1 John 5:6-13
INTRODUCTION
The apostle John is a simple writer, but his themes are very deep and profound. Of the four gospels, John’s gives us the deepest revelations of Jesus’ divine nature and of the absolute sovereignty that God exercises in our salvation. He talks about how God so loved the world that He gave us his Son, so that everybody who believes in him can have eternal life. At the end of his gospel he tells us that he wrote it so that we might believe in Jesus, and that through believing in Him we could have eternal life.
The first of John’s letters, found near the back of your bible, has a different purpose. In this letter, he is writing to those who have come to believe in Jesus. The topic and purpose for his letter, which we have talked about for the last two years, is found in today’s text:
1 John 5:13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.
Though I plan one sermon after this one, today’s passage is the climax of John’s letter of comfort for we who believe. John speaks a lot about truth and about love. But another word that he likes is the word “know”. And he is writing this letter to all true believers in Jesus that he wants them to have confidence that they have eternal life. He wants us all to have assurance of our salvation.
Now a lot of people claim that they expect to go to heaven when they die, but if pressed they will say “I think I will be going there”. In other words, they hope that they are going to make it. If we ask why they think they will make it, they will usually say something like “I think that I am a good person”, or that “I try to do more good things than bad things.” But the gospel is not kind to human pride and tells us that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23) and that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23a). Instead, we are called upon to believe in Jesus to receive salvation free of charge, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom 6:23 again) We are saved, says Paul “by grace… through faith, … not of ourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8) and “not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy”. (Titus 3:5) We are told to trust, and John wants us to be confident that we have eternal life. Thus he has written to us about assurance.
Now assurance is a tricky topic, and controversial. Not all churches teach it, even though surely John is talking about it in 5:13 of this letter. In fact, when the reformers taught that this doctrine was clearly taught in the bible, the Roman Catholic church responded (at the council of Trent): If any one saith, that he will for certain, of an absolute and infallible certainty, have that great gift of perseverance unto the end, -unless he have learned this by special revelation; let him be anathema.
So we must ask, are there reasons why we should be should think that having assurance is a bad thing? Surely. For one thing, many people think that they are saved when they aren’t. Remember that John talked about them back in chapter two. He called them antichrists, people who hung around the church and looked like everybody else but later they skedaddled away, revealing their true state. Also, Paul addresses a big issue in Romans just after talking about free justification through faith in Christ by asking whether having our sins – past, present, and future – fully forgiven meant that, since we now have our free ticket to heaven why wouldn’t that mean that we are now free to just sin all the time? Paul later writes for Christians to “work out their salvation with fear and trembling”. (Phil 2:12) James challenges Christians with the statement “faith without works is dead”.
So, we might reason, maybe it is better if everybody goes through life with some serious doubt about their salvation. Human logic at least would say that this is good because it will keep us on the straight and narrow, doing good works, attending church, donating to charity, and keeping our language clean. But John is stubborn here. He has written an entire letter to let Christians know that they have eternal life. So what would be the reason for this? What benefit is there in having assurance of eternal life? There are actually good reasons for this.
Assurance lets us live lives of peace and joy. Back at the start of this very letter John told us “And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete” (1:4) Reading through the letter, we see that he wants us to know that God is our Father (2:14). He wants us to be strong and defeat the evil one (2:13-14) and to love God rather than the world (2:15-16). He wants us to trust God and his promises (2:26). He wants us to have confidence and not fear approaching God (2:28). He wants us to purify ourselves (3:3). He wants us to love one another (ch 3-4). He wants our hearts to be reassured (3:19). He wants us to be free from fear (4:15-19). And he wants us to be confident in prayer (5:14-18). And that is just from this letter!
As I mentioned last time, however, the first four chapters leave us with a quandary. People don’t have assurance because they don’t know that they are good enough to make it to heaven. John purports to fix this by giving us a series of tests by which a saved individual may be identified. These tests fell into three categories: moral, doctrinal, and social, or if you prefer, tests of obedience, truth, and love. Do you keep God’s commandments? Do you believe that Jesus came in the flesh, lived, died and rose again bodily? Do you love God and also the people of God? The problem that becomes obvious to us as we read through it is that none of us come out perfect in this testing scheme at all.
