3.23 - The Three Witnesses, And The One Testimony

Chapter 23 The Three Witnesses, And The One Testimony

(1 John 5:6-12)

Transcendental and Experimental in St John—His Gospel an Autobiography—The Three Heavenly Witnesses—One Jesus Christ—“Through Water and Blood”—The Lord’s Baptism and Crucifixion—Crises of St John’s Faith—The Testimony of Pentecost—Three Witnesses merged in One—“Making God a Liar”—Witness of the Christian Consciousness.

―—―♦——— This is He who came by the way of water and blood,—Jesus Christ:
Not in the water only, but in the water and in the blood,
And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth.
For three are they that bear witness
The Spirit, and the water, and the blood;
And the three amount to the one.
If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater;
For the witness of God is this,—that He hath borne witness concerning His Son.
He that believeth on the Son of God, bath the witness in him;
He that believeth not God, hath made Him a liar,
Because he hath not believed the witness that God hath witnessed
concerning His Son.
And the witness is this,
That God hath given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son:
He that hath the Son, hath the life; and he that hath not the Son of
God, hath not the life.

— 1 John 5:6-12        

―—―♦———

ST JOHN’s Gospel is at once the transcendental and the experimental Gospel. Volat avis sine meta; but as the eagle bears you with him, you feel the measured beat of his pinions and the warm pulse of his heart. In his loftiest soarings his eye is stillupon the earth. There is nothing rapt and over-wrought, nothing occult or mythopoeic, about the writer of the Fourth Gospel. Not for a moment does he lose himself, or wander off into the allegorizing, Gnostical abstractions so common in his time. Whatever he writes—in Gospel or Epistle—is written by way of “witness,” with the verified facts of experience and the necessities of the situation held steadily in view. While his writings are comparatively sparing in description and personal detail, and the Apostle John ranks among the most metaphysical and absorbed of thinkers, closer acquaintance with him shows a mind observant no less than introspective, that for all its stillness of attitude is quite alive to its surroundings, and which reflects in a peculiarly sensitive and delicate way the influences playing upon it (compare pp. 52-53). The Apostle rises on the wings of the spirit above the world of sense, but it is to survey that world with more penetrating gaze; and he notices a hundred things which others overlook—the singular turns of the conversation with the woman of Samaria, the “lad” with the five barley loaves and two fishes among the famished multitude reported by Andrew, Mary’s “sitting in the house” when Martha’s quick ear and busy foot brought her to meet the Lord as He approached Bethany, the “prophecy” in which Caiaphas determined on the death of Jesus, the “blood and water” issuing at the soldier’s spear-thrust from the Saviour’s side, the share of Nicodemus in the burying of Jesus and the mixture and weight of the spices brought by him for embalming His body, the meaning of the grave-clothes left in the tomb of Jesus and their careful folding. Such particulars, trivial as they might seem to a hasty reader, arrest St John’s attention and linger in his mind, to reveal afterwards their significance.¹⁰¹

