要注意耶穌說話的場景，解經不能離開上下文。他正在同尼哥底母講話，救恩不只是猶太人，而且是外邦人，一直從以色列內擴展到全世界範圍，所以God so loved the World.

A.W.PINK

The fact is that ‘the world’ is used in a general way.. . Now the first thing to note in connection with John 3:16 is that our Lord was there speaking to Nicodemus, a man who believed that God’s mercies were confined to his own nation. Christ there announced that God’s love in giving His Son had a larger object in view, that it flowed beyond the boundary of Palestine, reaching out to ‘regions beyond.’ In other words, this was Christ’s announcement that God had a purpose of grace toward Gentiles as well as Jews. ‘God so loved the world,’ then, signifies, God’s love is international in its scope. But does this mean that God loves every individual among the Gentiles? Not necessarily, for as we have seen the term ‘world’ is general rather than specific, relative rather than absolute. . . the ‘world’ in John 3:16 must, in the final analysis refer to the world of God’s people. Must we say, for there is no other alternative solution. It cannot mean the whole human race, for one half of the race was already in hell when Christ came to earth. It is unfair to insist that it means every human being now living, for every other passage in the New Testament where God’s love is mentioned limits it to His own people — search and see! The objects of God’s love in John 3:16 are precisely the same as the objects of Christ’s love in John 13:1: ‘Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His time was come, that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.’ We may admit that our interpretation of John 3:16 is no novel one invented by us, but one almost uniformly given by the Reformers and Puritans, and many others since them. (The Sovereignty of God)