There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
The sacraments are holy, visible signs and seals, instituted by God so that by their use He might the more fully declare and seal to us the promise of the Gospel;1 namely, that He grants us out of free grace the forgiveness of sins and everlasting life, because of the one sacrifice of Christ accomplished on the cross.2
1 Gen 17:11; Deut 30:6; Rom 4:11; 2 Mt 26:27-28; Acts 2:38; Heb 10:10
67. Are both the Word and the Sacraments intended to direct our faith to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, as the only ground of our salvation?
Yes indeed; for the Holy Spirit teaches us in the Gospel, and by the Holy Sacraments assures us, that our whole salvation rests on the one sacrifice of Christ made for us on the cross.1
1 Rom 6:3; 1 Cor 11:26; Gal 3:27
68. How many Sacraments has Christ instituted in the New Covenant?
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Ephesians 1:1-2
This salutation is the briefest in any of Paul’s letters, yet it includes three simple things to which I will call your attention. First, Paul’s credentials: Notice how he describes himself, an apostle… by the will of God. An apostle was one sent with a message. Paul gloried in the fact that he was an apostle of Jesus Christ. And, as he tells us in his letter to the Galatians, the Lord Jesus appeared to him directly. Paul did not learn what he knew about the gospel by discussing it with the other apostles. The truth that he imparts to us here he learned directly from Jesus Christ, and that is his authority. Therefore, when you read Paul you are reading an authorized spokesman for the Lord Jesus. What he says is what he has heard. So if you don’t agree with Paul, you don’t agree with the Lord either!
Paul was always amazed by the fact that it was by the will of God that he was an apostle. He had no other glory in his life than that God, in the amazing wonder of His grace, had called this man, who was such a bitter, intense, nationalistic persecutor of the church; had arrested him and changed him; and had sent him out to be an apostle to the Gentiles. Notice that he gives no other credentials. He doesn’t refer to his training at the feet of Gamaliel or his Hebrew background and pedigree or the brilliance of his intellect or anything else. He simply says, I’m an apostle by the will of God. That is the ground upon which I write.
Then notice how these Christians are described: saints… the faithful in Christ Jesus. Saint is a word at which we all shudder a little. We don’t like to be called saints because we have such a plaster idea of what a saint is. We think of them as being unreal so holier-than-we, so unlike ordinary human beings. But the saints of the New Testament are people like us, people who are beset with struggles and difficulties, who have disturbances at home and problems at work and troubles everywhere else. But one thing is remarkable about them: they are different. That is really the basic meaning of this word saint. In the Greek it is derived from the word for holy. And holy means distinct, different, whole, belonging to God and, therefore, living differently. Holiness is the mark of saints. It isn’t that they don’t have problems, but that they handle them in a different way. They have a different lifestyle.
Then comes the invariable greeting of Paul to these believers: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. The two great heritages of the Christian are grace and peace. You can always have grace and peace, no matter what your circumstances. These are the two characteristics that ought to mark Christians all the time.
Father, help me to comprehend these great themes that have changed the history of the world. Help me by Your grace to rejoice, to lay hold of Your provision, and to be a responsive instrument in Your hand.
For the encouraging of our faith and the exciting of our fervency in this petition for the pardon of sin, we may plead with God:
The infinite goodness of his nature, his readiness to forgive sin, and his glorying in it.
You, Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you. Psalm 86:5(ESV) You are a God gracious and full of compassion, longsuffering and plenteous in mercy and truth. Psalm 86:15(KJV)
You are a God ready to forgive, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, Nehemiah 9:17(ESV) who does not always chide nor keep his anger forever. Psalm 103:9(ESV)
You, you are he who blots out my transgressions for your own sake, and will not remember my sins, which I am here to put you in remembrance of and to declare, in order to plead for mercy in Christ. Isaiah 43:25-26(KJV)
And now, please let the power of the Lord be great as you have promised, saying, “The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression.” Please pardon my iniquity and the iniquity of your people, according to the greatness of your steadfast love, just as you have forgiven us even until now. Numbers 14:17-19(ESV)
For who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of your inheritance? You do not retain your anger forever, because you delight in steadfast love. O that you would have compassion upon me and tread my iniquities underfoot and cast all my sins into the depths of the sea. Micah 7:18-19(ESV)
In Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson warned: “[W]e live in an age in which the authority of Scripture in our lives has been replaced by the authority of the self: we are encouraged on all sides to take charge of our lives and use our own experience as the authoritative text by which to live. The alarming thing is how extensively this spirit has invaded the church.”In the opening chapter of the book of Revelation, the Apostle John strongly asserts the authority of Scripture. How was this book written? Christ sent an angel, who showed John visions of “what must soon take place” (v. 1). Then John testified to all that he saw (v. 2). At the time, about AD 95, John was in exile on the island of Patmos, a Roman penal colony.The book of Revelation is an “apocalypse,” that is, an account of the end of the world. The term apocalypse means an “unveiling” or “disclosure.” This literary form consists mainly of symbolic visions and can be confusing or even overwhelming. This book also includes prophecies, narratives, and doxologies of praise. Though some see the events of the book as mainly in the past, a futurist interpretation will be taken here.The main purpose of the book, for the original readers as well as for us today, is encouragement. This is why John offers a blessing for reading this book (v. 3). Revelation encourages us to stand firm in the face of persecution from Satan and the world. We should take its message to heart, implying a response of faith and obedience. We can be encouraged primarily because of the imminent return of Christ (1 Thess. 4:16–18). “Imminent” means Christ could return at any time. In a very real sense, “the time is near.”
Go Deeper We don’t know when Christ will return, but we do know that He could return at any time. What difference might this truth make in our everyday lives?
Pray with Us Dear Lord, as we begin to study this book, grant us encouragement and strength to face difficulties in the world around us. We trust that You will return to make all things new!
5 But He was pierced through for our transgressions,
He was crushed for our iniquities;
The chastening for our peace fell upon Him,
And by His wounds we are healed.
Legacy Standard Bible (Is 53:5). (2022). Three Sixteen Publishing.
Vers. 5. But He was wounded for our transgressions.—The sufferings of Christ:— Three things suggest themselves as requiring explanation to one who seriously contemplates the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ.
An innocent man suffers.
The death of Jesus is the apparent defeat and destruction of one who possessed extraordinary and supernatural powers.
This apparent defeat and ruin, instead of hindering the progress of His work, became at once, and in all the history of the progress of His doctrine has been emphatically, the instrument whereby a world is conquered. The death of Jesus has not been mourned by His followers, has never been concealed, but rather exulted in and prominently set forth as that to which all men must chiefly look if they would regard Christ and His mission right. The shame and the failure issue in glory and completest success. What is the philosophy of this? Has any ever been given which approaches the Divinely revealed meaning supplied by our text? “He was wounded for our transgressions, etc. We learn here— I. THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS CHRIST RESULTED FROM OUR SINS. II. THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS WERE RELATED TO THE DIVINE LAW. III. THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS BECAME REMEDIAL OF HUMAN SINFULNESS. (L. D. Bevan, D.D.) A short catechism:—
What is man’s condition by nature? (1) Under transgression. (2) Under iniquities. (3) At feud with God. (4) Under wounds and most loathsome diseases of a sinful nature.
How are folks freed from this sinful and miserable condition? (1) In general, before the quarrel can be taken away, and their peace can be made, there must be a satisfaction. (2) More particularly there must be a satisfaction, because there is the justice of God that hath a claim by a standing law; the holiness of God, that must be vindicated; the faith of God, that must cause to come to pass what it hath pledged itself to, as well in reference to threatening as to promise.
Who maketh this satisfaction? The text says, “He” and “Him.” The Messiah.
How does He satisfy justice? (1) He enters Himself in our room. (2) Christ’s performance and payment of the debt according to His undertaking, implies a covenant and transaction on which the application is founded. (3) Our Lord Jesus, in fulfilling the bargain, and satisfying justice, paid a dear price: He was wounded, bruised, suffered stripes and punishment.
What are the benefits that come by these sufferings? (1) The benefits are such that if He had not suffered for us, we should have suffered all that He suffered ourselves. (2) More particularly we have peace and pardon. Healing.
To whom hath Christ procured all these good things? (1) The elect; (2) who are guilty of heinous sins.
How are these benefits derived from Christ to the sinner? (1) Justly and in a legal way; (2) freely. (J. Durham.) Sin:— Verses 5 and 6 are remarkable for the numerous and diversified references to sin which they make. Within the short compass of two verses that sad fact is referred to no less than six times, and on each occasion a different figure is used to describe it. It is transgression—the crossing of a boundary and trespassing upon forbidden land. It is iniquity—the want of equity: the absence of just dealing. It is the opposite of peace—the root of discord and enmity between us and God. It is a disease of the spirit—difficult to heal. It is a foolish and wilful wandering, like that of a stray sheep. And it is a heavy burden, which crushes him on whom it lies. So many and serious are the aspects of sin. (B. J. Gibbon.) The sufferings of Christ:— I. ATTEND TO THE SUFFERINGS OF THE SON OF GOD, as described in the text. The sufferings of the Saviour are described in the Scriptures with simplicity and grandeur combined. Nothing can add to the solemnity and force of the exhibition.
The prophet tells us that the Son of God was “wounded.” The Hebrew word here translated “wounded,” signifies to run through with a sword or some sharp weapon, and, as here used, seems to refer to those painful wounds which our Lord received at the time of His crucifixion.
The prophet tells us that the Son of God was “bruised.” This expression seems to have a reference to the labours, afflictions, and sorrows which our blessed Lord sustained, especially in the last scenes of His life.
The prophet tells us that the Son of God bore chastisements and stripes. II. CONSIDER THE PROCURING CAUSE OF THE SUFFERINGS OF THE SON OF GOD. “Our transgressions.” “Our iniquities.” III. ATTEND TO THE GRACIOUS DESIGN AND HAPPY EFFECTS OF THE SUFFERINGS OF THE SON OF GOD. “The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed.”
One gracious design and blessed effect of the sufferings of the Son of God was to procure for us reconciliation with God.
The renovating of our nature. (D. Dickson, D.D.) Substitution:— There is no more remarkable language than this in the whole of the Word of God. It is so clear a statement of the doctrine of the substitution of the innocent for the guilty, that we do not hesitate to say, no words could teach it if it be not taught here. We are distinctly told— I. THAT THERE BELONGS TO US A SAD AND GRIEVOUS WEIGHT OF SIN. There are three terms expressive of what belong to us: “our transgressions,” “our iniquities,” “gone astray.” These three phrases have indeed a common feature; they all indicate what is wrong—even sin, though they represent the wrong in different aspects.
“Transgressions.” The word thus translated indicates sin in one or other of three forms—either that of missing the mark through aimlessness, or carelessness, or a wrong aim; or of coming short, when, though the work may be right in its direction, it does not come up to the standard; or of crossing a boundary and going over to the wrong side of a line altogether. In all these forms our sins have violated the holy law of God.
“Iniquities.” This word also has reference to moral law as the standard of duty. The Hebrew word is from a root which signifies “to bend,” “to twist,” and refers to the tortuous, crooked, winding ways of men when they conform to no standard at all save that suggested by their own fancies or conceits, and so walk “according to the course of this world.”
