The Epistles of John, Part 21: On the Witness Stand Part 2

Continuing our exposition of 1^st John 5:6-12 and jumping immediately right back into the text.  John has shown us already the incredible testimonial power of water and blood as they relate to Christ.  These two elements stand as silent testaments to His ministry and work.  They work together as advertisements of God’s favor toward His Perfect Son.  The water at Jesus’s baptism, when the skies opened and the Spirit of God descended like a dove to rest upon Him, immediately catalyzing the testimony of John the Baptist which was borne on the wings of personal prophecy, previously delivered to him by the Holy Spirit.  

And the blood at the follow-up to the crucifixion, when God was pleased to raise His Son from the dead and exalt Him to the highest position over all that exists.  Likewise, the water and blood relate to the Jewish sacrificial system implemented by Moses at God’s command.  Both water and blood held strong cleansing properties and uses for the nation of Israel, causing readers of John’s epistle to immediately grasp the significance of his statement in the very first chapter that the blood of Christ covers our sins.  Furthermore, John is very clear that neither element, water and blood, stand alone as a witness.  They both function together to point the way to Christ as the Son of God and the complete rationality of belief and trust in Him.

We have also seen that the water and the blood are completely useless to us by themselves.  They are truth.  But that truth is meaningless until the Spirit Himself appears and bears witness to their veracity.  When that happens the water and the blood suddenly transform supernaturally into powerful witnesses that join the Spirit in an unceasing trumpet blast and timeless advertisement of the power of Christ to those who are alienated from God.  And these three witnesses do not merely agree with each other.  That is not strong enough of a word for what happens when they come together.  Rather, they merge into a single, harmonious, unified voice of testimony that weaves seamlessly into a coherent argument for and defense of the man Jesus as the Christ and the Son of God.

Finally, we have discussed how every detail of the Bible is of massive and exceeding importance.  Even an innocuous little note from John about blood and water issuing from Jesus’s side, following His death, when He was pierced with a Roman spear.  Such a small thing might be easily glossed over as an extraneous detail or nothing more than a historical fact to lend credibility to the Biblical record.  But as John makes clear, this tiny little aspect of the Crucifixion is so much more and is a part of the foundation of the entire process of redemption itself.  Details are critically important because God is a god of meticulous planning and exacting precision.  He does nothing by accident and the Scriptures are no exception to this.

All of this we have looked at before.  Now we will continue to read and attempt to comprehend John’s argument, starting with verse 9: If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater; for the testimony of God is this, that He has testified concerning His Son.  John is drawing a comparison between competing testimonies in this verse.  This is the Father’s “marturia”, or the testimony that He has given.  His agents, the water, the blood, and the Spirit, are His “martureo” or His witnesses.  Now John is going to inform us more deeply about the “marturia” they have given concerning Jesus.  And in John’s estimation, this testimony is of far greater worth than the testimony of men, for two reasons.

The first reason God’s testimony is greater than man’s is the very existence of the Christ Himself.  There is an implicit assumption of the truth of who Jesus is in John’s statement.  Notice that he says “God has testified concerning His Son.”  A confirmation from God regarding the Son-ship of Jesus must necessarily also confirm the deity of Jesus.  John has already touched on this point with a rhetorical question just a short time ago, in verse 5: Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?  In the Jewish culture of Jesus’s day son-ship was a very special thing.  The son of an official was considered equal in stature to the father, if not equal in authority.  More to the point, the offspring of a ruler was viewed as having the same blood as the father and therefore the same royal essence.  If people were expected to treat the king with reverence and respect you can be sure the same treatment was expected for the prince.

The Jews understood this well, which is why they became so incensed when Jesus claimed that He was God’s Son.  A clear view of this animosity can be seen in John 5:16-18.  Jesus had just healed a man who had been ill for 38 years.  It happened to be on the Sabbath that the healing was performed.  So, the Scripture says: For this reason the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because He was doing these things on the Sabbath.  But He answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.”  For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.

There is an imperial authority inherent in the son of a god that unmistakably trumps the worth and value of the son of merely a man.  Even secular cultures understand this.  Greek mythology, to take one example, is filled with stories about demi-human men such as Hercules and Perseus.  These heroes were the offspring of a union between a male god and a female human.  As such they were endowed with superhuman abilities as well as divine gifts to aid them in their various quests to defeat the forces of evil.  The implication of grandeur over and above ordinary men is clear and unambiguous.  Such a concept is not difficult or troublesome to understand for anyone, and these are fictitious characters.  So when it comes to a divine father and son relationship that is truth rather than fiction it is easily perceived how much worth is to be extended to the son.

The second reason that God’s testimony is greater than man’s is frankly rather shocking.  John says that the reason God’s testimony is greater is that He has testified.  This is what lawyers call a self-authenticating document (in this case a statement).  This is an item of evidence that is admissible in court with no extrinsic evidence of authenticity required.  An example would be a domestic public document that is signed and sealed.  The idea is a bit like saying “the best evidence for the existence of life is that life exists.”

To our overly rational and rabidly proof driven modern western minds this may very well sound like a weak and ineffective argument.  There is no real evidence given.  All that exists is a statement of divine authority.  God says, in effect, My witness trumps your witness simply because I have witnessed.  If we do take issue to such a declaration, we need to understand that our reticence is neither new or noteworthy.  In Exodus chapter 3 Moses has an encounter with a bush on Mount Horeb.  This particular bush was burning with a flame that never consumed it.  It must have been a simply astonishing sight.  Imagine the man’s surprise and amazement when the bush spoke to him.

The voice from within the fire introduced itself in verse 6 in this way: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  Notice that prior to this statement Moses was cautious but apparently unafraid.  Verse 3 records his internal dialogue with himself: “I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.”  There does not appear to be any fear but simply curiosity or fascination.  But after being advised to remove his sandals and being informed of who this really was, Moses immediately changes his attitude in the latter part of verse 6: Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

Many of us know the account well.  God gives Moses his mission for the last 40 years of his life, to travel to Egypt, confront the most powerful ruler on the planet with nothing but a staff, and lead an entire nation back to this same mountain so that they might come to know and worship the God of their fathers.

Moses is understandably pole-axed by this assignment.  Everything within him wants to balk and run away.  He responds in verse 13: “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’  Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’  What shall I say to them?”  Do you see what Moses is doing here?  God has already told him who He is.  He clearly identified Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Yet Moses is asking for His name?  He is dithering and avoiding the issue is what he is doing.  He does not want to take on this herculean task.  His flesh is recoiling from the responsibility and is telling him to go find a nice big hole to hide in somewhere, jump in it, and pull the dirt in on top of him.

The particularly relevant point here is God’s immediate response in verse 14.  You probably know the verse well: God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”  God knew exactly what His reluctant servant was attempting to do.  And the perfectly considered response was not to provide logic, rhetoric, evidence or any other such forms of placation to help Moses to feel better.  The Lord simply and with supreme finality affirms that He exists as the best evidence of who He is.  Moses, the offspring of Jacob, Pharaoh, and everyone else under the sun has no need of any further proof of the existence of God.  That God states His existence is enough.

Now to be sure, He goes on to give Moses additional information regarding what to say and how to say it.  He gives him inside information about both what the people are experiencing, what they are pleading for, and prophetic glimpses of what God is planning to do.  But this is all ancillary material.  The manner in which the Almighty chose to shut down the objections of His child was to self-authenticate Himself.

We can see a similar line of reasoning in one of Jesus’s parables; of the rich man and Lazarus.  It is found in Luke chapter 16, verses 19 to 31.  The rich man lived a life of ease and comfort while Lazarus lay outside his gates covered with sores and starving to death.  After both men died, Lazarus was brought to heaven but the rich man was sent to hell.  In his torment the rich man asks for just a drop of water to ease his suffering.  This is refused him.  He then asks that Lazarus be sent back to warn his brothers of their impending doom if they do not change their sinful ways.  It is this conversation in verses 27 to 31 that is pertinent to our point.

