One In Jesus

(John 5:1-3 ESV) After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.  ² Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades.  ³ In these lay a multitude of invalids — blind, lame, and paralyzed.

This was likely Pentecost. Jews would travel to Jerusalem for Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Booths. Jesus’ visits to Jerusalem for Passover are named in John, and Pentecost best fits the time of year. Moreover, the Jews concluded that the Law of Moses was given at Pentecost, which fits well with Jesus’ discourse about obedience to the Law of Moses, but certainty is impossible.

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(John 4:45-50 ESV)  ⁴⁵ So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast.  ⁴⁶ So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Cana there was an official whose son was ill.  ⁴⁷ When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.  ⁴⁸ So Jesus said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.”  ⁴⁹ The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”  ⁵⁰ Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way.

Why does John report this exchange between Jesus and the official?

It seems that Jesus is looking for a faith that doesn’t have to see a miracle to believe. Why is it important that John make this point to the readers of his book? Continue reading →

(John 4:25-26 ESV)  ²⁵ The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.”  ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

The Samaritan woman had already figured out that Jesus was a prophet. But Jesus had just spoken of the Kingdom coming — soon. After all, if worship would no longer be about Jerusalem, then God was about to bring a mighty change, and if so, that would seem to be the coming of the Kingdom — and with the Kingdom comes the Messiah. Continue reading →

Now, before we get to “worship … in truth,” we need to dispose of some baggage. It’s been routinely taught that “worship in spirit” means to worship with the right attitude  and “worship … in truth” means to worship according to the right rules.

The point Jesus is supposedly making is that the Samaritans [1] had the right heart but the wrong rules, whereas the Jews had the right rules but the wrong heart. Thus, Jesus is supposedly saying that, in Christianity, we must have both the right rules and the right heart.

This line of thinking goes back, I think, to early Calvinism and reaches the Churches of Christ via Puritanism, that same heritage that brought us the Regulative Principle of Worship (if it’s not authorized, it’s sin).[2] Continue reading →

(John 4:20 ESV)  ²⁰ “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

Then she goes straight to theology. She’s found a prophet, and rather than asking for the eternal life he’s offering (v. 14 is quite plain), she wants to talk about how best to worship God. (She would fit in well with many of us today.)

Jesus is happy with the change of subject, but as was so often the case, he uses her question to answer a better, deeper question. Continue reading →

(John 4:13-14 ESV)  ¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,  ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Jesus promises that his “Living Water” will quench thirst forever. It’s not a drink that refreshes for an hour. It’s like having a “spring of water” within so that you never thirst again.

This is an amazing promise. He’s plainly speaking of the Spirit, and he says that those who receive the Spirit receive it but once — and once is enough. You receive the Spirit and you keep it until Jesus returns.

There are those who teach that we gain and lose our salvation on a regular, recurring basis. When we sin, they say, we become instantly damned, only to be saved again when we repent, confess, and ask forgiveness. We flit back and forth between lost and saved hour by hour — constantly thirsty, and never truly quenched. Jesus disagrees.

Remember that all who have the Spirit are saved — which would be obvious to any First Century Jew — but is made explicit by Paul —

(Rom 8:11 ESV)  ¹¹ If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

If we “never thirst again,” then we never are lost again. Or else, if we’re lost, we no longer desire salvation because we’ve become so hardened, so rebellious, that we no longer desire salvation. For the Christian, there is no longing for salvation — unless the Christian is under the influence of false teachers. Jesus said so, and so it must be true.

Why no longing? Because you don’t long for what you already have.

(Rom 8:1 ESV) There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Jesus is not teaching “once saved, always saved” or even the perseverance of the saints. He’s teaching that, in the normal case, those who been saved remained saved until they die or Jesus returns. They never thirst again.

But he’ll explain later in the book, as is taught plainly in Hebrews, that you can fall away.

(Heb 10:26-31 ESV)  ²⁶ For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,  ²⁷ but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.  ²⁸ Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses.  ²⁹ How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?  ³⁰ For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.”  ³¹ It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

But we fall away by rebellion, by deliberately continuing to sin — not merely continuing to sin (we all do that) and not merely committing the occasional intentional sin (we’ve all done that). No, it’s the heart of rebellion that damns — and destroys our thirst for the Spirit.

The result, Jesus says, of having the Spirit within us, is not only that we never thirst again, but that the Spirit “wells up to eternal life.”

“There’s a Fountain Free.”

“There’s a Fountain Filled with Blood.”

(John 4:15 ESV)  ¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

The woman continues to be all-too-literal. She refuses to hear the metaphor. Why? Is she mocking Jesus?

Some people are just like that. They have no poetry in their souls, and so they struggle to understand metaphor and poem. Many are quite religious, but they see no point in God so often speaking to us through poetry and figures of speech. They have under-developed imaginations.

Or maybe, having never read the Prophets or the Psalms, she was simply uneducated in this kind of language. (Although, all cultures at all times use figures of speech. It’s an innate feature of our humanity, doubtlessly part of God’s image impressed on us.)

Or maybe she was being sarcastic to get Jesus to speak more plainly. I know some women who are like that.

(John 4:16-19 ESV)  ¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”  ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’;  ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”  ¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

This is truly hilarious. Jesus does a miracle. He just met her and yet he knows details about her life she likely wishes no one knew! But her reaction is not one of shame or embarrassment. Rather, she changes the subject: “I perceive that you are a prophet.” She wants to talk about Jesus’ powers, not her past life.

She is one tough lady. She goes to the well by herself in the heat of the day, and when her deepest secrets are revealed, she looks Jesus in the eye and changes the subject!

(John 4:1-3 ESV) Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John  ² (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples),  ³ he left Judea and departed again for Galilee.

This verse is rarely noted. We want to skip straight ahead to the Samaritan woman. But John put it here for a reason. Evidently, Jesus did not want his baptismal ministry to eclipse the baptismal ministry of John. Or was it, as some commentators suggestion, that Jesus was afraid of the Pharisees? Or not ready for a confrontation yet? Continue reading →