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Introduction
To start off this series, I want to do a bit of a review of where we’ve journeyed in the Bible over the last two years.
When I arrived in October, 2023, I set out to work through the Bible. I created a preaching plan that is meant to take about six years to get through the entire story of God’s people.
I have not been going through it in any particular order. My main purpose is for us to be shaped by the wisdom of the Bible. The Bible is, first and foremost, a book of wisdom.
I started with Colossians and Philemon, which describes the nature of the church. Why we exist and what we believe.
Then, we went through the season of Lent, which was a topical study focusing on our relationship with the crucified Messiah.
In Summer of 2024, we went through the first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch. In a series I called From Paradise to the Promised Land, we explored the establishment of the nation of Israel, their captivity in and rescue from Egypt, the instructions from God at Mount Sinai, and their journey to the border of Canaan.
And just as a side note, this coming spring and summer, we will be picking up where we left off in that series by going through the pre-king history of Israel starting Joshua.
The series on the Pentateuch taught us a good deal about Tabernacle worship, the sacrificial system, and the priestly duties of the Levites.
Following that we went into the New Testament book of Hebrews, which helped us understand how Jesus relates to that Levitical and Tabernacle system and is the fulfillment of all of God’s promises made to Israel.
To kick off 2025, we went through a topical series that was connected directly to the Alpha program. We explore the basics of the Christian faith.
Last spring and summer, we took 17 Sundays to study the book of Job in a series called Wisdom in the Whirlwind. The purpose of spending so much time in Job was to teach us what sort of God created and rules the universe how he governs the world with wisdom.
Then, this last fall, we studied The Cruciform Life in Philippians. We saw how the Christian life is one of sacrificial love in the humble way of Jesus.
In a way, that series was an introduction to what we are doing now as we look at John’s Gospel.
Philippians succinctly presents Jesus as the perfect image of God, who is in his very nature, a humble God who bends down to rescue us.
My hope, as we enter our study in John’s Gospel, is that we will be awakened to who Jesus is and the life he offers us. That we will grow in wisdom by knowing the purpose of God becoming human and sacrificing himself on the cross and rising from the dead.
By way of introduction, I want to address the greatest challenge in studying the Gospel of John.
It is one that is problematic for those who insist that the Bible is a history book and that any historical discrepancies make the Bible unreliable.
Some scholars who aim to deny that Jesus is God incarnate make their most compelling arguments around the proposal that John’s Gospel is unreliable as a true historical account of the life and teaching of Jesus.
Bart Ehrman is one of the more prominent New Testament scholars who denies the divinity of Jesus.
Ehrman grew up in the church and attended Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. He has a Master of Divinity and a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary.
So, if you want to study the New Testament from the perspective of a skeptic, he’s a good starting point.
He claims to be agnostic, which is the belief that the existence of God is unknowable.
He believes that a person named Jesus from Nazareth existed in the first century and that most of the stories about him in the Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke actually happened.
But, in those Gospels, Jesus never refers to himself as God.
The Gospel of John, however, contains many statements made by Jesus and his followers that would clearly show his self-identification as God.
So, Bart Ehrman’s assertion that Jesus never claimed to be God is based on the Gospel account of John being unreliable.
He says, “there are discrepancies, embellishments, made-up stories, and historical problems… this means they cannot be taken at face value as giving us historically accurate accounts of what really happened.”
One of the distinctive features of John’s Gospel is that it is highly interpretive. John doesn’t just tell what happened. He describes the significance of Jesus’ life and teaching within the understanding that Jesus is God.
This is what distinguishes John’s Gospel from all other historical documents written around the same time.
John is not meant to be read as a mere historical record, but a theological account of the life and teachings of Jesus.
But, the truth is, all history is slanted with a purpose. There is no such thing as pure, unedited history. Every historian does some degree of interpretive work in their storytelling.
It is quite likely that John’s Gospel is an interpretive account of Jesus’s life, written in order to supplement the other three Gospel accounts, as his was the last one to be written.
This does not mean that John can’t be trusted as historically accurate; rather, it means that the Gospel’s emphasis is more theology than history.1
Bart Ehrman and other critics understand this and make this issue the primary reason John’s Gospel can’t be trusted to present an accurate historical record.
It is possible, that the bold claims of John’s Gospel, such as “the Word became flesh,” “I and the Father are one,” and “before Abraham was, I am,” tell us more about what Christians came to believe in the decades following Jesus’ death than what Jesus actually said about himself.
What I want to suggest today is that this fact, that John wrote the Gospel as a theological interpretation, does not negate the truthfulness of his testimony.
The many scholars who support the legitimacy of John’s Gospel make the statement that John’s highly interpretive approach does not make it unreliable. Rather, John preserved highly reliable early historical memory about Jesus’ life and teachings.
There is much more I could say about this issue, so if you are interested, I’d be open to doing a study on it sometime. Just let me know. For the sake of our study in John, we choose to accept this Gospel as reliable and true.
So, let’s get into why John wrote the Gospel, which helps flesh out its highly interpretive nature.
Why did John write his Gospel?
John is claiming that Jesus himself understood his identity as the promised Messiah and as God incarnate; he acted with divine authority, and knowingly revealed God in human flesh.
John wrote the Gospel so that people would believe this fact about Jesus; to awaken the faith that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.
So, as he selected and recorded a small sampling the stories and teachings of Jesus, he told us the significance of these events by highlighting Jesus’ divine nature within them.
The fundamental question that John’s Gospel addresses is not just ‘Who is Jesus?’ as a historical figure, but ‘Who is the Messiah? Who is the Christ? Who is the Son of God?’
