A Complete Christology in Just Three Weeks

What was the greatest thing to come out of Ephesus? Not the temple of Diana, one of the seven wonders of the world. That was gone long ago. All that remains of it is a few scattered stones. The greatest thing to come out of Ephesus was the Gospel of John, revealing the Glory of Christ. The life of Christ shines there and lights up our dark world like a sun that never sets.

The Christology of John is something to behold! Christ is the Son, the uniquely begotten One (3:16). His life is just that: a life of sonship—divinely unique—all the way. This is revealed in all his actions. Every move he makes is filial. He is always dependent on the Father, never independent.

No other apostle was so close to Jesus as the beloved John, and none lived so long. He who leaned on Jesus’ bosom sees Christ as living in the bosom of his Father. John outlived Peter and Paul by a whole generation. He is the only original apostle who had a three-generation ministry. In his time the New Testament center of gravity had shifted three times: from Jerusalem to Antioch to Ephesus, which had now become the great center.

In John’s world the big word was “Logos” (Word). For the Jew it meant God’s Word in action, and for the Greek it meant reason and enlightenment. John seized it. It is his word, made to order for his Christ.

John sees something here. It is something we may miss, despite his simplicity of style and speech. “No man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him” (Luke 10:22). This great saying headlights all that John highlights in his Gospel (see 1:18; 3:35; chapters 5; 6, and 8). Jesus himself said, after uttering these words: “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see.”

Other religions at most claim for their so-called in-carnations men who became gods. In the Incarnation God became man. But John reveals more. The master plan is sonship. The Father is the source of all of Christ’s life, of all the action; the Son is all his, uniquely begotten; the Son through the Holy Spirit brings into birth many sons in his image and likeness, because they have the same new life. So with John it is not only Christ’s sonship but ours—in His.

Mystery? Indeed! It is loaded with mystery upon mystery: how the eternal life that was in the Father could be begotten in a human body like ours, and then be begotten again in us—all without any loss of His life in the exchange. John does not explain or argue these mysteries, and yet he succeeds in showing us how they all happen. All of this takes place by the process of birth, in our case the “new birth.” Our new “sonship” life is like His because it is His. Not by imitation, but by birth.

A new kind of life was brought into this world when Christ was born. It is a communicable life—all of it. John says so: “Of his fullness have we all received …” (John 1:16). John, in effect, is saying: “Jesus gave to us disciples everything he had and was.” This has to be one of the most weighty testimonies in the New Testament!

This new life is “eternal life.” Yet it is not only a life to come, in heaven. John hardly even talks about that. It is for here and now. It is a life that fully fits into all of our earthly life, transforming us as we live it. None of us had it at birth. Christ lived it out fully before us. Then gloriously, in his death and resurrection and by his Spirit, he made way for that same life to enter us and live in us. There is no possible way for us to live the life of Christ until he comes into us to live it. This life is a person, Christ himself.

But there is yet more. This life John describes is to burst all bounds and become “abiding life,” “abundant life.” Out from our innermost being are to flow “rivers of living water.” It is not only a life of His indwelling but of mutual indwelling: “I in you, and you in me.”

In every way John’s concept of sonship is unique. It is always qualified and bounded by humanity—in Christ’s case and in ours. Christ is always subject to his Father, submissive, obedient, constantly dependent—doing nothing on his own: “I can of mine own self do nothing.” And this is the way we too are to live this sonship life: “without me you can do nothing.”

Theology has often come short here. Orthodoxy has been afraid to let down its whole weight on Christ’s humanity, and liberalism has evaded his deity. The result was that both stopped short of John’s whole truth.

John affirms the full truth of Christ’s sonship. He does not wait to rationalize all its content. He does not try to solve the mystery of the two natures. He quickens all the action by telling it like it is, by proclaiming Christ as he really is, by speaking as one who “beheld his glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father” (1:14).

Better yet, John lets Christ himself do most of the speaking. He lets Christ declare himself, telling us who he really is and what he really came to do on earth. And this is the high point in John. This is the point where sonship lights up like the sun at noonday.

