Category Archives: John

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The Spirit as a divine person — John 14:16-17, 26

Christians honor God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Yet we may not always recognize the biblical foundations for what we believe.

That the Father is God goes without saying. That Jesus is divine in the New Testament would be equally obvious to its first readers, and would be to everyone today if we recognized ancient literary devices. For example, New Testament letters open with blessings from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, even though ancient blessings invoked deities. Old Testament descriptions of God are often applied to Jesus (e.g., Phil 2:6, 10-11; Rev 7:16-17). Even his title “Lord” would often imply his deity no less than the title “God,” especially in passages like 1 Cor 8:5-6, which evokes Deut 6:4 (one God, one Lord). Many passages are even more explicit, such as John 1:1; 8:58; and 20:28, framing the heart of John’s Gospel.

But what about the Spirit? This is more explicit in some passages (treated below) than in some others. In contrast to Jesus’s deity, the Spirit as a divine person was not a primary issue of contention with the earliest church’s contemporaries, so it received less attention at first. Jewish people recognized the Spirit as divine, although not as a person within God distinct from the Father. In the Old Testament, God was more concerned about defining himself as Israel’s one God as opposed to the false gods worshiped by other nations. At best there are possible hints that the Spirit could be distinguished from the one whom Christians call God the Father (cf. perhaps Isa 48:16). God was schooling his people in monotheism, but the term for God’s oneness is also the term for the oneness of husband and wife (Gen 2:24). That is, the necessary emphasis on God’s oneness does not exclude the later revelation of different persons sharing the nature of the one God.

Various passages in the New Testament provide much fuller hints, connecting the Spirit with the Father and the Son in special ways that presuppose their deity (1 Cor 12:4-6; 2 Cor 13:14; Eph 4:4-6; most explicitly, Matt 28:19). Sometimes in Acts the Spirit also acts in personal ways.

That the Spirit acts as a person becomes most clear in Jesus’s final discourse to his disciples in John 14—16. This is not so much because Jesus uses a masculine pronoun for the Spirit here; the masculine pronoun fits the gender of the Greek word paraklêtos (“counselor,” “advocate,” “comforter”) used in this context. That use no more makes the Spirit male than the feminine and neuter pronouns for the Spirit associated with the feminine Hebrew (ruach) and neuter Greek (pneuma) terms for “spirit” make the Spirit female or neuter.

The reason we recognize the Spirit as personal in these passages is that he carries forward Jesus’s mission after his ascension, working as “another advocate” (John 14:16-17, 26; 16:7-15). The Spirit convicts the world concerning sin and judgment (16:8-9, 11) just as Jesus does (3:19-20; 8:46; 12:31); he acts in Jesus’ place after Jesus’s exaltation (14:16; 16:10). He comes and speaks to the disciples whatever he hears (16:13), just as Jesus did (15:15). It is not surprising, then, that once Christians began considering these questions they recognized the Spirit as a divine person like the Father and the Son.

Christians today sometimes treat the Spirit—or even the Father and the Son—as an impersonal force. But God comes to us in a personal way, a way that invites us into a personal relationship with him. As we worship God together, let us remember and embrace that invitation.

(This post is adapted from my article for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer; more details are in my book Gift & Giver and in my two-volume commentary on John, both with Baker.)

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Who is the thief who comes to steal and destroy?

Many people assume that the thief in John 10:10 is the devil, but they assume this because they have heard this view many times, not because they examined the text carefully in context. Of course, the devil does come to steal, to kill, and to destroy; but we often quote the verse this way and miss the text’s direct applications because we have not stopped to read the verse in context.

When Jesus speaks of “the thief,” he speaks from a larger context of thieves, robbers, wolves, and strangers who come to harm the sheep (10:1, 5, 8, 10, 12). In this context, those who came before Jesus, claiming his authority, were thieves and robbers (10:8); these tried to approach the sheep without going through the shepherd (10:1). This was because they wanted to exploit the sheep, whereas Jesus was prepared to die defending his sheep from these thieves, robbers, and wolves.

