Jesus and His Fourfold Witness

By Elder Jewel Love

(Ed. – Jewel Love and his wife, Leila, have been members of WCG/GCI for more than 40 years. He served 10 years in the U.S. Air Force as a communications officer reaching the rank of Captain where his duties included boarding Air Force One.)

When Jesus spoke of his mighty deeds as bearing testimony to him, he wasn't exaggerating.

Most of us have been called to jury duty and some of us have actually served. Hopefully we haven’t been involved in cases where people have been innocently condemned. But it happens.

The First Century Jewish people also had a criminal justice system and a lot of it was based on the law in Deuteronomy that only in the mouth of two or three witnesses could a person be condemned.

John’s Gospel: Where Elephants Go To Drown

A Bible teacher once said that John’s Gospel is deep enough for an elephant to drown in and accessible enough for a mosquito to hop across.

What makes John so different?

While the other Gospels highlight Jesus as the preacher of the Kingdom of God, John sees Jesus as he himself in his being and ministry representing the Kingdom of God. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” it says in John 14:6. That just about covers everything. He mentions the Kingdom only twice. He himself is the way to the Kingdom.

Something about John's Gospel has drawn readers in for two millennia.
The mood and atmosphere is so different in the Fourth Gospel. While Matthew, Mark and Luke move along quickly laying out teaching in a line-upon-line synopsis (hence the term Synoptic Gospels), John offers long involved discourses and often arguments between Jesus and his enemies. This spur of debate allows some of the most profound teaching to issue forth, e.g. I am the Good Shepherd, I and my Father are one, I am the Resurrection and the Life.

John spells out his purpose near the end: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

The challenge from the Jewish hierarchy is most pronounced in the Fourth Gospel, hence the need for John to regularly assert Jesus’ right to claim “I and my Father are one.” We have seen this debate carried out in John 5.

Mystical Mysterious Backdrop

John also has more mystical moments of encounter with Jesus as divine. Even the famous first chapter dealing with the Logos teaching is phrased in terms any Greek philosopher would understand (Logos=“the Wisdom by which all things are steered”). This effectively but discreetly pushes Jesus’ origins back into eternity.

Jesus reaches one of the heights of his teaching in John 6, the Bread of Life discourse where whoever eats me shall live because of me. Then there is the exquisite scene with Mary in the Garden (John 20) and the dramatic encounter with doubting Thomas in the upper room (“Here, feel my hands and feet, it is I”). The book ends with the almost surreal breakfast on the beach at Galilee in the wee small hours of the morning (John 21).

John gets it all in, swiftly and effectively with a brevity and a verve that a Hollywood script writer might envy. This is his triumph: to set a very human man from Nazareth’s life in relation to the Lord of the ages, the Creator of all, the Shepherd of men’s souls.

This is what makes Jesus’ encounter with the leaders of his nation recorded in John 5 so interesting. Jesus had just healed a man who was infirm and he ordered him to take up his mat and walk away whole (John 5:1-15).

Equal with God?

Jesus got in trouble with the Pharisees for that. They had a law about carrying things on the Sabbath day. The leaders were angry enough to speak of killing him (5:18). So Jesus launched into a long discourse on the subject of judgment and life. At the end he concluded with four forms of witness to who he was and what he was about. The leaders hated him for claiming to make himself equal with God (5:18) but Jesus cites his reasons knowing that “If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true” (5:31).

John records some of Jesus' fiercest debates with his opponents in the area of Herod's Temple.

What were his witnesses?

First he refers back to John the Baptizer. “You have sent to John and he has borne witness to the truth…he was a bright and shining light and you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light” (5:32-35). Jesus and the crowds around Jordan knew that John had said of him, “You are the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). And John was the prophet all men respected. The enemies of Jesus knew that. So he silenced them on that count.

Words and Deeds

Second, Jesus asserted another important witness – the mighty works he had been doing, healings and other miracles that people could see. The lame man was one in a long line of witnesses to the fact that Jesus could heal by the power of his Father (5:30). (Even the Qur’an admits to the miracles that Jesus was able to do).

Third, the witness of his Father in heaven to whom he was. You remember that at Jesus’ baptism the heavens opened and a Voice said, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.” Some scholars think that while this is relevant Jesus is actually referring to the internal testimony of the Father’s word in people who heard Jesus speak or to us when we read the Scriptures, a reverberation of the Father inside us that causes us to respond to him. But the Jewish leaders did not respond. Anyone reading the Scriptures as they did and resisting the testimony in there is missing the meaning: Jesus is the point of Scripture.

Jesus knew he had the full backing and confidence of his Father in heaven.

The fourth line of testimony continues on from this. Jesus takes his critics back to the words of Moses who predicted the Messiah who would come (5:45-47). On the road to Emmaus Jesus met two distraught disciples after his own death and resurrection and encouraged them to reconsider the many mentions in the Law but also the prophets and the writings about Himself (Luke 24). Today twenty centuries later the written testimony in the prophets about Jesus as Messiah is one of our great testimonies to others and ourselves about who Jesus was.

So how about it. After hearing his fourfold witness is Jesus guilty? Guilty of being God…or not?