Lecture 18.docx

Well, at least we can see what's up there and see if that's a lot. We put a heartbreak in about verse five. So while perhaps, I don't know of a commentary, not that commentary is the reason, I don't know a commentary that says that this is the theme of first John. I can't run into all those commenta...

Well, at least we can see what's up there and see if that's a lot. We put a heartbreak in about verse five. So while perhaps, I don't know of a commentary, not that commentary is the reason, I don't know a commentary that says that this is the theme of first John. I can't run into all those commentary. Which may be a sign that it's really a stupid thing to think that that was first John's value. There's nobody else successful in this talk. But I am this week, and also in my commentary, just in the full discourse, I do think verses one through four are kind of a preamble. To establish the writer's credentials relative to how it is that he can say what he says in verse five. Because anybody can say anything about God, but nobody really knows about God. Except people to whom God has revealed himself. Because, sorry, but we're cut off from God. We're lost in space down here. And if God doesn't reveal himself to us in a redemptive way, the only thing we know about God is it's kind of scary. Because we have a sense of foreboding, and it's well taken, because anthropologists of all cultures have a sense of wrongdoing. They have lots of strategies for coping with that. But there is a long, true, and living God, and he's made himself known in saving ways. And that's what verses one through four are about. They do establish the credentials of the we, or de facto of John, but they do so by pointing to the one through whom there is life. They do so by pointing to Christ through whom God is accessible to us. Now, once you establish that God is accessible, once you establish that the writer has credibility in talking about God, because of the fellowship that he and others like him have with the Father and the Son, and once you get a preliminary statement of one affective reason that he's writing this, he's writing them so that they can all rejoice at this together. I think it's maybe the last time he mentions joy in the letter, not because later he changed his mind it's not that important, but because joy is the conclusion of things. That joy is an outcome of faith, obedience, and love. Joy is in a fourth axis, or joy is a starting point. We don't start with joy. We kind of work out from there. Joy is a product of the work of God behind these other vectors. So the message of 1 John brings joy to joy. This is the message which we've heard from him and announced to you, that God is light, and we can say, there's our word, God is light and that has entailments. So notice it's not just God is light, period, and then on to some other subject, or he starts making rational deductions from that. But God is light and there's no darkness in him, and that's emphatic, is how we would appreciate it. I see this very much in John. Skotia, utemia, is separated by that whole prepositional phrase, and an advert and a verb. So that's, for John, that's really, really tricky and creative, to hang that utemia at the end, to emphasize just how part of the separation there is between God who is light and darkness. And whether you want to talk about darkness in terms of false faith, or whether you want to talk about darkness in terms of antinomianism, which would be a negation of the x-axis, antinomianism would be a negation of the y-axis, or you want to talk about canishness, lovelessness toward the neighbor, hatefulness toward the neighbor, apathy toward the neighbor. You know, lots of little rifts in 1 John about love or lack thereof. Whatever one of the axes you would want to reflect on, relative to darkness in those domains, God's light. You can't go there and be a child of God, because God's light is so penetrating and it's so universal, and as I've said before this week, there's nowhere to hide. There's nowhere to hide from God. So I think that verse is what we call a programmatic verse. And it's not to say, if you know that verse, you don't really need the rest of the epistle, because the rest of the epistle unpacks the implications, both positively of who God is, and negatively of how to troubleshoot when maybe people are making claims to have some piece of the light, but actually they're in darkness. That can't possibly be right. It can't be right. Uda mia, none at all. So this is a last day, and I've already said we're going to try to wrap things up today. If we don't, we'll meet at 8 o'clock in the morning and finish up the rest. Yeah, that's a joke. I'm confident we'll finish today. But I already have my first pastoral testimony, and it will be an occasion for us to hear from a pastor who's been here all week but had to leave to go back to wherever he lives. And he has in the subject line, TMS Winterim pastoral testimony, and I also emailed him because he sent it late last night. I emailed him this morning and said, can I read