Category Archives: John

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For God so loved the world: what it means to believe in John 3:16

John 3:16 does refer to salvation from sin through faith in Jesus, as we usually expect.  But we do not catch the full meaning of this verse unless we read the Gospel of John the whole way through.  The rest of the Gospel sheds light on what this verse means about the “world” (for instance, it includes Samaritans–see 4:42 in context), on how God expressed his love (by describing the cross), and other issues.  We focus here on what John 3:16 means by saving faith.  Someone may say he believes in Jesus, yet this person may attend church once a year and continue to live in unrepentant sin (let us say this person murders people every other weekend).  Is this person really a Christian?  What does it really mean to “believe” in Jesus?

The rest of the Gospel of John clarifies what Jesus means here by saving faith.  Just before the conversation in which Jesus speaks 3:16, John tells us about some inadequate believers.  Many people were impressed with Jesus’ miracles and “believed” in him, but Jesus refused to put his faith in them because he knew what was really inside them (2:23-25).  They had some sort of faith, but it was not saving faith.

What would happen if someone professed faith in Christ, then later renounced Christ and became a Muslim or worshiped old Yoruba gods?  Would their earlier profession of faith be enough to save them in the end?  The question is not hard to answer in light of the rest of John’s Gospel, though some of us may not like the answer.  Later in the Gospel of John, some of Jesus’ hearers “believed” in him, but he warned them that they must continue in his word, so proving to be his disciples and learning the truth which would free them (8:30-32).  By the end of the chapter, however, these hearers have already proved unfaithful: they actually want to kill Jesus (8:59).  Jesus later warns that those who fail to continue in him will be cast away (15:4, 6).  In John’s Gospel, genuine saving faith is the kind of faith that perseveres to the end.

The purpose of John’s Gospel was to record some of his signs for Christian readers who had never seen Jesus in person, that they might come to a deeper level of faith, the kind of faith that would be strong enough to persevere in following Jesus to the end (20:30-31).  John makes this comment right after narrating the climactic confession of faith in this Gospel.  Jesus summons Thomas to “believe,” and Thomas expresses his faith by calling Jesus, “My Lord and my God” (20:27-28).  Jesus’ deity is an emphasis in John’s Gospel (1:1, 18; 8:58), so of all the other confessions about Jesus’ identity in this Gospel (1:29, 36, 49; 6:69), this is the climactic one: He is God.  The content of Thomas’s faith is correct, but John wants more from his own readers.  Correct information about Jesus is necessary, but by itself correct information is not necessarily strong faith.  Thomas believed because he saw, but Jesus says that he wants greater faith that can believe even before it sees (20:29).  John’s readers believe because he narrates his eyewitness testimony to them (20:30-31), confirmed by the power of the Holy Spirit (15:26-16:15).

In John 3:16, saving faith is not just praying a single prayer, then going on our way and forgetting about Jesus for the rest of our lives.  Saving faith is embracing Jesus with such radical dependence on his work for us that we stake our lives on the truth of his claims.

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Jesus’ second coming: is it referenced in John 14:2-3?

Jesus tells His disciples, “In my Father’s house are many ‘dwelling-places’” (14:2; “mansions” comes from the Latin translation–it is not in the original Greek text).  Jesus promises that He is going to prepare a place for His disciples, but will return and take them to be with Him where He is (John 14:2-3).  Usually readers today assume that Jesus here refers to his future coming to take us to heaven or the new earth.  If we had these verses by themselves, that view would make as much sense as any other; after all, Jesus often spoke of His second coming, and we will be with him forever.

But the context indicates that Jesus is speaking of an earlier coming here: not just being with Jesus after he comes back in the future, but being with him in our daily lives in the present.  How can this be?