Fatherhood

When we come to Christ’s relationship with his Father, his eternal Sonship comes into full focus. At least 113 times in John we read of “the Father.” The Son derives his being from the Father; yet he is co-eternal with him. Because he receives everything from the Father, this Gospel could be called the Gospel of the Father, as well as of the Son. His eternal vigilance in keeping himself obedient to the Father is the wonder of this Gospel.

No son was ever more like his father (“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” 14:9). No other son ever pleased his father so much (“I do always those things that please the Father,” 8:29). No other son ever lived so close to his father. The Son appears in this Gospel as one who still lives in his Father’s house and is at home there (“the Son of man which is in heaven,” 3:13). He is nourished and sustained there (“I live by the Father,” 6:57). He does no other will than the will of his Father (“I came … not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me,” 6:38). He and the Father will one will on earth.

No one else ever lived so much under an open heaven. (“Ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man,” 1:51). Although he had his head “in the clouds” where he could always behold the face of his Father, no two feet were ever placed more solidly or really on the earth (he is “the Way”14:6). Never for a moment did he ever lose touch with reality (he is “the Truth”14:6). He was larger than life itself but lived through it all (“the Life”14:6). Even his judgment came from the Father (“as I hear, I judge,” 5:30). He lived “in the bosom of the Father,” where the Father showed him everything (“the Father showeth him all things that himself doeth,” 5:20).

Christ’s majestic words and mighty works, which in this Gospel unite to form one indivisible flame, all proceed from the Father. Yes, more, they are done by him (“the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works,” 14:10). One day he came out with it very plainly: “I and my Father are one” (10:30). And on the eve of his passion, in his final prayer of intercession, he said: “Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee” (17:7). In other words: “Now at last these my disciples have come to see and know that everything I have and do comes from you, Father.” It was sonship, all the way.

His Prayer Life

Nothing so opens up how vast his sonship life really was as his praying. We often hear, “If Jesus, who never needed to pray, did pray, how much more must we pray.” This sounds very reverent, but it is more rhetoric than reality. Jesus did need to pray. No son was ever so obedient to or so utterly dependent on his father. Apart from prayer he could do nothing, for it was in answer to prayer that he received everything. All was “given”: “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. I have manifested thy Name unto the men which thou gavest me.… The words which thou gavest me … the glory which thou gavest me” (John 17:4 ff.).

But once again let us remember that this sonship life (in this case prayer life) is alive and active in one more dimension. His prayer life also brings our new prayer life along with it, to the peak of its possibility. This section is the heart of the Gospel of John.

His praying now is intercessory; he asks the Father to give his people (the Church) everything that by prayer he himself had received from him. Nothing was to be kept back. Everything he had—his “fullness” (1:16)—was communicable, to be given by prayer. How? By our going the same route. That is, we must also be prepared to receive all from him in a complete dependence: “the works that I do shall he do also … greater works than these shall he do” (14:12). He is preparing to give us everything: “my words,” “works,” “peace,” “joy,” “love,” and even “my glory” (John 17). Can it be true? Who would have thought that all these attributes could be communicated, given away? All are his! And each speaks volumes. What a life of “fullness” this sonship life really is!

So he now makes it all over to us by giving us the use of his name—in prayer. This is a further development. In Norway we say: “A dear child has many names.” No son ever had so many names as Jesus. His many names in John are all unique: “the Christ,” “Son of God,” “King,” “Son of Man,” “Bread of Life,” “Light of the world,” “Good Shepherd,” “the Way, the Truth, the Life”—all further revelations of his manifold person, and ways of further imparting his abundant life to us.

This, then, is the climax for our praying: he gives us the full use of that name. Not once, but six times! And in language that is unmistakable, more plain and simple and direct than he had ever before spoken: “whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do … if ye shall ask anything in my name I will do it.” No prayer-promises in all the Bible compare with these six (John 14:13, 14; 15:16; 16:23, 24, 26). They open heaven, and one would think we would make a rush for them as for pure gold!

“In my name”—what does it mean? It means we are praying as if he were right there doing the praying, bringing his kind of answers and results. It is he praying—in us—by his Spirit. And so we here find all these new and exalted prayer-promises interwoven with new promises and provisions of the Holy Spirit (John 14–16). But now it all comes to this: with all these final promises he is giving himself away!