the right parts of this to the class? And he said yes. So he said, upon my arrival back home, so this would have just been yesterday, I was immediately confronted with the relevance of 1 John to practical slash pastoral ministry in the life of one of my church members. This particular man is a friend who I have walked with closely for the last two and a half years. As he has wrestled with faith, sanctification, and his responsibilities as a father and a husband, he is morally upright and doctrinally sound. But what has been missing for quite some time is any real affection for Christ and the gospel. In other words, he is the coordinate that has been on the losing side. I kind of laughed when I read that. Almost immediately after walking through the door, I received a call from this man's wife informing me that he was considering divorcing her, but hadn't made up his mind yet. When I spoke to him through her, he informed me that he doesn't care what God thinks of this at all. Now, there is confirmation of the Z coordinate being broken. He doesn't care. He doesn't have any personal sense of God's unhappiness or consternation. He has been working with an abstraction. He has been working with doctrine. He has been working with behavior. So he doesn't care. There's not a carrying between him and God. So he doesn't care what God thinks of this at all, but that I can take my best shot at convincing him not to leave his wife. As we've been reminded all week, 1 John teaches us that God is light, and in him there is no darkness. What is becoming increasingly evident about this man is that he simply loves the darkness. Specifically, he is in love with himself. And so will do anything he can to stay out of the light. One of the great blessings of 1 John is that it teaches us how to see. In other words, it gives us a framework for understanding the darkness that we encounter, and a beautiful picture of what it looks like to walk in the light. So please pray for me at this time, specifically for pastoral wisdom and how to confront the darkness with the confidence, par a thea, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. That's in chapter 5. And the goal that God will give him, life. There are lots of neat ways to end a letter in Christianese. You can say, in him or in Christ, or the German pietists say, im Grauben verbunden, bound together in faith. But this was a new one on me. Till sin is bitter, Christ will not be sweet. Till sin is bitter, Christ will not be sweet. So I kind of took that personally and thought, what are you trying to say here? But let's pray for this man and for this brother, and for the last few minutes we have in 1 John this morning. Heavenly Father, thank you for this beautiful new day you've given us. As we think of other time zones, we know this is already the Lord's day, and we know that your people are already gathered for worship. And we thank you that as tomorrow approaches us through the time zones, that your name is being praised and that your kingdom is being exalted, and that you are at work redeeming your people. We thank you that we can be counted among them by your grace and that your word has gone out, and we thank you particularly for the privileges we have enjoyed this week of interchange with your word and ministry to our souls by your Spirit. And Lord, we pray that you would help us today to finish strong and to not miss too many big things that you would have for us. And we pray that you would align us properly with the things that we've seen this week and that we could take them with us and they could do their work in our lives in times ahead. We pray for this pastor. We thank you for the joyous occasion that brings him home today for our child's birthday. We pray for his ministry in coming days in particular with this man and his wife. We pray that you would have mercy on that family. We pray that this man would either regain or realize the fear of the Lord that is proper in this particular situation in his life where he doesn't care what you think. Lord, we pray that you would restore to him a sense that you are God and that our sins will find us out and that he's on very thin ice before you. We give this pastor the right combination of compassion and of bluntness to minister your truth to this individual. And we pray for the working of your Holy Spirit to give wisdom and also to convict. Thank you that you hear our prayers. Thank you that in each of our individual situations, in the crises that we face, in the service opportunities that are before us tonight or tomorrow, in the longer term needs that each of us, especially at the seminary stage of our lives, we look ahead and we ponder where you would have us go and what you have out there for us. Lord, we praise you for your wisdom and grace and mercy and we pray for the patience and the trust that's necessary for things to work out in your good time. Help us to be diligent in every connection of our lives and every assignment you place before us as we await further light on our paths. And so, Lord, we entrust our class time