God Gives Us Certainty 1 John 5:6-12
John provides certainty that God's testimony about Himself is true. Since this is true, we should have a two-fold urgency: 1. To walk faithfully as a child of His, and 2. to see an urgency in sharing His Word and truth with those who are lost and separated from Him.
Blood and Water
1. ‘He came in all the purifications that were made by water and blood under the Old Law, which was dedicated with blood and water. Heb. 9:22; because all those purifications were typical of, and preparatory to, His sacrifice on the Cross, and derived all their efficacy from it.……
2. ‘He came by water in His Baptism; and by blood in His circumcision, and especially in His agony and bloody sweat in Gethsemane, and by the blood shed in His scourging before His passion, and in the crown of thorns, and the piercing of His hands at the crucifixion.….
3. ‘He came both by water and blood at once, in a special manner, on Calvary after His death. …
‘Thus St. John in his Gospel prepares us to understand the words of this Epistle; and in his Epistle also he elucidates what had been recorded in his Gospel. His words therefore may be thus paraphrased: ‘This is He who came—that is, proved Himself to be what He was pre-announced to be by the types and prophecies of the Old Testament, and what He proclaimed Himself to be in the New—the “Coming One,” “The Comer” (ὁ ἐρχόμενος), the Messiah, the true Paschal Lamb, and Very Man, a true Sacrifice for Sin; and yet Very God, the Everlasting Jehovah, of whom the prophet Zechariah spoke (Zech. 12:10), when he prophesied of His being pierced at His death.
‘He came by blood and water. He proved thereby the reality of His humanity and of His death; and thus He has given a practical refutation—which St. John saw with his own eyes—to the heretical notions of those in the Apostolical age, such as Simon Magus and the Docetae, who alleged that Christ had not a real human body, but was merely a spectral phantasm, crucified in show; and therefore Irenæus in the next age after St. John, infers this fact of the piercing of the side and the flowing out of the blood and water, recorded by St. John, as conclusive against their heresy. …
‘In the words, “not by water only,” there seems also to be a reference to another heresy of the Apostolic age, that of Cerinthus, who said that Christ came in the water of baptism, and descended into the Man Jesus; and afterwards departed from Him, when He shed His blood on the cross. In opposition to this notion St. John says, “This is He who came by water and blood; not by water only, but by water and blood.”
4. ‘Further it is to be observed that in this passage of his Epistle St. John is speaking of Christ’s generation, and of our regeneration.—Every one who believeth that Jesus is the Christ, hath been born, and is born, of God; i.e., is regenerate; and every one who loveth Him that begat, loveth Him also that is begotten of Him; i.e., whosoever loveth God the Father, loveth Him who by generation is the only-begotten Son of God; and every thing that is born of God (i.e., is regenerate) overcometh the world; and who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus—the Very Man Jesus—is also the Son of God?
‘St. John then proceeds to describe the means by which our regeneration, or New Birth, is communicated to us from God, through His Son Christ Jesus, Very Man and Very God, and how the new life, so communicated, is sustained in us. He does this by saying, This is He who came—came to us—by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood.