Three words summarize our next guest. Those words are “love”, “witness”, and “believe”. The Renaissance painters all portrayed the Apostle John as doe-eyed, pale-skinned and effeminate. This they did to accentuate the “love” part of John’s character. In doing so, they ignored the other parts, for the most part.
I want to discuss those parts first.
The word “witness” in the New Testament (martureo) is the word we get our modern English word “martyr” from, and it means to testify, to bear record of, to give true testimony, to give evidence for. I mention this because this is a word that Matthew records for us eleven times, seven of which are in the context of a false witness or a witness against; Mark uses the word nine times, five of which are in the negative; Luke uses the word five times, once in the negative context, but John uses the word seventy-three times, and not once does he use it in the negative.
When I say, “I was a witness,” what do you take that to mean? That I saw something, that I remember it, and that I can tell you about it, right? Okay, now if I say, “I’m going to testify because I was a witness,” what do you take that to mean? That all of those things are true, and that I am going to go to court and “bear witness” or reveal the truth of what I observed, right? It is in this sense that John uses the word martureo. Think about all of the people who have borne witness to their faith in Jesus Christ and been martyred in the process. Think there was any doubt in their minds as to what they knew? Think there was any question in the minds of those who witness their being burned alive or torn apart by wild animals while they were still alive about what they believed?
Just in the gospel he wrote, John uses the word “believe” ninety-eight times. To believe is not to intellectually acknowledge, but to totally trust in, depend upon, and rely upon. That is what is meant by John in the most famous verse in all of the Bible: John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Natural-Born Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.” It is not just people who give a mental nod to the existence of Jesus Christ who are saved; it is those who put their complete faith and trust in Him for their salvation.
It is those whose faith in Jesus Christ cannot be shaken or unhinged, those who will not deny Jesus Christ under any circumstances who truly believe.
John believed what he witnessed, loved the truth that He believed, and loved the Savior that he believed in. He bears witness to all of this “so that you might believe (John 19:35).”
So, what is a witness? Someone who gives an account of or who testifies (bears witness) to the truth. Truth is of vital importance – Jesus said, “For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world, to bear witness [testify] to the truth (John 18:37).” So, being a witness to the truth was also crucial to John, as it should be to all of us who claim the name of Jesus Christ.
Now, what does raw truth look like, the kind of truth that has no regard for the feelings of those who hear it or read it or see it? What does it sound like? How does raw truth treat people? What does truth need in order for it not to be cold and impersonal legalism?
It needs love, of course.
This is the other word that summarizes John’s character: “love”. John uses the word “love” 105 times! In fact, the epistle he wrote that we know as 1 John contains the word love and its variants forty-seven times.
We saw last time that, along with his brother James, John was called a “Son of Thunder” by Jesus. We saw that these two brothers were pushy, self-seeking, unyielding, uncompromising, fiery proclaimers of the truth as they saw it. We saw that they were men who would be in the midst of turmoil, whether they caused it or not, and this would be especially so if it had to do with the “truth”. They were explosive men, men of strength and ambition, men to be reckoned with in any context.
Remember that the one and only time John is mentioned alone is the occasion we looked at briefly last time when he came to Jesus bragging about forbidding someone who wasn’t part of their little circle to cast out demons in Jesus’ name.
Go back to Luke 9:46-56. Let’s read this again.
Okay, so Jesus has just settles another squabble among the disciples about which of them might be the greatest in the kingdom. Now, last time we saw that John and his brother, prodded by their mother, had gone to Jesus and requested preferential treatment and recognition in His kingdom. They were told in no uncertain terms that those two places were reserved for someone else, and that they were going to have to pay a high price just for their faith, let alone such places of significance.
Here in Luke, we see the same push-me-pull-you attitude surging through the disciples. Jesus takes a toddler, puts him in the middle of the group and tells them that anyone who wants to be great in the kingdom of God has to be willing to receive that little guy as an equal.
Verse 49 starts out, “And John answered…” What does that mean? John was changing the subject, trying to show how spiritual and discerning he was, completely ignoring the lesson that Jesus has just tried to get them all to understand. John seems to be trying to get Jesus to say, “Oh, okay, John; being narrow-minded about the moving of God, excluding people who don’t happen to be part of your own little circle – you’re right, that makes you great in the kingdom, too. Thanks for straightening Me out on that.”