to you today and we do so with gratitude and we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I think we're at 5-3 and we're going to do it in sort of an abbreviated way and that will give more time for people with formal presentations to do their work. Ten, five, one, two, one, two, ten, one, two, three, five, ten, one, two, three, four, eight, five. Gar, four, connecting verse three with the previous verse, where he has said, by this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and we keep His commandments. Verse three, four, this is the love of God that we keep His commandments. And there you see sort of the synonymity between teromen and poiomen. He's changing those words just for style's sake. And the commands of Him not are burdensome. His commands are not a drag. They're not a bore. Now, they often are, honestly. But, you know, he's speaking from a vantage point, first of all probably of his own walk with the Lord. It's entirely possible that he's reached a point in his life where God has wrestled him down to the ground enough times and he's learned his lessons. And one of the things you find out is you get older, you have learned enough bitter lessons that you just give up fighting against God, at least on a few fronts. You know, because you just, sin does get bitter. And so, you know, there are more areas that God's taught you that, you know, just not fruitful to go there. And you don't have the energy anymore. You know, when you're young you've got so much energy. I mean, the flesh just wants to drag you off in every direction for every dark purpose. And the older you get, the less energy you have for that. Now, John may be a very old man and he may have really gotten to a point, I'm not saying sinless perfection, but he maybe can say with a great deal of conviction that God's commandments, you know, they don't chafe. I mean, he might be where the psalmist is in Psalm 119 or in Psalm 1. His delight is in the law of the Lord and in his law he meditates day and night. And, you know, we're all there at moments, right? But at moments, I mean, for example, in pastoral work, I think one of the hardest things, and maybe this is just me and my temper, but I think it's really hard to keep a pure heart relative to people that you work with that cause problems. That cause problems. There's a lot of people in church settings that cause problems. And, I mean, statistically, the bigger the church, in other words, the more successful you are probably, the more people are going to be working against you. I mean, statistically, the more people are out there to give you grief. And to keep a pure heart in working, in being their shepherd. And not to become hypocritical, not to start treating them one way to their face, but then ragging on them, you know, to your wife and poisoning her heart too. Or maybe having staff meetings where you ridicule and, you know, you slander people. You know, shut the door and then attack them. You know, this happens on church staff. You get adversarial relations between people. And you can't avoid adversarial relations objectively, but you can avoid sinning in those connections. But I think it's very, very difficult. At least I have always found it difficult. So the command to love, I mean, even your enemies, I mean, you still know they're your enemies. And they're not your friends, but to be able to manage that without sinning against God or against them. I think that's really hard. It's really hard. And therefore it's a burden that we have this charge from God. To have clean hearts. Because it's not easy to have a clean heart. You know, the younger you are, you know, once you reach puberty, it's hard to have a clean heart in the sensual realms. It's hard to have a clean heart with respect just to our speech generally. The Bible says so much about the tongue. And the book of James, you could say, almost boils everything down to how we speak. The person who's bridled the tongue has pretty much beat the devil. And then he says no one yet has ever tamed the tongue. But out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks, and that's the source, or at least the symptom, of all of our woes. Our big mouths. And the drivel. And the dross that comes out of what we say. You know, it's a window into the blackness of our souls. That the Lord's light is trying to transform. So for all kinds of reasons, the things we know that God urges on us, they're tough. They're tough. But God's love for us has been perfected in the work of His Son, and this is having an ongoing effect in our love for God. It's getting truer. It's getting brighter. And momentary light affliction is producing among us a weight of eternal glory. So God's making progress, and He's made more progress in John than He has made in me. Because I don't think it would have occurred to me to write this. But, you know, John paid his dues. And, you know, John started in a shallower pit than some of us started in. I'm talking about the Jewish heritage and lots of other advantages, I think, maybe. Some people have, and they start out