Peter wants to follow Jesus wherever He goes, but Jesus tells him that if he wants to follow Jesus where He is going, he must follow Him to the death (John 13:31-38).  Nevertheless, Peter and the other disciples should not be afraid; they should trust in Jesus the same way they trusted in the Father (14:1).  He would prepare a dwelling-place for them in His Father’s house, and would come back afterwards to receive them to Himself (14:2-3).  “You know where I’m going and how I will get there,” He told them (14:4).  Perhaps like us, the disciples were confused, and Thomas spoke for all of them: “Lord, we don’t even know where You’re going; how can we know the way you’re getting there?” (14:5)  So Jesus clarifies His point: Where He is going to the Father (14:6), and He is going there by dying on the Cross but would return afterward to give them the Spirit (14:18-19; 16:18-22).  How would they get to the Father?  By coming through Jesus, who is the way (14:6).

We often cite John 14:2-3 as a proof-text for Jesus’ future coming; conversely, we cite John 14:6 as a proof-text for salvation.  But if we follow the flow of conversation, we have to be wrong about one of them.  14:2-3 declares that Jesus will bring them where He is going, but 14:6 tells us where He’s going and how we His followers will get there: He is going to the Father, and we come to the Father when we get saved through Jesus (14:6).  Do we come to the Father through Jesus only when He returns in the future, or have we come to Him already through faith?  The entire context makes this point clear.  We enter the Father’s house when we become followers of Jesus Christ!

In the context of John’s entire Gospel, there is no reason to assume that the “Father’s house” refers to heaven, though it might be an allusion to the Temple (John 2:16) or to the Father’s household (John 8:35; and we are His new temple and His household).  More helpfully, Jesus goes on to explain the “dwelling-places” (NIV: “rooms”) explicitly in the following context.  The Greek word for “dwelling-place” used in 14:2 occurs in only one other verse in the New Testament—in this very context, in 14:23, part of Jesus’ continuing explanation of 14:2-4.  “The one who loves Me will obey Me, and My Father will love that one and we will come make our ‘dwelling-place’ with that person” (14:23).  The related verb appears throughout John 15:1-10: “Dwell [abide]” in Christ, and let Christ “dwell” in you.  We all know that Jesus will return someday in the future, but if we read the rest of John we learn that Jesus also returned to them from the Father after His resurrection, when He gave the disciples the Spirit, peace and joy (20:19-23), just as He had promised (14:16-17, 26-27; 16:20-22).  This is in fact the only coming the context addresses (14:18 in the context of 14:15-27; 16:12-24).

What is the real point of John 14:2-3?  It is not that Jesus will return and we will be with Him someday—true as that teaching is from other texts.  It is that Jesus returned after His resurrection so Christians could have life with Him (14:18-19), that He has already brought us into His presence and that we can experience the reality of His presence this very moment and at all times.  This means that the same Jesus who washed his disciples feet in the preceding chapter, who taught and healed and suffered for us, is with us at this very moment.  He invites us to trust His presence with us.

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“If I be lifted up” — Jesus’ meaning in John 12:32

In the United States, Christians often sing, “Lift Jesus higher…He said, ‘If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto Me,’” based on John 12:32. The Bible does talk about “exalting” God and “lifting him up” in praise, but that is not the point of this text. If one reads the next verse (which explicitly says that Jesus was referring to his death), it is clear that “lifting him up” refers to his death on the cross. (The play on words with “lifting up” was already used in both Greek and Hebrew for forms of hanging, such as crucifixion.) Thus, if the song means by lifting Him up what the biblical verse means, we would be singing, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” Of course God knows our hearts, but one wonders why a song writer would base a song, which millions of people might sing, on a verse yet not take the time to look up the verse on which it is based!

John three times refers to Jesus being “lifted up”: in one case, he compares this event to the serpent being lifted up in the wilderness (Jn 3:14), to make eternal life available to everyone (3:15). In the second, Jesus declares that His adversaries will lift Him up (8:28). In other words, John means by “lifting up” what Isaiah meant by it: Jesus would be crucified (Isa. 52:13 with Isa. 52:14-53:12). John includes plays on words in his gospel, and may also indicate that we “exalt” Jesus by preaching the Cross; but leaves no doubt as to the primary sense of the term in this context: crucifixion. To read it any other way is to ignore his explicit, inspired explanation of the “lifting up.”

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The thief who comes to steal and destroy — John 10:10

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.