And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, that you send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—in order that he may warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’  But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’  But he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent!’ But he said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’”

The point is the same as in the case of Moses and the bush.  Requests for additional evidence are unnecessary.  In fact, they are pointless.  The only reason for a man to ask for more proof from God is to delay the inevitable admission that he does not believe.  And that lack of belief will not be altered by any further show and tell on God’s part.  The reason is quite simple.  God is the one who gives out the capacity for faith, at His whim.  If He has not seen fit to do this for someone then no amount of argumentation on the planet is going to convince them of anything.

The Apostle Paul knew this well, having witnessed it firsthand.  In his first letter to his beloved son in the faith, Timothy, he writes in chapter 1 verses 12 to 14: I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor.  Yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus.  It was God’s grace toward Paul that overflowed abundantly and was evidenced by both faith and love.  God was the possessor of these attributes, and He parceled them out to Paul at the time and place of His own choosing, not Paul’s.

A further point to be made about 1^st John 5:9 is this.  Who in their right mind would be such an ignorant buffoon anyway as to believe the testimony of a man over the testimony of God?  Even with sin clouded perception that prevents us from seeing our own faults, it is immediately apparent to any sane human being that other human beings are unreliable at best and untrustworthy at worst.  Give a newborn baby with siblings just a few months of life.  Even before they can walk or talk they can see and assess that their brothers or sisters are looking out for their own interests, and when those interests run contrary to the interests of their younger brother there is blood to be paid, in intent if nothing else.  Solomon saw this and wrote about it in Proverbs 22:15 when he said “foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.”

We see the reality of man’s sick, twisted, and fallen nature all around us.  A recent Open Doors story highlighted the experiences of a young girl from Uganda named Susan.  She was born into a Muslim family.  But after hearing the gospel she placed her faith and trust in Jesus for her salvation.  Susan's father, enraged about this, locked her in a room with a mattress and told her she could not leave the mattress until she was ready to renounce Jesus.  Then he left.  He did not return for three months.  Susan only survived through the help of her brother who slid food and dug channels of water under the door for her.  She was finally freed through the intervention of neighbors.

The point is this.  If even one’s own family members, given the right circumstances and motivations, cannot be trusted, then how much warier should we be of everyone else on the planet?  Are they not more to be distrusted than our “loved ones”?  King David, a man who knew painfully well the betrayal of those closest to him, wrote the following in Psalm 41:9: Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.  Such experiences prompted the king to write Psalm 118, verses 8-9: It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man.  It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.

Such is the madness of the human race contaminated with sin and determined to pursue unrighteousness at all costs that we would go against our own common sense and the evidence right in front of our faces to pursue anything and everything other than God.

Continuing on with 1^st John chapter 5, we come to verse 10: The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself; the one who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has given concerning His Son.

This is a fascinating verse.  We can see once again John bringing out the point of testimonies, or “marturio”.  God has given us witnesses who proclaim the deity of Jesus as the Son of God.  Their proclamation stands as a written confirmation of this truth, existing long after the events that inspired them.  This we already know.  But now John ups the ante by explaining that when we come to believe in what the witnesses claim, we take the testimony into ourselves.

This is an important point and we dare not miss it.  The Greek for “has” in this verse is “echo”.  It is one of the three words we examined at the beginning of this passage.  It means to have, to hold, or to possess.  It is a common word with over 500 occurrences in the New Testament.  In 1^st John alone “echo” shows up 23 times.  Because of that we have looked at it before in this series.  But I want to focus in on it again because it lends a very specific and powerful point to what John is saying.

To “echo” something is to possess it.  It is to gain and/or hold ownership of it.  It is the eternal inheritance “have” of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”  It is the marriage union “has” of John 3:29: “He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. So this joy of mine has been made full.”  And it is the divine character “has” and “have” of John 5:26: “For just as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself.”

This is the way John uses “echo” in his writings.  And it should tell us something about his meaning here in 1^st John.  He chose the present active form of the word to express his thought in verse 10.  This means that when we are granted the gift of faith and are persuaded to put our trust in Christ it constitutes an immediate and present possession of the testimony about Him.  In other words, we enter into, with our bodies, minds, and lives the multi-faceted witnessing testimony of Jesus that God has orchestrated.  We become a part of the testimony by owning it within ourselves.

But what exactly is this testimony that we come to possess?  John tells us, but he does it down in verse 11.  So I’m going to skip around a bit in order to flesh this out.  Verse 11 reads: And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.  The witness we are expected to give to the world stems from the foundation of the life we have been given in Christ.  It is a gift of matchless splendor, awe-inspiring benefits, and unfading glory. 

Peter spoke of it this way in 1^st Peter 1:3-4: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you. 

Here’s the thing.  John has already specified exactly what our Christian conduct should look like.  We should walk as Jesus walked (1 Jn. 2:6).  We should hate the world system and the “stuff” in it (1 Jn. 2:15).  We should love one another unto poverty and even death (1 Jn. 3:11, 16-17).  And we should carefully guard against all false teachers who have forsaken the truth of Scripture (1 Jn. 4:1).  In other words, our pursuit of Christ should be a total body, total lifestyle, total energy, all-in commitment.

But even if John hadn’t written any of those things.  Just by considering the extent of the inheritance we have been granted that Peter speaks of in his letter, should we not be driven to heights of joy, gratitude, and passion?  Should not our zealous desire to love our God back, as much as we possibly can, so as to in some small way measure up to the love which He has granted to us, overwhelm our senses and all other concerns in life?  Shouldn’t our personal testimony be absolutely drenched and dripping with a soul encompassing satisfaction in God and God alone?  I think it should and I think John would agree if he were in the flesh with us.

Now then, let’s back up a moment to what we read in verse 10 and ask a question.  Namely, what does all of this business about eternal witnesses and possession of the testimony actually mean to you on a daily basis?  To answer that I would like you to consider the following.  This conduct I’m talking about is not about you alone.  Your reputation is not all that is at stake.  In Christian circles we often state that God’s reputation is also on the line.  And that is true.  But I think what John is getting at here is a fuller and deeper exploration of that theme.  Rather than simply tossing a blanket “God’s reputation” he is explaining in detail how thousands of years, hundreds of prophecies, and the perfect unified fulfillment of those prophecies alongside the infinite Spirit of God have come together to coalesce in the man, Jesus, who is the Christ of God.  Furthermore, every single person since the day of Pentecost who has placed their faith and trust in this Christ has joined the harmony being sung by the witnesses who came before them.

That is the living organism of the church that you have entered into if you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior.  Is it any wonder then that the author of Hebrews phrases his point at the beginning of chapter 12 like this: Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us?  Because of this great cloud or living organism we have been joined to, we have absolutely no excuse for apathy, debilitating sorrow, or fleshly pursuits.  You had better believe it’s not all about you.  That is a massive understatement!

And we are still not done on this point.  Because even though each individual Christian is only one tiny piece of a larger whole, one individual cog in a labyrinthine system of gears, one unique witness amongst thousands or hundreds of thousands.  Even though all that is true, yet at the same time there is a delightful importance to every one of us as well.  We are sons and daughters of the king (2 Cor. 6:18)!  We are a royal priesthood of believers (1 Pet. 2:9)!  We are the saints of the living God (Acts 9:13)!  We will rule and reign with Christ on high, judging angels and nations (Rev. 5:10; 1 Cor. 6:3)!

All of this presents to the Christian an incredible dichotomy of understanding in which we are at once humble yet exalted.  We are both insignificant and majestic at the same time.  Reflecting on these truths causes me to echo the prophet Isaiah in 55:8-9 when he wrote: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.  “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”  Hundreds of years later Paul was similarly awestruck by the revelation he had been given.  In Romans 11:33 he wrote: Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!  Truly these writers of Scripture had the right of it.

However, there is a terrifying flip side to this coin.  The witnesses that God has put in place are eternal witnesses.  As we have seen, they consist of the undying and unchanging Holy Spirit and the unalterable historical events of the water and the blood as well as the historical record of Christian belief that has come down to us through the centuries.  Because all these elements testify eternally of the truth of Christ, when that truth is rejected, the effect is a continual, unceasing statement of belief that God is a liar.  This is why John uses the perfect tense of both “poieo”, or to make and “martureo”, or to bear witness.  He wants us to understand the weight of seriousness attached to the concept of disbelieving the testimony God has given us.