The point becomes even clearer if we start further back in the context. In chapter 9, Jesus heals a blind man and the religious officials kick the blind man out of the religious community for following Jesus. Jesus stands up for the formerly blind man and calls the religious leaders spiritually blind (9:35-41). Because there were no chapter breaks in the original Bible, Jesus’ words that continue into chapter 10 are still addressed to the religious leaders. He declares that He is the true Shepherd and the true sheep follow His voice, not the voice of strangers (10:1-5). Those who came before Him were thieves and robbers, but Jesus was the sheep’s true salvation (10:8-9). The thief comes only to destroy, but Jesus came to give life (10:10).

In other words, the thief represents the false religious leaders, like the Pharisees who kicked the healed man out of their synagogue. The background of the text clarifies this point further. In Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34, God was the shepherd of His scattered people, His sheep; these Old Testament passages also speak of false religious leaders who abused their authority over the sheep like many of the religious leaders of Jesus’ day and not a few religious leaders in our own day.

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“My Lord and My God!” — Jesus appears to “doubting Thomas”

The following Bible background is for John 20: 19-28

Verse 19: Residences often had bolts and locks on outside doors. “Peace” (i.e., may God cause it to be well with you) was the standard Jewish greeting. Both the mourning period and the continuance of the Feast of Unleavened Bread could have kept the disciples in Jerusalem, even apart from other factors.

20: People could show wounds to stir sympathy, attest courage, or to stir antipathy toward those who inflicted the wounds. But here they function as evidence that he is the same Jesus. Scars could be employed to identify one. Many Jewish people also believed that one would be resurrected in the form in which one died, to prove that the person was the same (wounds could afterward be healed).

The hands refer to the forearm or wrist, not the palm (under the crucifixion victim’s weight, spikes there would have ripped open the hand rather than supported one on a cross).

21: In Jewish law, a person’s agent (sent as a representative) was backed by the sender’s full authority, to the extent that he carried out the sender’s commission.

22: The breathing may recall Ezekiel 37, but especially Genesis 2:7. One of the main functions of God’s Spirit in the Old Testament and early Jewish thinking was to inspire people to speak for God. In the Old Testament and early Judaism, God himself is the giver of the Spirit.

25: Thomas need not be accusing his friends of lying; many claimed to see ghosts in dreams. But a “resurrection,” by Jewish definition, involved no mere apparition but new bodily life; this is what Thomas wants confirmation for.

27: Soldiers could bind victims to crosses with rope, but also could nail them to crosses through their wrists.

28: Both “Lord” and “God” were often divine titles in the Septuagint (cf. e.g., Psalm 35:23; Hosea 2:25). Domitian, probably emperor when this Gospel was written, demanded worship as “Lord God.” A few decades later, a letter from a Roman governor confirms that Christians were known to worship Jesus “as a god.”

 

(Adapted from Dr. Keener’s personal research. Used with permission from InterVarsity Press, which published similar research by Dr. Keener in The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. Buy the book here.)

 

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The empty tomb — John 20:1-18

Verse 1: The Sabbath ended at sundown on Saturday night, but because night travel was unsafe Mary (and anyone else) would have waited till morning arrived or at least was approaching.

Most Judean tombs were private family tombs, many of them around Jerusalem. In many cases this was a cave with a disk-shaped stone to roll in a groove across its entrance. A wealthy tomb could have a stone roughly a yard or meter in diameter, requiring more than one person to move it.

2: Romans saw to it that those crucified were dead; on the rare occasion where a crucifixion was stopped and a person taken down and given medical help, they usually died anyway. Apart from a resurrection, which no one expected, Mary could only imagine that the body had been stolen, that the authorities had confiscated it (to put it temporarily in a criminals’ common grave), or that owners of the site had moved it.

4: Comparison could often elevate one person without denigrating the other, especially if they were friends. Athletic prowess was one ancient basis for comparison, especially concerning young men.

5: The stooping suggests a tomb with a low entrance leading to a lower pit; the lighting or the positioning of Jesus’ body (for example, on shelves to either side) would explain why the head veil was not visible before entering.

7: The scene is not the disarray one would expect from hasty grave robbers. Nor would robbers have removed the wrappings to take the body.

12: Among the many associations of white, angels were normally thought to be arrayed in white.

14: Jewish people believed that angels could appear in various forms and sometimes disguises, and sometimes that God could disguise individual humans.

15: A “gardener” fits the garden (19:41); these often were very poor.

16: “Rabboni” (my teacher) is more personal than “Rabbi.”

17: People applied sibling language figuratively to members of one’s people, fellow disciples, friends, and others. It may be relevant (depending on one’s interpretation of 20:17) that ancient texts sometimes included predictions of events fulfilled only after the close of the narrative. On ascensions, see comment on Acts 1:9-11.

18: Ancient Mediterranean culture esteemed the testimony of women far less than that of men (and in some circles did not normally accept it).

 

(Adapted from Dr. Keener’s personal research. Used with permission from InterVarsity Press, which published similar research by Dr. Keener in The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. Buy the book here.)

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The Word became flesh — John 1:1-14

The Greek  term  translated “word” was also used by many philosophers to mean  “reason,” the  force  which structured the universe; Philo combined this  image  with  Jewish  conceptions of the  “word.” The Old Testament had personified Wisdom (Prov 8), and ancient Judaism eventually identified personified  Wisdom,  the Word and the Law (the Torah).

By  calling  Jesus  “the Word,”  John calls him the embodiment of all God’s revelation in the Scriptures and thus declares that only those who accept Jesus  honor the  law  fully  (1:17) . Jewish people considered Wisdom/Word  divine yet distinct from God the Father, so it was the  closest  available term John had to describe Jesus.

1:1-2.   Beginning like Genesis 1:1, John alludes to the Old Testament and Jewish picture of God creating through his preexistent wisdom or word.  According to standard Jewish doctrine in his day, this wisdom existed  before the rest of creation but was itself created. By declaring that  the Word “was”  in the  beginning and  especially by calling the  Word  “God” (v. 1;  also the most likely reading of  1:18),  John goes beyond  the common Jewish conception to imply that  Jesus is not created.

1:3.  Developing Old Testament ideas (e.g., Ps 33:6; Prov 8:30), Jewish teachers  emphasized that  God  had  created all things   through his Wisdom/Word/Law and sustained them because the righteous practiced the law.  (Some even  pointed out that Genesis 1 declared “And  God said” ten times when  he was creating, and  this  meant that God created all things with his Ten Commandments. )  Ancient  Jewish  teachers would  have agreed  with verse 3.

1:4.    Developing Old Testament prom ises  of  long  life  in  the  land  if Israel obeyed  God  (e.g., Ex 20:12; Deut  5:16; 8:1; 11:9), Jewish  teachers emphasized that the reward for obeying God’s word was eternal life. John declares that this life had always been available through God’s word, which is the same word that he identifies with Jesus. Jewish teachers  called many things “light” (e.g., the   righteous,  the   patriarchs,  Israel, God), but this term  was most commonly applied to God’s  law (a figure also in the Old Testament, e.g., Ps 119:105).

1:5.  That   darkness  did  not  “apprehend” the light may be a play on words (it  could  mean  “understand” [NIV] or “overcome” [NRSV]). Similarly,  in the Dead Sea Scrolls,  the forces of light and darkness were engaged  in mortal combat, but light  was predestined to triumph.

1:6-8.    “Witness” was especially a legal concept in the Greco-Roman world and in Jewish circles. Isaiah used it in relation to the end time, when the people God delivered would testify to the nations about  him  before  his tribunal (43:10; 44:8). This image recurs throughout this Gospel.

1:9-10.   Jewish  tradition declared  that God  had offered  the law to all seventy nations at  Mount Sinai  but  lamented that   they  had  all chosen  to  reject  his word; only Israel had accepted it. In the same  way, the world of John’s  day has failed  to recognize God’s  Word among  them.