The third phrase has reference rather to the God of Law, than to the law of God, and to Him in His relation to us of Lord, Leader, Shepherd, and Guide. There is not only the infringement of the great law of right, but also universal neglect and abandonment of Divine leadership and love; and as the result of this, grievous mischief is sure to follow. “Like the sheep,” they find their way out easily enough; they go wandering over “the dark mountains,” each one to “his own way,” but of themselves they can never find the way home again. And so far does this wandering propensity increase in force, that men come to think there is no home for them; the loving concern of God for the wanderers is disbelieved, and the Supreme Being is regarded in the light of a terrible Judge eager to inflict retribution. And all this is a pressure on God. He misses the wanderers. And through the prophet, the Spirit of God would let men know that the wanderings of earth are the care of Heaven. Nor let us fail to note that in these verses there is an entirely different aspect of human nature and action from that presented in the verse preceding. There, the expressions were “our griefs,” “our sorrows.” Here, they are “our transgressions,” etc. Griefs and sorrows are not in themselves violations of moral law, though they may be the results of them, and though every violation of moral law may lead to sorrow. Still they must not be confounded, though inseparably connected. Grief may solicit pity: wrong incurs penalty. And the sin is ours. The evil is wide as the race. Each one’s sin is a personal one: “Every one to his own way.” Sin is thus at once collective and individual. No one can charge the guilt of his own sin on any one else. On whom or on what will he cast the blame? On influences? But it was for him to resist and not to yield. On temptation? But temptation cannot force. In the judgment of God each one’s sin is his own. II. THIS SERVANT OF GOD BEING LADEN WITH OUR SINS, SHARES OUR HERITAGE OF WOE. How remarkable is the antithesis here—Transgressions; iniquities; wanderings, are ours. Wounds; bruises; chastisements; stripes, are His. There is also a word indicating the connection between the two sides of the antithesis, “wounded for our transgressions”—on account of them; but if this were all the explanation given, it might mean no more than that the Messiah would feel so grieved at them that they would bruise or wound Him. But there is a far fuller and clearer expression: “The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” This expression fixes the sense in which the Messiah was wounded and bruised on our account. In pondering over this, let us work our way step by step.
The inflexibility of the moral law and the absolute righteousness and equity of the Lawgiver in dealing with sin are thoughts underlying the whole of this chapter. The most high God is indeed higher than law; and though He never violates law, He may, out of the exuberance of His own love, do more than law requires, and may even cease to make law the rule of His action. But even when that is the case, and He acts χωρὶς νόμου (“apart from law,” Rom. 3:21), while He manifests the infinite freedom of a God to do whatsoever He pleaseth, He will also show to the world that His law must be honoured in the penalties inflicted for its violation. This is indicated in the words, “The Lord hath laid on Him,” etc. Nor ought any one for a moment to think of this as “exaction.” Exactness is not exactingness; it would not be called so, nor would the expression be tolerated if applied to a judge who forbade the dishonouring of a national law, or to a father who would not suffer the rules of his house to be broken with impunity.
It is revealed to us that in the mission of this servant of Jehovah, the Most High would act on the principle of substitution. When a devout Hebrew read the words we are now expounding, the image of the scapegoat would at once present itself to him.
The Messiah was altogether spotless; He fulfilled the ideal typified by the precept that the sacrificial lamb was to be without blemish. Being the absolutely sinless One, He was fitted to stand in a relation to sin and sinners which no being who was tainted with sin could possibly have occupied.
The twofold nature of the Messiah—He being at once the Son of God and Son of man, qualified Him to stand in a double relation;—as the Son of God, to be Heaven’s representative on earth—as the Son of man, to be earth’s representative to Heaven. Thus, His offering of Himself was God’s own sacrifice (John 3:16; 1 John 4:10; Rom. 5:8; 2 Cor. 5:19), and yet, in another sense, it was man’s own sacrifice (2 Cor. 5:14, 21; Gal. 3:13).
By His incarnation, Christ came and stood in such alliance with our race, that what belonged to the race belonged to Him, as inserted into it, and representative of it. We need not use any such expression as this—“Christ was punished for our sin.” That would be wrong. But sin was condemned in and through Christ, through His taking on Himself the liabilities of a world, as their one representative Man who would stand in their stead; and by the self-abandonment of an unparalleled love, would let the anguish of sin’s burden fall on His devoted head. Paul, in his Epistle to Philemon pleads for Onesimus thus, “If he hath wronged thee or oweth thee ought, put that to my account.” So the Son of God has accepted our liabilities. Only thus can we explain either the strong language of the prophecy, or the mysterious sorrow of Christ depicted in the Gospel history. On whatever grounds sin’s punishment was necessary had there been no atonement, on precisely those grounds was an atonement necessary to free the sinner from deserved punishment. This gracious work was in accord with the appointment of the Father and with the will of the Son.
Though the law is honoured in this substitution of another for us, yet the substitution itself does not belong to law, but to love! Grace reigns; law is not trifled with; it is not infringed on: nay, it is “established.” III. CHRIST HAVING ACCEPTED OUR HERITAGE OF WOE, WE RECEIVE THROUGH HIM A HERITAGE OF PEACE. (C. Clemance, D.D.) Vicarious suffering:— In a large family of evil-doers, where the father and mother are drunkards, the sons jail-birds and the daughters steeped in shame, there may be one, a daughter, pure, sensible, sensitive, living in the home of sin like a lily among thorns. And she makes all the sin of the family her own. The others do not mind it; the shame of their sin is nothing to them; it is the talk of the town, but they do not care. Only in her heart their crimes and disgrace meet like a sheaf of spears, piercing and mangling. The one innocent member of the family bears the guilt of all the rest. Even their cruelty to herself she hides, as if all the shame of it were her own. Such a position did Christ hold in the human family. He entered it voluntarily, becoming bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh; He identified Himself with it; He was the sensitive centre of the whole. He gathered into His heart the shame and guilt of all the sin He saw. The perpetrators did not feel it, but He felt it. It crushed Him; it broke His heart. (J. Stalker, D.D.) With His stripes we are healed.—The disease of sin:— I. IT IS A WASTING DISEASE; it bringeth the soul into a languishing condition, and wasteth the strength of it (Rom. 5:6). Sin hath weakened the soul in all the faculties of it, which all may discern and observe in themselves. II. IT IS A PAINFUL DISEASE, it woundeth the spirit (Prov. 18:14). Greatness of mind may support us under a wounded body, but when there is a breach made upon the conscience, what can relieve us then? But you will say, They that are most infected with sin feel little of this; how is it then so painful a disease?
If they feel it not, the greater is their danger; for stupid diseases are the worst, and usually most mortal.
The soul of a sinner never sits so easy but that he has his qualms and pangs of conscience, and that sometimes in the midst of jollity; as was the case of Belshazzar, while carousing in the cups of the temple.
Though they feel not the diseases now, they shall hereafter. III. IT IS A LOATHSOME DISEASE. IV. IT IS AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE. Sin cometh into the world by propagation rather than imitation: yet imitation and example hath a great force upon the soul. V. IT IS A MORTAL DISEASE, if we continue in it without repentance. (T. Manton, D.D.) Recovery by Christ’s stripes:—
None but Christ can cure us, for He is the Physician of souls.
Christ cureth us not by doctrine and example only, but by merit and suffering. We are healed by “His stripes.”
Christ’s merit and sufferings do effect our cure, as they purchased the Spirit for us, who reneweth and healeth our sick souls (Titus 3:5, 6). (Ibid.) Healed by Christ’s stripes:— “With His stripes we are healed.” We are healed—of our inattention and unconcern about Divine things. Of our ignorance and unbelief respecting these things. Of the disease of self-righteousness and self-confidence. Of our love to sin, and commission of it. Of our love to the riches, honours and pleasures of this world. Of our self-indulgence and self-seeking. Of our lukewarmness and sloth. Of our cowardice and fear of suffering (1 Pet. 4:1). Of our diffidence and distrust, with respect to the mercy of God, and His pardoning and accepting the penitent. Of an accusing conscience, and slavish fear of God, and of death and hell. Of our general depravity and corruption of nature. Of our weakness and inability; His sufferings having purchased for us “the Spirit of might.” Of our distresses and misery, both present and future. (J. Benson, D.D.) His stripes:— This chapter is not mainly an indictment. It is a Gospel. It declares in glad while solemn language that, terrible as sin is, it has been dealt with. The prophet dwells purposely upon the varied manifestations of the evil in order to emphasize the varied forms and absolute completeness of its conquest. He prolongs the agony that he may prolong the rapture. I. OUR NEED OF HEALING. There is no figure which more aptly represents the serious nature and terrible consequences of sin than this one of bodily sickness. We know how it prostrates us, takes the brightness out of life, and, unless attended to, cuts life short. Sickness in its acutest form is a type in the body of sin in the soul. Sin is a mortal disease of the spirit. A common Scriptural emblem for it, found in both Old and New Testaments, is leprosy—the most frightful disease imaginable, loathsome to the observer and intolerably painful to the sufferer, attacking successively and rotting every limb of the body, and issuing slowly but certainly in death.
It is complicated. It affects every part of the moral being. It is blindness to holiness, and deafness to the appeals of God. There is a malady known as ossification of the heart, by which the living and beating heart is slowly turned to a substance like bone. It is a type of the complaint of the sinner. His heart is hard and impenitent. He suffers, too, from the fever of unhallowed desire. The lethargy of spiritual indifference is one of his symptoms; a depraved appetite, by which he tries to feed his immortal soul on husks, is another; while his whole condition is one of extreme debility—absence of strength to do right. In another part of the book our prophet diagnoses more thoroughly the disease of which he here speaks (chap. 1:5, 6). No hospital contains a spectacle so sickening and saddening as the unregenerate human heart.
The disease is universal. “There is none righteous; no, not one.” What the Bible declares, experience confirms. The ancient world, speaking through a noble literature that has come down to us, confesses many times the condition expressed by Ovid, “I see and approve the better things, while I follow those which are worse.” Christendom finds its mouthpiece in the apostle Paul, who, speaking of himself apart from the help of Christ, mournfully says, “When I would do good, evil is present with me.” And modern culture reveals its deepest consciousness in the words of Lowell, the ambassador-poet, “In my own heart I find the worst man’s mate.” It is a feature of the malady that the patient is often insensible to it. But from every lip there is at least occasional confession of some of its symptoms. There is discomfort in the conscience; there is dissatisfaction at the heart; and there is dread in the face of death and the unknown beyond. The Scriptures are the Röntgen rays of God, and their searching light reveals behind an uneasy conscience, behind a dissatisfied heart, behind the fear of death, behind all the sorrows and evils of life, that which is their primary cause—the malady of sin.
This disease is incurable—that is, apart from the healing described in the text. “The end of these things is death”—spiritual death; insensibility to God, and absence of the life of fellowship with Him which is life indeed—physical death, in so far as that natural process is more than mere bodily dissolution, and is a fearful and hopeless leap into the dark; for “the sting of death is sin”—and eternal death. Men are great at quack remedies, and the world is equally flooded with nostrums for the disease of sin. And what is the result of these loudly-hawked specifics? They are as useless as the charms which our grandmothers used to scare away diseases. The Physician is He who gave His back to the smiters; the balm is the blood which flowed from “His stripes.” II. OUR MEANS OF HEALING. “With His stripes.” “Stripes” does not mean the lashes that fell on His back, but the weals which they left. We remember how He “suffered under Pontius Pilate” before He “was crucified, dead and buried.” His back was bared, His hands were tied to a low post, and a coarse, muscular giant flourished a whip above Him. It was a diabolical instrument, that Roman whip—made of leather with many thongs, and in the end of each of them a piece of iron, or bone, or stone. Every stroke fetched blood and ripped open the quivering flesh. The Jewish law forbade more than forty stripes being given, but Christ was scourged by Romans, who recognized no such merciful limit. But as we know that Pilate intended the scourging to be a substitute for crucifixion, and hoped that its severity would so melt the Jews to pity that they would not press for the worse punishment—which end, however, was not reached—we may infer that He was scourged until He could bear no more, until He could not stand, until He fell mangled and fainting at His torturer’s feet. Nearly two thousand years have passed since that awful affliction, but its significance is eternal. But how can the sufferings of one alleviate the sufferings of another?
Because the sight of them moves us to sorrow. There are certain maladies of the mind and heart for which there is hope if the emotions can be stirred and the patient made to laugh or cry. There is hope for the sinner when the thought of his sin melts his heart to sorrow and his eyes to tears. Sorrow for sin—repentance of wrong-doing—is the first stage in recovery. And there is nothing that will cause penitence like a sight of the Saviour’s wounds.
The sight of them relieves our consciences. For as we look at those livid weals we know He did not deserve them. We know that we did merit punishment direr far. And we know that He endured them, and more mysterious agonies of which they were the outward sign, in our stead. Then, gradually, we draw the inference. If He suffered for us, we are free. If our load was laid on Him, it is no longer upon us. Conscience accepts that logic.
The sight of them prevents further outbreaks. This cure is radical. It not only heals, it also strengthens. It gradually raises the system above its tendency to sin. For the more we gaze upon those livid stripes, the more intolerable and hateful sin, which caused them, appears, and the more difficult it becomes for us to indulge in it. Our medicine is also a strong tonic, which invigorates the spiritual nature and fortifies its weaknesses. Stanley, in one of his books on African travel, tells of the crime of Uledi, his native coxswain, and what came of it. Uledi was deservedly popular for his ability and courage, but having robbed his master, a jury of his fellows condemned him to receive “a terrible flogging.” Then uprose his brother, Shumari, who said, “Uledi has done very wrong; but no one can accuse me of wrong-doing. Now, mates, let me take half the whipping. I will cheerfully endure it for the sake of my brother.” Scarcely had he finished when another arose, and said, “Uledi has been the father of the boat boys. He has many times risked his life to save others; and he is my cousin; and yet he ought to be punished. Shumari says he will take half the punishment; and now let me take the other half, and let Uledi go free.” Surely the heart of the guilty man must have been touched, and the willing submission by others to the punishment he had merited must have restrained him from further outbreaks as the strict infliction of the original penalty never could. By those stripes he would be healed. Even so, the stripes of our Lord deliver us from the very tendency to sin. For the disease to be healed the medicine must be taken. Our very words “recipe” and “receipt” remind us of this. They are related, and signify “to take.” The selfsame word describes the means of cure, and commands that it be used. Look upon His wounds! And let those of us who have looked for our cure, still look for our strengthening. We should not have so many touches of the old complaint if we thought oftener of the stripes by which we are healed. Look all through life, and you will grow stronger and holier. (B. J. Gibbon.) The universal remedy:— Not merely His bleeding wounds, but even those blue bruises of His flesh help to heal us. There are none quite free from spiritual diseases. One may be saying, “Mine is a weak faith;” another may confess, “Mine is distracted thoughts;” another may exclaim, “Mine is coldness of love;” and a fourth may have to lament his powerlessness in prayer. One remedy in natural things will not suffice for all diseases; but there is a catholicon, a universal remedy, provided in the Word of God for all spiritual sicknesses, and that is contained in the few words—“With His stripes we are healed.” I. THE MEDICINE ITSELF WHICH IS HERE PRESCRIBED—the stripes of our Saviour. By the term “stripes,” no doubt the prophet understood here, first, literally, those stripes which fell upon our Lord’s shoulders when He was beaten of the Jews, and afterwards scourged of the Roman soldiery. But the words intend far more than this. No doubt with his prophetic eye Isaiah saw the stripes from that unseen scourge held in the Father’s hand which fell upon His nobler inner nature when His soul was scourged for sin. It is by these that our souls are healed. “But why?” First, then, because our Lord, as a sufferer, was not a private person, but suffered as a public individual, and an appointed representative. Our Lord was not merely man, or else His sufferings could not have availed for the multitude who now are healed thereby. He was God as well as man. Our Saviour’s sufferings heal us of the curse by being presented before God as a substitute for what we owe to His Divine law. But healing is a work that is carried on within, and the text rather leads me to speak of the effect of the stripes of Christ upon our characters and natures than upon the result produced in our position before God. II. THE MATCHLESS CURES WROUGHT BY THIS REMARKABLE MEDICINE. Look at two pictures. Look at man without the stricken Saviour; and then behold man with the Saviour, healed by His stripes. III. THE MALADIES WHICH THIS WONDROUS MEDICINE REMOVES.
The mania of despair.
The stony heart.
The paralysis of doubt.
A stiffness of the knee-joint of prayer.
Numbness of soul.
The fever of pride.
The leprosy of selfishness.
Anger.
The fretting consumption of worldliness.
The cancer of covetousness. IV. THE CURATIVE PROPERTIES OF THE MEDICINE.
It arrests spiritual disorder.
It quickens all the powers of the spiritual man to resist the disease.
It restores to the man that which he lost in strength by sin.
It soothes the agony of conviction.
It has an eradicating power as to sin. V. THE MODES OF THE WORKING OF THIS MEDICINE. The sinner hearing of the death of the incarnate God is led by the force of truth and the power of the Holy Spirit to believe in the incarnate God. The cure is already begun. After faith come gratitude, love, obedience. VI. ITS REMARKABLY EASY APPLICATION. VII. Since the medicine is so efficacious, since it is already prepared and freely presented, I do beseech you TAKE IT. Take it, you who have known its power in years gone by. Let not backslidings continue, but come to His stripes afresh. Take it, ye doubters, lest ye sink into despair; come to His stripes anew. Take it, ye who are beginning to be self-confident and proud. And, O ye who have never believed in Him, come and trust in Him, and you shall live. (C. H. Spurgeon.) A simple remedy:— I. THESE ARE SAD WORDS. They are part of a mournful piece of music, which might be called “the requiem of the Messiah.”
These are sad words because they imply disease.
There is a second sorrow in the verse, and that is sorrow for the suffering by which we are healed. There was a cruel process in the English navy, in which men were made to run the gauntlet all along the ship, with sailors on each side, each man being bound to give a stroke to the poor victim as he ran along. Our Saviour’s life was a running of the gauntlet between His enemies and His friends, who all struck Him, one here and another there. Satan, too, struck at him. II. THESE ARE GLAD WORDS.
Because they speak of healing.
There is another joy in the text—joy in the honour which it brings to Christ. III. THESE ARE SUGGESTIVE WORDS. Whenever a man is healed through the stripes of Jesus, the instincts of his nature should make him say, “I will spend the strength I have, as a healed man, for Him who healed me.” (Ibid.) Christopathy:— I. GOD HERE TREATS SIN AS A DISEASE. Sin is a disease—
Because it is not an essential part of man as he was created. It is something abnormal.
Because it puts all the faculties out of gear.
Because it weakens the moral energy, just as many diseases weaken the sick person’s body.
Because it either causes great pain, or deadens all sensibility, as the case may be.
Because it frequently produces a manifest pollution.
Because it tends to increase in the man, and will one day prove fatal to him. II. GOD HERE DECLARES THE REMEDY WHICH HE HAS PROVIDED.
Behold the heavenly medicine.
Remember that the sufferings of Christ were vicarious.
Accept this atonement and you are saved by it.
Let nothing of your own interfere with the Divine remedy. Prayer does not heal, but it asks for the remedy. It is not trust that heals; that is man’s application of the remedy. Repentance is not what cures, it is a part of the cure, one of the first tokens that the blessed medicine has begun to work in the soul. The healing of a sinner does not lie in himself, nor in what he is, nor in what he feels, nor in what he does, nor in what he vows, nor in what he promises. It is in His stripes that the healing lies. III. THE REMEDY IS IMMEDIATELY EFFECTIVE. How are we healed?
Our conscience is healed of every smart.
Our heart is healed of its love of sin.
Our life is healed of its rebellion.
Our consciousness assures us that we are healed. If you are healed by His stripes you should go and live like healthy men. (Ibid.) Healed by Christ’s stripes:— Mr. Mackay, of Hull, told of a person who was under very deep concern of soul. Taking the Bible into his hand, he said to himself, “Eternal life is to be found somewhere in this Word of God; and, if it be here, I will find it, for I will read the Book right through, praying to God over every page of it, if perchance it may contain some saving message for me.” The earnest seeker read on through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and so on; and though Christ is there very evidently, he could not find Him in the types and symbols. Neither did the holy histories yield him comfort, nor the Book of Job. He passed through the Psalms, but did not find his Saviour there; and the same was the case with the other books till he reached Isaiah. In this prophet he read on till near the end, and then in the fifty-third chapter, these words arrested his delighted attention, “With His stripes we are healed.” “Now I have found it,” says he. “Here is the healing that I need for my sin-sick soul, and I see how it comes to me through the sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be His name, I am healed!” (Ibid.) Self-sufficiency prevents healing:— I saw a pedlar one day, as I was walking out; he was selling walkingsticks. He followed me, and offered me one of the sticks. I showed him mine—a far better one than any he had to sell—and he withdrew at once. He could see that I was not likely to be a purchaser. I have often thought of that when I have been preaching: I show men the righteousness of the Lord Jesus, but they show me their own, and all hope of dealing with them is gone. Unless I can prove that their righteousness is worthless, they will not seek the righteousness which is of God by faith. Oh, that the Lord would show you your disease, and then you would desire the remedy! (Ibid.) Sin deadens sensibility:— It frequently happens that, the more sinful a man is, the less he is conscious of it. It was remarked of a certain notorious criminal that many thought him innocent because, when he was charged with murder, he did not betray the least emotion. In that wretched self-possession there was to my mind presumptive proof of his great familiarity with crime; if an innocent person is charged with a great offence, the mere charge horrifies him. (Ibid.)
Exell, J. S. (n.d.). Isaiah (Vol. 3, pp. 112–118). Fleming H. Revell Company.
53:5. Pierced … crushed … punishment … wounds are words that describe what the remnant will note about the Servant’s condition on their behalf and because of their transgressions (peša‘, “rebellion”; cf. v. 8; 1:2) and iniquities. As a result those who believe in Him have inner peace rather than inner anguish or grief (see comments on “infirmities” in 53:4) and are healed spiritually. Ironically His wounds, inflicted by the soldiers’ scourging and which were followed by His death, are the means of healing believers’ spiritual wounds in salvation. Jesus’ physical agony in the Crucifixion was great and intense. But His obedience to the Father was what counted (cf. Phil. 2:8). His death satisfied the wrath of God against sin and allows Him to “overlook” the sins of the nation (and of others who believe) because they have been paid for by the Servant’s substitutionary death.