But in the first four verses of chapter five John comes full circle and brings us back to faith. Our faith overcomes the world. But it is not just raw belief that does it. It is a trust in Jesus, the Son of God. John is not contradicting Paul’s theology or even James’. They all say the same thing, just in different ways. Paul explains justification by faith and then answers sticky questions about how it works out in real life. James comes from the other side and addresses the issue of how faith works out because that is the part that we see. But both speak of faith. John was neither as methodical as Paul nor as combative as James, but he instead subtly wove the two themes together and cleverly constructed a tapestry that only revealed its story when it was completed. He built up the picture slowly in a way that generates an intuitive understanding of the mysterious but glorious wonder of salvation by faith.
The
simple story of all three writers is that
(1) salvation
is a miracle wrought by God in the hearts of sinners by the power of his Holy
Spirit without any righteousness or work on our part because we could not save
ourselves, and
(2) when He saves a person they are made new and sealed by the Holy Spirit, and that nature will always manifest itself in real life. As Jesus put it: “you shall know them by their fruits”.
As
some of the reformers put it: “Faith alone saves, but faith that saves is not
alone.” And the fruit that comes from the new nature is threefold, as John has
explained in the preceding chapters.
I We Trust Christ Because He Alone Did The Work – (The Testimony of the Apostles) (6a):
That brings us to our text for today. Verse five was the transition into John’s conclusion, and verse six begins John’s explanation of the saving faith he spoke of. Let’s read verse five and the start of verse six:
1 John 5:5-6a Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is he who came by water and blood--Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood.
At this point I want to mention that there are various controversies on the interpretation on verses 6-9 with regard to what John is referring to when he talks about “water and blood” in verses 6 and 8. (There is another issue we will talk about later). When reading various commentaries there are a lot of suggestions about what John is talking about.Some suggest that the water refers to Jesus’ birth (where the water would be amniotic or other bodily fluids) and the blood refers to his birth or his death. Others suggest that they both refer what flowed out from Jesus’ side when the centurion pierced his side with a spear. Others say that they refer to the ordinances of baptism and communion in the church.
The majority of modern conservative commentators that I have consulted seem to agree that John is referring to two events in Jesus’ life that were involved in heresies that John has addressed already in this letter, his baptism and his crucifixion. Remember back in chapter four, John told us:
1 John 4:2-3a By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.
And then in chapter five we read:
1John 5:1a, 5 1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, … 5 Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
In these verses John affirms that believers will believe in a Jesus who (a) is the Son of God, an eternal member of the trinity, and who (b) took on human nature, becoming like us and living a real life on earth with us, and (c) He is the promised Messiah. Jesus is the great God-man, the only one who is qualified to accomplish our salvation.
Why would John reference his baptism and his crucifixion here? Consider that the nature of Jesus is the first doctrine messed with by cults, his deity being the doctrine that is the most attacked. The JWs declares that Jesus is a created angel, named Michael. The LDS church makes him the physical child of a god named Elohim whose brother was Lucifer. Islam declares him to be a great prophet who specifically did not die on the cross (because their god caused the soldiers to grab the wrong guy at the last minute).
The
heresy that John was dealing with, is still seen today in some cults, was that
Jesus was just a regular man until his baptism. When He was baptized, they say,
the spirit of the Christ descended on Him for three years but abandoned Him
while He was on the cross, so what died on the cross was just the man, no
longer the Christ. But John contradicts this with his statement in verse six.