1:11.    Here  John  breaks  with the image in Jewish  tradition, according to which Israel  alone of all nations had received the law. Jewish people expected  that  the  faithful  of Israel  would likewise accept the revelation when God gave forth the law again in  the end time (Is 2:3; Jer 31:31-34). (In most Jewish  tradition,  the law would, if changed at all,  be more stringent in the world to come.)

1:12-13.   The emphasis  is thus not on ethnic  descent  (v. 11)  but  on spiritual rebirth;  see comment  on 3:3, 5 for details on how ancient  Judaism  would hear the language of rebirth.

1:14.   Neither Greek philosophers nor Jewish teachers could conceive of the Word becoming flesh. Since the time of Plato, Greek philosophers  had emphasized that the ideal was what was invisible and eternal;  most Jews so  heavily emphasized  that  a human  being could not become a god that  they never considered that God might become human. When God  revealed his glory to Moses in Exodus 33-34, his glory was “abounding in covenant  love and covenant    faithfulness”  (Ex  34:6),  which could also be translated “full of grace and truth.”

Like  Moses of old  (see 2 Cor  3:6-18), the disciples saw God’s glory, now revealed in Jesus. As the Gospel unfolds, Jesus’ glory is revealed in his signs (e.g., Jn 2:11) but especially in the cross, his ultimate act of love (12:23-33). The Jewish people were expecting God to reveal his glory in something  like a cosmic spectacle of fireworks; but for the first coming, Jesus reveals the same side of God’s character that was emphasized to Moses: his covenant love.

“Dwelt” (KJV, NASB) here is literally “tabernacled,” which  means  that  as God tabernacled  with his people in the wilderness,   so  had  the  Word   taber­nacled among his people in Jesus.

(Adapted from The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. Buy the book here.)

 

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How can we hear the Holy Spirit accurately?

The Holy Spirit passes on Jesus’ words as clearly as Jesus passed on the Father’s. We should be able to hear Jesus’ voice as clearly today as his disciples did two thousand years ago and­— since we see things in light of the resurrection— understand his message better. Of course, Christians have often abused the promise of hearing God’s voice, hearing instead only what they wanted or expected to hear. What objective guidelines can help us learn sensitivity to the Spirit and enable us to hear God’s direction accurately?

First of all, the Spirit does not come to testify about himself; He comes to testify about Jesus (John 15:26; 16:14).  He brings to our remembrance and explains what Jesus has already said (14:2 6). What the Spirit teaches us is therefore consistent with the character of the biblical Jesus, the Jesus who came in the flesh (1 John 4:2). The more we know about Jesus from the Bible, the more prepared we are to recognize the voice of his Spirit when he speaks to us. Knowing God well enough to recognize what he would say on a given topic can often inform us what God is saying, because God is always true to his character. But be warned: those who take Scripture out of context thereby render themselves susceptible to hearing God’s voice quite wrongly.

Second,  the Spirit  does not  come  merely  to show us details such as where to find someone’s lost property, although the Spirit is surely capable of doing such things and sometimes does them (1 Sam. 9:6-20). Nor does the Spirit come just to teach us which sweater to put on (especially when it is obvious which one matches) or which dessert to take in the cafeteria line. The Spirit does, however, guide us in evangelism or in encouraging one another (for example, Acts 8:29; 10:19; 11:12.)  The  Spirit  also comes  to reveal God’s  heart  to us,  and  God’s heart  is defined in  this  context as love  (John 13:34-35; 15:9-14, 17). To walk in Christian love is to know God’s heart (1 John 4:7-8; see also Jer. 22:16).

Third, it helps if we have fellowship with others who also are seeking to obey God’s Spirit. In the Old Testament, older prophets mentored younger prophets (1 Sam. 19:20; 2 Kings 2:3-8). And among first-generation prophets in the early church, Paul instructed the prophets to evaluate each others’ prophecies, to keep themselves and the church on target (1 Cor. 14:29). Spiritual mentors or peers who are mature in their relationship with God and whose  present walk with  God  we can trust can seek God with  us and provide us a “safety  net” of sorts.

