Basics of the New Testament - Lesson 3

So having looked at the Synoptics, it’s now time to turn to the fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John. And I need to address an issue up front, and that is: why is John so different? Why is it so different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Well, we believe that John was written, some people argue, late 60s, probably more in the 90s, or late 80s. And so what that means is John has had 50 years or so to reflect, to think through what Jesus had taught, to mull it over. And what you get in the Gospel of John is John takes what is implicit in the Synoptics and makes it explicit. 

Now, it’s totally faithful, but that appears to be what he’s doing. So, for example, Mark saying, “Let me show you what Jesus does,” and you will then conclude that he’s God. John says, “Let me just tell you: Jesus is God.” Okay? And so John is taking what is implicit in the Synoptics and making it explicit. And also, there’s really no reason to repeat what are the three Synoptics. So they’ve been around, people are aware of them. Imagine John saying, “Well, I don’t want to do the same thing. Let me think through how I want to do this.” And I suspect that Jesus had different ways of speaking, and John was attracted to Jesus’ mannerism of speaking that is then reflected in the fourth Gospel. So, anyway, it is different.

Okay, what are some of the features in the fourth Gospel? Again, it’s really hard to nail these down, but there’s a real emphasis on having faith, having trust in God. What actually is belief? So, the world’s most famous verse, “God loved the world, so he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And when John says “believe in,” he violates Greek grammar so badly that the same mistake isn’t in any other known Greek literature. John did it on purpose to make a point. We don’t believe in Jesus in the way I believe in my son’s ability to do something; but we believe into Jesus, which means we transfer trust out of ourselves, and true belief, true faith, transfers trust into the person of Jesus Christ. So, I no longer believe in or trust my ability to earn favor with God, but rather I trust that Jesus did on the cross for us what we could not do for ourselves. And so, there’s a real emphasis on true biblical faith as moving out of ourselves, denying ourselves, right? We talked in the previous lesson; and moving it into Jesus Christ. Jesus did on the cross for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Now, John doesn’t follow the geographical structure of the Synoptic, you know: Galilee, travel, Jerusalem. He has a different structure, and some people like to look at John’s structure around a series of what are called the “I am” sayings, and there’s whole dialogues, whole chapters of dialogue around each of these sayings, but they provide a basic structure of the Book of John. They’re built on the “I am” statements that you get from the burning bush in Exodus 3:14. So Moses goes, sees the bush on fire. It’s not consumed. He goes over to it. A voice comes out of it. It says, “Take your sandals off. You’re on holy ground.” So, God was in the burning bush, and at one point in that discussion Moses says, you know, “What’s your name?” And Jesus, God, says, “Oh, I am who I am.” Big debate on what it actually means, but if you’ve heard the name of God, Yahweh, okay, that is coming out—that is our understanding of God’s personal, unique name that’s revealed to Moses. So, if you say, “I am” something, a Jew’s going to hear, “Oh, that’s the name of God in the burning bush; our God, the unique, only, holy, righteous God, right? So, that’s the background of these “I am” sayings.

So, here they are. “I am the bread of life,” meaning Jesus says, “I am fully satisfying.” Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” In other words, he is the source of life. He’s the source of truth. “I am the door for the sheep.” In other words, he is the true revelation of salvation and life. You go in through his door and no other door. Later on in the same passage, I am the Good Shepherd. I lay down my life for my sheep; the prophecy of his coming death. “I am the resurrection and the life.” This is the passage where he raises Lazarus from the dead. “I am the resurrection and the life.” In other words, “I am the source of all life.” In 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me;” the claim of absolute uniqueness. There is no other path to relationship with God other than through Jesus Christ. And “I am the vine. I am the source of spiritual nourishment.” So you have those “I am” sayings that are identifying Jesus, that they’re certainly alluding to the “I am” in Exodus.

But then you get to explicit statements of the divinity of Christ. If you’re talking to someone and you want to say that Jesus is God, and they say, “Well, where’s the Bible say that?” This is where it is. Okay? So first of all, it’s actually stated in the purpose of the book. In John 20, he ends with a statement: “Jesus performed many of the 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” (who’s the Messiah? He’s the Son of God), “and that by believing you may have life in his name.” So the very purpose of the Book of John is evangelistic. It is to show who Jesus really is. And like we just said, this is certainly hinted at earlier, it’s hinted in the “I am” statements. It’s also hinted at the relationship that Jesus claims to have with the Father, that, “I am his Son. I say what I hear my Father saying. I do what I see my Father doing.” He claims this unique and close relationship to God the Father. The Jews clearly understood that he was claiming to be God, because they tried to kill him for it. He had committed blasphemy in their minds.