Think of it.  Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of every decade.  The life of a man or woman who rejects the testimony that God has given concerning His Son stands as a blazing beacon of offense, slander, and opposition to God.  Our culture would have us believe that God is a god to be scorned for His judgment.  They would teach our children that truth comes from within them and no one, not any other human being or even a god in the heavens, has the right to tell them differently.  But the reality is that God’s grievance against humanity surpasses our ability to comprehend such things.

We must endeavor to wrap our minds around the enormity of transgression that God has endured at the hands of sinful men.  Otherwise, when we come to a passage such as Deuteronomy 20:16-18 we will not be able to deal with or understand the rationale behind such a seemingly murderous rampage: Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.  But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord your God.

Of course it goes without saying that any judgment which falls upon mankind here on earth pales in comparison to what awaits the unbeliever who dies in their hatred of God.  And on that note, John closes this passage of Scripture with verse 12: He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life.  The opposite or absence of life is obviously death.  This is the prescription and prognosis for all those who do not possess the Son of God.  Wait a minute; what?  Possess the Son of God?  Doesn’t that sound a little… sacrilegious?  It may sound that way but I urge you to think again on John’s usage pattern of “echo”, the word he uses once more to indicate our relationship with the Son and the life.

John very clearly uses “echo” in the sense of ownership or possession.  We have already looked at this.  But here in verse 12 when it is applied to the Son, what does that look like?  How are we to understand this idea of possession or ownership when it is applied to God?  The first thing to wrap our minds around is that this is not the same as going down to the corner grocery store, choosing of our own volition an item, purchasing it with money, and thus coming into possession of it.  If we attempted to apply that paradigm to God it very much would be sacrilege.

Rather, it must be understood that whatever form this “having the Son” takes it is completely and totally done at His own motivation, not ours.  Titus 3:4-6 is instructive here: But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.  At God’s own choosing and at God’s own timing and at God’s own good pleasure He did this for us.  He washed us clean with the baptism of the Holy Spirit which was poured on us through Christ.

Understand that this idea of pouring is to be seen as not just a small trickle or even a controlled and measured flow.  It is an overwhelming flood of whatever is being poured.  In Matthew 9:17 Jesus is teaching.  He is describing a believer’s new relationship with Him and how it differs from the Law of Moses.  To accomplish this, He uses a parable of wine and wineskins, as follows: Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined.  The pouring of the wine out of the split wineskins is nothing less than an eruption of liquid that spews out and drenches whatever it falls upon.

So it is with the Christian when God saves them.  He drenches them with the Holy Spirit through the atonement of Christ.  What is drenched in this way is forever changed.  The “liquid” in the metaphor soaks into clothing, pores, hair, eyes, and mouth.  Even after being cleaned up the shirt is probably stained and the alcohol has been ingested to some degree into the person’s digestive system where it is processed and very literally becomes a part of them.

That is the picture I think John is giving us here of the “possession” of the Son and the life.  It is essentially the same kind of image we see from Jesus Himself in His high priestly prayer.  John 17:22-23 reads: The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.  There is an incomprehensible unity and oneness between the believer and his Christ that defies logic and explanation.  Paul says in Ephesians chapter 5 that the marriage relationship images this union in part.  And in God’s design of biblical marriage no human relationship is as close and intimate as that one.  But even with that metaphor in our minds we still come up short in attempting to provide a bonafide logical explanation for what Jesus is talking about.

So I don’t claim to have an inside track on exactly how this unity works.  But I think John is adding to our understanding here in 1^st John by referring to it as a possession or an ownership.  It is at God’s whim yes.  But once He has chosen us we are bonded to the tri-une God with an adhesive more powerful than anything else in the universe. 

This should at the very least cause us to stop and re-evaluate our Christian conduct and character.  This salvation we have entered into, this faith in the Christ, this belief and trust in Jesus of Nazareth, is not, to use a crude phrase, a “one-night stand”.  I am afraid many Christians view it that way.  They are oblivious to the reality of what they have entered into when they became a follower of Christ.  They think of Christianity as something they did, rather than something they do.  They perceive it as an event that occurred in their past rather than an ever present all-encompassing all-consuming daily reality.  They think of darkening the doors of a church as the extent of their current investment in Christ.  They view the passionate zeal that we see in Scripture as something reserved for the clergy. 

Is what I have just written true of you?  Ray Vanderlaan, a Jewish historian and Bible teacher, puts it this way.  In the first century, when someone was chosen as the disciple of a Rabbi, that young man was required to demonstrate a hunger to be like their master in every way.  The student had to watch how the teacher walked, how he ate, how he studied, how he taught.  They had to want to be like their Rabbi more badly than anything else in the world.  How badly do you want to be like your Rabbi?  The truth of the multi-faceted and eternal testimony we have been ushered into should cause us to look beyond and outside of ourselves to our divine Rabbi Jesus rather than within to our own pitiful broken souls.  And the wonder of it all should cause us to overflow with love and devotion and passion for the God who made it possible for us to follow Him.

The Epistles of John, Part 20: On the Witness Stand Part 1

For the disciple of Jesus Christ who has spent time studying the Bible, there are probably many passages of Scripture that stand out as particularly meaningful or powerful or important.  To be sure, an orthodox understanding of God’s word is clear on the point that every single piece, or as Jesus put it ever jot and tittle, of sacred Scripture is valuable and stands on its own as the breath of God in written form.  We obtain this important teaching especially from 2 Timothy 3:16-17: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.  Yet even with that truth evident, it must be said that some passages, at least to our limited human understanding, seem to rise above the rest and stand as majestic monuments or towering skyscrapers that dominate the spiritual landscape with the authority of God.

In Genesis chapter 1 we find God speaking and the universe literally spins into existence, borne on the wings of the command of its creator.  We feel awe at the sheer scope of what is on display before us and we shrivel into insignificance when we consider our place within the whole of creation.  We come to the 23^rd chapter of Psalm and our fears are eased and our minds stilled by the calm, peaceful reassurance of David’s depiction of God as our perfect and loving shepherd who provides for us in every circumstance.  A few pages later, in Psalm 51, we are humbled at the breadth and depth of David’s repentance as he pours out his sorrowful heart to God regarding his own personal horror over what he has done with Bathsheba and Uriah. 

Moving forward to the New Testament our soul stirs and our eyes rise to the heavens as we behold the wonder of the birth of Christ in Luke chapter 2.  Perhaps most keenly during the Christmas season each year our heart leaps within us at the thought of our savior being born into low and humble circumstances.  Yet in Matthew chapter 27 we are shocked into speechlessness over the heinous and callous evil of the perfect spotless lamb of God being crushed by the hands of sinful men as he was nailed to a cross to die an agonizing death on our behalf. 

But then from our sorrow bursts forth a shout of triumph as the church is born on the Day of Pentecost.  Peter’s powerful sermon in Acts chapter 2 blasts across the annals of history as if he held a Spirit-wrought megaphone to his lips which blasted apart the bonds of space and time to come down to us two millennia later.  After that we find a quiet unassuming man with a towering intellect named Paul.  Our minds are stretched in an attempt to understand his logic as he unleashes a barrage of rhetoric in defense of the Christian faith in the book of Romans.  He expertly weaves parallels between Adam and Jesus in chapter 5 as he examines the lasting impact and effect on the human race of both sinful failure and sinless perfection.

This is a short list.  I could easily go on for pages describing the themes and currents of Scripture that beckon us to explore the mysteries of the wonders of God.  I am sure that you could add to what I have written with your own list of personal favorites and meaningful anecdotes.  However, in very few of the explorations of Bible themes that I have done have I come across 1^st John 5:6-12 as being of paramount significance.  But to my mind this passage is massively, incredibly, amazingly important.

The bedrock of the Christian faith is the Christ Himself.  Jesus said “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” This is the core of what it means to be a Christian.  The reformers of the 16^th century, men who faced down the menacing authority of the Imperial Roman Church, took as one of their core tenets of belief the Latin phrase “Solus Christus”, which means literally “through Christ alone”.  Peter, of the famous Acts 2 sermon of two paragraphs ago, said the following in Acts 4:12 in reference to Jesus: “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”

Through all the denominational differences that exist within Protestantism, the doctrinal disagreements over sacraments, proper forms of worship, consumption of alcohol, etc. the one unifying theme that pumps like life’s blood through the global church is this common, shared, conviction that belief in Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation.  Therefore, it should come as no surprise that this idea is how John ended his previous section in verses 1 to 5 on warfare and victory.  He told us previously that: whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith.  Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?  In John’s mind this faith in Jesus is the pathway to victory for everyone who claims to be a Christian.

And now, in verses 6 to 12 John is going to just blow the doors off of this core doctrine of Christianity.  These seven verses are a powerful manifesto on the authenticity and the veracity of Jesus as the Son of God.  As people who seek to pattern our lives after such core truths as a deep and profound faith in Christ, we desperately need to be intimately familiar with passages such as this one, because it forms of the core of everything we believe about everything.

So here in a few minutes we are going to walk through this passage together, examining what the apostle is communicating with his words.  But before we get to that I want to take a moment and talk about three words from the language John wrote in; Greek.  These three words are, in my opinion, of particular significance in verses 6 to 12.  So I want to be sure we have as accurate of an understanding of them as possible so that when we come across these words in the verses our comprehension of John’s meaning will be clearer.

The first two words are very similar and are in fact related.  They are “martureo” (mar-tur-eh-o) and “marturio” (mar-tur-ee-o).  If you say them out loud with the pronunciations I’ve provided you may notice they sound very similar to another word you are probably familiar with; martyr.  The reason for that is martyr means literally “witness”.  And these two Greek words are essentially two different sides of that same coin.  “Martureo” means “to bear testimony, to be a witness, or to give evidence”.  “Marturio” means “the witness, testimony, or evidence given”. 

So, a “martureo” is the one who provides a detailed “marturio” of the circumstances surrounding a given situation.  You might wonder what the big deal is.  Well, as we will see, this issue of witnesses and testimony given is going to be critical to John’s argument in this passage.  It is the foundation of what he will be presenting to us.  Between the two of them, these words occur eleven times in 7 verses.  So we had better make sure we have a firm grasp on their meaning. 

The other Greek word I want to address is one that has come up before in this series; “echo”.  It means “to have, to hold, or to possess.”  I don’t want to overstate my position, but I am of the opinion that this little word “echo” is going to rise to the forefront and become the proverbial “mouse that roared” in this passage.  I’m not going to say too much about it now, in fact it won’t come up in part 1 at all, but keep it in your mind because we are going to revisit it later in part 2.

And with that, on to the Scripture!  Verses 6 to 8 reads thusly: This is the One who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. It is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.  For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. 

John has already told us that it is our faith, specifically our faith in Christ, that overcomes or conquers the world.  And now he begins to explain the fullness that exists behind or beyond that faith.  There are three components to this opening salvo of his argument: the water, and the blood, and the Spirit.  John uses a precise order to present these elements and we will mirror it.  The water and blood are closely intertwined so we will treat them first as a pair, then consider the Spirit, and finally examine all three together.

If we wind the clock back about 60 some odd years from the point at which John is writing, and we dialed in on a location just outside the city of Jerusalem, we would behold a terrible sight.  Three men side by side, fastened to crosses of wood, breathing out their final agonizing hours in excruciating pain.  Somewhat close to the foot of the middle cross stands an older Jewish woman.  Her gaze is haunted as she stares up at the horrifying sight of the broken, battered, unrecognizable form of her crucified son.  A few other women are close to her as well as a younger man.  The man on the cross suddenly addresses his mother as well as the man with her.  If we turn to John 19:26-27 we can hear his words from so long ago: When Jesus then saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, “Woman, behold, your son!”  Then He said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!”  From that hour the disciple took her into his own household.

From John’s usage pattern throughout the gospel he wrote, we know that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” was none other than John himself.  This tells us something very valuable.  John, probably alone of all the eleven remaining apostles, was actually there at the crucifixion of Jesus.  It is almost certain that Peter was not with him.  John himself records in John 18:25-27 that Peter denied the Lord when confronted about Him after the arrest.  And Mark, traditionally at the dictation of Peter, tells us in Mark 14:72 that Peter was in sorrowful mourning over his failure after the rooster crowed.  So the odds are that he did not return, whether out of fear or remorse, to witness the moment of death.

And it is probable that none of the other 9 apostles hung around either.  Jesus actually told them this would happen.  Matthew 26:31 records His words: Then Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away because of Me this night, for it is written, ‘I will strike down the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered.’  Without exception, Jesus’s best and brightest students deserted their master in His hour of need.  And the likelihood of them returning seems low, all except for John.

So he was likely the only one of the men who was there at the foot of the cross with Mary, the mother of Jesus.  He was probably the only one of the New Testament writers who witnessed firsthand the moment of death when physical life passed out of the shattered body of the Lord.

And when that instant of death had passed, John alone of all the gospels records a fascinating historical detail.  John 19:34: But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out.  Now, there are medical reasons why this would have occurred.  You can go elsewhere to learn about those.  But John’s inclusion of this detail in 1^st John 5:6 reveals that there is theological significance behind this otherwise ordinary effect of the horrors of crucifixion.

You can be sure that John, having seen this happen with his own eyes, would have been severely impacted by it.  I have very little doubt that over the next six decades of his life he often reminisced on all that he had seen and heard while with his Master.  And now, here at the end of his own life, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, John is presenting these two elements of water and blood to us as symbolic pictures of God at work in salvation.

I think there are two things in view with the water and the blood.  The first is God’s favor, bestowed upon His Son.  In this image the water represents the baptism of Jesus, early on in His ministry.  Matthew 3:16-17 gives us the most pertinent account of this event: After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”  This was God’s visible and authoritative stamp of approval upon the incarnated God in human flesh.  It served as a launchpad for Christ’s ministry. 

Additionally, it corresponded to the personal testimony of John, who baptized Him.  The Gospel of John, chapter 1 and verse 32 reads: John testified saying, “I have seen the Spirit descending as a dove out of heaven, and He remained upon Him.  I did not recognize Him, but He who sent me to baptize in water said to me, ‘He upon whom you see the Spirit descending and remaining upon Him, this is the One who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.’  I myself have seen, and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

What an amazing endorsement of the ministry and work of Christ from one who was clearly and demonstrably a prophet in the spirit of Elijah!  And just as God opened His Son’s earthly ministry with a clear sign of approval, so He closed it with the same.  This is the significance of the blood in John’s epistle.  When Jesus was crucified to death and his side was pierced with a spear, the blood and water that emerged referenced the completion of His work and God’s favor upon Him.  How you might ask does the blood symbolize the Father’s favor?  Well, it was not the blood in and of itself.  It was what happened after the blood; the resurrection.

Turning to Paul’s masterwork letter to the Romans, the 4^th verse of the 1^st chapter tells us: who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord.  The fact that Jesus did not stay dead, that God the Father instead raised Him up to new life at the appointed time, rings out the truth of His deity.  It stands as the clearest and most resounding affirmation of favor and pleasure that the Father could possibly have bestowed upon the Son.

This is further confirmed by none other than King David.  In Psalm 16:10 he prophesies: For You will not abandon my soul to Sheol; nor will You allow Your Holy One to undergo decay.  How do we know that David was foreshadowing Christ by almost 1,000 years?  Because of the exposition of Paul on his first missionary journey.  In Acts 13:35, while addressing the Jews who were assembled in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, he said the following: Therefore He also says in another Psalm, ‘You will not allow Your Holy One to undergo decay.’  Paul is giving a presentation of the gospel in which he clearly identifies Jesus as the One of whom David spoke so long ago. 

There is no doubt whatsoever that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead served as a mark of approval from God at the end of His ministry just as the baptism served the same function at the beginning.  In this way these two events book ended Jesus’s time on earth with the blessing of His Father. 