Jesus was he who came by (or through, or into) the water. He was the
Christ, the Messiah, before the Holy Spirit descended on him in the
Then John makes his point clearer. He did not come just by water only, but by the water and the blood. The Jesus who died on the cross and rose again and who was baptized was God in flesh. If He was not deity, his death would be insufficient to be the propitiation for the sins of millions and millions of believers. Even if He could die in the place of one other human, as a mere human He would have had to endure an eternity of suffering for that one man’s sin. But as a regular man, and therefore a sinner, He would have to spend eternity in hell for his own sins so He would have been useless in procuring our salvation. On the other hand, if He was not human in his life and death He would not have been able to identify with us in his death, any more than animals. Remember the verse in Hebrews 10:4 - For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
So
saving faith trusts in a Christ who is both God and man. A Christ who died a
sacrificial death in space-time history on a cross outside of
But why should anyone have faith in these signs? Because they were testified to by hundreds of people, especially by the eleven apostles who testified to the world, most of them staking their testimonies by accepting painful deaths rather than recant. And John declared himself one of those witnesses at the beginning of this letter. Remember how he started it?
1 John 1:1-3a That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life-the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us- that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you,
The testimony of John, the last living apostle, was the same testimony as the other apostles. Notice the words heard, seen, looked upon, touched with our hands. He even repeats these words. This Jesus, this God-man, can save us, and no other. And John has placed him firmly on our planet in space and time for us to know and believe in.
II We Trust Christ Because He Alone Has God’s Testimony (6b-10):
Having witnessed about Jesus himself, John now refers to the rules of evidence from the Mosaic Law. In Numbers and Deuteronomy God declared that nobody could be condemned on the basis of the testimony of only one witness (Num 35:30, Deut 17:6 & 19:15). And the witnesses have to agree for their testimony to be valid. This is the reason that, during Jesus’ trial the Sanhedrin were frustrated because they could not get the testimony of any two or three of Jesus’ accusers to agree in their details.
Jesus Himself when the Pharisees and scribes were questioning his credentials gave this defense:
John 5:31-35,37a,39 31 "If I [alone] testify about Myself, My testimony is not true. 32 "There is another who testifies of Me, and I know that the testimony which He gives about Me is true. 33 "You have sent to John, and he has testified to the truth. 34 "But the testimony which I receive is not from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved. 35 "He was the lamp that was burning and was shining and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. … 37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. … 39 "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me;
Jesus cites three witnesses to back up his own testimony to them: (1) John the Baptist, (2) God the Father (through the miracles given to Him to do), and (3) the Old Testament, which prophesied about Him. John now cites three witnesses in these verses: The Holy Spirit and the aforementioned water and blood.
I John 5:6b-8 6 This is he who came by water and blood--Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. 7 For there are three that testify: 8 the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree.
The Holy Spirit has many ministries in the life of a believer. It is the Spirit who first makes us alive when we are dead in our sins. Jesus told his disciples after the Last Supper that He would send them the Holy Spirit, who would guide them “into all the truth” (John 16:13). Paul wrote in the great chapter eight of the book of Romans:
Romans 8:14-17a 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!" 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs--heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.
This is what is referred to as the internal witness of the Holy Spirit where God reveals to the heart of a believer who Jesus is and provides faith in the newly-built heart. John has already mentioned this ministry of revealing Christ and keeping the believer in Christ back in chapter two. Right after he spoke of the fake believers who left the church, John wrote to his readers:
1 Jn 2:20-21, 25, 27 20 But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. 21 I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. ... 25 And this is the promise that he made to us--eternal life. ... 27 But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie--just as it has taught you, abide in him.
Going back to the water and the blood, consider the testimony of God at those times. When Jesus was baptized, God the Father spoke from heaven, saying "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." (Matt 3:17) The Holy Spirit descended upon Him then so that in that scene every member of the Trinity was represented in unity. At the crucifixion Jesus’ blood was shed for us. As it happened, the Father gave many signs, including three hours of darkness, earthquakes, and even the resurrection of some Old Testament saints. The veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom when the sacrifice was finished, and then Jesus rose from the dead three days later, about which Paul wrote that “[He] was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 1:4).
John therefore establishes the credentials of Jesus as our redeemer, not based on human testimony, but on God’s testimony, with three witnesses, fulfilling the Old Testament law for valid testimony. Since we are told elsewhere in scripture that God is not able to lie, this is sufficient. John emphasizes the strength of this testimony in the next two verses:
1 John 5:9-10 9 If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. 10 Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son.