But there are a few passages that are absolutely explicit in this claiming of the divinity of Christ. It starts off, famous verse, John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word” (and Jesus is the Word, you find out). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What you have here is John dancing around the concept of the Trinity. Okay, God the Father is fully God. God the Son, Jesus, is fully God. God the Spirit is fully God. We’re going to talk about this in a second. And yet Jesus is not the Father. The Father is not the Spirit. And so John is having this tap dance around the difficulty of understanding that you can have a Godhead. You can have three members of the Godhead, all of whom are distinct and yet are fully God in and of themselves. So you have the Word, pre-existence. He was with God. In other words, he was with God the Father. He lived in relationship with him. And the Word was God. Jesus was fully divine. Now, there are people that want to translate this as “the Word was a God,” and they just don’t know Greek. There is no article of the word “the” in front of God. But it’s not because it’s not God with a capital G. There’s other grammar involved. It’s pretty complex. But this is clearly an affirmation that Jesus the Word was fully divine. He was fully God.

If they want to argue with you on that one, just drop down to verse 18. “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” So you got two people there, don’t you? You have God and you have the Son. The Son is God and yet exists in a closest relationship with God the Father. Don’t you just love the Trinity, right? God is one, God is three. But here, there’s no other way to get around it. This is a clear affirmation of the divinity of Christ. 

You also have a statement like in John 10:30, “I and the Father are one.” They understood—the Jews understood clearly that he was claiming to be God and tried to kill him for blasphemy. So there are other places in the New Testament where you get the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. But these are all but one of the strongest affirmations. The other one’s in Titus, and we’ll get to it.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about was the Upper Room Discourse. It’s a very long passage of Jesus spending time with his disciples the evening before he was betrayed by Judas. And we call it the Upper Room Discourse. And there’s two things I want to point out. The first has to do with the whole issue of the Holy Spirit. And I’ve already hinted at it with my comment relative to the Trinity. But let me read you a passage. It’s John 14, starting at verse 15. Jesus had been saying that he was going to leave them. The disciples were sad. And so verse 15, “If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father” (and this is Jesus speaking), “and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever, the Spirit of Truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you, and he will be” (this is Pentecost), “he will be in you.”

Now, the word translated in this translation as ‘advocate’ is a very complicated word. In Greek it’s paraklētos. And sometimes we just give up and call the Holy Spirit the paraklete. The word can refer to someone who helps, someone who is a legal advocate for you in the court, someone who counsels you. I mean, the Greek paraklētos has a very wide range of meanings, and translations generally have to pick one. And I don’t know if anyone’s better than the other. But the important thing is that this paraklētos is another. In other words, the Holy Spirit is going to continue doing the same things that Jesus has been doing. He’s another Jesus, in a sense. The difference is Jesus is leaving to go back up into heaven. 

The Holy Spirit, the paraklete, will be with the followers of Christ forever. And we’re going to learn that because he’s with you forever, the new covenant is going to come about; the law is going to be written on our hearts, and he’s going to work on our lives. He’s going to empower us to produce fruits; and we’ll talk quite a bit about this. But again, this is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that we saw in Jeremiah 31, that another is going to come, the paraklete. He’s going to be just like Jesus, in a sense, except that he’s not going to leave. Okay? So this is the promise. And this is, again, where we get the doctrine of the Trinity from. The word Trinity doesn’t occur in the Bible, but it’s what the Bible is trying to get at, that there’s one God. And yet we talk about a Godhead with three persons of the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So God the Father plans, God the Son accomplishes the work (he did it on the cross), and then God the Holy Spirit finalizes; he makes what Christ did applicable to people. So it’s a complicated concept, but he is another one like Jesus. That’s such an important passage I wanted you to see.

The other thing I wanted to mention, and it’s just because it’s one of my favorite passages; I get to pick what we talk about. In John, chapter 17, we have what is called the High Priestly Prayer. And this is a prayer that Jesus as a high priest, in other words, as one who intercedes for us on our behalf to God the Father, he’s our high priestly. This is his prayer. And in the first five verses, he’s praying for himself. And then starting at verse 6, he shifts over and he prays for the 11 disciples. Judas is gone by this time. He prays for the 11 disciples. And it’s really interesting. What does God, Jesus, pray for the 11 disciples? Well one of the things…the main thing, I think, is that unity… Verse 11, “I will remain in the world no longer” (he’s praying to God the Father), “but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.” In other words, the unity of God the Father and God the Son is the same kind of unity—obviously not exact because we’re not God, but it’s a model of the kind of unity that exists between believers. Would you say the church exhibits that kind of unity?

The second is down in verse 15. He says, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one.” People like to talk about, “We are in the world, but we’re not of the world.” That’s where the ‘of’ comes from. But I think the part, and the High Priestly Prayer that means the most to me, is verses 20 to 26, because he’s praying for the future disciples. In other words, this is the only time Jesus prays for you, it’s the only time he prays for me, is in this verses 20 to 26. And again, the prayer is for unity, okay? 21, the unity that the disciples were to have in the previous passage is the kind of unity that you and I in the church are supposed to have. “I pray also for those who still believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” Now we will never be united to one another in the same way that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit are. But that’s the model of the kind of unity that we are to have as a church in this world. And why is it so important? Look down at verse 21, “May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” In other words, one of the purposes of the unity of the church is evangelistic, that people see how we relate to one another; and they feel outside, and they go, “I want to be a part of that. I want to be in that,” all right? That’s what the unity of the church, among other things, is all about. And again, you just have to ask yourself, “How are we doing? How are we doing?” Anyway, that’s the Gospel of John.