In addition to the water and the blood serving as a sign of God’s favor upon His Son, I think there is a second symbolic component John intends us to understand here.  That is, that the water and blood also demonstrate the work that Christ did on our behalf by cleansing with water and atoning with blood.

Through Jesus’s own words we can see the association He has always made between water and cleansing.  John chapter 4 details His encounter with the woman of Samaria.  In verse 14 He explains to her the symbolic relationship between the “water” He is offering and eternal life: “but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”  Just as with the light and darkness metaphor that John used earlier in his letter, Jesus uses an example that is easy and natural to understand.  We instinctively grasp the concept of water as a cleansing agent for the washing away of dirt.  So it is a very small mental leap to translate that into a spiritual washing away of sin.  However, this was not a new concept that originated here in this conversation.  True to Jesus’s pattern, rather than seeking to abolish the existing revelation of God in the form of the Mosaic Law, He instead sought to uphold it.  Let me explain.

In Numbers chapter 19 God gives instructions to Moses for purification from sins.  First, the priests were to slaughter a heifer, burn its carcass, and save the ashes.  Then in verses 17 and 18 we read: for the unclean person they shall take some of the ashes of the burnt purification from sin and flowing water shall be added to them in a vessel.  A clean person shall take hyssop and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it on the tent and all the furnishings and on the persons who were there, and on the one who touched the bone or the one slain or the one dying naturally or the grave.

This is just one reference to water as a purifying agent that is found in the Law of Moses.  The necessity of being cleansed before the Lord was a staple part of the people’s lives from the very beginning of the nation.  So it is not at all surprising that Jesus capitalized on that centuries old understanding to help explain what He was offering.

Cleansing through blood was no less important a principle to the Jews.  They were specifically prohibited by God from consuming blood.  This was not an arbitrary rule.  The reason is found in Leviticus 17:10-11: ‘And any man from the house of Israel, or from the aliens who sojourn among them, who eats any blood, I will set My face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people.  For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.’  Rather than a callous consumption of blood, God commanded the Jews to use it carefully and specifically to symbolically cleanse both people and objects, as in Exodus 24:6-8: Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and the other half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar.  Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient!”  So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”

The Lord wanted the people to associate blood with life and atonement.  He did not want it casually dealt with in a flippant manner.  He wanted to be crystal clear that the horror of sin was so bad that it required extreme measures to compensate for it.

Therefore, when we come to a passage such as 1^st John 1:7, if we have been previously exposed to the paradigms of cleansing given by God, it should immediately make sense: but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.

So what we have depicted in Scripture is both water and blood as cleansing agents.  But notice, back in 1^st John 5:6, that John makes a distinction between the water and the blood.  He specifies that it is not the water only that is relevant.  He wants to be sure that we understand that it is both the water and the blood that Christ came through in order to provide salvation.  This is not a partial salvation.  The Son of God did not accomplish a portion of what was required to reconcile men with God.  He accomplished it all.

Furthermore, His work was intimate and unique to Him.  He fully entered into it.  We know this because the Greek that is translated “by” water and blood is the word “dia”.  It is the root of our modern word diameter.  A more precise translation of it is “through” rather than “by”.  Imagine a circle.  If we attempt to calculate the diameter of that circle, what are we wanting to know?  We need to find the distance from one side to the other, directly through the middle of it.  Jesus did not just utilize water and blood to accomplish His mission.  They were not tools or instruments that helped Him along the way.  He literally passed through the middle of both elements in order to bring completion and fulfillment to the Father’s plan of redemption.

All of this, the importance and relevance of water and blood as well as the necessity of having the blood added to the water as a symbolic cleansing agent, is illustrated beautifully with a single passage from Hebrews chapter 9.  Verses 13 and 14 wrap the whole thing together in a theological package for us to digest: For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

But that’s not all.  We’re not even finished with verse 6 because John has more to say.  Christ’s work was completed with His death and His position was secured with His resurrection.  But all of this is still meaningless to mankind.  It is not until the Spirit of truth appears as a witness that any of this relates to man in any way.  You see, the water and the blood testify to nothing by themselves.  They exist as a real and meaningful symbolic component of Christ’s work.  But it is required that the Spirit speak these truths into the mind of a man for it to make any kind of sense to him.

This is what John means when he writes in verse 6 that Jesus came through the water and the blood.  And then he follows that up by immediately switching to the perspective of the Spirit.  It is here, in the second sentence of the verse, that we find our first occurrence of “martureo”.  The Holy Spirit of God becomes the star witness for the defense who stands in the box and points at the water and the blood.  He says “Look at the mark of favor that God the Father has bestowed upon this man Jesus.  God expressed His satisfaction with Him at the beginning of His ministry with a supernatural event at His baptism.  Then He indicated His supreme pleasure in what His Son had accomplished by raising Him from the dead.  And both of these, the water and the blood, stand as timeless testaments of the cleansing power of the Son of God for the sake of sinful men who stand before the throne of God in judgment.”

This vision of supernatural revelation of the truth of Christ’s work is exactly how Jesus described the Spirit in John 14:16-17 when He first explained Him to His disciples: I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.  And then in 16:13-15: But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come.  He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you.

This is why John now states in his letter that the Spirit is the one who is the “martureo” for the Christ.  Just as Jesus Himself was and is the literal embodiment of truth, so is the Holy Spirit.  And once He appears on the scene to testify, suddenly something miraculous happens.  John says in verses 7 and 8 that now there are three that testify about the Son: The Spirit is joined in His work by the water and the blood.  They transform, through His testimony, into witnesses themselves.  Whereas before they did nothing for human beings, now they become the sweetness of a refreshing spring of crystal clear spiritual water and the comfort of a sheltering blanket cast over our shoulders in the cold winter’s night of our alienation from God.

And notice the word John uses at the end of verse 8.  It is translated in almost every major modern English Bible translation as “agree” or “agreement”.  I find this to be unsatisfactory.  The key word in Greek is “heis”.  It means, simply, “one”.  The Greek word for agree is “symphoneo” (soom-phone-eh-o).  That word is not in this verse at all.  A literal, grammatically incorrect, rendering of the original phrase would be something like this: “and the three into the one are”.

Now, perhaps it’s just me, but agree just doesn’t carry the same weight of meaning as “one” or “three into one”.  Agreement sounds like two or three people meeting together, discussing their options, and coming to an accord regarding how to proceed.  It sounds like a debate with a peaceful ending, essentially.

Rather than that watered down image, I take the wording John used to mean that these three witnesses converge into one combined voice.  They come together, are absorbed into a common whole in a marvelous display of harmony, and then communicate as a single cohesive unit.  I find the word picture John is painting for us to be far stronger and much deeper and infinitely surer than mere agreement.

Only the King James Version of the English Bible comes close to matching the grandeur that John associated with this relationship.  It renders the phrase as “and these three agree in one.”  That is a little better, but I still think it does a disservice to John’s meaning for the sake of a grammatically sound translation.

In summary, I believe that this passage out of the fifth chapter of 1^st John, if it doesn’t already, should occupy a position of supreme importance in our understanding of theology and the gospel of Jesus Christ.  John explicitly and definitively lays out for us the model of what stands behind our faith in Christ which is what accomplishes our victory over the world.  In a single master-stroke of literature the Apostle and his partner the Holy Spirit grab ahold of four millennia of divine revelation and mediatorial significance from the Lord God to His chosen people: first the Israelites and now the church of Jesus Christ.

And these two authors point out for us that details are critically, invaluably important.  How many times have we perhaps read John’s account of the Crucifixion and come across 19:34 where he describes the piercing of Jesus’s side and the blood and water that flowed out?  I can think of at least one film depiction of this that shows it graphically.  And have we understood the depth and splendor behind that single detail from the 33-year physical life span of the Lord?  Have we perhaps assumed simply that John was merely attempting to provide a historically accurate record of what happened and that was all?  If so, we now know better from John’s own pen.  And we would do well to apply that same level of understanding to all of the sacred Scriptures.  God does nothing by accident.  He is a God of design, intentionality, structure, and planning.