Martin, J. A. (1985). Isaiah. In J. F. Walvoord & R. B. Zuck (Eds.), The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures (Vol. 1, p. 1108). Victor Books.
53:5 The repetition of the pronouns He, Him, and His for our and we underscores the fact that the Servant suffered in our place. The chastisement … His stripes: For a similar reference, see 1 Pet. 2:24. Peace sums up the Servant’s ministry of reconciliation, justification, adoption, and glorification (2 Cor. 5:17–21). By saying that they were healed (v. 4), the remnant expressed its faith in what God had announced in 52:13.
Radmacher, E. D., Allen, R. B., & House, H. W. (1999). Nelson’s new illustrated Bible commentary (p. 863). T. Nelson Publishers.
† 53:5 — But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. On the cross, Jesus willingly became our substitute. God made Jesus “who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21).
Stanley, C. F. (2005). The Charles F. Stanley life principles Bible: New King James Version (Is 53:5). Nelson Bibles.
53:5 pierced through for our transgressions … crushed for our iniquities. This verse is filled with the language of substitution. The Servant suffered not for His own sin, since He was sinless (cf. Heb 4:15; 7:26), but as the substitute for sinners. The emphasis here is on Christ being the substitute recipient of God’s wrath on sinners (cf. 2Co 5:21; Gal 1:3, 4; Heb 10:9, 10). chastening for our well-being. He suffered the chastisement of God in order to procure our peace with God. by His scourging we are healed. The stripe (the Heb. noun is singular) that caused His death has brought salvation to those for whose sins He died. Peter confirms this in 1Pe 2:24.
MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (2006). The MacArthur study Bible: New American Standard Bible. (Is 53:5). Thomas Nelson Publishers.
53:5 But contrasts with “our” incomprehension in v. 4b. The servant’s anguish was “our” fault, not his own. our transgressions, our iniquities. His sufferings went to the root of all human woe (cf. Matt. 8:17; 1 Pet. 2:24). wounded, crushed, chastisement, stripes. Isaiah emphasizes how severely God punished the rejected servant for the sins of mankind.
Crossway Bibles. (2008). The ESV Study Bible (p. 1338). Crossway Bibles.
53:5 was pierced for our transgressions The people realize that the Servant is suffering for their wrongdoing, not being punished for his own sin.
crushed because of our iniquities The Servant suffers on behalf of other people. See note on Isa 53:11.
our peace The Servant brings people into right relationship with God (vv. 11–12) and others. This could also indicate that there is a spiritual component to the Servant’s healing ministry described in v. 4.
his wounds we were healed The Servant is able to heal people—metaphorically and physically—because he is willing to follow the will of Yahweh—even though it results in his suffering.
Barry, J. D., Mangum, D., Brown, D. R., Heiser, M. S., Custis, M., Ritzema, E., Whitehead, M. M., Grigoni, M. R., & Bomar, D. (2012, 2016). Faithlife Study Bible (Is 53:5). Lexham Press.
I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice. (John 16:22)
Surely He will come a second time, and then, when He sees us and we see Him, there will be rejoicings indeed. Oh, for that joyous return! But this promise is being daily fulfilled in another sense. Our gracious Lord has many “agains” in His dealings with us. He gave us pardon, and He sees us again and repeats the absolving word as fresh sins cause us grief. He has revealed to us our acceptance before God, and when our faith in that blessing grows a little dim, He comes to us again and again and says, “Peace be unto you,” and our hearts are glad.
Beloved, all our past mercies are tokens of future mercies. If Jesus has been with us, He will see us again. Look upon no former favor as a dead and buried thing, to be mourned over; but regard it as a seed sown, which will grow, and push its head up from the dust, and cry, “I will see you again.” Are the times dark because Jesus is not with us as He used to be? Let us pluck up courage; for He will not be long away. His feet are as those of a roe or young hart, and they will soon bring Him to us. Wherefore let us begin to be joyous, since He saith to us even now, “I will see you again.”
Scroll to bottom after photo for mini-library suggestions of books on grace.
What are these incomparable riches of God’s grace?
First, Christ Jesus.
“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:4-7).
As we are saved, we step from dead flesh to life eternal. From enemy sinner to forgiven friend. From object of wrath to recipient of grace.
He is GREAT!!
He manifested Himself as man, servant, no less, so that He could live a life full of the same temptations we experience, can you imagine that? “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2:18)
GRACE!!
As our High Priest, when we confess to Him, He understands! Thoroughly, bodily, intimately. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are–yet was without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15).
GRACE!!
Another example of the incomparable riches of His grace is “The Promise of the Holy Spirit” –“On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” (John 7:37-39).
We are given the grace of Spirit within us and as a result have eternal security of our salvation all the days of our life. Incomparable grace!
“He set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.” (2 Corinthians 1:22)
What is to come is MORE GRACE!!
When you think of Jesus and what He has done for us and continues to do, don’t you just get weak in the knees? Doesn’t your heart faint with love? He saved us so that He could shower us with His grace. “But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.” (1 Peter 5:10) He is the God of all grace, and He chose to shower us with the riches of that incomparable grace.
Don’t forget to remind each other of these things. Encourage one another. Repeat your testimonies. Share verses, laugh with joy at our Great Savior, who is of all Grace. All is well because Christ Jesus has risen and dwells in His heaven. All of us in Him are testimonies of His grace, and that is all joy.
EPrata photos
Some Suggestions for Books on Grace:
Fundamentals of the Faith: 13 Lessons to Grow in the Grace and Knowledge of Jesus Christ, foreword by John MacArthur
John Bunyan and the Grace of Fearing God, Joel R. Beeke
The Glory of Grace, Lewis Allen
Christian Freedom (Grace Essentials), Samuel Bolton
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: A Brief Relation of the Exceeding Mercy of God in Christ to His Poor Servant John Bunyan, John Bunyan
All of Grace: An Earnest Word with Those Who Are Seeking Salvation by the Lord Jesus Christ, C. H. Spurgeon
Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament, Mark Vroegop
Grace Transforming, Philip Graham Ryken
The Grace of Repentance, Sinclair B. Ferguson
Grace Defined and Defended: What a 400-Year-Old Confession Teaches Us about Sin, Salvation, and the Sovereignty of God, Kevin DeYoung
Transforming Grace: Living Confidently in God’s Unfailing Love, Jerry Bridges
If we engage in activity that we think is evil, even if it isn’t, we enter the realm of sin by acting against our conscience. In this sermon, R.C. Sproul calls us to cultivate consciences that align with the priorities of the kingdom of God.
Study Reformed theology with a free resource bundle from Ligonier Ministries:
https://grow.ligonier.org/?utm_source…R.C. Sproul preached this sermon at Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, FL. Hear more from his series in the book of Romans:
“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” — Matthew 7:13–14 (KJV)
There is a peculiar irony unfolding in the Western church today. In our age of radical inclusivity, of big-tent theology and culturally sensitive sermons, we have somehow convinced ourselves that the road to eternal life is as wide and as welcoming as a freshly paved highway. We have softened the Gospel, sanded down its rough edges, and packaged it in language so comfortable that it barely resembles the words spoken by the very Christ we claim to follow. And in doing so, we have forgotten — or perhaps deliberately ignored — one of the most sobering statements Jesus ever made: the gate is narrow, and the road is hard, and few find it.
This is not a call to legalism. It is not a retreat into cold, joyless religion. It is a call to honest reckoning with what it actually means to be a Christian, and a challenge toa church that has grown so desperate for cultural approval that it has traded the difficult truth of the Gospel for a feel-good substitute that costs nothing and, perhaps, delivers nothing.
The Gospel Has Been Streamlined
Walk into many Western churches today and you will encounter a version of salvation that has been ruthlessly optimized for frictionless consumption. The pitch, whether spoken from a polished stage or broadcast through a slick app, goes something like this: acknowledge that you are a sinner, say a prayer, mean it in your heart, and you are saved. Welcome to the family. Here is your coffee.
There is nothing technically false in that sequence, and yet something has gone profoundly missing. The sinner’s prayer has become a transaction — a spiritual signature on a dotted line — rather than the beginning of a radical and costly reorientation of one’s entire life. We tell people that salvation is a gift freely given, and this is gloriously true. But we have quietly omitted the part where the recipient of that gift is expected to be transformed by it.
The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 10:9 that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. Churches often stop there. But the full counsel of Scripture does not. The same Paul who wrote “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” and James noted that faith without works is demonstrated to be dead. He wrote that we are to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).
He wrote that those who continue to live according to the flesh will not inherit the kingdom of God (Galatians 5:19–21). These are not obscure passages buried in footnotes. They sit at the heart of apostolic teaching, and yet at least a full generation of Western churchgoers have been raised with little awareness of them.
What Does It Mean to Truly Believe?
This is the question the modern church so rarely answers with any depth. To believe, in the biblical sense, is not merely a cognitive acknowledgment — a nodding agreement that God exists and that Jesus died for sins. Even the demons, James reminds us, believe that much, and they tremble (James 2:19). True saving faith is something altogether different. It is a trust so complete that it reshapes the will, reorders the affections, and ultimately changes the direction of ones’ life.
When Jesus calls people to follow Him in the Gospels, He does not ask them to fill out a form and attend a weekend service. He says, “Take up your cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). He warns a would-be follower to count the cost before committing, just as a builder must estimate the expense of a tower before he lays the foundation (Luke 14:28). He tells the rich young ruler — a moral, sincere, seeking man — that he must sell everything he has and give it to the poor (Mark 10:21). The young man walks away sorrowful, and Jesus does not chase after him with a revised offer.He does not lower the bar.
None of this means we earn salvation. The Reformation principle of sola fide — faith alone — stands. We are not saved by our works. But what the Western church has failed to communicate is that genuine faith is never truly alone. Authentic belief is always accompanied by repentance, by a turning away from the old life, and by a growing conformity to Christ. Salvation is a gift received by faith, but it is a gift that, by its very nature, changes the one who receives it. If nothing changes, one must ask honestly whether genuine faith was present at all.
The Lukewarm Church and the Broad Road
Jesus’ words in Matthew 7 are not spoken in a vacuum. They come at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, a discourse filled with demanding, searching, and frankly uncomfortable teaching about the nature of true discipleship. Immediately following the warning about the narrow gate, Jesus speaks of false prophets — teachers who lead people astray with appealing words — and then, most chillingly, of those who will call out “Lord, Lord” on the day of judgment and be told, “I never knew you. Depart from me” (Matthew 7:23).
The people He is describing are not atheists. They are not the openly rebellious. They are people who apparently believed they were in right standing with God. They had participated in religious activity. They had spoken the right words. And yet they were on the broad road all along, never having passed through the narrow gate of genuine surrender and transformation.
The church of Laodicea in Revelation 3 is addressed with perhaps the most uncomfortable words in the New Testament: “Because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:16). The Laodiceans were not hostile to Christ. They were comfortable with Him. They had wealth, self-sufficiency, and a confident sense that their spiritual condition was fine. Christ tells them they are, in fact, wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. They simply did not know it.