We know that this is John’s purpose by reading the entire Gospel and paying attention to the repetitiveness of his statements about the identity of Jesus being the Son of God, the promised Messiah.
But, we can also know this by reading one single verse toward the end of the Gospel, which I will talk about in more detail shortly.
John 20:30–31 “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
This one statement in verse 31 summarizes the entire purpose of John’s Gospel.
Throughout this series, we will come to understand the nature of God’s salvation plan, how we can be reconciled with God through Jesus, and through this reconciliation, we will experience true life the way God intended for his image-bearers.
Believe that Jesus is the Messiah
The purpose of John is that we will believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but what does it mean that Jesus is the Messiah?
Who is the Messiah and why is this important as an identity of Jesus?
Messiah is the English translation of the Hebrew word for anointed one, or someone who is specially chosen and honoured by God to perform a particular task on his behalf.
Another word for Messiah is Christ, which comes from the Greek. Christ is not Jesus’ last name. It’s a title, just like Messiah.
So, when we say “Jesus Christ” we are saying “Jesus, the Messiah” or “Jesus, God’s anointed one.”
Many Jews at the time had the idea that a future ruler of Israel would be a great and powerful priest. This priestly ruler was understood to be the Messiah, one who is anointed by God.
The most widespread understanding of “messiah” is the promise that God made to David in 2 Samuel 7:12–14 “When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands.”
God promised that he himself would “be a father” to the son of David, Solomon. Solomon, the king, was in a sense the “son of God.”
God made another promise that is just as significant. He tells David in 2 Samuel 7:16 “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.”
This is about as plain as God could make it. David would always have a descendant on the throne. God promised.
But, this didn’t happen historically. David’s descendants were on the throne for less than 400 years. In fact, it wasn’t long before there was no throne in Israel for any king to occupy due to the Babylonian captivity and exile.
The belief was that the messiah would re-establish the throne, restore Israel to its promised glory and prominence, and this messiah’s kingdom would last forever.
So, it should come as no surprise that Jesus was rejected by the Jewish religious and legal authorities. He looked nothing like their expectation of the future king.
He was nobody. A homeless wanderer, touching unclean people, working on the Sabbath, not requiring his followers to obey Jewish rituals. He had no formal training as a rabbi, no prominent family, and no famous Jewish teacher to vouch for him.
Yet, his followers identified him as the Son of God, the Messiah. And he never rejected this title. He accepted people’s worship. He made claims that put him in equal standing with God. He taught with the authority of a messiah. He performed the miracles expected of a messiah.
And he was executed for claiming to be the King of the Jews. But, he claimed to have come not as an earthly king to replace Caesar or sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem. His kingdom is of a different reality. It is eternal because it is a kingdom of renewed creation.
When Jesus was killed, everyone had the same thought. Another false messiah. We have to keep waiting for the true messiah. Even the disciples gave up hope.
This is because there was no expectation that the true messiah would be killed and come back to life.
The resurrection did not fit into the picture of their understanding of who Jesus was. And there must have been many other things in their minds going against Jesus as the Messiah for them to have given up hope so quickly.
But, upon his resurrection, hope was restored. After several weeks of Jesus appearing to hundreds of his followers, they began to understand the true nature of the Messiah and his kingdom.
It all has to do with true life. Eternal life. Renewed life.
When we look at the life and teaching of Jesus, which we will do over the next few months, we will see that death and resurrection are required, not only for Jesus to give us new life, but for us to experience new life in Christ.
In order for us to experience eternal life, we too need to go through death and be resurrected into new life.
Let’s move on to the final statement in our passage today.
By believing, have life
This statement is at the centre of the entire series on John’s Gospel, which I have titled The Life of Jesus.
The word “Life” occurs 36 times in John’s Gospel, which is more than in any other single New Testament book.
So, we will cover this theme of “life” all throughout the series. But, a good question to start with is, what is this life and how do we get it?
The obvious answer to how we get it is by believing. So, a good followup question is, what does John mean?
To believe is most commonly understood as being convinced that something is true, or to trust in someone or something.
It is a very common word in the New Testament, occurring over 200 times with close to half of them in John’s Gospel alone.
And all of the occurrences in John are verbs, or action words. Belief, for John, is not something we have, it is something we do.
As one commentator wrote, “faith is an activity that takes people right out of themselves and makes them one with Christ.”2
This is the sort of belief that brings life.
The word “Life” in John refers to eternal life, the gift of God through his Son. However, in this verse, as is the case in John chapter 1, we could take it as a much broader understanding.
John 1:1–4 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.”
It is only because there is life in Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, that there is life in anything on earth at all.
- He came that people might have life and have it more abundantly (10:10).
- He died so that people might have everlasting life (3:16).
- He gave his flesh for the life of the world (6:51).
- Only those who eat his flesh and drink his blood have life (6:53–54).
- Only those who come to him have life (5:40).
- When he gives life people perish no more (10:28).
- He said that he had power to lay down his life and to take it again (10:18).3
There is much more to come on the themes of life and belief.
I only say now that our belief in Jesus is primarily an activity. And as we participate in active belief in Jesus, his life is imparted to us.
John’s purpose for writing this Gospel was to awaken the faith that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.
This faith is not a conviction that is present and fully mature upon the moment of confession, but it must constantly be renewed, and therefore must constantly hear the word of truth.
This is why we gather each week, why it is good to read the Bible every day.
- Mark J. Keown, Discovering the New Testament: An Introduction to Its Background, Theology, and Themes: The Gospels & Acts, vol. I (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 285. ↩︎
- Leon Morris, The Gospel according to John, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 296–297. ↩︎
- Morris, 73-74. ↩︎
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