If we feel that the Spirit is leading us to do something, but recognize that much is at stake if we are wrong, we may do well to talk the matter over with other mature Christians. Proverbs advised rulers that wisdom rests in a multitude of counselors, and that advice remains valid for us as well. In the end, we may not always settle on  the counsel  others  have given us— like us, they too  are fallible— but if they are diligent  students of the Scriptures and persons of prayer, we should humbly consider their counsel. God sometimes shows us things for the church that others may not yet see; at the same time, God may well have shown some of our brothers and sisters things we have not yet seen.  I have a few spiritual mentors and peers whose counsel I especially treasure and whose wisdom time has consistently (though not always) vindicated.

Many of us as young Christians were intrigued by the frequent experience of supernatural guidance from the Holy Spirit. While most of us who have learned to hear the Spirit in that way still experience such guidance regularly today, after a number of years, sensitivity to the Spirit’s guidance in that form becomes almost second nature and thus becomes less of a focus than it once was. Nor is this guidance, exciting as it may be to one discovering it for the first time, always the most important form of guidance God’s Spirit gives us.

By this method of hearing the Spirit, we might help someone in need, because the Spirit specifically directed us to do so. But many of us have also learned to hear God’s Spirit exegetically, as the Spirit has spoken in the Scriptures.  By hearing the Spirit’s voice in Scripture, we might help that same person in need simply because Scripture commands us to do so.  But perhaps the  deepest sensitivity  to the  Spirit comes  when  we learn  to bear the Spirit’s fruit  in our  lives­ when our hearts become  so full of God’s heart that we help that person  in need because God’s love within us leaves us no alter­ native. All three forms of guidance derive from the Spirit and from Scripture. Yet where  needs  clearly exist, God’s  character that we have discovered  by means of Scripture and the Spirit is sufficient to guide us even when we have no other  specific leading of the  Spirit  or  scriptural mandate, provided neither the Spirit  nor  the  Bible argues against it. It is when the Spirit has written the Bible’s teaching in our heart that we become most truly people of the Spirit.

(Adapted from Three Crucial Questions About the Holy Spirit, published by Baker Books.)

 

 

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The Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us: John 16

Jesus had been telling his disciples that the Spirit would further explain the teachings he had given them – not make up new things that had little to do with the Jesus they had known (1 John  4:2-6), but to teach  them and explain what Jesus had already  begun  to reveal (John  14:26; compare Neh. 9:20; Ps.143:10;  perhaps Prov. 1:23).  In John 16, Jesus explains further how  the  Spirit would  carry on  Jesus’ mission. (John intends this promise for his readers, not just for Jesus’ first hearers [see 1 John 2:20, 27].)

John 16:1-11 encourages persecuted Christians by telling them that those  who drag them  into  court  are themselves  the ones on trial, because God is the ultimate judge. In God’s courtroom,  the Spirit is their “Paraclete” (translated variously “comforter,” “counselor,” “advocate”), a term  which often  meant  a “defense attorney” (1 John 2:1). In the same way, the Spirit testifies along with us as a witness for Christ (John 15:26-27) and prosecutes the world concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment  (16:8-11). Everything that Jesus says the Spirit will do in the world, Jesus himself had done  (3:18-19; 8:46; 15:22).

In other words, the Spirit carries on Jesus’ mission of revealing the Father, in a sense mediating Jesus’ continuing presence, so that by the Spirit Jesus continues to confront the world as he did personally two thousand years ago. Of course,  the Spirit does not reveal Jesus in a vacuum; when Jesus sends the Spirit to convict the world,  he sends  the Spirit,  not  directly to the world  itself, but to us (16:7, the Spirit is sent “to you,” that is, to Jesus’ disciples). The Spirit continues to confront the world with the person of Jesus through our proclamation of him.