at a higher plane in their walk with the Lord. Now God has higher expectations for them. To whom much is given, much is required. So God, I'm not saying God's partial, but, some people rise to heights that others of us never will, and that's OK. God, in the end, relative to God, you know, we're all redeemed sinners. Anyway, it's a profound statement. Let's go to four. The hati here serves roughly like the gar here. The gar connects three with two, and the hati, you might translate four. German D-E-N-N. It's a soft inferential. It's not a heart because, but it's a softer connective four. So ten, four, one, six, and I'll throw the two in there since it's substantive. Nine, one, two. I do believe in God. Five, one, two. Ten, three, five, one, two. One, six, one, two. One, two, three, four. And I'll just go start with what we have here, which we have a neuter. Everything begotten of God conquers the world. And this is the victory which conquers the world, our faith. And I know that some of you are finishing up your worksheets today and you're translating as you go, so I'll say it one more time, not because you can't read it for yourself, but just to sort of parallel what you're putting down. For everything begotten by God, and of course this is a metaphor, you know, the idea is produced or generated. Sent forth from God conquers the world. And this is the victory which conquers the world, our faith. Now this begetting language, you know, in this context, we've already seen that it's relating to regeneration. And that's up in verse one, everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born or begotten of God or from God. And here he says something similar except he uses the neuter. And are any of you using Cooley, C-U-L-Y? Are any of you using that little handbook? It's a really good handbook. I think I already packed it, so it's not with me right now. C-U-L-Y, Cooley, it's a handbook of the Greek of 1 John. And one of the things that he points out in there is, first of all, Raymond Brown's suggestion that the neuter here sets up a category, which includes people, but it's bigger than people, with which John wants to oppose the category of the world. So you've got world and you've got everything begotten of God, which would include the people that God begets, but everything associated with that. There's also another way of looking at this, which Cooley calls attention to, and which is often overlooked. I do call attention to this in my commentary and it really takes us back to 1-1, because when we start 1 John we've got all those neuter relative pronouns. Remember, that which was from the beginning, and then there's, you know, some people say, well see, it's not talking about Christ because it's a neuter. And that should be a singular. Do you all know about Blauste Brunner and Funk? Okay. It's unfortunate that in English we don't really have an up-to-date proper technical grammar of Greek New Testament. You know, A.T. Robertson was great for the 19th century, but lots has gone on since then. The standard reference grammar for the New Testament is Blauste Brunner and Funk. And so, you know, if you're doing technical exegesis, I know we have some THM students here, if you're doing a paper, you're a second or third year student, you need to find BDF in the library, and whenever you're doing an exegesis paper, at some point always check the index of BDF and see if your verse, say you're doing Romans 1-5, see if Romans 1-5 is listed in BDF, because as you do Greek exegesis you realize New Testament Greek is kind of quirky. You know, there's always little things it's doing, and scholars know, well yeah, it does that sometimes. But most commentators, they're not going to point to all the quirks. Number one, maybe they didn't check BDF themselves. Number two, you know, every commentary has its purposes, and not a lot of them necessarily are to make sure you explain the quirks of the Greek to the reader. But the neuter is sometimes used with reference to persons, if it is not the individuals, but a general quality that is to be emphasized. So when you think of the Johannine prologue, it really is talking about Christ, but there are qualities of Christ that the writer of the prologue is calling attention to, namely that he was hearable, that he was visible, that he was touchable, that through him life came, he was efficacious. So, whereas, you know, if you don't really know Greek, or if you haven't done your homework, you might just fall into the trap and think, well that's a neuter so it can't refer to Christ. But you know something? Just because it's a neuter doesn't mean it can't refer to Christ. You've got to read the fine print. You've got to go to seminary and find out how to know what's known. Achan suggests a neuter of abstraction, conceiving of the pre-incarnate Christ as an abstract deity. I don't know exactly where that leaves us, but I thought it would throw in there. Witherington's suggestion that Ha refers to God's wisdom is unconvincing. Witherington is always going on about wisdom, and you know there's nothing