Not even close. Jesus says, “Do not hinder him; for he who is not against you is on your side (verse 50).” Jesus is telling John, who is anything but the disciple of love at this moment, that he’s got it all wrong.
Not long after this, we see the incident when James and John want to call down fire out of heaven to destroy the Samaritans for rejecting Jesus, just as Elijah had done centuries before. Not at all loving, is it?
Then how is it, do you think, that John is called “John, the disciple whom Jesus loved”?
John was the son of a fisherman, man who was wealthy enough and successful enough to have hired men working for him. John was the younger brother of two, and he was of a fiery, impatient temperament.
In his boredom one day he heard of a fiery preacher who was oddly dressed, yelling up a storm out beyond the Jordan and unsettling the Scribes and Pharisees no end. “My kind of guy!” thought John. So, off he goes to take a look at this preacher, this throwback to the prophets of old.
What he witnessed there along with his close friend, cousin and fellow fisherman Andrew caused a deep and longing to stirr in his heart. As he witnessed men of all walks of life responding to the fiery message of John the Baptizer by walking down into the river and submitting themselves to the rite of baptism, John’s heart was touched in a way that it hadn’t been before.
Look back to the passage we studied when we first met Andrew. John 1:29-39 tells of the two disciples of John the Baptizer to whom he points out Jesus, and then they follow Him and spend the day with Him. The other gospels do not record this event. There are a number of occasions when John records an event or records an event from an entirely different perspective then the other three gospels that strongly suggests that he was witness to things that others were not. All scholars that I have read agree that John was the other disciple with Andrew that day because of several things in the account, not the least of which is the detail that “these things took place in Bethany beyond the Jordan, where John was baptizing (John 1:28).”
There was something in John way back then that caused him to be searching out the deep things of God in spite of his fiery temperament. There was already a gentleness and a tenderness that allowed him to desire to know and understand God much better then he did already. He had a hunger for the truth all along. Jesus was able to take the raw materials of this man and mold and shape him into the strongest witness of the life, the ministry, the love, the compassion and the future return of the Savior of the world.
The balance between the truth and love was critical for John’s life as it is with our own. He is perhaps the one who most closely modeled the character of Christ throughout the remainder of his life. Perhaps that is why he is the only disciple to have lived to a ripe old age, despite all he suffered and endured. He lived to be almost 100 years old, surviving even disciples of the disciples and contributing much to the second and third generations of Christian believers.
So, let’s look at these things a little closer, shall we?
Turn with me to John 1:17. This is a foundational verse for a lot of reasons, not least of which is to tell us the difference between the Old Covenant of endless sacrifice and little if any guarantees of forgiveness, and the New Covenant (which is what the word “testament” really means) with its once-for-all sacrifice and the promise of forgiveness for all who will believe.
First notice that the verse says, “For the Law was given through Moses”. It doesn’t say that Moses gave the Law, but that it was given through Moses. Moses was the messenger of God laying out His Law to those who would be His people. Moses was the one who laid out the 613 Commandments, the 365 Thou-shall-not’s, and the 248 Thou-shall’s, but they all originated with God Most High.
Jesus Christ, on the other hand, came bearing “grace and truth”. It is most interesting that these two elements of God’s character are together and that they are also the two most significant traits of the Apostle John.
What do you have if you have truth without grace? You have legalism, the religion of the Pharisees. You have rules and regulations and a works-oriented righteousness that no one can achieve or attain to or live up to. You have a raft of unreasonable expectations that, even if they were met, won’t be one iota of help in getting someone into heaven.
On the other hand, what do you have if you have love without truth? You have license, you have lack of responsibility, you have carte blanché permissiveness. There are no guidelines, no limits, no restrictions, everyone is allowed to “create their own reality”, to live out their lives however they want to and no one has the right to question or look with a discerning eye at their life or choices.
John came to understand the balance between truth and love; he came to the place where his life had been so saturated with the “grace and truth” of the life of Jesus Christ that it became his own way of life.
John was a man who had a great capacity to love, so he had a great capacity to be loved. It wasn’t the kind of love that is just a bunch of gooey sentimentality. It is the kind of love that 1 Corinthians 13 speaks of so familiarly and so eloquently. It is the love that has a reasoned strength to it, a love that knows the truth and chooses to believe God’s best about a person and their attitudes or actions or word or choices or circumstances. It is a love that trusts completely in the sovereignty of God and feels a deep compassion for the hurts and the failings of others, not critical judgementalism. It is a love that is able to withstand beatings and ridicule and torture and the loneliness of old age and exile because it knows the One who has loved with a greater love than anyone could ever hope or understand.