These and many circumstantials in his narrative show in St John a minutely attentive and selective eye, a memory on which scene and incident, and feature of character and turn of phrase that had once impressed it, photographed themselves with sharp distinctness. Hence, while it is a work of supreme theological value, St John’s Gospel is also of primary historical moment. It has supplied the chronological framework of the ministry of Jesus; and it corrects and supplements repeatedly, sometimes designedly, the inferences otherwise drawn from the more loosely framed Synoptic narrative. The opening words of this Epistle (“That which was from the beginning: which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, etc.”) indicate the double character of this Apostle’s mind—its union of speculation and simplicity, its sublime mysticism and its open-eyed practical sense, its perfect fusion of the temporal and the eternal. In this combination of qualities apparently disparate lies the unique gift of the author of the Fourth Gospel, his power to see and to represent God manifest in the flesh.¹⁰² This twofold sensibility, equally true to the natural and spiritual, which in some form or other distinguishes all the greatest and sanest minds, is the key to the symbolism which pervades St John’s writings. His imaginative method differed essentially from the popular allegorism of the day; it is more poetical than philosophical in nature, and was the expression of the writer’s genius and cast of mind, rather than of any prevalent school, Alexandrian or Palestinian. The Gospel of John is in effect, though unconsciously for the most part, a spiritual autobiography. The writer discloses himself silently, in the most naive and intimate manner possible, as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” After he has told the story of the first miracle, he writes, “This beginning of His signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed on Him” (John 2:11); and at the end (John 20:30) he sums up all he has recorded as “the signs which Jesus did in the presence of His disciples.” As we read and re-read his Gospel, we become gradually aware that we are retracing a great inward experience; we are following the drama of a soul’s awakening, the growth of a mighty faith and love in the heart of the man who wrote this tale. The Fourth Gospel is the record of St John’s saving acquaintance with Jesus. While this book has a commanding objective unity, and is the history of Christ’s self-revelation, of the Father’s revelation in Him to the world, moving on to its climax through the contrasted developments of faith and unbelief amongst men, it has no less an interior unity lying in the breast of the author, as it relates the rise and progress of his knowledge of the Son of God. It is the story of the manifestation of the life eternal through the Incarnate Word to the soul of St John. The movements and crises of the narrative, as he unfolds it, were points of vital moment and of crisis in his own discipleship; these supplied him with a mirror to reflect and a key to unlock the mystery of the relations of Jesus to the world. Of this personal and subjective aspect of his record, of its autobiographical nature, the Apostle indeed advertized us, when he said in referring to his testimony about Christ, “The life was manifested, and we have, seen it; and we bear witness and report to you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested to us” (1 John 1:2).

We dismiss, without misgiving or regret, the clause respecting the heavenly Trinity from 1 John 5:7-8 of the received text. The rejected sentence is a striking statement of the Trinitarian creed of the early Church, to which St John might have subscribed in due place and form; but it is irrelevant to this context, and foreign to the Apostle’s mode of conception. What the writer here asserts and seeks to vindicate against the world (1 John 5:1-5), is the Church’s victorious faith in the Son of God. To invoke witnesses for this “in heaven” would be nothing to the purpose. The contrast present to his thought is not that between “heaven” and “earth” as spheres of testimony, but only between the various elements of the testimony itself (1 John 5:6-10).¹⁰³ The passage of the Three Heavenly Witnesses is now on all hands admitted to be a theological gloss. It first appears in two obscure Latin writings of the fifth century, and made its way probably from the margin into the text of the Latin Version; no Greek codex of the New Testament exhibits it earlier than the fifteenth century.¹⁰⁴