This is the portrait of much of the Western church in our age. We are not openly apostate. We still use the name of Jesus. We still run programs and fill buildings and produce content. But we have become so thoroughly marinated in the cultural value of inclusion and affirmation that we have lost the will — and perhaps the ability — to preach a Gospel that demands something of its hearers.
Repentance Is Not Optional
One of the most significant casualties of the modern church’s pursuit of cultural relevance is the doctrine of repentance. The word metanoia in the Greek — repentance — means a genuine change of mind and direction. It is not remorse for being caught. It is not a vague sense of spiritual inadequacy. It is a turning: away from sin, toward God, accompanied by a genuine intent to walk differently.
John the Baptist’s opening sermon was “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). Jesus’ first recorded words of public ministry are identical (Matthew 4:17). Peter’s first sermon at Pentecost, when the church was born, culminates in a call to “Repent and be baptized” (Acts 2:38). From the very first moments of the Gospel’s proclamation, repentance was inseparable from the message of salvation.
To remove repentance from the Gospel is not to make it more accessible. It is to make it something else entirely. A gospel without repentance is not good news — it is a false peace, the kind the prophet Jeremiah warned about when he described those who heal the wound of God’s people lightly, crying “Peace, peace, when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).
Grace Is Not Cheap
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who understood better than most what a costly commitment to Christ could demand, wrote in The Cost of Discipleship about the danger of what he called “cheap grace.” Cheap grace, he wrote, is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. It is grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ.
Cheap grace is precisely what the broad road is paved with. It is comfortable, it is affirming, it asks nothing, and it leads, Christ says, to destruction.
True grace — the grace that actually saves — is costly precisely because it cost God everything. And those who receive it genuinely are not unchanged by the transaction. They do not continue living as they did before and simply add a Sunday morning obligation to their calendar. They are, as Paul puts it, new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). The old has gone. The new has come.
The Narrow Gate Is an Act of Love
It would be easy to read all of this as a grim, judgmental corrective — a finger-wagging rebuke of a church that is simply trying to love people well. But the opposite is true.To point people toward the narrow gate is the most loving thing a Christian and a church can do.
A doctor who tells a patient that their lifestyle is killing them is not being unkind. A doctor who withholds that diagnosis to avoid an uncomfortable conversation is failing in his fundamental duty of care. The church that tells people the road is easy, the gate is wide, and commitment is optional is not being inclusive. It is being negligent. It is allowing people to walk toward destruction with a smile on their face and a vague sense of spiritual security.
Jesus warned about the narrow gate because He loves the people who might otherwise miss it. He wanted us to know the truth before it was too late, not after. The narrow way is not punishing. It is purifying. It strips away the things that cannot save us — the cultural Christianity, the sentimental religiosity, the unexamined assumption that proximity to the church is the same as relationship with Christ — and it leads to life.
A Call to the Church
The Western church does not need a harsher tone. It does not need more condemnation from its pulpits or colder shoulders at its doors.But it desperately needs more honesty. It needs pastors and teachers willing to lovingly, patiently, and faithfully preach the whole counsel of God — not just the passages that generate applause.
It needs congregations willing to ask hard questions of themselves: Am I actually following Christ, or simply following a comfortable religious identity? Has my faith produced genuine repentance? Is there evidence in my life that I have passed through the narrow gate, or am I simply on the broad road with a Christian bumper sticker?
It needs a renewed willingness to tell people the truth: that salvation is a free gift of grace received through genuine faith, and that genuine faith looks like something. It costs you your old life. It costs you your autonomy as king or queen of your own existence. It costs you the comfortable sins you have made peace with. And in return, it gives you something no broad road can ever offer — not the applause of a culture, not the comfort of cheap affirmation, but the narrow, hard, beautiful road that leads to life.
The gate is straight. The way is narrow. Few find it.
May the church be faithful enough to show people where it is.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. (1:1–2)
Archē (beginning) can mean “source,” or “origin” (cf. Col. 1:18; Rev. 3:14);or “rule,” “authority,” “ruler,” or “one in authority” (cf. Luke 12:11; 20:20; Rom. 8:38; 1 Cor. 15:24; Eph. 1:21; 3:10; 6:12; Col. 1:16; 2:10, 15; Titus 3:1). Both of those connotations are true of Christ, who is both the Creator of the universe (v. 3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2) and its ruler (Col. 2:10; Eph. 1:20–22; Phil. 2:9–11). But archē refers here to the beginning of the universe depicted in Genesis 1:1. Jesus Christ was already in existence when the heavens and the earth were created; thus, He is not a created being, but existed from all eternity. (Since time began with the creation of the physical universe, whatever existed before that creation is eternal.) “The Logos [Word] did not then begin to be, but at that point at which all else began to be, He already was. In the beginning, place it where you may, the Word already existed. In other words, the Logos is before time, eternal.” (Marcus Dods, “John” in W. Robertson Nicoll, ed. The Expositors’ Bible Commentary [Reprint; Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002], 1:683. Emphasis in original.). That truth provides definitive proof of Christ’s deity, for only God is eternal. The imperfect tense of the verb eimi (was), describing continuing action in the past, further reinforces the eternal preexistence of the Word. It indicates that He was continuously in existence before the beginning. But even more significant is the use of eimi instead of ginomai (“became”). The latter term refers to things that come into existence (cf. 1:3, 10, 12, 14). Had John used ginomai, he would have implied that the Word came into existence at the beginning along with the rest of creation. But eimi stresses that the Word always existed; there was never a point when He came into being. The concept of the Word (logos) is one imbued with meaning for both Jews and Greeks. To the Greek philosophers, the logos was the impersonal, abstract principle of reason and order in the universe. It was in some sense a creative force, and also the source of wisdom. The average Greek may not have fully understood all the nuances of meaning with which the philosophers invested the term logos. Yet even to laymen the term would have signified one of the most important principles in the universe. To the Greeks, then, John presented Jesus as the personification and embodiment of the logos. Unlike the Greek concept, however, Jesus was not an impersonal source, force, principle, or emanation. In Him, the true logos who was God became a man—a concept foreign to Greek thought. But logos was not just a Greek concept. The word of the Lord was also a significant Old Testament theme, well-known to the Jews. The word of the Lord was the expression of divine power and wisdom. By His word God introduced the Abrahamic covenant (Gen. 15:1), gave Israel the Ten Commandments (Ex. 24:3–4; Deut. 5:5; cf. Ex. 34:28; Deut. 9:10), attended the building of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:11–13), revealed God to Samuel (1 Sam. 3:21), pronounced judgment on the house of Eli (1 Kings 2:27), counseled Elijah (1 Kings 19:9ff.), directed Israel through God’s spokesmen (cf. 1 Sam. 15:10ff.; 2 Sam. 7:4ff.; 24:11ff.; 1 Kings 16:1–4; 17:2–4., 8ff.; 18:1; 21:17–19; 2 Chron. 11:2–4), was the agent of creation (Ps. 33:6), and revealed Scripture to the prophets (Jer. 1:2; Ezek. 1:3; Dan. 9:2; Hos. 1:1; Joel 1:1; Jonah 1:1; Mic. 1:1; Zeph. 1:1; Hag. 1:1; Zech. 1:1; Mal. 1:1). John presented Jesus to his Jewish readers as the incarnation of divine power and revelation. He initiated the new covenant (Luke 22:20; Heb. 9:15; 12:24), instructs believers (John 10:27), unites them into a spiritual temple (1 Cor. 3:16–17; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:21), revealed God to man (John 1:18; 14:7–9), judges those who reject Him (John 3:18; 5:22), directs the church through those whom He has raised up to lead it (Eph. 4:11–12; 1 Tim. 5:17; Titus 1:5; 1 Peter 5:1–3), was the agent of creation (John 1:3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2), and inspired the Scripture penned by the New Testament writers (John 14:26) through the Holy Spirit whom He sent (John 15:26). As the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ is God’s final word to mankind: “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son” (Heb. 1:1–2). Then John took his argument a step further. In His eternal preexistence the Word was with God. The English translation does not bring out the full richness of the Greek expression (pros ton theon). That phrase means far more than merely that the Word existed with God; it “[gives] the picture of two personal beings facing one another and engaging in intelligent discourse” (W. Robert Cook, The Theology of John [Chicago: Moody, 1979], 49). From all eternity Jesus, as the second person of the trinity, was “with the Father [pros ton patera]” (1 John 1:2) in deep, intimate fellowship. Perhaps pros ton theon could best be rendered “face-to-face.” The Word is a person, not an attribute of God or an emanation from Him. And He is of the same essence as the Father. Yet in an act of infinite condescension, Jesus left the glory of heaven and the privilege of face-to-face communion with His Father (cf. John 17:5). He willingly “emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.… He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:7–8). Charles Wesley captured some of the wonder of that marvelous truth in the familiar hymn “And Can It Be That I Should Gain?”:
He left His Father’s throne above,
So free, so infinite His grace!
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam’s helpless race.
Amazing love! How can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Amazing love! How can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
John’s description of the Word reached its pinnacle in the third clause of this opening verse. Not only did the Word exist from all eternity, and have face-to-face fellowship with God the Father, but also the Word was God. That simple statement, only four words in both English and Greek (theos ēn ho logos), is perhaps the clearest and most direct declaration of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ to be found anywhere in Scripture. But despite their clarity, heretical groups almost from the moment John penned these words have twisted their meaning to support their false doctrines concerning the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ. Noting that theos (God) is anarthrous (not preceded by the definite article), some argue that it is an indefinite noun and mistranslate the phrase, “the Word was divine” (i.e., merely possessing some of the qualities of God) or, even more appalling, “the Word was a god.” The absence of the article before theos, however, does not make it indefinite. Logos (Word) has the definite article to show that it is the subject of the sentence (since it is in the same case as theos). Thus the rendering “God was the Word” is invalid, because “the Word,” not “God,” is the subject. It would also be theologically incorrect, because it would equate the Father (“God” whom the Word was with in the preceding clause) with the Word, thus denying that the two are separate persons. The predicate nominative (God) describes the nature of the Word, showing that He is of the same essence as the Father (cf. H. E. Dana and Julius R. Mantey, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament [Toronto: MacMillan, 1957], 139–40; A. T. Robertson, The Minister and His Greek New Testament [Reprint: Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978], 67–68). According to the rules of Greek grammar, when the predicate nominative (God in this clause) precedes the verb, it cannot be considered indefinite (and thus translated “a god” instead of God) merely because it does not have the article. That the term God is definite and refers to the true God is obvious for several reasons. First, theos appears without the definite article four other times in the immediate context (vv. 6, 12, 13, 18; cf. 3:2, 21; 9:16; Matt. 5:9). Not even the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ distorted translation of the Bible renders the anarthrous theos “a god” in those verses. Second, if John’s meaning was that the Word was divine, or a god, there were ways he could have phrased it to make that unmistakably clear. For example, if he meant to say that the Word was merely in some sense divine, he could have used the adjective theios (cf. 2 Peter 1:4). It must be remembered that, as Robert L. Reymond notes, “No standard Greek lexicon offers ‘divine’ as one of the meanings of theos, nor does the noun become an adjective when it ‘sheds’ its article” (Jesus, Divine Messiah [Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presb. & Ref., 1990], 303). Or if he had wanted to say that the Word was a god, he could have written ho logos ēn theos. If John had written ho theos ēn ho logos, the two nouns (theos and logos) would be interchangeable, and God and the Word would be identical. That would have meant that the Father was the Word, which, as noted above, would deny the Trinity. But as Leon Morris asks rhetorically, “How else [other than theos ēn ho logos] in Greek would one say, ‘the Word was God’?” (The Gospel According to John, The New International Commentary on the New Testament [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979], 77 n. 15). Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, John chose the precise wording that accurately conveys the true nature of the Word, Jesus Christ. “By theos without the article, John neither indicates, on the one hand, identity of Person with the Father; nor yet, on the other, any lower nature than that of God Himself” (H. A. W. Meyer, Critical and Exegetical Hand-Book to the Gospel of John [Reprint; Winona Lake, Ind.: Alpha, 1979], 48). Underscoring their significance, John restated the profound truths of verse 1 in verse 2. He emphasized again the eternity of the Word; He already was in existence in the beginning when everything else was created. As it did in verse 1, the imperfect tense of the verb eimi (was) describes the Word’s continuous existence before the beginning. And as John also noted in verse 1, that existence was one of intimate fellowship with God the Father. The truth of Jesus Christ’s deity and full equality with the Father is a nonnegotiable element of the Christian faith. In 2 John 10 John warned, “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching [the biblical teaching concerning Christ; cf. vv. 7, 9], do not receive him into your house, and do not give him a greeting.” Believers are not to aid heretical false teachers in any way, including giving those who have blasphemed Christ food and lodging, since the one who does so “participates in [their] evil deeds” (v. 11). Such seemingly uncharitable behavior is perfectly justified toward false teachers who deny the deity of our Lord and the gospel, since they are under God’s curse:
There are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed! (Gal. 1:7–9)
Emphasizing their deadly danger, both Paul (Acts 20:29) and Jesus (Matt. 7:15) described false teachers as wolves in disguise. They are not to be welcomed into the sheepfold, but guarded against and avoided. Confusion about the deity of Christ is inexcusable, because the biblical teaching regarding it is clear and unmistakable. Jesus Christ is the eternally preexistent Word, who enjoys full face-to-face communion and divine life with the Father, and is Himself God.
MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (2006). John 1–11 (pp. 15–20). Moody Press.
Introducing John’s Gospel
John 1:1
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The Gospel of John has blessed the hearts of God’s people through the centuries. It has been called “God’s love letter to the world.” Luther wrote of it, “This is the unique, tender, genuine chief Gospel.… Should a tyrant succeed in destroying the Holy Scriptures and only a single copy of the Epistle to the Romans and the Gospel according to John escape him, Christianity would be saved.” Luther must have especially loved the Gospel because he preached on it for many years from the pulpit of the parish church of Wittenberg. Some of the most widely known and best-loved texts in the Word of God are from this Gospel—John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”; John 6:35: “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty”; John 10:11: “I am the good shepherd”; John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life”; John 15:1: “I am the true vine.” There is the beloved fourteenth chapter: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back, and take you to be with me that you may also be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.… I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:1–4, 6). Because of these and other passages, it is not surprising that the Gospel of John has been a source of blessing to untold generations of God’s people. It has probably been the means by which more persons have come to know Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord than any other single portion of Scripture.
A Unique Gospel
But the Gospel of John is merely one of four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—all of which tell of the life of Jesus Christ on earth. So we need to ask: What makes this Gospel unique? What makes John different? As one begins to read it, he soon notices some very obvious differences. Because of their similarities, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels; the three look at the life of Christ from similar viewpoints and employ similar and, at times, even identical language. John stands apart. In the first place, John omits many things that either one or more than one of the synoptic Gospels include. John gives no account of Christ’s birth. There is no mention of his baptism, although John clearly presupposes a knowledge of Christ’s baptism on the part of his readers. The institution of the Lord’s Supper is not included. There is no ascension. What is perhaps most striking of all, there are no parables, those pithy sayings of Jesus that occupy such a prominent place in the other accounts of Christ’s teachings. At the same time John shows a detailed knowledge of things that the other Gospels omit. For instance, John reports on an early ministry of Jesus in Judea. He indicates that the duration of Christ’s ministry was close to three years, not one year, which is the impression one gets from reading the synoptic Gospels. John alone speaks of the changing of the water into wine at Cana. He alone tells of Nicodemus, of the woman of Samaria, of the raising of Lazarus. Only in John do we find the great discourses spoken by Jesus to his own disciples during the final week in Jerusalem.
Johannine Scholarship
It is probably because John is so different (and so spiritual) that some scholars have attacked this book strongly. Otherwise, it seems strange that this Gospel, which has been such a blessing to Christian people, should become the outstanding example among the New Testament books of what a section of God’s Word can suffer at the hands of the higher critics of the Scriptures. One would have thought that the historical accuracy and apostolic authorship of John would have been defended stoutly. But this has not been the case until recently. Instead there had been a generation of scholarship (not so many years ago) that thought that John was not at all reliable. In this period all but the most conservative scholars said that the Gospel must have been written at least 150 or even 200 years after Christ’s death. Many placed it in a literary category of its own as being something very much like theological fiction. Today this is no longer true. There has been a remarkable change in the scholarly climate surrounding John’s Gospel, with the result that it is becoming increasingly inadequate to deny the Johannine authorship. A new claim is even being made for the reliability of the Gospel as history. Moreover, this claim has come about, not because the scholarly world itself is becoming more conservative but because the evidence for the reliability of John has simply overshadowed the most destructive of the academic theories. Thus today men of such academic stature as Oscar Cullmann of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and John A. T. Robinson of England argue that the Gospel may well embody the testimony of a genuine eyewitness, as it claims. And some, like the late Near Eastern archaeologist William F. Albright, are willing to date the book in the A.D. 60s, that is, within thirty or forty years of Christ’s death and resurrection. At this point someone may say, “What has produced such a turnabout in the ways these men view the Gospel?” It is a good question. The answers to it are significant. First, many ancient manuscripts and parchments of John or parts of John have been discovered, and these have pushed back the dating of the book. For a long time, before the great harvest of archaeological discoveries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the earliest copies of the fourth Gospel were from the fourth century, about A.D. 325 to 340. While this was much more impressive than any manuscript evidence for other ancient writings—for instance, the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s verses were written about 2,000 years after his death—nevertheless, it gave scholars liberty enough to date John so late that it could not have been written by anyone who knew Jesus or even by anyone who could have known those who had known him. The discovery of more ancient manuscripts has changed this. One ancient scrap of papyrus, which was originally found in Egypt as part of the wrapping of a mummy and is now part of the papyrus collection at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, alone destroys these theories. This piece of papyrus contains just a few verses of John 18 (vv. 31–34, 37, 38). But it dates from the first quarter of the second century—in other words, less than one hundred years after Christ—and thus shows that John’s Gospel had been written early enough to have had a copy pass to Egypt to be used there and then to be discarded by the year A.D. 125. This is conclusive evidence for a fairly early dating of the Gospel.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The second major factor in a reassessment of the dating and historical accuracy of John’s Gospel has been the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were uncovered in 1947 and the years immediately following, but the impact of their discovery is continuing even now as the scrolls are being unrolled, assembled, translated, and published. Before the scrolls were discovered, scholars evaluated the differences between John and the synoptic Gospels in a way that was highly unfavorable to John. For instance, they noticed the unique language of John’s Gospel, with its contrasts between light and darkness, life and death, the world below and the world above, and so on. They noticed that the contrasts were generally lacking in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “Well,” they said, “it is obvious that the first three Gospels are Jewish and reflect a Jewish setting. But it is also obvious that John’s work is not. John’s Gospel must come from a Greek setting. Therefore, we must seek the origin of these unique terms not in the actual speech of Jesus of Nazareth but in Greek thought and particularly in Hellenistic Gnosticism.” Then the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. These revealed a whole world of nonconformist Judaism that had simply not been known to scholars previously. The home of the scrolls was Qumran, not far from Jerusalem, in the very area where John placed the earliest events of Christ’s ministry. And what was most significant, the literature revealed the same use of the so-called Greek terms (logos, light, darkness, life, death) that are found in John’s Gospel and actually provided a far closer parallel to them. One scholar, A. M. Hunter of Aberdeen University in Scotland, writes of these discoveries: “The dualism which pervades the Johannine writings is of precisely the same kind as we discover in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” John A. T. Robinson writes: “I detect a growing readiness to recognize that this [the historical background of John’s gospel] is not to be sought at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second, in Ephesus or Alexandria, among the Gnostics or the Greeks. Rather, there is no compelling need to let our gaze wander very far, either in space or time, beyond a fairly limited area of southern Palestine in the fairly limited interval between the crucifixion and the fall of Jerusalem.” He adds that the Dead Sea Scrolls “may really represent an actual background, and not merely a possible environment, for the distinctive categories of the Gospel.”
Other Factors
The historical trustworthiness of John’s Gospel is also supported by John’s accurate knowledge of the geography of Palestine. This has been vindicated increasingly by archaeological discoveries. To be sure, John mentions many places that are also mentioned by the synoptic Gospels, so critics could say that these were only known secondhand from their writings. For instance, John could hardly tell the story of Jesus without mentioning Bethsaida (1:44; 12:21), the praetorium (18:28, 33; 19:9), Bethany (11:18), and so on. But John also speaks accurately of Ephraim (11:54), Sychar (4:5, which is probably to be identified with Shechem at Tell Balatah), Solomon’s Porch (10:23), the brook Kidron, which Jesus crossed to reach Gethsemane (18:1), and Bethany beyond Jordan, which John carefully distinguished from the other Bethany near Jerusalem (1:28). All of these places are now known, and John himself has again and again been demonstrated to be accurate. Two archaeological discoveries are particularly interesting. In 5:2, John mentions a pool called Bethesda that, he says, had five porches. For years no one had even heard of this pool. What is more, since John’s description made it sound like a pentagon, and since there had never been any pentagon-shaped pools in antiquity, the existence of this pool was thought by many New Testament scholars to be doubtful. Now, however, approximately fifty to seventy-five feet below the present level of the city of Jerusalem, archaeologists have uncovered a large rectangular pool surrounded by four covered colonnades and having an additional colonnade crossing it in the middle somewhat like a bridge. In other words, there was a pool with five porches, as John said. It is conclusive evidence of John’s accurate knowledge of the city of Jerusalem as it was before its destruction by the Roman general Titus in A.D. 70. The second archaeological discovery involves the probable identification of Aenon near Salim, which John mentions in 3:23, as having “plenty of water” in the Jordan valley. It was obviously the place where John the Baptist found adequate water for his baptizing. These three lines of evidence—the evidence of the manuscripts, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the knowledge of ancient geography—are also supported by other lines of discoveries. There has been an attempt to show that the author of the fourth Gospel (whoever he may have been) must have spoken in Aramaic because, according to those who are experts in this field, Aramaic idiom underlies John’s Gospel. Careful study of the text has convinced other scholars that the material preserved by John may be as old as Pauline theology or the traditions preserved by the Synoptics. Thus, a better knowledge of the author of the fourth Gospel and his times has succeeded in pushing scholars away from the critical postures they once held, and has caused them to admit not only the possibility of apostolic authorship but to speak even more surely of an early and very reliable tradition that underlies and is in fact preserved in the writing of the Gospel.
