Can I Get A Witness?
We are messengers. Messengers of God’s radical grace. We give testimony to God’s work in our lives through Jesus, which is a powerful thing. I love hearing other people’s testimonies. They are so encouraging. . .to hear about people’s encounters with God. John, in his first letter, acknowledges that the testimony of people is indeed powerful, but John says the testimony of God is greater (1 John 5:9-15). What an amazing thought, the testimony of God.
With TV shows like Perry Mason, Matlock, and Judge Judy we have long been fascinated by the drama of the court room. But then with OJ and his televised real trial we’ve become even more so. Right now if you look at any major newspaper or news website you will find updates on Donald Trump’s current trial. We eat this stuff up. And so often in fiction and reality we see the two sides trying to present that knockout witness. . .that revelatory testimony that sheds light on everything. And we also see the two sides trying to poke holes in the other sides expert witness. . .trying to cast doubt or even prove the witness is flat out lying. Well, John is presenting us with THE expert Witness. The One with the unassailable testimony. . .Truth Himself. We hear God testify to us. He tells us what He thinks is most important. He proclaims a message to us. This is what we have in the Bible. It reminds me of Dr. Steven Paulson’s description of church, which I am sure I have shared before. He said, “Church is a bunch of sinners gathered around Christ to hear what he has to say.”
God’s testimony. . .knowing his mind. . .I know I am not alone in wanting to know what he has to say. . .what he thinks. There are entire industries devoted to this type of thing in our culture today. Horoscopes in the newspapers or psychics or palm readers, all of them are selling the fact that they can give people insight into the greater scheme of things, whether it be a person’s future or purpose in life or to contact the spiritual realm, they are looking for more than the simple testimony of humanity. They are looking for something greater something beyond, for meaning in the universe, if you will. It is very new age and eastern, tapping into that great unified consciousness.
But John is telling us the difference between God and all of these other attempts to connect with the spiritual or divine. God, the Christian God, is a self-disclosing God. For God to have a testimony, it must mean that God testifies. He is not silent. He does not stand far off waiting for us to find some way to bridge the great divide between the physical and spiritual. Instead, He crosses over. He breaks into our world and speaks.
SO what does He say? Well, John tells us that too. He says, “And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (vv. 11-12). If you were ever looking for a cliff notes version of what the Bible is about, this is it! John sums up the whole of the Christian Bible in two sentences. God gave eternal life in His Son, Jesus. Whoever has Jesus has life, and whoever does not have Jesus does not have life. This is what God thinks is most important for us to know. God’s testimony is about His Son Jesus. It is about what He has done for us. He doesn’t tell us the secrets to the stock market or the winning numbers of the lottery. He doesn’t tell us the solution to global warming or who to vote for in the next election. God tells us that the most important thing is His Son Jesus and the gift of eternal life in Him. Jesus, the Son of God, is the one who crossed the great divide between the physical and the spiritual, between heaven and earth, so that we wouldn’t have to because if it were up to us, we would all be doomed. Instead, he became a human being so that he could then go to the cross to die for the sins of the world and rise again to defeat death for those who believe in him.
There are a couple things I want to highlight about God’s testimony to us. We have already said that He speaks to us, so it is a top-down motion here, which flies in the face of most types of religion or spirituality today. Most if not all others are usually a bottom-up motion. But it is also a gift. John said God gave us eternal life in Jesus. It is not earned or won or deserved, but it is given. This is radical grace. God freely gives himself to us so that we might be free and be with Him forever. God is a giving God, a gracious God.
The next thing I want to highlight is the emphasis on eternal life in God’s testimony. God is concerned with our big problem: death. His testimony regarding His Son Jesus is about life and death. Death is the consequence of sin, of our shortcomings, of our failure to love; failure to love God, others, and ourselves as we should. That’s what we were made to do; we were made to be in relationship, and more often than not our relationships are characterized by division and strife as opposed to grace and love. If we are honest with ourselves, we have been on both sides of painful relationships, we have been hurt by others, but we have also done the hurting. This is evidence of our brokenness, our inability to love as we should, and the ultimate result of it is death. But God does not leave us there. He does not allow death to have the final say. He gives us eternal life in Jesus who rose again from the dead after being crucified on the cross for our broken love. As we said earlier, Jesus conquers death for those who believe in him.
I had a couple of interesting conversations with a friend about eternal life. He told me that he thought eternal life sounded like it would get boring after a while. He thought maybe we could live another 100 years or so, but after that, it should just be lights out because it would be lame to do the same thing forever. I thought this was a very perceptive observation. It’s not often that you hear a person not wanting to live forever. Think of how so many are obsessed with their legacy or think of all of the Silicon Valley execs hoping to download their brain into a computer so that they can “live” forever. Well, my friend thought that that actually didn’t sound so great, and I agreed with him. But in this passage, we see that God does not just give us eternal life according to life as we now know it. He gives us eternal life in Jesus. We get to be in relationship with God himself forever. In the previous chapter, John tells us that God is love. We get to spend eternity with love himself and we get to experience all of the benefits of that. We are the recipients of perfect love, and we get to spend eternity getting to know God who is wisdom himself.
Also, the fact that we get eternal life in Jesus means that we no longer experience time the same way. We think in terms of time passing, so eternity sounds like a long, long, long time in a galaxy far, far away. But that’s not the case with God. As the Creator, He is outside of time, so instead of experiencing eternity as time passing, we will finally get to experience what it is like to be fully present. That is where God is, He is in the eternal present. We would no longer live with grief and pain from our past or fear and worry about the future, but we get to live in the now in total freedom and in prefect love. It’s hard to wrap our brains around, but it will certainly not be boring.
God’s testimony, his promise to us, is that he has given us eternal life in His Son Jesus. This Sunday is Ascension Sunday on the church calendar, which means we remember and celebrate Jesus ascending into heaven after the resurrection. It reminds us that our hope is indeed in the fact that Jesus has risen from the dead guaranteeing the promise of eternal life, and it also reminds us that He is coming back. He will return to bring all of those who have believed in His name, who have believed in the very testimony of God himself, into eternal life with Him, into paradise. To save us from death. That is our hope. That is our good news. That is our message, and not simply our message but the message of God himself. As John said, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life” (v. 13). Amen.
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