wrong with wisdom and God's wisdom, but to say, well it's Ha so it doesn't refer to Christ because it's not Has. I don't know how then we should think it talks about wisdom because wisdom is He, right? Sophia. So if it's the wrong gender for Christ, it's also the wrong gender for wisdom. But it's not a problem because, and if you look at 138 section 1 in BDF, they're going to give you other examples of this usage. So to go back to 5.4, everything begotten of God conquers the world. He could be talking about the regenerated person even though it's a neuter because he could be referring to the quality of having been produced by God. Rather than the identity of the person, you know, the one who believes and the one who loves and so forth. They're stressing the person. Here stressing the quality of the person as having been begotten by God because that's the key to their conquering the world. And by the way, this is another pointer to his conviction that grace precedes faith. That whatever we are as children of God, we owe all the virtue to God because we have been begotten by God. That's a pretty comprehensive metaphor. That metaphor of birth, it's not birthing from a male standpoint. It's insemination. If you use begetting of a woman, genao, then it's I give birth. But when you use genao of God, he's not giving birth, he's begetting. The female gives birth, the male begets. Genao. So that's sort of a gender specific word when you apply it. One or two people in your translations that I read said give birth. No, God doesn't give birth, God begets. And since that's an old word, and since people don't do livestock breeding and stuff anymore, it's easy to forget what that's about. But God implants his saving seed in his people and so they conquer the world. And this is the victory, the symptom that the seed has sprouted is faith in God. James uses this language in James 1, he says to the people that he writes to, receive the word implanted. Receive the implanted word which is able to save your souls. And he's assuming it's there, but he's talking about something that all of us find we have to do. We often have to sort of renew our openness to what God's word tells us because we discover we've kind of closed that off. We've forgotten it, we've turned our back on it, we've sinned against it, and we need to reopen a discussion here and receive what we now realize. Yeah, that is right, that is what God says to me in his word. Verse 5, 3, 10, 5, 1, 6-2, 1, 2, A, here we'll call it 10, May 8, 1, 6-2, 10, 2, 5, 1, 2, 1, 2. And when the brackets are there, that means, well is that there in the Nestle Allant because this is Trigelles. Yes it is. The brackets are there, it's telling you Nestle Allant think it is from John, so they put it in the text. In text criticism we say NA27 reads death. That is to say they put it up in the text, but they put brackets around it because they don't want to be sued if you can prove they're wrong. There's enough, not so much problem that they leave it down in the apparatus, but enough that even though they've decided to read it, it's like a little warning flag. Caution, we're not going to walk the plank for death. If you think death shouldn't be there, you could be right. And who is the one who conquers the world, if not, or except, the one believing that Jesus is the Son of God? And then you might think the next verse would then talk about the one believing, but the next verse is going to talk about the one believed in. Because he says here, this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith, that's the Fides Qua, and I'll write that down because a couple of you put it in your notes, but it wasn't necessarily spelled the way you want it to. Fides Qua, creditur, C-E-R-D-I-T-U-R, and then Fides Qua, creditur. And the top one is my faith, and the bottom one is the faith. I'm writing, urging you to contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints, that's the Fides Qua. And there are a lot of times in the New Testament where the writers are talking about faith, and not all the time, but often it's articular. There'll be an article in front of it, it'll be the faith. And since most of us come from revivalist tradition churches, you know, gospel preaching churches that urge people to receive the gospel and to believe, a lot of people only understand faith in terms of what they do in order to receive the message. And then because of the ambiguity in English with the word by, which can mean because of or through, lots of people in our churches are semi-Pelagian. And they may even believe, you know, on a quiz they may even get it right. A quiz that would test them on their belief on the sovereignty of God and salvation. They may do okay on the quiz. But because of lack of a really solid teaching, they don't even know that that exists. And I touched on this yesterday. You know, if you asked them, okay, what is it that you believe? They could just give you maybe bits and fragments. There's no strong sense of a Trinitarian faith that they could articulate. And, you know, part of that, in