John’s Purpose
What does this have to do with a study of what is obviously a spiritual Gospel? Just this: John himself insists upon the reliability of the things about which he writes. Take 1 John 1:1, 3 as an example. There John writes, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.… We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.” In other words, John says that he is writing to them about a person whom he has heard, seen, and touched. Hence, he is writing about something objectively true that will bear the brunt of historical investigation. John sounds the same note in the Gospel: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30–31). There are always people who will say that faith is something that must be entirely divorced from evidence. But that is not stated in the Bible. Faith is believing in something or someone on the basis of evidence and then acting upon it. In this case, John has provided evidence for the full deity of Jesus so that readers, whether in his age or ours, might believe it and commit their lives to Jesus as their Savior. In John’s Gospel we have an accurate record of things that were said and done in Palestine almost 2,000 years ago by a Jew named Jesus of Nazareth and that are presented to us as evidence for his extraordinary claims. If one will believe this and approach the record honestly with an open mind, God will use it to bring that person to fullness of faith in the Lord Jesus as God’s Son and his Savior. This was John’s purpose in writing his Gospel. It is my primary purpose in writing these studies. What will happen in your case? It all depends on whether or not you open your mind to John’s teaching. Sometime ago I was talking to a young man who was very critical of Christianity. “Have you investigated the evidence?” I asked him. “What do you mean? How does one do that?” he asked. “Go home this week and begin to read John’s Gospel,” I answered. “But before you begin, take a moment to pray something like this: ‘God, I do not know if you exist or, if you do, whether you hear me. But if you exist and if you hear me, I want you to know that I am an honest seeker after truth. If this Book of John can really speak to me and show me that Jesus is the Son of God and is God, I ask you to prove that to me while I read it. And if you prove it, then I will believe in him and serve him forever.’ ” I told him that if he did that, God would speak to him and that he would be convinced that all the things that are written about Jesus of Nazareth in this book are true and that he is the Son of God and our Savior. The young man went home. I saw him a week later, and I asked, “Did you read the book?” He answered, “Well, I have to admit that there are other things to which I give a higher priority.” Here is another case. A Christian at the University of Pennsylvania entered into a series of Bible studies in John’s Gospel with a young woman who was not a Christian. The two young women went through several chapters where Jesus is declared many times to be God, but none of it clicked with the non-Christian. Suddenly, in the midst of a study of the third chapter of John, and after many weeks of study, the inquiring non-Christian exclaimed, “Why, I see it! Jesus Christ is God! He is God.” That was the turning point, and several weeks later she became a Christian. That is what we are looking for in the following studies of John’s Gospel. Moreover, as that happens, we will also look for a strengthening and encouraging of believers in the service of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and our Lord.
Jesus Christ Is God
John 1:1–2
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
What do you think of Jesus Christ? Who is he? According to Christianity this is the most important question you or anyone else will ever have to face. It is important because it is inescapable—you will have to answer it sooner or later, in this world or in the world to come—and because the quality of your life here and your eternal destiny depend upon your answer. Who is Jesus Christ? If he was only a man, then you can safely forget him. If he is God, as he claimed to be, and as all Christians believe, then you should yield your life to him. You should worship and serve him faithfully.
Four Gospels
If you are one who has never answered this question personally or if you have assumed (perhaps without much investigation) that Jesus was only a man, then the Gospel of John was written particularly for you. It was written for those who do not yet believe that Jesus Christ is God, to lead them to that conclusion. I do not know which literary critic once said, “A novel without a purpose is like a life without a career. In order to be a story it must have something to say.” But, whoever the author may have been, the statement itself is a correct one. What is more, it is as correct for biblical literature as it is for works by purely human authors. In one sense the Gospel of John has the same purpose as each of the other three Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke. That is, John wishes to present to the reader the earthly life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who was born under the reign of Herod the Great and who died when Pontius Pilate was the Roman procurator in Judea. In another sense, however, John has a purpose that is distinctly his own. That purpose is to show that Jesus Christ is God. That is his thesis. To some extent, Matthew’s Gospel portrays the Lord Jesus primarily as the Jewish Messiah. In fact, it is possible to argue that everything that goes into his account of Christ’s life supports that theme. Mark’s purpose is to reveal Jesus Christ as God’s servant. Luke deals with Christ’s humanity. John, however, reveals Jesus as the eternal, preexisting Son of God who became man in order to reveal the Father and to bring men access into eternal life through his historical death and literal resurrection. How do we know that? We know it because John says so. He writes, “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30–31). Arthur W. Pink, one of the great students of this Gospel, has written, “In this book we are shown that the one who was heralded by the angels to the Bethlehem shepherds, who walked this earth for thirty-three years, who was crucified at Calvary, who rose in triumph from the grave, and who forty days later departed from these scenes, was none other than the Lord of Glory. The evidence for this is overwhelming, the proofs almost without number, and the effect of contemplating them must be to bow our hearts in worship before ‘the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ’ (Titus 2:13).”
John’s Thesis
It is not surprising, therefore, when we turn from the end of John’s Gospel to the beginning, that we find John presenting there the thesis that Jesus Christ is God. I think that John would have done very well in one of our universities today. When you write a paper in a university the best way to do it—although you can be more subtle than this—is to say in your opening paragraph what it is that you are setting out to prove, then prove it, and when you get to the end, sum it all up and say, “See, I did it. It’s just what I said I would do at the beginning.” That is exactly what John does. He starts out in the first two verses stating that Jesus Christ is God. He proves it in twenty-one chapters. Then, when he gets to the end he says that the things written in his book were written so that you and I, his readers, might know that Jesus Christ is God and that we might believe on him. At the beginning he says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning” (John 1:1, 2). We know from verse 14 that the Word is Jesus, for in that verse John says that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” Thus, we find John to be saying that Jesus existed from the beginning, that he was with God in the beginning, and that he was God. In other words, the opening verses of the Gospel contain a full statement of Christ’s divinity. These verses teach three things about the divinity of Jesus Christ. The first statement is that Jesus existed “in the beginning.” In other words, Jesus was preexistent. He was “before” all things. There are several ways in which the phrase “in the beginning” is used in the Bible. In 1 John it is used of the beginning of Christ’s earthly ministry. John writes, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). In the first verse of the Book of Genesis the phrase is used of the beginning of creation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The use of the phrase in John’s Gospel goes beyond even that, however, for John says that when you begin to talk about Jesus Christ you can do so properly only when you go back beyond his earthly life—back beyond the beginnings of creation—into eternity. That is where Jesus Christ was. Moreover, this is found wherever the Bible speaks in detail about Christ’s person. The author of the Book of Hebrews looks back to the beginning when he says, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe” (Heb. 1:1–2). The Book of Revelation reveals Jesus to be the “Alpha and Omega … the First and the Last” (Rev. 1:8, 17). Paul writes that before Jesus became man he was “in very nature God” and had “equality with God” (Phil. 2:6). These statements all point to the preexistence of Jesus as one important aspect of his divinity. The second statement is that Jesus Christ was with God. This is an affirmation of Christ’s separate personality, and it is a very subtle statement. John wishes to say, and indeed he does say, that Jesus is fully God. He reports Jesus as saying, “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). But John is aware also that the Trinity is involved here, that there is a diversity within the Godhead. Thus he also expresses this truth in his statement. The final phrase is a declaration that Jesus is fully divine, for John says, “and the Word was God,” or literally, “and God was the Word.” This means that everything that can be said about God the Father can be said about God the Son. In Jesus dwells all the wisdom, glory, power, love, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth of the Father. In him, God the Father is known. John then sums up his teaching by saying, “He was with God in the beginning” (v. 2). With these words the highly emphatic and unequivocal statement of the full divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ is ended.
Knowledge of God
At this point we need some practical applications. What does it matter to say that Jesus Christ is God? First, to say that Jesus Christ is God is to say that we can now know the truth about God. We can know what he is like. The counterpart to this statement is that apart from Jesus Christ we really cannot know him. Is God the god of Plato’s imagination? We do not know. Is he the god of Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher? Is he the god of other philosophers? Is he the god of the mystics? The answer is that apart from Jesus Christ we do not know what God is like. But if Jesus Christ is God, then we do know, because to know the Lord Jesus Christ is to know God. There is no knowledge of God apart from a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, and there is no knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ apart from a knowledge of the Bible. One of the saddest stories in the Word of God concerns this theme. It is in John’s Gospel. Toward the end of his ministry, Jesus explained carefully that he was going away from the disciples but that he was going to prepare a place for them and would one day return. The disciples were depressed at the thought of his leaving them. He went on to say that if they had really known him, they would have known the Father. At this point Philip, who was one of the disciples asked him, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us” (John 14:8). In other words, Philip was saying, “If I could just see God, I would be satisfied.” How sad! The disciples had been with Jesus for almost three years and now were nearing the end of his ministry. Still they had not fully recognized that Jesus is God and that they were coming to know God through him. Jesus then had to answer by saying, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (v. 9). If you want to know what God is like, study the life of Jesus Christ. Read the Bible! The things recorded there of Jesus Christ are true. What is more, if you read them, you will find that the Holy Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of truth, will interpret and explain them to you.
Always Like Jesus
The second practical application of the truth that Jesus Christ is God is that God was always like Jesus. William Barclay, who knew this truth, writes, “If the Word was with God before time began, if God’s Word is part of the eternal scheme of things, it means that God was always like Jesus. Sometimes we tend to think of God as just and holy and stern and avenging; and we tend to think that something that Jesus did changed God’s anger into love, and altered God’s attitude to men. The New Testament knows nothing of that idea. The whole New Testament tells us, and this passage of John especially tells us, that God has always been like Jesus.” Does Jesus Christ hate sin? Yes! So God has always hated sin also. Does Jesus Christ love the sinner? Yes! Therefore, God loves him also. Barclay says, “What Jesus did was to open a window in time that we might see the eternal and unchanging love of God.” In fact, God so hates sin and so loves the sinner that in eternity he planned the way in which he would redeem the race. We read the Old Testament and we find God saying, “There must be an atonement for sin.” We read the accounts of Christ’s life and death, and we find God saying, “There is the atonement for sin.” We come to our time and as the Word of God is preached we find God speaking to our hearts and saying, “That was the atonement for sin. Believe it and be saved.” God has always been like Jesus.