“This,” the Apostle writes in 1 John 5:6—this “Son of God,” as we hold Jesus to be (1 John 5:5)—“is He that came through water and blood,—Jesus Christ.” By this time “Jesus Christ” and “Jesus the Son of God” had become terms synonymous in Christian speech (see pp. 317-318 above). The great Church controversy of the age turned upon their association (see Chapter 14 and Chapter 19). St John insists at every turn upon the oneness of Jesus Christ; the belief that “Jesus is the Christ” he makes the test of a genuine Christianity (1 John 5:1; compare 1 John 2:22; 1 John 3:23, 1 John 4:2-3, 1 John 4:15). The name thus appended to 1 John 5:6 is no idle repetition; it is a solemn reassertion and summation of the Christian creed in two words—Jesus Christ. And He is Jesus Christ, inasmuch as He “came through water and blood—not in the water only.” This passage brings to a point the polemical aim towards which the whole Epistle, in one way or other, has been directed (see pp. 61-64, 363): “These things I have written,” St John explained in 1 John 2:26, “concerning those that lead you into error”—viz. the “antichrists” and “false prophets” of 1 John 2:18-26 and 1 John 4:1-6. The heretics whom the Apostle opposes allowed, and maintained in their own way, that Jesus Christ “came by water,”¹⁰⁵ when He received His Messianic anointing at John’s baptism and the man Jesus thus became the Christ; but the “coming through blood” they abhorred. They regarded the death of the cross, befalling the human Jesus, as a punishment of shame inflicted on the flesh, in which the Divine or Dei-form Christ could have no part. Upon this Cerinthian view, the Christ who “came through water,” went away rather than came “through blood”; the Doketists saw in the death upon the cross nothing that witnessed of the Godhead in Jesus Christ, nothing that spoke of Divine forgiveness and cleansing (see 1 John 1:7, 1 John 1:9), but an eclipse and abandonment by God, a surrender of the earthly Jesus to the powers of darkness. This error revived in a new form what the Apostle Paul had called “the scandal of the cross.” As the crucifixion had seemed to him, in his Jewish unbelief, a disproof of the Messiahship of Jesus, so to these later misbelievers it was evidence that Jesus, who had been one with the Christ, was a helpless, forsaken man. But St John had found in the shedding of His blood a grander evidence of His Sonship to God, the demonstration of His perfect harmony with and understanding of the Divine will and love to men (1 John 4:9-10). The simple words “that came” are of marked significance in this context; for “the coming One”¹⁰⁶ was a standing name for the Messiah, now recognized as the Son of God. “He that came,” therefore, signifies “He who appeared on earth as the Divine Messiah”; and St John declares that in thus appearing Jesus Christ disclosed Himself through the two signs of blood and water. These emblems signalize two great stages in the Messianic path of Jesus: the baptism of water at the hands of John, who proclaimed Him the Lamb of God bearing the world’s sin and at the same time the Son of God (John 1:29-34), while the descent of the Holy Spirit and the Father’s voice heard from heaven designated Him in this double character of Christhood and Sonship; and the baptism of blood (see Luke 12:49-50)—His own blood—which instead of contradicting consummated the water-baptism. For in this blood-shedding Jesus Christ fulfilled His noblest office, He accomplished the universal expiation (1 John 2:1; Revelation 1:5; Revelation 5:9; Revelation 7:14). So through the dark gateway of Calvary and the grave He passed to the throne of universal Lordship, and by this passage “came” to His Church in the sovereign power of the Spirit bestowed as the fruit of His redeeming death (see John 14:18; John 7:39, John 13:31-32; Luke 24:26).

Thus the inauguration and consummation of our Lord’s ministry were marked by the two supreme manifestations of His Messiahship; of both events this Apostle had been a near and deeply interested witness. Under the sign of “the water” he gathers up all the testimony to Jesus Christ, from man and from God, that attended His baptism; under the sign of the “blood,” all that centres in the cross. When he speaks of the Lord as “coming through (traversing) water and blood,” these are viewed historically as steps in His march of humiliation, suffering, and victory, as signal epochs in the continuous disclosure of Himself to men and crises in His past relations to the world; when he says “in the water and in the blood,” they are apprehended as abiding facts, each making its distinct and living appeal to our faith and together serving to mark out the ground upon which Christianity stands. In the above interpretation of verse 6 the opinions of the best expositors concur. And this is precisely the line of thought which corresponds to St John’s personal experience, and harmonizes with the tenor and spirit of the Fourth Gospel. The Evangelist was a pupil of the Baptist John. It was the testimony of his former master, and the words and scenes connected with the baptism of Jesus, that led this young and ardent disciple to the knowledge of Christ; so first he was taught—imperfectly at the beginning, and more clearly as the course of events threw light on his first experiences—to discern in Jesus the Christ and Son of God (John 1:19-51). There followed three years of education in this truth under the Master Himself; then another crisis, which for the moment discomfited, but in the end reinforced and perfected, his faith, when, standing at the foot of the cross, the disciple whom Jesus loved watched his Lord die a death of blood and horror. The witness of “the blood” which was to the world’s eyes, as it was designed by His Jewish judges to be, a complete disproof of the claims of Jesus, had in God’s amazing wisdom and mercy become the means of enhancing those claims in the highest degree and of giving them eternal validity (Revelation 1:5-6; Revelation 5:9-14). As He said, so it had proved, that His blood was “shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28). Through the virtue of His cross Christ Jesus, as His Spirit and Church together testified, had “come and preached peace to the far off and peace to the nigh,” granting “access to both in one Spirit unto the Father” (Ephesians 2:16-18). The offence of the cross had shown itself already in many lands God’s power unto salvation; and St John’s triumphant saying, “Not in the water only, but in the water and in¹⁰⁷the blood!” echoes St Paul’s exclamation, “Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ!” (Galatians 6:14). The Apostle John, standing beneath the cross and waiting for a sign of its meaning, had seen the blood and water together stream from the pierced heart of Jesus at the thrust of the soldier’s spear (John 19:34-35); the union became in his eyes emblematic of the double efficacy of Christ’s salvation. It united the beginning and the end in the testimony of Jesus, the new birth of water and Spirit and the redemption. through blood experienced by His people (John 3:5; Revelation 1:5; Revelation 7:14)—the water of purification and consecration, enriched and vitalized by the blood of propitiation. So the whole mission of Jesus was summed up, and expressed itself, in that strange mingled current, which gushed from the heart of the slain Christ to give life and cleansing to the world. This verse stands in much the same relation to the Christian Sacraments as the related teaching of John 3:1-36 and John 6:1-71. Neither here nor there is any direct allusion made upon the writer’s part to the ritual ordinances; in both instances there is a clear analogy of meaning, such as could hardly fail to be present to the thoughts of the Apostle and his first readers. The two sacraments symbolize the facts and truths assumed by St John in this place. Observing them in the obedience of faith, we associate ourselves visibly with “the water and the blood,”—with Christ baptized and crucified, living and dying for us. But to see in those observances the veritable water and blood that were here intended—to make the Apostle mean that the water of Baptism and the cup of the Lord’s Supper are the primary witnesses to Him and the essential instruments of salvation, and that the former sacrament is unavailing without the addition of the latter (as though he had written “Not in Baptism only, but also in the Eucharist”)—is to trifle with his declaration and to empty out its historical content. The sacramentarian paraphrase substitutes the signs for the things signified, and puts the sacraments into the place which belongs to Christ alone.¹⁰⁸

