Yesterday we read David’s long poem praising the Lord for his victory and deliverance from his enemies.
Psalm 119 is famous for being the longest chapter in the Bible, and it is an acrostic psalm with a difference. In this psalm, every line of each stanza starts with the same letter of the alphabet. (Most acrostic psalms are by line, not according to stanzas.) The psalm has 22 stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And this psalm has a clear theme: God’s Word or a synonym for it is mentioned in almost every verse.
One of the features of John's Gospel is that he breaks in with commentary without warning. Because of the lack of quote marks in ancient Greek, there often no overt signs marking the end of Jesus' speech and John's comment, or at the end of this chapter, John the Baptist's speech and John's comment. I personally don't think that John 3:16 is Jesus' words about himself, but is the start of John's explanation of Jesus' enigmatic words: “as Moses lifted up the bronze snake on a pole in the wilderness, so [I,] the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in [Me/him] will have eternal life.” We read that story in Numbers 21. Imagine that all one had to do to be healed of a snake bite was to look at the bronze snake which Moses had put up on a pole. Do you think any of the people who were bit refused to look at that snake?
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