The 3:16 Verses

            The idea that many of the verses of the Bible that fall at “3:16” – that is, the sixteenth verse of chapter three – are pivotal verses in Scripture. The most famous, which I talked about at length yesterday, is John 3:16 - “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

            But what are these other famous verses that fall on 3:16? There must be several, if it’s a “thing”, as it were.

            To be honest, it isn’t.

            First of all, seventeen of the Bible’s 66 books don’t have a “3:16”, usually because chapter three doesn’t contain 16 verses, but occasionally because they’re only one or two chapters long in all. So that cuts the list to 49 possibilities.

            Of those 49, many are transitory verses, such as Phillipians 3:16, “Only let us hold true to what we have attained”, or Romans 3:16, which reads, “in their paths are ruin and misery,”…

            Others lend a tantalizing taste of the familiar, although on their own the verses are fairly insignificant. Matthew 3:16 needs nothing of its surroundings to remind us of the glory of the Lord’s baptism:

“And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him,”

And Luke 3:16 shares a moment just prior to that:

“John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.’”

Some are important in and of themselves, although ‘famous’ is too strong a word. Of these, First John 3:16 is a perfect example:

“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.”

And while it has verses around it which add to its importance, Genesis 3:16 holds a great deal of meaning within its single verse:

To the woman he said,

“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be contrary to your husband,
but he shall rule over you.”

Surrounding that, of course, is the remainder of God’s judgment following the original sin, this being the sentence to womankind (its representative as yet unnamed – if you want a good bar bet, ask what the name of the woman who bit the apple off the tree in the Garden of Eden was. Answer: It wasn’t an apple, and she didn’t possess a name until after she’d left the Garden.).

Two stand out for their sheer inanity. First Samuel 3:16 is part of the young prophet Samuel’s first experience with the Holy Spirit, at night when he thought his master Eli was calling him,

But Eli called Samuel and said, “Samuel, my son.” And he said, “Here I am.”

And the other was the opening of the proof of King Solomon’s newfound wisdom, in chapter 3 of First Kings, which starts in verse 16 as follows:

“Then two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him.”

The one verse in the 3:16 category that really does stand alone and has great significance is in Second Timothy, and should be familiar to all readers of this blog.

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”

This verse is the reason that we study verses that seem otherwise irrelevant – verses that we think of the ‘flyover’ verses of the Bible. In my yearly stroll through my Bible-In-A-Year, I just finished the first nine chapters of First Chronicles, the lines of genealogy and ‘begats’ that bore us to tears twenty-six centuries later. But the importance of those lineages cannot be overstated to what was happening at the time: the author of Chronicles was laying out the authorized Jewish lines of descent that would allow a person claiming to be of Hebrew ancestry to verify that heritage. He also was emphasizing the background of the nation of Israel, which the people didn’t know anything about in the infidel nations they had been exiled to for the last seventy years.

All Scripture has usefulness for us in 2017, in this case as a historical lesson about the lessons God imposed upon His people. It’s usable for teaching and training in God’s character. And it’s useful in the overall picture of God and His Son, Jesus Christ.

But nothing else in the Bible in the fabled “3:16” slot comes close to rivaling the Lord’s quote – the cornerstone of Scripture, the root of our salvation.