The people groaned, knowing the stairway was impassable. But William Dixon hurried to the front of the house and found an iron drainage pipe running up the wall. Taking hold of it, he pulled himself upward to the window and found the terrified boy. He scooped up the child and scrambled back to the ground.

A few days later, the grandmother succumbed to her injuries, leaving the little boy an orphan with no home, no guardian. The village held a hearing to determine his fate.

When the meeting was called to order, two volunteers came forward. One good citizen answered the standard questions, giving every assurance that he would provide a good home. The second volunteer was William Dixon, the rescuer. He said few words, but his hands spoke for him. They were bandaged. The hot iron pipe he’d been forced to climb had burned them severely.

When it came to a vote, the man with the scarred hands went home with the orphan, a father once more. His love, everyone agreed, was written on his hands.1

The love of our Lord was also written on His hands—the two hands stretched out and nailed to the cross, where they flowed with the blood that indelibly wrote His love for us for all eternity.

That is the message of the greatest verse in all Scripture—John 3:16. As Charitie Lees Bancroft’s great hymn expresses it,

Before the throne of God above

I have a strong and perfect plea.

A great high Priest whose Name is Love

Who ever lives and pleads for me.

My name is graven on His hands,

My name is written in His heart.

The historian Pliny once said that he had seen the entire Iliad of Homer written in so small a character that it could be stuffed into a nutshell. In the mid-1500s, English penman Peter Bales found a way to write the entire Bible on a single sheet of paper that folded to fit within an egg-sized walnut shell—not that you or I could actually read the minuscule type, mind you. (I’ve yet to figure out the practical value of that project.) In a sense, John 3:16 is the entire Bible stuffed into a tiny nutshell.

John 3:16 has long been regarded as our greatest, most direct, and most concise statement of the Gospel. With almost miraculous precision, it places the good news of the love of God in the smallest of packages. When you say “John 3:16,” even many unbelievers either know what it means or know the verse itself. It is the most famous book-chapter-verse reference in the entire Bible. You’ll see it on a banner at a sporting event, emblazoned on a T-shirt, or scrawled in graffiti on an underpass. It’s a shorthand way of saying, “God loves us all.”