When Jesus commissioned his followers, he declared, “I send you just the same way the Father sent me” (John 20:21), and empowered them by giving them the Holy Spirit (John 20:22). As Jesus’ followers today, we share the same commission to let the world know about the Lord; we also must depend on the same power of the Spirit that Jesus gave his disciples.
When one reads accounts of frontier revivals in the early nineteenth century, or spectacular “people movements” in overseas missions, one is quickly struck by how much of the success was driven simply by the uncontrollable activity of the Spirit. People prayed and labored in faith, but after they had proved their faithfulness, God accomplished miraculously far beyond what human effort could have done. If this were not true, there would be no church in the world today! And since it is true, we should seek God with the same expectancy to accomplish his purposes today.
One passage in John’s Gospel that talks about the Spirit is John 7:37-39. Here Jesus promises rivers of living water to those who believe in him; we begin to drink at the moment we first believe, but we may continue to drink and experience God’s powerful presence throughout our Christian life. (The Spirit is the foretaste of our promised future in glory; Rom 8:23; 2 Cor 5:5.)
Most scholars believe that John wrote to Jewish believers in Jesus kicked out of some of their local Jewish communities for following Jesus as their divine Lord. Thus he often contrasts the true experience of the Spirit with mere ritual. Jesus offers a baptism in the Spirit greater than John’s baptism in water (1:31-33); he values a friend’s desperate situation at his wedding more than the traditional demands of ritual water pots (2:6); he offers living water within the believer, better than Jacob’s well precious to the Samaritans (4:12-14). Jewish teachers could envision Gentiles converting to Judaism through baptism as being “reborn” into Judaism; Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born from the water of the Spirit (3:3-6). Jesus rather than the healing waters of a pool healed a paralytic (5:5-9), and the Siloam pool helped a blind man only because Jesus sent him there (9:7).
Priests used the waters of the Pool of Siloam in a special ritual during the Feast of Tabernacles. After a public procession, they poured water from that pool out at the base of the altar, symbolically reenacting an expectation in Scriptures they read on the last day of that feast: rivers of living water would someday flow from God’s temple (Ezek 47:1-12; Zech 14:8). On the last day of this festival, Jesus declares, “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me! Let them drink, whoever believes in me!” Then he refers to the very Scripture that was read on that day: rivers of water would flow from the “belly”; Jewish people considered the temple the navel of the earth. Jesus is saying, “I am the foundation stone of God’s new temple! Let the one who wills come and drink freely!” The water of which he spoke was the Holy Spirit, and would be available once Jesus was glorified (Jn 7:39).
John later explains that Jesus was glorified in part by being crucified (John 12:23-24; this echoes the Greek translation of Isa 52:13). Jesus was glorified by being lifted up on the cross, crowned with thorns and hailed “King of the Jews.” When a soldier pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, “blood and water” flowed out (19:34). The spear undoubtedly ruptured the sac around Jesus’ heart, which contained not only blood but a watery substance, but it is not hard to guess why John, alone of all the Gospels, makes a point of mentioning it. Once lifted up on the cross, Jesus offered eternal life to all. We should depend fully on this gift of the Holy Spirit he paid such a great price to provide for us.
Craig is author of The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).