside it, by way of explicating it, the statement Paul makes in Ephesians 3:18 about 'the four dimensions of redeeming love' - its breadth (God so loved the world), its length (that He gave His only begotten Son), its depth (that whosoever believeth in Him), its height (should not perish but have everlasting life). Temple points out that this is a greater statement than the other that John makes in his epistle, 'God is love', which is a statement about the nature of God, whereas 3:16 is a statement about the action of God. The divine purpose is stated in 17 as being not to condemn, but to save. Nevertheless, Christ's coming precipitates a crisis for men. And, as Temple says, 'If a man refuses belief - trust - in the manifested nature of the Son of God, he is condemned already. There is no further verdict needed; his conduct finds him guilty. His failure to accept the revelation when it comes is itself the judgment on the character he has been forming. For the essence of judgment is not the sentence but the verdict, the discrimination between the approved and the condemned. The Cross itself, the very means of redemption, is an agent of that discrimination, that judgment.' The presence of Christ in the world issues in the judgment of the world, for weal or woe. He sifts men.