This principle of who He is applies inside the church, as in 1^st Corinthians 14:33 where Paul describes proper corporate worship: For God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.  And it applies in the entirety of the natural created order all around us, as in Job 38:4-6 where God describes His exacting construction of the world: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?  Tell Me, if you have understanding.  Who set its measurements?  Since you know.  Or who stretched the line on it?  On what were its bases sunk?  Or who laid its cornerstone?”  Every detail in the Bible is there for a reason.  Woe to us if we decide otherwise and carelessly bounce through the Scriptures as if they are a mindless television program that we can turn half our brains off for.

Godless Politics

This is not a fiery diatribe against the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, or the liberal left-wing media in the United States.  It is a blunt assessment of some of my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ who have professed to be disciples of Jesus and how they have conducted themselves over the course of this presidential election cycle.

I have spent the last five months of my life immersed up to the neck in the book of 1^st John.  This is a letter that urgently, unapologetically, repeatedly, and dogmatically pushes the need, no the commandment, that Christians are to love each other because God first loved us (1 Jn. 2:9-11, 3:11, 4:7, 4:7-12, 4:20-21, 5:1).  In fact, John states that God literally is the embodiment of love.  Therefore, if you do not love he says you do not know God.  

Furthermore, John is quite helpful in that he gives us a precise definition of biblical, godly love.  1^st John 3:16-17 reads: We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.  But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?  The Bible’s definition of love is a total commitment, up to and including death, to put the interests of others before your own.  Christ was willing to be tortured to death in obedience to His Father’s will and for the sake of His elect bride, the church.  And even if you lack the opportunity to give your life for a brother or sister in Christ, John doesn’t let you off the hook.  He explains that even if it’s just a mundane material need that someone has, you are still to put them before yourself by providing their need for them out of your own goods.

This is such a fundamental principle, giving up your life and/or your resources for someone else, that we really don’t need any more information to flesh out the definition.  The Bible certainly does provide it in other books, but we could get by just fine with only 1^st John and still know perfectly well how to love.  This kind of love does not tear others down because it considers their feelings as of paramount importance.  It does not become frustrated with them because it is tender toward their ignorance, real or imagined.  It does not get impatient with them because their time is more valuable.

My point is this.  I’ve seen a lot of garbage lately from Christians who have been attacking other Christians for their political stance with aggressive statements, derogatory comments, rude and insensitive responses, and sarcastic quips.  These forms of communication stem from the aforementioned selfish, frustrated, and impatient superiority.  If you think they don’t you are deluding yourself and your conscience knows it.  The Bible states emphatically that this is not the love of God, God commands us to love (1^st Jn. 3:23), the Christian who practices such things does not know God (1^st Jn. 4:8), and most damning of all, is a liar (1^st Jn. 4:20) who dwells in darkness (1^st Jn. 2:9).

And I would like to state, for the record, that I am obviously not naming any names.  So if your hackles just went up and you feel like I’m talking about you please understand it is your own Holy Spirit led conscience that is convicting you, not me.  If your hackles didn't rise and you have been active on social media during this campaign season, please go back and read through your posts, put yourself in the shoes of the person you were speaking with, and ask yourself if they saw the love of Christ in how you communicated with them.  It is quite possible you have blinded yourself to the sin you are committing.

If you are a disciple of Jesus and you are guilty of what I have described...stop it!

The Epistles of John, Part 19: The Rules of Warfare

Everybody loves a winner and everybody loves winning.  In 1950 the head coach of the UCLA Bruins, “Red” Sanders, first uttered his famous quote “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.  Six years prior to that General George S. Patton gave a speech to the soldiers of the U.S. Third Army on June 5, 1944; just one day before the D-Day invasion of Normandy.  In this speech he said the following: “Americans love a winner.  Americans will not tolerate a loser.  Americans despise cowards.  Americans play to win all of the time.”

Now, I imagine that some of the people reading this will take issue with what I’ve just stated and with the quotes of those two men.  And I would quite agree that the motivating factors behind what Sanders and Patton said are all wrong.  They were approaching the situation from the perspective of fundamentally a Darwinian viewpoint.  The strong will get stronger, crush the weak, and rule the world.  That is clearly in opposition to the God centered worldview that we find in the Bible.

But I contend that, given the right circumstances, anyone can find themselves rooting for the winner and thoroughly enjoying the victory.  For the Christian who disagrees I would ask the following.  Do you enjoy the thought of Christ returning and crushing the head of the serpent, ruling the earth with a rod of iron, and casting death and hades into the lake of fire?  Yes, I thought so.

When we come to the fifth chapter of John we find the apostle essentially doing a little victory chant himself.  In the first five verses of the chapter he lays out an explanation of the conquest he hinted at in chapter 4 verse 4.  He’ll follow it up with more detail in verses 6 through 12.  And ultimately John chose to end this letter with a resounding crescendo of positive and triumphant encouragement for his readers; us.  He has warned us of various dangers, admonished us for our failures, and counseled us strongly against sinfulness.  But after all that, here at the end, he is all positive.  I think John meant for us to finish his letter primed to immediately march into battle with the enemy.

But before we dig into chapter 5, I want to go back and re-visit verse 4 of the previous chapter, where John last mentioned our victory: You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.  When we looked at this verse before, I asked the following question: How can John state that we have overcome the false prophets he was referring to there when it seems that the situation in our world and our country is deteriorating at a rapid fire pace? 

Christians are increasingly marginalized in the United States.  We are more often than not finding ourselves on the fringes of mainstream society.  Our views and our values seem to be trampled on through Supreme Court decisions, Executive Orders, local ordinances, Board of Education policies, and the “court” of public opinion.  Our natural instinct in the face of these events is to doubt, fear, and become disgruntled.

But frankly, to even have a rapidly fading morality issue in our country would have been shocking to John.  His understanding of Christianity was that it was implicitly marginalized, relentlessly persecuted, and fatally condemned by secular society.  The Roman Empire under which John lived had systematically murdered most or all of his fellow apostles by this point.  The annihilation of Jerusalem and dissolution of Israel as a nation state was 20 years into John’s past.  He had witnessed his lord and friend, Jesus, be plotted into execution by the Jewish Sanhedrin, and prior to that Christ had repeatedly told His disciples that this sort of treatment was what they should expect.  John himself, as he penned this letter, was either on or soon to be on the island of Patmos, exiled there to die a lonely and miserable death, due to his faith.

So I think John would not have been shocked by the moral decline of America.  He would have been dumbfounded that there was a semblance of morality to decline from in the first place.  Yet, still he presses this point of victory.  First back in chapter 4 and now he is going to add depth and nuance to his argument here in chapter 5.  So what gives?  When I covered this in chapter 4 I stated that the victory John spoke of was not a temporal or material victory, it is a spiritual one.  I further stated that this victory was future to us, having its fulfillment in the triumph of Christ when He returns.  I stand by those conclusions.  But now we are going to see another layer to the issue come to light.

And with that, on to chapter 5.  John begins by re-iterating, as he has done repeatedly, a twofold truth that he has already informed us of.  Verse 1 of chapter 5 reads: Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him.  Even though we have covered this ground a number of times already I think there are a couple points to be made here.  They are not necessarily new truths.  But they are important enough to bring up again.

The first is this.  John states that anyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.  By implication then, John believes that Jesus being the Christ is a true statement.  This much is obvious.  But I want us to dwell for just a minute or two on what it means that He is the Christ.  The word in Greek is “christos”.  In Hebrew it’s “messiah”.  Both words mean anointed one.  Contextually, before an Israelite king was crowned he was anointed on his head with oil.  The first recorded instance of this is in 1 Samuel 9:16: “Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him to be prince over my people Israel. He shall save my people from the hand of the Philistines. For I have seen my people, because their cry has come to me.”  The man of whom the Lord spoke was Saul, the first king of Israel.  His anointing by Samuel, one already having been confirmed as a special messenger and envoy of God, was intended to convey to all Israel that Saul was likewise chosen of God in the same manner.  The people were to know and understand that the one who had been anointed was set apart by God for a special purpose.

