John Lightfoot on John 3:17

[Not to condemn the world.] In what sense (beside that which is most common and proper) the Jewish schools use the word the world, we may see from these and such like instances:

I. The whole world hath forsaken the Misnas, and followed the Gemara. Where something may be noted in the story as well as in the grammar of it.

So John 12:19: Behold the world is gone after him. We very often meet with All the world confesseth, &c. and The whole world doth not dissent, &c. By which kind of phrase, both amongst them and all other languages, is meant a very great number or multitude.

II. When they distinguish, as frequently they do, betwixt the poor of their own city, and the poor of the world; it is easy to discern, that by the poor of the world are meant those poor that come from any other parts.

III. "R. Ulla requires not only that every great man should be worthy of belief, but that the man of the world should be so too." It is easy to conceive, that by the man of the world is meant any person, of any kind or degree.

IV. But it is principally worthy our observation, that they distinguish the whole world into Israel, and the nations of the world; the Israelites and the Gentiles. This distinction, by which they call the Gentiles the nations of the world, occurs almost in every leaf, so that I need not bring instances of this nature. Compare Luke 12:30 with Matthew 6:32; and that may suffice.

V. They further teach us, that the nations of the world are not only not to be redeemed, but to be wasted, destroyed, and trodden underfoot. "This seems to me to be the sense: the rod of the exactor shall not depart from Judah, until his Son shall come to whom belongs the subduing and breaking of the people; for he shall vanquish them all with the edge of his sword." So saith Rambam upon that passage in Genesis 49.

"'The morning cometh, and also the night,' Isaiah 21:12. It will be the morning to Israel [when the Messiah shall come]; but it will be night to the nations of the world."

"R. Abin saith, That the Holy Blessed God will make the elders of Israel sit down in a semicircle, himself sitting president, as the father of the Sanhedrim; and shall judge the nations of the world."

"Then comes the thrashing; the straw they throw into the fire, the chaff into the wind; but the wheat they keep upon the floor: so the nations of the world shall be as the burning of a furnace; but Israel alone shall be preserved."

I could be endless in passages of this nature out of these authors: but that which is very observable in all of them is this; That all those curses and dreadful judgments which God in his holy writ threatens against wicked men, they post it off wholly from themselves and their own nation, as if not at all belonging to them, devolving all upon the Gentiles and the nations of the world. So that it was not without great reason that the apostle asserteth, Romans 3:19, "Whatsoever things the law saith, it saith to them which are under the law." Which yet they will by no means endure.

Christ, therefore, by this kind of phrase or scheme of speech, well enough known to Nicodemus, teacheth him (contrary to a vulgar opinion, which he also could not be ignorant of), that the Messiah should become a Redeemer and propitiation, as well to the Gentiles as to the Jews. They had taught amongst themselves, that God had no regard to the nations of the world, they were odious to him, and the Messiah, when he came, would destroy and condemn them: but the Truth saith, "God so loved the world, that he hath sent his Son not to condemn, but to save the world." This very evangelist himself is the best commentator upon this expression, 1 John 2:2; "He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world"; i.e. not for us Jews only, but for the nations of the world.