In other words, if the rules of evidence are sufficient for us to credit mere human testimony as true, how much more shall the testimony of God be received? And this testimony is not just that we should believe in some guy called Jesus. His testimony is about a specific individual, the Messiah, the Son of God, the God-man who died as the full propitiation for the sin of everyone who trusts in Him and who rose again and now sits at the Father’s right hand as our eternal advocate, the only person in the universe who could accomplish this because of who He is.
III We Trust Christ Because He Alone Is Eternal Life – (The testimony of God) (11-13,20):
So God has testified at the bench in Jesus’ behalf, and his testimony is determinative. What has He testified about Jesus? What eternal truth has God promised all who trust in Jesus Christ? How does his testimony give us assurance?
1 John 5:11 And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.
So in the end, those who trust in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have eternal life. There are several important parts of this testimony, so we should parse these words carefully.
First, all Christians have been given eternal life. John lists this in past tense, which means that if you are trusting in Christ you already have eternal life. It is not life that is eternal in the future. It is not a promissory note for eternal life. It is not a long life that will be eternal unless you mess up and lose it. Eternal life that you can lose is not eternal life at all.
To be clear, this eternal life is not just a long, drawn out life in this broken world in an aging, sick ancient body. That is the body of this world before our final glorification. Unless the rapture comes soon, we will all experience death in this old body, but the new creation that God has caused to be born again within us will continue, and at the resurrection we will receive our eternal body. Body 2.0, we can call it. No sin nature in it, no sickness, no agony. A body that can stand in the presence of God’s glory in the new Jerusalem and not die. A holy body. A beautiful body. A body like that of the angels.
The second thing to notice is where our eternal life is. It is in God’s Son, Jesus Christ. Imagine a million dollars sealed in an envelope. To get the million dollars you need to take the envelope. If you don’t have the envelope you don’t have the money. In the same way, the testimony of God is that only those who have Jesus have eternal life. As John elaborates in the next verse:
1 John 5:12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.
Do you have Jesus? Then you have eternal life. Do you want eternal life? God’s testimony is that you need Jesus. This is an either/or situation, and there is no third choice. Certainly this is not a popular doctrine for many people. We like to think that there is some sort of credit for trying. “All paths lead to God”. But we can’t reach God by ourselves, He is out of reach. And if you think about it, the saying “all paths lead to God” is a nonsense statement. It is like saying “all letters are Q”. How can the gospel be true at the same time as another religion that says God will take you to heaven if you, say, wear yellow socks, is true? If I can get to heaven if I really believe that I can, then I am saying that Jesus’ sacrifice for my sin was a total waste of time. If I can earn eternal life by putting on yellow socks instead of trusting what God testified is the only way, I am spitting on Christ, I am calling Him a loser, a failure, someone who I am better than, because not only can I save myself, but I came up with a better way! What an insult. The writer of the book of Hebrews warned those who reject the gospel and have no sacrifice for their sins:
Hebrews 10:29 How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?
The
supremacy and uniqueness of Jesus is not a strange doctrine in a corner of the
Bible. Jesus told his disciples “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No
one comes to the Father except through me.”
Peter preached in
Jesus is eternal life. He said John 10 “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” And then specifically:
John 10:27-29
“27My sheep hear my voice,
and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life,
and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29
My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to
snatch them out of the Father's hand. 30I
and the Father are one.”
Conclusion
There is no better deal in the universe. In Jesus there is utter security, because He is the only provision made by God for reconciling yourself with Him. So where is our security? In the Son. If you have the Son, you have life.
In the final three verses of this letter John summarizes his teaching here. Verse 20 tells of what we know, because of God’s testimony:
1 John 5:20 And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.
If you have received Jesus Christ as your Savior, you can have peace, joy, and rest in Him. If you have not yet trusted Him, consider the question from Hebrews 2:3:
How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?
Today
can be the day that you receive eternal life. Will you trust Him today?
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