But the practice of anointing did not begin with the kings.  It goes all the way back to the initial formation of Israel as a nation state.  In Exodus 30: 22-25 God gave to Moses a very special recipe: Moreover, the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Take also for yourself the finest of spices: of flowing myrrh five hundred shekels, and of fragrant cinnamon half as much, two hundred and fifty, and of fragrant cane two hundred and fifty, and of cassia five hundred, according to the shekel of the sanctuary, and of olive oil a hin.  You shall make of these a holy anointing oil, a perfume mixture, the work of a perfumer; it shall be a holy anointing oil. 

The Lord went on in the following verses to clearly and emphatically give instructions for the use of this oil.  It was to be used to consecrate, or symbolically mark as holy, the tent of meeting, the lampstand and utensils, and the altar of incense.  In addition, the priests, beginning with Aaron and his sons, were to be anointed with the same mixture.  In short, everything to do with the proper and uniform worship of God was to be marked publicly as especially set aside and special to the Lord.  God was so emphatic about these requirements that in verse 33 He warns that anyone who reproduced the oil for a purpose unrelated to the worship of God or who put it on anyone whom God did not specify was to be cut off, or exiled, from the nation.

Clearly, this was a very serious matter to God.  Of course the oil itself did not make anyone physically any more holy than they had been before.  But the significance was no less important for that fact and bore a twofold implication.  First, as already mentioned, anointing a person or a thing at God’s direction symbolically marked them as belonging to God.  Second, the exacting requirements for both the manufacture and use of the oil was a test of obedience for God’s people.  Did they love Him enough to follow His instructions to the letter?  Human beings are notorious for inconsistency.  So the only possible way to nail this year after year and decade after decade was to put forth a tremendous effort to implement policies and procedures that would ensure the guidelines were obeyed.  And this labor was in itself an act of worship that proved the worker’s dedication to His God.

So anointing, in a Jewish context, was a big deal.  And the fact that Jesus is the messiah, the christos, the anointed one, is of extraordinary significance.  Matthew Henry, in his commentary on 1^st John, describes Jesus as the Christ in this way:

that he is Messiah the prince, that he is the Son of God by nature and office, that he is the chief of all the anointed world, chief of all the priests, prophets, or kings, who were ever anointed by God or for him, that he is perfectly prepared and furnished for the whole work of the eternal salvation.

The importance of Jesus of Nazareth as God’s anointed cannot be understated.  And because it is true it requires more than simply an acknowledgement of Jesus as a good man, a wise teacher, a noble martyr, a revolutionary thinker, or anything else.  One can state all of these things without admitting the truth that Jesus was and is the holy, ordained, and anointed messiah of Israel and christos to the rest of the world.  And that is precisely John’s point.  We have gone over this extensively already in these essays.  But it is worth repeating.  In order to be classified as born of God by the apostle John, it is insufficient to mouth words of belief about Christ’s status.  It is insufficient to attend church and nod your head at the preacher or teacher.  You MUST truthfully and convincingly testify to your belief in Jesus as the Christ of God with your whole life.  It cannot possibly be stated any better than Jesus Himself did it in the familiar passage of Matthew 22:37: And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’

John’s second point in this first verse is that if you qualify on the first point as a child of God, then it is incumbent upon you as one of His loving children to in turn love anyone else who is born of Him.  So, Christian, the question must be asked, how is your relationship with your brothers and sisters in Christ?

I think this is a very relevant question today.  As I write, in the latter half of 2016, we are in the midst of a quite contentious presidential election cycle.  It has been unique in my lifetime among all the campaign seasons I have witnessed, in that there is a distinct lack of clear direction.  Typically, although Christians may not agree with all positions a given candidate supports, there is enough alignment for them to feel comfortable casting a vote for one candidate or another.  But this time around there seems to be no clear answers.  Black and white has been muddied into a stagnant puddle of gray morass congealing upon the floor.

And in this environment, perhaps fueled by the pseudo anonymity of the Internet, I have witnessed many conversations among professing Christians that didn’t very much look like it was being carried out by disciples of Christ.  I have read accusatory tones, condemning language, and outright hostility from people who publicly bear the mantle of a believer.  There seems to be a mindset among some folks that if someone doesn’t agree with their perspective they are worthy of ridicule.  And I have born witness to this going both ways; both right and left.

Friends, this should not be!  Have we forgotten so quickly the manner in which John opened his letter?  Have we forgotten the special call to harmonious fellowship between the three persons of the godhead and all those who, like we, have been given new spiritual birth by God?  1^st John 1:3-4: what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.  These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.  John personally bore witness to the wonders of God in the flesh.  And he expressly stated that his purposes in revealing this to us is so that we might share in the fellowship he himself enjoyed, and in so doing fully complete both our joy and his.

Now perhaps no one reading this is guilty of the aforementioned crime of attacking others for their political decisions or other decisions.  But let me ask you pointedly.  How do you feel about the people who choose to attack you?  Maybe you are very schooled in your public social skills and you refrain from lashing out against people for their behavior in a public forum.  But what is the status of your view of them in the privacy of your own heart?  In other words, when a fellow believer attacks you, snubs you, criticizes you, or in any other way communicates negativity, do you still love them? 

To come at it from another angle, when you consider your brothers and sisters in Christ what do you focus on?  Do you concentrate on their negative attributes that are worldly or their positive attributes that are heavenly?  I do not mean to say that we should excuse sin.  But what I do mean is that we should give attention to the positive rather than the negative.  If we approach the social situations in our lives from that perspective, it will radically transform our love.  Because when the inevitable offense comes rather than wallowing in anger over the sinfulness of your fellow man you will be more apt to sorrow over the lack of Christlikeness they have exhibited toward you.  The point is to look upward to heaven rather than downward to earth.

I think that is just what John had in mind with the next verse: By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments.  Did you see what John just said?  Read it again.  He said that the benchmark we are to measure ourselves against in order to determine whether we love other Christians has nothing to do with them!  The determining factor in whether we love them or not is how well we obey God’s commandments.  That is just astonishing to me.  Now sure, some of His commandments are to love others, to lay down our lives for them, to give them the goods we have to help sustain their life, etc.  We have looked at many of these in 1^st John already (2:10, 3:10-11, 3:16-17, 4:11).  But the focus is not on the human here.  It is upon God Himself.

The perspective of this passage is the doing well of God’s commands as a litmus test for how well we love His children, rather than the spotlight being cast on the children themselves.  It is remarkable to me how consistently the Bible seeks to turn our attention away from man and toward the Lord.  In passage after passage, on topics ranging all over the theological landscape, the Scriptures insistently call us to focus our eyes upon Him rather than us.  Just a few examples are Matthew 10:25-31, 2^nd Corinthians 1:3-4, and Jeremiah 10:23.  The authors of the Bible repeatedly and unapologetically trumpet the pre-eminence of God over man.  And our passage today in 1^st John is no exception to this pattern.  Once you open your eyes to this facet of Scripture it just refuses to stay silent.  You begin to see it all over the place.  Everywhere you turn in the Bible the glory and magnificence and majesty of God is proclaimed and the inferiority and worthlessness of man apart from Christ is broadcast.

All that being said, it is critical to acknowledge another truth.  Notice the order of verse 2.  John precedes the keeping of the commandments with an exhortation to love the one who issued them.  In Deuteronomy 10:12-13 Moses describes for us the pattern of God-honoring and God-pleasing obedience: “Now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require from you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the Lord’s commandments and His statutes which I am commanding you today for your good?  Our love for God MUST precede the keeping of His commandments.  Anything else is legalism and unrighteous law keeping.  In point of fact, it is not genuine obedience at all.

Do you doubt the emphasis I am giving this?  Consider the following two passages.  In 1^st Samuel 15:22 the prophet chastises King Saul for his disobedience: Samuel said, "Has the LORD as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams.  In Psalm 51:16-17 David, in the midst of pouring out his repentant heart to God, makes the following statement: For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; You are not pleased with burnt offering.  The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.  Stack that up against what John has just said in verse 2 and understand that if you do not love God, you cannot keep His commandments in the first place.