North America, you know, there's a very good book, maybe a few of you have read, it's by Nathan Hatch. It's called The Democratization of American Christianity. The Democratization of American Christianity. And it's a book that, more than any book I know of, now I'm not a historian, so most good books in history I've never heard of, but in any country where there's a Christian presence, it's there through a historical process. And, you know, there are strengths there and there are weaknesses there. But if you don't understand the processes, it's easy not to understand, you know, what's going on with, you know, the churches that you may even be wrestling with things in. And you go, you know, I don't understand why we have this problem. And, you know, in the Revolutionary War period, so sort of at the birth of the founding of the country in terms of, you know, a constitutional presence, the three prominent churches, numerically, hands down, were congregational, episcopal, and presbyterian. That's not to say that most people went to those churches, most people didn't go to church in the 1760s, 1780 range. It's a pretty godless time. But just in terms of if there were churches, and if there were training centers for pastors, almost everybody was one of those three denominations, numerically. By 1840, the most numerous group of Christians in North America, hands down, far and away, were Methodists. And second, were Baptists. So in 40 to 50 years, things totally inverted in terms of numbers, but also in terms of some popular perceptions of the church and of Christianity. And that's where the title is helpful, The Democratization of American Christianity. One of the things that happened, which affects all of you and me, is that in the older pattern, ministers were viewed as something like physicians and barristers, lawyers. They were seen as learned, trained, professional people. That is, so they're like a respectable caste in society, maybe even slightly elevated. But in 1840, it's anti-clerical. Anti-clerical. We don't need ministers, we just need the Bible. Every man's his own Bible. And one of the things that Hatch talks the most about is how political slogans, and especially the word freedom, because the early decades of our country, speaking now as a North American to North Americans, blue passport carrying person, I know not everybody here might be an American, but indulge me. We were big on freedom. Freedom from Britain. Freedom from tyranny. Remember the one, was it the Vermont flag, that had the snake on it and said, don't tread on me. Get out of my yard. Kind of an idea. And that was transferred directly into the church when it came to ministers. And that's a very strong, there are still people who feel that way about ministers. And I've run into a lot of them in churches. So low view of ministers, high view of the individual. Of course we get that, you know, if you don't minister long in Baptist churches until you run into somebody who takes the priesthood of the believer as a ground for dissing you. And they may not know what they're talking about, but that's their ID card as a minister disser. Because they can always trump anything that anybody says to them, whether they know what they're talking about or not, because of the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer. So liberty, freedom, comes to mean the tyranny of self-important individuals in many cases. And anti-clericalism makes it very difficult for there to be order in the church except the order of the demos, the people. You know, it's a democracy. And it's all justified because Christian experience is all about our experience. So John moves from this is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith, to who is it? Except the one who believes in Jesus, the Son of God, to Jesus the Son of God. Now this is a Fides Quae approach to illumining the Fides Quae. Your Quae is as good as your Quae. Now, caution. Where the American revolutionaries had it right was that credal traditions are susceptible to dead formalism. So you can know the creeds and really harp on the creeds and be lost. So there's no virtue in mastering the Quae by itself, just because you can say the Apostles Creed doesn't make you a Christian. But my point is we don't have to choose and we need both poles. We need the foundation, the Quae, and then we need the manifestation. We need both. So relative to the foundation, 3 5 1 6 dash 2, 9 2 10 2, 2 2, 8 9 1 2, 8. Monon is a form of monos, which is a 4. However, and I'm sure this is my commentary in one of the uses of monon, there are a number of adjectives in Greek, maybe sometime even a noun, that in their singular accusative masculine form they become adverbs. And you translate it only if it's monos. 