Certainty in God's love

God’s witnesses

We have the basics explained to us that we have eternal life through Jesus. But more than this, how do we know this to be true?

We are given three witnesses to our salvation in Christ. The Spirit of God, the water, and the blood. What does that mean?

Jesus “came” through water in His baptism and “came” through blood in His death on the cross. John’s point in emphasizing this is that the Son of God, the one who came to earth as a man, truly did experience all the things that we do and that we cannot just write off the life of Jesus as a myth, even though that might seem easier for us, but that to reduce the life of Jesus to myth would be removing the true importance of Christ’s life and death, His love for us through His perfect life and obedience.

If we still have a hard time believing that then we also have the Spirit, who speaks through the Word of God and convicts us of the truth. John 15:26 ““When the Counselor comes, the one I will send to you from the Father—the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father—he will testify about me.”

All three of these “witnesses” work towards giving us confidence in the truth of Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God. Why are these witnesses important? Because witnesses give us confidence that something is true.

For a court case you have witnesses who tell their side of the story and help to provide a more accurate picture of the truth.

What the water, blood, and Spirit do is tell the story that Jesus is God. At Jesus’ baptism the Father came down and Said that this is His Son “in whom I am well-pleased”, at Jesus crucifixion and resurrection we see the power of God in Jesus, and in the Spirit we see that Jesus was correct in telling us He would send His Spirit to us.

Now you may say “well, in a court room you have humans who tell the story, but these are all from the Bible and from ‘God’ so I should be immediately skeptical of any of the information”. But what John says is the exact opposite. “If we accept human testimony, God’s testimony is greater, because it is God’s testimony that He has given about His Son.” How much more trustworthy should God’s words be than mans words?

John 5:36 ““But I have a greater testimony than John’s because of the works that the Father has given me to accomplish. These very works I am doing testify about me that the Father has sent me.”

What John tells us is from this testimony we should be convinced about who God is because of these testimonies. That they should give us further confidence in what we believe about Jesus, we should trust the words God has given us.

Because to deny this testimony is to deny God and to deny what He has told us in His Word. You can’t accept other things the Bible says and reject what it says about Jesus. You can’t be unsure that Jesus died for our sins and the Father sent Him and also say you believe in God. Because you then are saying that God is a liar. It is the most serious of claims you could make, in fact it is literally life changing.

It is life changing because what the Bible proclaims is that eternal life comes only from the Son of God and from no other place. No one can come to the Father except through Jesus. No other religion or belief. It is exclusive.

It is also something that we can earn, but only something that we can be given by faith.

Our own witness

John tells us the purpose of the entire letter. “so that you may know that you have eternal life” and he gives us the way in which we know we have eternal life.

That us, having believed, may have confidence we have received eternal life. That we may have present confidence about what we will receive in the future.

But we also have another assurance. That we can approach God with confidence.

I don’t like talking to people on the phone because I never know what I am going to say or how someone will answer me. I get very anxious talking to people on the phone unless it is a close family member. I just freeze up. Maybe you feel that way with God. You don’t know what to say, you don’t know what to ask for, you don’t know what will happen if you do ask.

“Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or for bending his will to ours, but the prescribed way of putting his will before our own. It is by prayer that we seek God’s will, embrace it and align ourselves with it.”

It is us coming to God and saying “God there are a lot of things that I want but only if you give them to me and not that I do it on my own. And what we know is that God desires to give us good things so we can have confidence that He hears us and will give us what we need.

Because sometimes we don’t ask for the right reasons. Like James 4:3 tells us. James 4:2-3

James 4:2–3 CSB

You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

If my kid says “I’m hungry” what they may be thinking in their mind is “can you take me to McDonalds” but even though I might not take them to McDonalds I will give them what they desire, which is to have their hunger satisfied. Now that is easier for us to understand than how God answers our prayers. But He does answer them.

But what our faith in God means is that we “accept that God’s will is best, and it will trust His plan and purpose, even if it does not understand at the time.”

But what this tells us is that our confidence is not that we can receive these things on our own. In fact, what this tells us is that the world’s problem is that they ignore God and try to receive all these things without God. That the reason that there are wars, why people murder, why people steal, and any other sin is because they believe they want something that God can’t give them. But what John and James both tell us is that the problem is not that God can’t give them to us but the problem is our hearts that believe we need to do it without God.

One of my kids tried to sneak a cookie in their bed one day. Now what do you think happened when they tried to sneak the cookie in their bed?

-They received less enjoyable things, less cookies that week, they didn’t get to enjoy the cookie that they stole, and they felt they had to “sneak” something leading to anxiety and fear.

-But if they would have asked they might not have received it when they wanted it but they would have received it in the right time.

But we often think immediate is better. Because we don’t want to wait, waiting feels oppressive to us. Waiting feels like we deserve something and the other person isn’t giving it to us.

To believe we are saved in Christ means that we are satisfied

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Letters of John (Second Edition) Accepting God’s Testimony and Eternal Life (5:4b–12)

to have eternal life means to have one’s spiritual hunger and thirst satisfied (John 4:14; 6:35), to be raised up on the last day and to live forever (John 6:40, 51, 54), to have the light of life so that one does not walk in darkness (John 8:12), to have abundant life (John 10:10), and to know the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom he sent (John 17:3); and it means that, though we die, we will live (John 11:25).

John 6:32-37

“Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, Moses didn’t give you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Then they said, “Sir, give us this bread always.” “I am the bread of life,” Jesus told them. “No one who comes to me will ever be hungry, and no one who believes in me will ever be thirsty again. But as I told you, you’ve seen me, and yet you do not believe. Everyone the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will never cast out.”

To believe that we are saved in Christ is to reject what the world may tell us that we can be satisfied outside of what God gives us