Providing Testimony

The Christian Understanding of Reality
(1 John 5:6-15)

Christianity makes a comprehensive and paradoxical claim – that truth is objective, yet can be experienced by us. In this twelfth address on 1 John – a New Testament letter written to counter an early form of New Age thought – Rob Yule explains that the Christian understanding of reality is holistic, integrating aspects which we often separate, such as the divine and the human, objective and subjective, present and future. Rob preached this message at Greyfriars' Classical Service on 26 November 2006, challenging people to recognise Jesus as the revealer of reality.

A disquieting feature of our post-modern age is the loss of objective truth. Postmodernism is the view that one person's perspective is as valid as anyone else's. The realm of faith is viewed as quite different from the realm of science, as having no objective basis in reason or reality. Thus faith is patronisingly reduced to the status of mere personal preference or opinion.

I'm reminded of the New Yorker cartoon in which Satan welcomes people to hell with the words, 'You'll find that there's no right or wrong here – just whatever works for you.'

Today few people bother to discuss the truth of something. They just play the victim role, shout louder, or try to bully others into submitting to their viewpoint.

This passage in 1 John makes a paradoxical claim: on the one hand that Christianity is based on objective truth, and on the on the other hand that this truth can be personally experienced by us. Truth is personal – it centres on Jesus Christ. Christ encounters us with his claim to be the truth, and reveals his truth to us by the Spirit. Our Christian testimony is that we meet the truth in Jesus Christ, and that his truth changes our lives.

Fully divine and fully human

The objective aspect of Christian truth is summed up in John's statement that Jesus Christ 'came by water and blood' (1 John 5:6). Commentators have given three different explanations of this enigmatic saying:

1. The Protestant reformers Luther and Calvin said that the water and blood refers to the two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper. That makes the saying refer to how we come to experience Jesus Christ in worship, rather than how Jesus 'came' historically into the world.
2. Augustine, the greatest Christian thinker of antiquity, says that it refers to the blood and water which flowed from Jesus' side when the soldier pierced him with a spear when he was hanging on the cross. At least this refers to how Jesus 'came'. To shorten the agony of crucifixion victims soldiers would break their legs so that they would die quicker by asphyxiation. 'But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.' (John 19:33-34). The post-mortem separation of blood and serum is evidence that Jesus was truly dead.
3. Modern commentators like John Stott take a third view, saying that water and blood represent historical experiences through which Jesus passed during his earthly life. Water signifies his baptism, with which his ministry began, and blood represents his death on the cross, which his ministry ended.

My interpretation is a variation on this viewpoint. In my view water represents Jesus' birth – which began with the rupturing of the membrane of the womb and the release of the amniotic fluid, as happens with the birth of every human being. Blood represents his cruel death by crucifixion. In other words, 'water and blood' signify the reality of Jesus' humanity, over against all heresies, ancient or modern, that minimise or deny his true humanity.

John was opposing an early New Age heresy when he wrote these words. In his day – late in the 1st century – the equivalent of New Age thought today was Gnosticism. A 1st century Gnostic thinker named Cerinthus said Jesus was not born of a virgin, but was the son of Joseph and Mary by normal sexual relations, who grew up to be wiser than other teachers. According to Cerinthus, at his baptism, the Christ-Spirit descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove. He then preached about the unknown God, and performed miracles. But at the end of his life, as he died on the cross, the Christ-Spirit left Jesus and returned to God. So Jesus suffered, but the Christ-Spirit didn't suffer – rather as Muslims hold, that God's agent couldn't suffer or be defeated.

This kind of thinking is typical of Gnostic-New Age thinking down the centuries. It drives a wedge between the material and the spiritual. It removes God to a higher, spiritual realm where he can't be touched by human sorrow and affliction.

By contrast, the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ was born fully divine and fully human by means of a virgin birth. Strictly speaking, a virginal conception followed by a normal birth. The virgin Mary conceived by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, not by sexual intercourse (Luke 1:34-35). But Jesus' subsequent birth was entirely natural. He came 'by water' – by the breaking of the waters of the womb in childbirth. He was a real human being who entered life just like us. John affirms this over against those who would spiritualise our faith, denigrate our humanity, and deny the incarnation of the Son of God.

John also says that Jesus Christ 'came by blood' – he died a real and cruel death, shedding his blood and dying in anguish on the cross. John affirms this over against adherents of triumphalist faiths – like the followers of Islam – who deny that God would allow his Son to suffer and experience abandonment. Against this heresy John insists on the divine-human nature of Jesus from the time of his birth to his death on the cross.

The denial of the incarnation of the Son of God is a common error even today, perpetuated by best-sellers like The Da Vinci Code. But the Bible refutes it, because, as John Stott says, 'If the Son of God did not take to himself our nature in his birth and our sins in his death, he cannot reconcile us to God'. (The Epistles of John [London, Tyndale Press, 1964], p. 179).

Fully objective and fully subjective

In addition to water and blood, John says that the Spirit also 'testifies' or 'bears witness' (1 John 5:6b). This is the subjective aspect of Christian truth. The Holy Spirit is what Bishop John Taylor called 'the go-between God' – because the Spirit links us with God and makes God real in our experience. The Spirit bears witness to Christ, points us to Christ, makes Christ real to us. The Spirit also changes us, opening closed minds and softening hard hearts – enabling those who were spiritually unreceptive to believe in Christ and receive Christ.

The Holy Spirit's testimony, John says, is in the hearts of believers, bringing them to faith and personal experience of Christ: 'Those who believe in the Son of God have this testimony in their hearts.' (1 John 5:10). Theologian John Calvin called the Holy Spirit 'the inner teacher', because it is through the Spirit's 'secret testimony', 'secret working' or 'illumination' in our hearts and minds that we are brought to faith in Christ (Institutes, I. 7. 4, III. 1. 1, 3-4, III. 2. 33-36). It is the Spirit who opens our eyes to see who Jesus is and to receive him as our Lord and Saviour.

So we have here two kinds of testimony which corroborate each other: objective and subjective, history and experience, water and blood on the one hand and the Spirit and illumination on the other. The perfect agreement or harmony between the outer and the inner, between objective reality and subjective experience, echoes the biblical criterion that truth is confirmed by the agreement of two or more witnesses – never merely one witness on its own (Deuteronomy 19:15).

Fully present and fully future

To believe in Jesus Christ is to experience eternal life. He is the revealer of reality. 'God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.' (1 John 5:11). The Son is life. To receive Christ is to receive life, eternal life. 'Eternal life' is the free gift of God. It rejuvenates and revitalises our lives. Those who are converted are re-energised and transformed by God's life. It is impossible to truly meet Jesus Christ without having your life radically changed. Jesus Christ, God's Son, is life! That's the testimony of everyone who has experienced the joy and wonder of conversion.

Eternal life is God's life, the presence of the age to come. Jewish theology calls this the olam haba, the life of 'the age to come'. In the person of Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead, the life to come has broken in to 'the present age', the olam hazeh – and can be received, experienced and enjoyed by believers now. Conversion joins these two realms, bringing the believer, who lives in this present world, into a foretaste of the life to come. The newbirth detaches us from allegiance to this present world, and aligns us to God and his coming kingdom.

In this life every human being has a real choice – between faith and doubt, between belief and unbelief. There's no neutrality. 'Those who believe in the Son of God have this testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe God have made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son.' (1 John 5:10). Since Jesus Christ rose from the dead and reveals the life to come, your attitude to him determines your personal destiny. Why don't you make the right choice today?

Rob Yule, 26 November 2006
© 2006, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church