Nearer to St John’s thought lies the inference that Christ is our anointed Priest as well as Prophet, making sacrifice for our sin while He is our guide and light of life. To the virtue of His life and teaching must be added the virtue of His passion and death. Had He come “in the water” only, had Jesus Christ stopped short of Calvary and drawn back from the blood-baptism, there had been no cleansing from sin for us, no witness to the chief function of His Christ-hood. “The man who thinks to find Him in, the water alone ‘has not the Son,’ and therefore ‘has neither the Father,’ nor ‘the life’” (1 John 5:12; 1 John 2:23: so Th. Zahn). The Lord Jesus was “straitened till” His final “baptism was accomplished,” for His mission up to that point remained unfulfilled (Luke 12:50); the “fire” that He “came to cast on the earth” was kindled from the flame which rose heaven-high upon the altar of Calvary. A third crisis came in St John’s experience as a Christian believer with the descent of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. How much this event imported to him is manifest from the length at which he relates our Lord’s preparatory words on the matter in his Gospel. This third manifestation of the Son of God—the baptism of the Spirit following on that of water and of blood, a baptism in which Jesus Christ was agent and no longer subject—verified and made good the other two. “And the Spirit,” he says, “is that which beareth witness” (τὸμαρτυροῦν, “the witnessing power” 1 John 5:6)¹⁰⁹: the water and the blood, though they have so much to say, must have spoken in vain and become mere voices of past history but for this abiding Witness and Advocate (see John 14:16; John 15:26, John 16:7-15). “He shall testify concerning me,” said Jesus; “He, the Spirit of truth, shall glorify me, for He will receive of what is mine, and declare it to you.” “The Spirit,” whose witness comes last in the order of distinct manifestation, is first in principle; His breath animated the whole testimony; hence He takes the lead in the final enumeration of 1 John 5:8. The witness of the water had the Spirit’s attestation by act, in place of word; the Baptist “testified, saying, I have beheld the Spirit descending as a dove out of heaven; and it abode upon Him. And I had not known Him; but He who sent me to baptize in water, He said to me, Upon whomsoever thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and abiding upon Him, that is He that baptizeth in the Holy Spirit” (John 1:32-33). The first human witness to Jesus was “full of the Holy Spirit” (Luke 1:15); his first public attestation was sealed by the Spirit. The three witnesses of this passage are all latent in the testimony of St John’s earlier master: the Baptist declared, “I baptize you in water, He shall baptize you in the Holy Ghost and fire” (the first and third witness); he said again, “Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world” (the second witness—of “the blood”). The testimony of the Holy Spirit, which on the day of Pentecost burst forth in flame cast down to the earth, shoots its hidden fires through the entire historical gospel; and it is that same gospel—the record of the life and death of Jesus—which the Holy Spirit perpetually “takes and declares” to men (John 16:15). He transfuses it with His life and heat, and age after age burns it anew into the conscience and spirit of mankind.