Just  as the  Old  Testament prophets knew  God  well before they proclaimed him, our proclamation should flow from a deep and intimate knowledge of God. The Spirit not only empowers us to proclaim Jesus to the world but testifies to us about Jesus for our own  relationship with him (16:12-15; see also Eph. 2:18; 3:16). The Spirit will take the things of Jesus and  reveal them  to us, glorifying Jesus as Jesus himself glorified the Father (John 16: 14-15; see also 7:18, 39; 17:4). As soon as he returned to them after the resurrection, Jesus gave his followers the Spirit so that they could continue to know him (16:16; 20:20-22).

Jesus promised that whatever the Spirit would hear, the Spirit would make known to the disciples (16:13). To someone reading the Fourth Gospel from start to finish, this promise would sound strangely familiar. Jesus had just told his disciples, “I have not called you slaves, but friends, because a slave does not know what  the master  is doing,  but whatever  I have heard from the Father, I have made known  to you” (15:15). Friendship meant many different things to people in the ancient  Mediterranean world, but one aspect of friendship about which moralists often wrote was the intimacy that it involved: true friends could share confidential secrets with one another. As God said to his friend

Abraham, “Shall I hide from Abraham the thing which I am about to do?” (Gen. 18:17).  Moses, too, as God’s friend, could hear his voice in a special way (Exod. 33:11; Deut.  34:10). Jesus was open with his disciples about  God’s  heart,  and promised that the Spirit would  be as open with  the disciples after the resur­rection as Jesus  himself  had been  before the resurrection. Ancient philosophers emphasized that friends shared all things in common; Jesus explained that all that belonged to the Father was his, and all that was his would be the disciples’  (16:14-15). In the context, Jesus especially intended God’s truth (16:13). They would know the heart of God.

 

(Adapted from Three Crucial Questions About the Holy Spirit, published by Baker Books.)

 

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Jesus, the living Word — John 1:14-18

Modern writers have proposed many valuable aspects of background for the “Word,” but probably the most obvious is what the “Word” was in the Old Testament: God’s word was the law, the Scripture he had given to Israel.  John probably wrote his Gospel especially for Jewish Christians.  Opponents of these Jewish Christians had probably kicked them out of their synagogues and claimed that they had strayed from God’s Word in the Bible.  Far from it, John replies: Jesus is the epitome of all that God taught in Scripture, for Jesus himself is God’s Word and revelation.

John probably alludes to one story in particular, the account of when Moses went up to receive the law the second time in Exodus 33 and 34.  Israel had broken the covenant and God had judged them; now he gives Moses the law again but does not wish to “dwell” with Israel.  Moses pleads with God to dwell with them, and then pleads with God to show him his glory.  “No one can see my full glory,” God told him, “but I will show you part of my glory, and make my goodness pass before you.”

As God passed before Moses, Moses witnessed an astounding spectacle of glory; but especially God revealed his “goodness,” his holy character, to Moses.  As he passed before Moses, he described himself as “abounding in covenant love and covenant faithfulness,” which could be translated, “full of grace and truth.”  And after God was finished revealing his character, Moses protested, “God, if that is the way you are, then please forgive us and dwell with us.”  And God promised to do so.

Some thirteen centuries later, the apostle John spoke of himself and his fellow eyewitnesses of Jesus in a manner like Moses.  “We beheld Jesus’ glory,” he said, “full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14).  He builds to a climax in 1:17: “For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus.”  To be sure, God revealed his grace and truth to Moses when he gave him the law; but Moses saw only part of God’s glory, only part of his grace and truth.  “No one has seen God at any time,” John reminds us, alluding back to God’s warning to Moses that he could not see all of God’s glory; but now “the only God, who is in the Father’s bosom, has revealed fully God’s character” (1:18).  Moses saw part of God’s glory, but those who walked with Jesus saw all of God’s glory, for to see him is to see the Father (Jn 14:7).

Whole book context explains the point here more fully.  God’s glory is revealed in various ways in Jesus (2:11; 11:4), but the ultimate expression of God’s glory here is in the cross and the events that follow it (12:23-24).  We see God’s heart, and most fully understand what God was like, when we look at the cross where God gave his Son so we could have life.