John has such a love of the truth that we find him to be the closest physically of all of the disciples. John 13:23 says, "There was reclining on Jesus’ breast one of His disciples, whom Jesus loved." “Whom Jesus loved…” wouldn’t you want to be known that way? The disciple whom Jesus loved; that’s the Apostle John. He never uses His name in his gospel. He simply calls himself the “disciple whom Jesus loved."
At the foot of the cross, Jesus looks down to find John standing next to His mother. John 19:26; “When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, ‘Woman, behold your son!’”.
On Resurrection morning, after Mary Magdalene had found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty, runs to find Peter “and the other disciple, whom Jesus loved”, and tells them that the tomb is empty. John dashes ahead of Peter and arrives first.
All throughout the end of the story from then on, we find reference after reference to John, not by name, but by that phrase, “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
It is interesting to note that in all of the references to John this way, all use the word agapao except one, which uses the word for brotherly love phileo. We know that agapao comes from the word agape, which is the Greek word that describes divine love.
Was John better than the other disciples? No, he just understood the love of Christ better than any of the rest of them did. His writings, as we’ve already seen, are filled with message after message of the love of God, the love of Christ, and the witness that everything was to that love.
John 21:24 gives us a summarizing statement from this beloved apostle. He says, “This is the disciple who bears witness of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his witness is true.” See how focused John is on the truth?
Something else to note is that of all of the people who were mighty in faith and who did great works for God, it was the Apostle John to whom Jesus came and commissioned to write down His last will and testament, if you will. We know this writing as the last book in our Bible, the book of Revelation. Some people mistakenly think of this and refer to this writing as the revelation of John, but that isn’t the case at all. In fact, Revelation 1:1, the very first words proclaim quite clearly, “The revelation of Jesus Christ…”
There must have been something exceptional about John in order for Jesus to select him to be the author of the closing of the Sacred Scriptures. There was a kindredness to these two men that Jesus didn’t share with anyone else.
Of all of the things Jesus could have done to care for His mother after His death, He determined that the best course of action was to delegate her care to John, His beloved disciple. One tradition tells us that John didn’t leave Jerusalem until after the death of Mary and that he remained and cared for her each and every day for the remainder of her life. Another tells us that when John left Jerusalem and took over the churches of Asia, he took Mary with him. In either case, John fulfilled his commission from Jesus, or else Jesus would not have entrusted His Revelation to him.
When all of the disciples were asking Jesus, “Is it me, Lord? Is it me who is going to betray you?” it was John who was closest to Jesus, John who was leaning against Jesus, John who heard Jesus say, “That is the one for whom I shall dip the morsel and give it to him,” that identified who would betray Him.
On the Sea of Galilee the night of the storm when the disciples saw someone or something walking toward them on top of the storm tossed waves, it was John who recognized Jesus and called out, “It is the Lord.”
Back at the Sea of Galilee, when Peter had led the inner-circle back to their fishing boats after Jesus’ Resurrection, it was John who first recognized Jesus on the beach and called out, “It is the Lord.”
John was extremely attentive to the person, the work, and especially the words of Jesus. He is the one who records the lengthy teachings of Jesus on the night of His betrayal, including what we know as the High Priestly Prayer of John 17. It is from John’s pen that we get so much of our understanding about who the Holy Spirit is and what His role is in our lives and in the world in general. Without those words, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit would be even more confusing that it is today.
Sensitive and gentle of heart, John was also a man of strength and fortitude, a man who did not waiver in his walk with the Lord or in his testimony of all that he had witnessed, even though it cost him dearly.
Legend has it that when John was old and unable to walk to the worship services, he was carried there on a chair. He seldom spoke, but on the rare occasions when he did respond to the requests for him to speak, he would simply say, “Little children, love one another.”
After a time the disciples, wearied at always hearing the same words, asked, "Master, why do you always say this?"
"It is the Lord’s command," was his reply. "And if this alone be done, it is enough!"
Sound altruistic? Perhaps; or, perhaps it is more insightful than we realize. Perhaps of all the disciples, it was the disciple whom Jesus loved who truly grasped the message and purpose behind the coming of Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray.