I don’t want to belabor the point.  But I think we fail at all of this so miserably so much of the time that it bears at least one more question.  Namely, do you apply your love for God to your relationships as that which should inform and undergird them?  Or do you initiate and maintain your relationships with an absence of consideration for your love for God?  Further, does following the former path rather than the latter path in life feel onerous to you?  If it does, then the next verse in 1^st John 5 was written for you.  Verse 3 reads: For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.

I believe this verse, if adhered to and fully believed, will fundamentally alter our perception of reality.  Look at what John is saying.  He re-states that obeying God’s rules are how we demonstrate our love for Him.  Ok, we have seen this before; no problem.  But then he claims that God’s commandments are not burdensome.  Really John?  Are you kidding me?  Have you talked to your brother in Christ Paul lately?  You know, Paul, the one who whined and cried like a baby over his repeated sin in Romans chapter 7?

This is the same Paul who wrote the following two passages.  Romans 4:13-15: For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith.  For if those who are of the Law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise is nullified; for the Law brings about wrath, but where there is no law, there also is no violation.  2^nd Corinthians 3:5-6: Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

The Law (i.e. God’s commandments) brings about wrath.  The Law kills.  It is the Spirit who gives life.  How can Paul write such things while John writes that God’s commandments are not burdensome?  For that matter consider King David’s perspective on the Law.  Here was a man who lived prior to the sending of the Spirit of Truth into the world as a helper.  In Psalm 19: 7-10 he wrote the following: The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.  The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.  The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether.

This man absolutely adored the Law of God; all 613 of them presumably.  He gloried in them and reveled in their purity and light and truth.  There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between Paul’s and David’s view of the Law, which we can easily interpret as the keeping of God’s commandments as John is describing it.  Because although Christians may be freed from the yoke of bondage to the Law, it still describes holy and righteous living that is pleasing to God.  If we can dig past the surface of slaughtered bulls, evildoers stoned to death, and people exiled for their infractions we will see that the underlying factors behind all of it are the same that we face today as Christians.  In fact, it is the same root issue that John is describing for us.  We are to love the Lord first.  We are to place our faith and trust in Him alone.  And that love should envelop our entire lives as the focal point of all that we say and do.

So what gives with the contrast between Paul and David?  And how does that inform our question of what John is getting at in verse 3?  Well, we need to understand that David is not attempting to provide a doctrinal explanation for his keeping of God’s law.  He is just describing how he feels about it.  Paul, on the other hand, is providing an exposition of man’s relationship to the Law both pre and post conversion.  The apostle didn’t stop with Romans 4:13-15 above.  He also wrote Romans 7:5-6 and 10:1-4.  He explains through these other passages how it was sin which killed us through the Law.  The Law, in and of itself, is good.  It will never kill.  But when sin comes into contact with it only death is produced by the sin.  The Law of Moses was not Israel’s problem.  Their issue was trying to forcibly keep it through their own power which resulted in their spiritual deaths.  This was the point of Isaiah’s prophecy in chapter 8 verse 14 in his book: “Then He shall become a sanctuary; but to both the houses of Israel, a stone to strike and a rock to stumble over, and a snare and a trap for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”

The reason David was able to love the Law of God, in spite of its Old Testament rigidity, was that God had enabled Him to overflow with love for God that overcame and vanquished his fallen human tendency to hate the restrictive nature of it.  And that brings up what I think is the crux of this matter.  Our perception is warped beyond recognition.  That is why we tend to view obedience as burdensome even when John and Christ before him claim it is not.  Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

This seems to be precisely what John is saying.  We ought to demonstrate our love for God by carefully and closely and diligently guarding His commandments.  This should not a burden to us because Christ’s yoke is as easy as breathing and as light as a feather.  In putting his yoke around our necks we find ultimate rest and peace for our souls.

But this is not typically how we perceive rules, is it?  No, we tend to view it exactly the opposite.  We have an upside down view of reality.  We tend to think of rules and laws as burdens weighing us down, and only by engaging in selfish acts of sinful disobedience can we rise above them.  But the reality is that it is the sin that weighs us down like a millstone, and only by engaging in selfless acts of righteous obedience to God’s commandments (i.e. Christ’s yoke and burden; i.e. the Law of God) can we rise freely above the flotsam of this world.

If you take this teaching to heart and pursue it with vigor it will change everything in your life.  As a child you will honor your parent’s authority with delight.  As a parent you will give and enforce rules differently.  As an employee you will obey nonsensical corporate standards with gusto.  As a citizen you will respect your government even when you disagree with them.  As a disciple maker you will pour into your disciples a zest for the laws of God that will transform their perspective of Christianity.  As a disciple you will hunger and thirst after righteousness like never before.  I think it is safe to say that no matter your position, station, or circumstances in life, you will be radically altered by a biblical view of rule and law.

This transformative process will explode your ideas of Christian position in and relation to the world as well.  Here at the end, after that lengthy build-up and preparation, we come to what I think is the point of the passage.  It is found in verses 4 and 5: For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that overcomes the world – our faith.  Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

I want you to observe something in verse 4.  The word overcomes is the English equivalent of the Greek “nikao”.  It is the same word John used in 4:5 to indicate our victory over the world.  But here is the interesting thing.  In the first instance John used the perfect verb tense of “nikao”.  This lent it a meaning of past occurrence with effects that propagate into the present and beyond.  It has present significance without present instance.  But here in 5:5 John instead uses the present tense for the same word.  I believe the authors of Scripture were intelligent men.  I believe they meant exactly what and how they wrote.  And I further believe that in some mysterious supernatural way we do not fully understand the Spirit of God Himself super-intended their words.

Therefore, I do not believe it was an accident or a random fancy that caused John to use the present tense of “nikao” here in chapter 5.  I think he is trying to tell us something.  I believe what he is teaching here is that our victory is a living and active victory.  Yes, it is in the past.  And yes, that past victory is of such a tremendously significant nature that it’s effects spill over into the present.  But our triumph over the world is more than that.  It is a present reality of our lives each and every day.

Again though, how can that possibly be so in the face of the overwhelming odds Christianity in America is facing right now?  For that matter, how would this verse apply and be relevant to the great mass of Christians throughout the centuries and even today who have historically been maltreated and scorned for their faith?  I think it is so because everything that transpires in our lives is of benefit.  Turn your attention to another familiar passage but one that is well worth re-visiting; Romans 8:28: And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. 

Do you really believe this verse?  Do you trust the truth of this promise even when the worst circumstances imaginable present themselves to you and are thrust into your face?  Do you really believe that nothing that happens to us is “bad”?  I don’t mean evil.  Bad is distinct from evil.  Evil is either of a physical nature concerning the destruction of that which God has created or a moral nature concerning the violation of that which God has decreed.  Evil certainly is alive and well in this world.  And it most definitely impacts us sometimes.  But the Bible teaches that even when we encounter evil it is for our good rather than our detriment.  This is why I say nothing “bad” happens to Christians; because “all things” are interwoven for our good.

This was precisely Joseph’s perspective when he was re-united with his brothers after 20 years of separation brought about by the most heinous of arrangements, his imprisonment and selling into slavery at their hands.  Genesis 50:20 gives us his outlook on the situation as he came to his final days of life: As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.  Perspective is everything.  And when our perspective is fixed upon God it completely changes our entire world view.

That world view should be thinking of spiritual issues rather than material ones.  Ephesians 6:12: For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.  That doesn’t mean you have to ignore or be unaware of what goes on in the world.  But it does mean you have to keep those things in their proper place; way down the totem pole of importance in life.

At the end of all this I think we can summarize this passage with the following outline:

1. What is our relationship to the world?  We overcome or conquer it.
2. By what means do we accomplish this?  Through our faith and love.
3. Who do we love?  God first, and through Him others.
4. What or whom is our faith in?  It is in Jesus.
5. What do we believe about Jesus?  That He is the Son of God and the Christ.

So Christian, as I think John intended, go forth with confidence, not fearing what the world may throw at you.  Fight the good spiritual fight with love, diligence, and commitment.  You are a part of God’s family now and He wins.