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Rivers of living water in John 7:37-38

Jesus’ promise of rivers of living water in John 7:37-38, referring to the coming of the Holy Spirit (7:39), is exciting in any case.  But it is especially exciting if one traces through the rest of the Gospel the contrast between the true water of the Spirit and merely ritual uses of water by Jesus’ contemporaries.

John’s baptism in water was good, but Jesus’ baptism in the Spirit was better (1:26, 33).  Strict Jewish ritual required the waterpots in Cana to be used only for ritual waters to purify, but when Jesus turned the water into wine he showed that he valued his friend’s honor more than ritual and tradition (2:6).  A Samaritan woman abandons her waterpot used to draw water from the sacred ancestral well when she realizes that Jesus offers new water that brings eternal life (4:13-14).  A sick man unable to be healed by water that supposedly brought healing (5:7) finds healing instead in Jesus (5:8-9); a blind man is healed by water in some sense but only because Jesus “sends” him there (9:7).

The function of this water is suggested more fully in John 3:5.  Here Jesus explains that Nicodemus cannot understand God’s kingdom without being born “from above” (3:3, literally), i.e., from God.  Some Jewish teachers spoke of Gentiles being “reborn” in a sense when they converted to Judaism, but Nicodemus cannot conceive of himself as a Gentile, a pagan, so he assumes Jesus speaks instead of reentering his mother’s womb (3:4).  So Jesus clarifies his statement.  Jewish people believed that Gentiles converted to Judaism through circumcision and baptism, so Jesus explains to Nicodemus that he must be reborn “from water.”  In other words, Nicodemus must come to God on the same terms that Gentiles do!

But if Jesus means by “water” here what he means in 7:37-38, he may mean water as a symbol for the Spirit, in which case he is saying, “You must be born of water, i.e., the Spirit” (a legitimate way to read the Greek).  If so, Jesus may be using Jewish conversion baptism merely to symbolize the greater baptism in the Spirit that he brings to those who trust in him.  The water may also symbolize Jesus’ sacrificial servanthood for his disciples (13:5).

So what does Jesus mean by the rivers of living water in John 7:37-38?  Even though we will deal with background and translations more fully later, we need to use them at least briefly here to catch the full impact of this passage.  First, in most current translations, at least a footnote points out an alternate way to punctuate 7:37-38 (the earliest Greek texts lacked punctuation, and the early church fathers divided over which interpretation to take).  In this other way to read the verses, it is not clear that the water flows from the believer; it may flow instead from Christ.  Since believers “receive” rather than give the water (7:39), and since they elsewhere have a “well” rather than a “river” (4:14), Christ may well be the source of water in these verses.  (This is not to deny the possibility that believers may experience deeper empowerments of the Spirit after their conversion.)

Jewish tradition suggests that on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, priests read to the people from Zechariah 14 and Ezekiel 47, which talk of rivers of living water flowing forth from the Temple in the end time.  Jesus is now speaking on the last day of that feast (7:2, 37), probably alluding to the very Scriptures from which they had read (“as the Scripture said,” 7:38).  Jewish people thought of the Temple as the “navel” or “belly” of the earth.  So Jesus may be declaring, “I am the foundation stone of the new temple of God.  From me flows the water of the river of life; let the one who wills come and drink freely!”

Normally (as we will point out below) one should not read symbolism into biblical narratives, but the end of John’s Gospel may be an exception, a symbol God provided those who watched the crucifixion.  (John uses symbolism a little more than narratives normally do.)  When a soldier pierced Jesus’ side, water as well as blood flowed forth (19:34).  Literally, a spear thrust near the heart could release a watery fluid around the heart as well as blood.  But John is the only writer among the four Gospel writers to emphasize the water, and he probably mentions it  to make a point: once Jesus was lifted up on the cross and glorified (7:39), the new life of the Spirit became available to his people.  Let us come and drink freely.