This quarter’s lessons will be focusing on the Gospel of John, the disciple of Jesus who lived into the 90s of the Cristian era. The other three gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke—are called the synoptic gospels, because they have largely the “same view” of Jesus and record many of the same incidents.
But the Gospel According to John is very different. Its focus is the divinity of Christ. John wanted to show Jesus as divine, as THE Son of God. He tells us, in John 20:30-31 that Jesus did many things that he hasn’t put in his book, but the incidents he has chosen, he specifically chose so that, “you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.”
It seems that John foresaw what would become the perennial error or heresy about Jesus Christ: That he was just another man. A wise man, a good man, a moral example, even a prophet (as the Muslims allow), but ultimately just another man.
So John has written a gospel that does not leave us the option of believing that Jesus was just another man. With this goal, it is not surprising that John includes many of Jesus’ miracles. His many miracles were signs of His divinity.
It was left to John to tell the story of Jesus’ first miracle, turning water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana, up in the Galilean country. None of the other gospel writers record this event. One thing that stands out is that Jesus’ mother, Mary, was also at the wedding feast; she was a relative of one of the parties being married, and perhaps also one of the hostesses. She approached Jesus, telling him that they had run out of wine. Jesus’ first miracle was a way of honoring his mother, according to the fifth commandment.
Another thing worth mentioning is that Jesus took time out from his brief earthly ministry (of only three and a half years) to attend a wedding feast. He thus honored the institution of marriage, which is what we would expect given that He established marriage in the Garden of Eden. Gen. 2:19-24. And He later said,
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Mat. 19:4-6
Marriage between one man and one woman—as established at the creation and that Christ honored and taught—is all Christians have on offer, and all we will ever have. Anything else—polygamy, polyamory, same-sex “marriage”, a hundred different genders, etc.—is coming not from Christ but from the adversary of souls, from the father of lies, from the pit of hell. Anyone trying to gain acceptance for these things, well, we know for whom such a one is working, and it is not Jesus Christ.
Healing the official’s son, as narrated in John 4:46-54, is another miracle only John, among the gospel writers, records. When the official realized that his son had been healed at the exact moment of the day when Jesus had told him, “Go, your son will live,” he and his entire household believed that Jesus was the Christ.
Later, Jesus goes down to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals, and visits the Pool of Bethesda. There He meets a man who has been invalided for 38 years, and asks him, “Do you want to get well?” “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The lesson is that if you want to get well, dispense with all other methods and cures. Christ will heal you, and the healing He supplies does not depend upon human effort; you don’t need others to carry you to troubled waters. You need only believe and then act upon that belief, which is what this man did: he heard Jesus command, “pick up your mat and walk,” and he obeyed. If in true faith you obey Jesus’ command, Jesus Himself will supply the power necessary to your obedience. Too often we do not believe and hence we do not obey.
Ah, but the Pharisees didn’t like that man carrying his mat on the Sabbath day. They had lots of rules about what you could carry on the Sabbath, and how far. But these were invented human traditions made up by the Pharisees. Jesus ignored them. Jesus said, “My father is always at His work, and I too am working.” John 5:17. The Sabbath isn’t a day off for God the Father, nor for Jesus Christ. Jesus’ work was blessing and healing, and that went on seven days a week.
In effect, Jesus changed the subject from Sabbath-breaking to blasphemy; Jesus was making a point about His divinity and His Sonship to the Father. He points out that God never ceases His work of sustaining the universe, keeping the “natural” laws in operation, so that we can all live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). Who do you think is doing that, seven days a week? asks Jesus.
The more shocking thing to the Pharisees quickly becomes not that Christ is, in their eyes, profaning the Sabbath but that Christ is implying that he, too, is God, and he, too, sustains all things by His powerful word (Heb. 1:3). The point of John’s telling of this story is to highlight the divinity of Christ. This is why John begins his gospel with this famous passage:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. John 1:1-3
Christ was with the Father in the beginning, He was God, and all things were made through Christ; the Father created through Jesus Christ (Heb. 1:2). Who knows, then, how better to keep the Sabbath than the One who rested on the Seventh day in the beginning? The Pharisees are trying to tell God how to keep a Sabbath that He Himself established at the creation. This is John’s point.