An Acceptable Sacrifice
Third, the truth that Jesus Christ is God means that his death on the cross was significant. It means that in this way he himself became the one sufficient and acceptable sacrifice for man’s sin. If you or I were to be so foolish as to make a statement that we would die for another man’s sins and then were somehow to lose our lives, in terms of sin our death would mean nothing. We are sinners. If we were to die for sin, or pretend to do it, the only sin we could die for would be our own. But Jesus had no sin. Being God, he is sinless. Hence, when he died, he died for the sins of others, in their place; he removed forever the burden of sin from those who believe on him. Finally, because Jesus Christ is God, it means that he is able to satisfy all the needs of your heart. God is infinite. Jesus is also infinite. Therefore he is able to satisfy you out of that inexhaustible immensity. There is a story that illustrates this truth. Do you remember the verses in Ephesians in which Paul prays that the Christians to whom he is writing might “have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:18–19)? These verses speak of the four dimensions of God’s love—breadth, length, depth, and height—and they say that out of that fullness God is able to satisfy the one who comes to him. During the Napoleonic period in Europe some of the emperor’s soldiers opened a prison that had been used by the Spanish Inquisition. There were many dungeons in the prison, but in one of them the soldiers found something particularly interesting. They found the remains of a prisoner, the flesh and clothing all long since gone and only an ankle bone in a chain to tell his story. On the wall, however, carved into the stone with some sharp piece of metal, there was a crude cross. And around the cross were the Spanish words for the four dimensions of Ephesians 3:18–19. Above was the word “height.” Below was the word “depth.” On one side there was the word “breadth.” On the other there was the word “length.” Clearly, as this poor, persecuted soul was lying in chains and was dying, he comforted himself with the thought that God who in himself contains the breadth, length, depth, and height of all things was able to satisfy him fully. He is able to satisfy you fully whatever your need or your longing.
“Who Is This?”
This is John’s thesis. We are going to see the evidence for it as we go on in these studies. But even here we must raise the question with which we began and which is above all questions: What do you think of Jesus Christ? Who is he? This was the question that was raised all through Christ’s earthly ministry. When Jesus rode into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey on what we call Palm Sunday the people turned to one another and asked, “Who is this?” (Matt. 21:10). The disciples asked the question after Jesus had stilled the storm on the Lake of Galilee: “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” (Mark 4:41). Herod asked, “I beheaded John. Who, then, is this I hear such things about?” (Luke 9:9). When Jesus forgave the sins of the paralytic, the scribes and Pharisees asked themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Luke 5:21). This is the question. Is Jesus only a man? If he is, you can afford to forget him. Or is he God? If he is God, then he demands your belief and your total allegiance. Do you believe that Jesus is God? You should be able to say with doubting Thomas, in the story that is really the spiritual climax of the fourth Gospel, “My Lord and my God.” To draw back from making that confession is to perish. To believe it is to enter into eternal life.
Boice, J. M. (2005). The Gospel of John: an expositional commentary (pp. 13–25). Baker Books.
Iranians around the world – and, according to some reports, within Iran – celebrated on Saturday following confirmation America had launched “Operation Epic Fury” against Iranian regime targets and, President Donald Trump later confirmed, killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., looks back on a ‘historic’ day after U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, opening up on where he differs from the Democratic Party on ‘Ha…
(Just The News)—The FBI is on high alert following the U.S.-Israeli coordinated strikes on Iran overnight.
FBI Director Kash Patel said that the FBI is “fully engaged on the situation overseas,” and he has directed the bureau’s counterterrorism and intelligence teams “to be on high alert and mobilize security assets needed.”
Patel said the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force across the country is working to “address and disrupt any potential threats to the homeland.”
The announcement from the FBI comes as the U.S. Secret Service issued a statement saying that it is “actively monitoring the situation in Iran and remains in close coordination” with federal and local partners.
Other law enforcement agencies across the country, including the New York Police Department and the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, released similar statements.
“At this time, there are no known threats to D.C. We are prepared to increase our presence as needed,” according to a statement from MPD.
NYPD said it is also increasing patrols across the city in response to Operation Epic Fury.
“As is our protocol and out of an abundance of caution, we will be enhancing patrols to sensitive locations throughout the city, including diplomatic, cultural, religious and other relevant sites,” according to a NYPD post on X.
Videos from Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Abdanan show cheering, impromptu dance parties, fireworks; man shouts ‘hello new world’ as statue of republic founder is toppled in Galleh Dar
Large crowds of Iranians took to the streets, cheering with joy and playing celebratory music, Saturday night and early Sunday as reports spread that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed.
Internet and phone service are almost entirely down in Iran, making accounts hard to verify and causing difficulties in assessing how widespread the celebratory sentiment was.
Celebrations in Tehran began shortly after 11 p.m., even before Iranian state television confirmed the killing of Khamenei, who brutally ruled over the country for 36 years.
TheNew York Times, citing video calls with three residents of Tehran, said that “loud Persian dance music filled the streets. Many residents, from their windows and balconies, joined in a chant of ‘freedom, freedom.’”
The newspaper also published videos — with some individuals’ faces blurred — of celebrations in Abdanan, a Kurdish city where many protesters were killed in January — showing men and women cheering and honking their car horns in the middle of the street upon hearing the news.
Fireworks could be seen being launched in videos shared on social media.
Videos posted on social media also showed joy and defiance elsewhere in Iran, with people cheering as a statue was toppled in the city of Dehloran in Ilam province, dancing in the streets of Karaj city, near Tehran in Alborz province, and celebrating in the streets of Izeh in Khuzestan province.
In the town of Galleh Dar in southern Iran, people brought down a monument commemorating Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic in 1979, a video on social media showed.
“Am I dreaming? Hello to the new world!” a man can be heard shouting in the video, as fires burned on a traffic circle where the monument was toppled, prompting cheers and applause.
Another video showed people celebrating in the town of Lapuee in southern Iran outside the house of a 15-year-old teenager, Pooya Jafari, who was shot dead during anti-government protests in January.
Thousands of Iranians were killed during a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in January. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has recorded more than 7,000 deaths, while warning the full toll is likely far higher.
The killings drew threats from US President Donald Trump that he could order military action against the regime to protect the demonstrators. Both Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have called on protesters to take to the streets at the conclusion of the US-Israeli military operation, to finish the job of toppling the regime.
In Shiraz, people “were abandoning their cars for an impromptu dance party,” according to The New York Times, “whistling, cheering, clapping and screaming with joy.”
And a video from Isfahan showed a jubilant crowd of mostly young men and women, cheering and honking their horns.
A 33-year-old woman from Isfahan said she began crying from a mix of joy and disbelief when she heard Khamenei was dead.
Speaking to Reuters from Iran, she said she joined others dancing in the street to “share my happiness with my people,” expressing hope that his death would mean the end of the Islamic Republic.
She declined to be named for fear of reprisal.
But Atousa Mirzade, a primary school teacher in the central city of Shiraz, said she could not be happy about the country’s leader being killed by a foreign power.
“I also cannot be happy because I don’t know what will happen to our country. We saw what happened in Iraq — chaos and bloodshed. I would prefer the Islamic Republic to that situation.”
Meanwhile, thousands gathered in the center of Tehran to mourn Khamenei’s death, journalists said.
The mourners, dressed mostly in black and some crying, chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” in Enghelab (Revolution) Square, with many waving Iran’s flags and holding photos of Khamenei.
Iranian state television announced a 40-day mourning period and seven public holidays.
University student Hossein Dadbakhsh, 21, in Mashhad, said Iran would avenge its leader.
“I am ready to sacrifice my life for Islam and for my Imam Khamenei. The Zionist regime and Trump will pay a heavy price for the martyrdom of my leader,” he said by phone, his voice trembling with emotion.
Fox News host Mark Levin breaks down why it was crucial to take military action against the Iranian regime on ‘Hannity.’#fox #media #breakingnews #us #usa #n…
Secretary of State Marco Rubio just delivered a masterclass in Middle East realpolitik, calmly laying out exactly how the Iranian regime has pulled the strings on nearly every terrorist proxy, proxy war, and regional meltdown for decades.
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With the mullahs’ decades-long campaign of chaos finally met with decisive action, Rubio’s no-nonsense explanation is reminding everyone why the recent strike wasn’t just justified, it was overdue by several decades.
“Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong; for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.”So begins Psalm 37, one of my favorite passages in the Scriptures. What a great section of the Bible to meditate on today. Why? Because the most wicked leader in the world is dead.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was the longest-serving tyrant on planet Earth, coming to power on June 4, 1989. He terrorized his own nation — and terrorized Americans, Israelis, moderate Arabs, and many others — for nearly 37 years. But Khamenei was finally assassinated on Saturday in a joint operation by the United States and Israel.
He is now burning in the fires of eternal Hell, and rightly so.
The fact that Khamenei was killed on Day One — along with more than 40 other senior Iranian military and political officials — demonstrates what a massive success this extraordinary and historic joint military operation by U.S. and Israeli forces has already been.
And there is much more to come.
Khamenei’s assassination on the first day was a true miracle that required precise intelligence, pinpoint-accurate military targeting, and total surprise. Both President Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and their teams deserve enormous credit.
Indeed, they will go down in history for having achieved what none of their predecessors even dared to attempt.
Their senior advisers say that they have shown Trump and Netanyahu conclusive proof of Khamenei’s dead body.
Khamenei led the most wicked regime on the planet since the death of the Islamic Republic’s first wicked Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Ali Khomeini, who ousted the pro-American and pro-Israel Shah of Iran and arrived in Tehran to seize power on February 1, 1979. Khomeini ruled for a decade until his death in the spring of 1989. Previously Iran’s president from 1981 to 1989, Khamenei took over from Khomeini and proved far more diabolical and bloodthirsty than his mentor.
Khamenei held to a sick and twisted Shia Muslim End Times theology.
He ran an apocalyptic, genocidal death cult whose explicit mission was to destroy America, destroy Israel, destroy Judeo-Christian civilization, and bring about the End of Days and the return and global reign of the Twelfth Imam, also known as the Mahdi.
This is precisely why he wanted to build, buy, or steal nuclear weapons. This is also why he wanted ballistic missiles powerful enough to hit every American base in the Middle East, devastate the capitals and cities of our Arab allies, and deliver a nuclear knockout blow to the world’s only Jewish state.
And it’s why he was feverishly trying to develop and field intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching American cities and wiping them off the face of the Earth.
But now he is dead.
Thank God that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu were not intimidated. Thank God they worked together to stop World War III — and a Second Holocaust — despite the intense resistance of forces on the American Left and Right, and vicious international opposition as well.
Beginning in Trump’s first term, Trump and Netanyahu systematically applied economic, political, and military pressure on Khamenei and his fellow tyrants in Tehran.
When Trump came back to power in the wake of the Iranian-orchestrated seven-front war against Israel — the worst war in Israel’s modern history, one that began on October 7, 2023, and is not yet over after 875 days — he and Netanyahu began developing a detailed plan to finish the job once and for all.
Today, their plan worked — spectacularly. And Khamenei was not the only player taken off the chessboard. He was just the king.
Here is a partial list of other senior Iranian military and political officials who were assassinated on Saturday, according to the Israel Defense Forces and U.S. intelligence officials:
Reza Mozaffari-Nia — Former deputy defense minister and former chairman of the SPND Organization
Aziz Nasirzadeh — Defense Minister of Iran
Saleh Asadi — Head of the Intelligence Directorate of the Khatam al-Anbiya emergency command, and a senior intelligence officer of the Supreme Command of the Iranian Forces
Ali Shamkhani — Secretary of the Iranian Security Council
Mohammad Pakpour — Commander of the IRGC since Operation “Rising Lion” and one of the leaders of the “destruction of Israel” plan
Mohammad Shirazi — Head of the Military Bureau of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since 1989
Hossein Jabal Amelian — Deputy Defense Minister and chairman of the SPND Organization
All Israel News, based near Jerusalem,covers news and eventsimpacting Israel and the Middle East for the Evangelical world.
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