His Own Words: Claims of Jesus in the Gospel of John
His Own Words: Claims of Jesus in the Gospel of John
Jesus’ every communication from the God who sent him is rebuffed by being too incredible to believe or even hold in the mind’s eye for more than a couple seconds. This makes his words and sentences claims.Why? Simply because we don’t have the ability to believe them! Think about this. The simple statement that God had sent him here as light bounces off like gibberish. Too ethereal. Too wild. Hearers simply toss it out and walk away...but with that little nagging consciousness that if God really sent a man this is exactly what he would be like.
Among the common people as well as the leadership, he simply could not be dismissed. The fact that they were spoken, have stood for 2000 years, and continue to get identical response from each successive generation, demonstrates their universal applicability over two millenia. No better, or more individual-touching criteria could be devised whereby to gauge humankind’s response. I say this to anticipate the question how can one man’s words to a few folks in a small mid-eastern country twenty centuries ago serve to put the entire race of men on trial? I’ll turn that around: How would you do it if you were God, mankind’s maker?
PREFACE
“And besides my son, be warned by them:
Of making many books there is no end, and
much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Solomon, 977 BC
What you have in your hand is not a book but rather notes by an admirer of Jesus.
When I started to list Jesus’ claims like “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the light of the world,” I expected John’s gospel to contain about a dozen. A month later I had over three dozen. My pencil gave way to a spreadsheet and a year of slowly combing pages turned up well over three hundred – a book length list. There were other surprises as well.
No one likes reading lists, myself included. A comment at the side of each quote relieved the repetitiveness, brought context to the content and put exotic claims into ordinary language. Ordinary that is, to a very unordinary man.
Father’s Day rolled around this year and my son, a third generation student of John’s writings, gifted me a book which he had quietly placed on Amazon as His Own Words and there it was, neatly bound into a paperback. My Excel spreadsheet notes are now a book.
Open it anywhere. Meet the man Jesus who was sent to speak the recorded words. Imagine yourself there as listener or in his shoes as someone charged with the impossible task of ambassador from God to man. Find out how ordinary words in heaven become claims when spoken on earth. The difficulty you’ve had understanding Jesus’ words may just disappear.
Harvey Vedder, October 2018