“It is the Spirit,” therefore, “that bears witness”; in all true witness He is operative, and there is no testifying without Him. “For the Spirit is truth,” is “the truth”¹¹⁰—Jesus called Him repeatedly “the Spirit of the truth.” Truth in its substance and vital power is lodged with Him; in this element He works; this effluence He ever breathes forth: He is “the truth,” as Christ for whom He speaks is “the truth” (John 14:9). “The truth” is the sole object and content of genuine witness-bearing. The testimony which men give to Christian verities, however formally correct in historical fact or theoretical doctrine, is untrue for themselves and unconvincing to others—unless the indwelling Spirit of Christ animates it and testifies through them. Practically, “the Spirit is the truth”; whatever is stated in Christian matters without His attestation, is something less or other than the truth. A still larger meaning is implicit in St John’s apophthegm: the full and perfect “truth” lies in the realm of “the Spirit,” in the region of the eternal, the Divine, behind all the things of time and sense (compare Hebrews 11:1, Hebrews 11:3, 2 Corinthians 4:18; 1 Corinthians 13:12-13).

Such, then, are the “three witnesses” which were gathered “into one” in the Apostle John’s experience, as testifying to the truth about Christ and His salvation: “the three,” he says, “agree in one,”¹¹¹ or more strictly, “amount to the one thing” (καὶοἱτρεῖςεἰςτὸἕνεἰσιν, 1 John 5:8); they converge to this single point. The Jordan banks, Calvary, the upper chamber in Jerusalem; the beginning, the end of Jesus Christ’s earthly course, and the new beginning which knows no end; His Divine life and words and works, His propitiatory death, the promised and perpetual gift of the Spirit to His Church—these three cohere into one solid, imperishable witness, which is the demonstration alike of history and personal experience and the Spirit of God. They have one outcome, as they have one purpose; and it is this—viz. “that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son” (1 John 5:11). The revelation of Jesus as the Son of God is complete from the day of Pentecost onwards; and the Church from that day repeats unfalteringly the witness of the Baptist and the Evangelist, with an ever-multiplying concert of voices, through the whole earth: “I have seen, we have seen, and borne witness that this is the Son of God, that the Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world” (John 1:34; 1 John 4:14). The Apostle has told us in 1 John 5:6-8 what are, to his mind, the proofs of the testimony of Jesus—evidences that must in the end convince and “overcome the world” (1 John 5:5). So far as the general cause of Christianity is concerned, this is enough. But it concerns each man to whom this evidence comes to realize for himself the weight and seriousness of the testimony meeting him. St John points with solemn emphasis in 1 John 5:9-10 to the Author of the threefold manifestation. “If we receive the witness of men”—if credible human testimony wins our ready assent—“the witness of God is greater.” The declaration of the Gospel brings every man that hears it face to face with God (compare 1 Thessalonians 2:13). And of all subjects on which God might speak to men, of all revelations that He has made or might conceivably make, this, St John feels, is the supreme and critical matter—“the testimony of God, viz. the fact that He has testified¹¹²concerningHis Son.” The Gospel is, in St Paul’s words, “ God’s good news about His Son “ (Romans 1:2-3). God insists upon our believing this witness; it is that in which He is supremely concerned, which He asserts and commends to men above all else. Concerning this God the Father spoke audibly from heaven, saying at the anointing and again at the transfiguration of Jesus, “This is my Son, the beloved: hear Him.” St John had listened to those mysterious voices, and they had taught him the infinite importance of a true faith in the Sonship of Jesus. His resurrection was a crowning vindication of Jesus by the Eternal Father, who thus declared by act and deed that in spite of—nay, because of—His death, He was more than ever the Son of His good pleasure (Acts 13:32-35; Romans 1:4). And finally, the descent of the Holy Spirit, bestowed at the request of the exalted Jesus (John 14:16, Luke 24:49), was a glorious and demonstrative witness of God’s mind concerning His Son Jesus, as St. Peter forthwith argued on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:32-36).