One day Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” He also said that we are to have that same oneness (John 17). He does not merely pray for unity, which can be superficial. He prays deeper: for “oneness,” which is organic unity. He prays “that they all may be one; as thou, Father art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us … that they may be one even as we are one … I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one” (17:21–23). This is a oneness that cannot be created at any ecclesiastical roundtable. It is ours by birth—the New Birth.

Charismatic Gifts

When it comes to the realm of the Holy Spirit, John is a skilled old master. What a theology he unfolds here! His is the latest New Testament word on this “fullness.” What he says is desperately needed today, when so much new ‘charismatic’ wine is coming into old skins. So much of it is sadly splitting Christians from Christians—a thing that is foreign to John. He knows only one division: that of Christians from non-Christians. We need help from the grand old apostle of love. Real love! The kind that goes deeper than emotion. We need help so to teach the Spirit’s “fullness” that we do not shift the center from Christ to the Holy Spirit.

What about the “evidence” of being filled with the Holy Spirit? John would say that the evidence is not “gifts” of the Spirit but a new sonship life.

Jesus is our perfect pattern here, as in everything. Every aspect of the Christian’s life has a corresponding aspect in his. The essence of it all when he was filled with the Spirit was voiced very plainly by the Father: “This is my beloved Son.” The devil then battled Jesus on that in the Temptation, seeking to get him to act on his own, or to display himself as a sort of Superman. Satan’s purpose was to get him away from his true Sonship, a life of dependence on his Father for everything. For Christ there was now a constant “open heaven” (John 1:51): prayer would reach the Father always, and he would always be heard. The infilling of the Spirit for us, too is a fulfilling of our new sonship life. John says: “At that day [Pentecost] ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you” (14:20).

Conflict With The Jews

John unfolds many contrasts and conflicts in this divine drama, such as light vs. darkness, faith vs. unbelief. But the chief conflict unfolds between Jesus and the Jews. And in every battle it is Christ’s sonship that draws the fire. He has one encounter after the other with them at the sword’s point of his sonship (John 5–8). And he disarms them.

Jesus, we notice, did not argue his messiahship with the Jews. To them he revealed his messiahship only in terms of his sonship, which meant his constant filial relationship with his Father. Everything, he insisted, was not “from himself” but “from the Father.” The Jews said God was their father, but in their hassles with Jesus they missed both “Father” and “Son.” Though religious at every turn, they were practical atheists. Jesus, in other words, rested his whole case on his sonship with the Father. It was even bigger than his messiahship, and included it. It also was the only way to it. And he made clear at once what kind of a messiah he really was. They were looking for a political messiah, some kind of a superman. His filial life was the very opposite of that.

John, like Jesus, never indulged in a theological dispute that would separate Jesus’ deity from his humanity, in assertions that “he did this as God” and “he did that as man.” He avoids getting on this teeter-totter theology. Arguments? Plenty! But not on this level. He stays on the higher ground of Christ’s real sonship: where God and man are always one.

John was not a systematic theologian, though he set forth his content with masterly arrangement and dramatic skill. But he was a theologian, the theologian of the New Birth, and of the new life in Christ. He is not bound by the logic of Western thinking. He goes straight to the person of Christ and presents him in a theology of his eternal sonship. This is the thing that above all else is unique in John: he lets Christ develop his own Christology.

John is supremely the evangelistic theologian. With John it is theology as Gospel and the Gospel as theology. Evangelism is the cutting edge all the way. But in his evangelism the total sonship life in Christ comes through. Every facet of this Gospel produces “sons of God” and brings them into Christ’s “fullness.”

John stuck to his original vision. He was from first to last the evangelist. As a “deeper-life” evangelist, he never loses the Christ-contact with the outsider, while also bringing the insider into Christ’s fullness. He knows how to reach outsiders for Christ.

What a colorful evangelistic career John had! In his youth he helped to evangelize all of Galilee, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and now the uttermost parts of the earth, out from Ephesus.

To think that he could accomplish all of this in the form of testimony! His Gospel is an eyewitness account, which shows what enormous power there can be in a single testimony. And to think that John could pack all this immense Christology of sonship into just three weeks of Christ’s life and ministry! This is spiritual genius! John would say it better: “the anointing” taught him all things (2:2).

And so, through the New Birth, our race reaches its true fulfillment in a divine sonship that is one with Christ’s eternal sonship.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.