Let the man, therefore, who with this evidence before him remains unbelieving, understand what he is about; let him know whom he is rejecting and contradicting. “He has made God a liar”—he has given the lie to the All-holy and Almighty One, the Lord God of truth. This Apostle said the same terrible thing about the impenitent denier of his own sin (1 John 1:10); the two denials are cognate, and run up into the same condition of defiance toward God. “He that honoureth not the Son,” Jesus said, “honoureth not the Father who sent Him”; “they have both seen and hated both me and my Father” (John 5:23; John 15:23). Such, the Apostle urges, is the consequence of disbelief in Jesus Christ; it brings men into diametrical opposition to God, and that upon the point which touches most nearly the, Divine truth and honour, viz. the witness that He has given to His own Son. On the other hand, “he who believes on¹¹³the Son of God,” “who has heard from the Father, and comes” to Christ accordingly (John 6:45), finds “within himself” the confirmation of the witness he received (1 John 5:10a). His inner consciousness and the fruits of faith in his life¹¹⁴ verify the witness of God about Christ which he has accepted. The testimony of “the Spirit and the water and the blood” forms no mere historical, objective proof; it enters the man’s own nature, and becomes the regnant principle, the creative factor of his new life. The Apostle might have added the subjective confirmation affirmed in 1 John 5:10-11 as a fourth, experimental witness to the other three; but, to his conception, the sense of inward life and power attained by Christian faith is itself the witness of the Spirit translated into terms of experience, realized and made operative in personal consciousness. “The water that I will give,” said Jesus, “will be within him a fountain of water, springing up unto life eternal” (John 4:14). It is thus that the believer on the Son of God “puts his seal to it that God is true.” His testimony is not to the general fact that there is life and truth in Christ; but “this is the witness that God gave to us life eternal, and this life is in his Son” (John 4:11). This witness of God concerning His Son is not merely a truth to be believed or denied, it is a life to be chosen or refused. On this choice turns the eternal life or death of all to whom Christ offers Himself: “He that hath the Son, hath life; he that hath not the Son of God, hath not life” (John 4:12).

“Life” appears everywhere in St John as a gift, not an acquisition. Faith accordingly is a grace rather, than a virtue; it is a yielding to God’s power, rather than the exerting of our own. It is not so much that we apprehend Christ; He apprehends us,—our souls are laid hold of and possessed by the truth concerning Him. Our part is but to receive God’s bounty pressed upon us in Christ; it is merely to consent to the strong purpose of His love, to allow Him (as St Paul puts it) to “work in us to will and to work, on behalf of His good pleasure” (Php 2:13). As this operation proceeds and the truth concerning Christ takes practical possession of our nature, the conviction that we have eternal life in Him becomes increasingly settled and firm. Rothe aptly says upon this passage: “Faith is not a mere witness on the man’s part to the Object of his faith; it is a witness which the man receives from that Object. ... In its first beginnings faith is, no doubt, mainly the acceptance of testimony from without; but the element of trust involved in this acceptance includes the beginning of an inner experience of that which is believed. This trust arises from the attraction which the Object of our faith has exercised upon us; it rests on the consciousness of a vital connection between ourselves and that Object. In the measure in which we accept the Divine witness, our inner susceptibility to its working increases, and thus there is formed in us a certainty of faith which rises unassailably above all skepticism.” The language of St John in this last chapter of his Epistle breathes the force of spiritual conviction raised to its highest potency. For him perfect love has now cast out fear, and perfect faith has banished every shadow of doubt. “Believing on the name of the Son of God,” he “knows that he has eternal life” (1 John 5:13). With him the transcendental has become the experimental, and no breach is left any more between them.