10 9 1 2, 10 9 1 2, 10 1 2 5, 1 6 dash 2, 10 1 2, 5 1 2. This one, or this could be translated here, he is, because it's a near demonstrative pronoun and it's pointing back to the Son of God, Jesus. So you could either translate this one, or you could translate he, because in English it's so obvious from the rhetoric of the end of the previous verse, if you say he, it's referring to that one. And I'm going to say he here because we're going to get an autos down in, a hutos down in 5 20, I think it is, or 5 18 or somewhere down there that it's clearly he is God, referring to Christ. So I want to just point out how hutos sometimes can mean he. He is the one who came. I'm going to take that in an aorist sense, since it's an aorist participle, even though it's a participle it doesn't necessarily tell us anything about time, but it's because it's not present. If it was present then you get the idea of coming. But since it's not present, and since we know historically he did come, we're going to say the one who came through water and blood. Jesus Christ. Not in water only, but in the water and in the blood, or you could say by. And the spirit is the one who is testifying, because the spirit is the truth. And there's a lot of discussion on water and blood. I take it to be, I think, baptism and blood, crucifixion. I refer to Cooley. Cooley's handbook doesn't, I mean it's basically just grammatical description, and for that reason it's helpful. But he has a long page here in which he defends the view that it's the water of birth, and so he's talking about the incarnation, that he was actually born as a human. So incarnation and anti-dossetic. He really was human. There's a vast discussion about water in the Jahanian literature, and I'll just say I don't think it's conclusive, and I don't even think it's most likely that it's talking about the water of birth. I think it's talking about the beginning of his ministry and the culmination of his ministry. The beginning was the baptism by John. We underrate that, I think. Just like a lot of people underrate the cross, they like the resurrection. They like the resurrection model of Christian life more than the suffering model of Christian life. The cross was a scandal. Jesus' baptism was a scandal. Again, it's kind of odd some of the things we don't see because it never gets talked about, but just to remind you, what was John's baptism for? What was it for? Excuse me? Okay. What's repentance for? Okay, entrance. What would John's baptism be a sign of in terms of you? What would it say about you? Who said sinner? Alright. It's a sign that you're a sinner. And when Jesus came to be baptized, John didn't want to do it. Now, I don't know if John knew that Jesus was sinless, but he knew that he was a better man than John was. And so, at first he wouldn't do it. Remember Matthew, I think, says, records how they had a little discussion, and Jesus said, permit it, because thus it befits us to fulfill all righteousness. I think that's probably something like the King James. So, although the New Testament never, I think, records this, John's baptism of Jesus is a de facto proof that Jesus was a sinner by his own admission. Because John was calling sinners to repentance, and Jesus accepted John's baptism. But now there's two ways to take John's baptism. In every other case, it was for sinners. And also in Jesus' case, it was for sinners, but you've got to put an asterisk by that. He became a sinner in terms of his identification with us. It was a foreshadowing of being on the cross, bearing our sin. He made him who knew no sin to be sin. The cross wasn't the first time that Jesus was comprehensively associated with sin, and publicly identified himself as the friend of sinners. So to us, yeah, Jesus' baptism, it's not that big of a thing. Why would he mention baptism here? Well, maybe because it was a huge hurdle for a lot of people. This whole idea of the connection of a divine figure with sin. All other worship gurus point to God as the one who deals with sin. God himself doesn't take on sin and somehow still remain God. This is a validation of John, who is in turn a validation of God's promise. He fulfills Malachi 3, 4 in the MT. John the Baptist is actually critical, and Jesus praised John the Baptist. He really says you've got to pay attention to what he did. He's not the greatest, but he's absolutely critical in all kinds of ways. So I'm just saying there are lots of historical reasons for saying that as John the Apostle looks back on Jesus' identity, and is speaking over and over again about Christology and the person of Christ, it's very important that we see him, I mean it's obvious he's a human being and was born, but it's very important that we see him in his fulfillment of everything that John the Baptist came to call people to. See him in his identification with Israel and with the people of God in all times. His identification with us as sinners. He came through water. He came through the baptism of John and by the blood. Now other people want to say water and blood, that's Jesus on the cross and the spear on the side. I can't rule that out, but not all the interpretations can be right. Verse 7, 10, 4, 5, 1, 6-2. For there are three who testify, or who are testifying. I think the helping device in English helps there. There are three who are testifying. Or if you want to be more economical, for the ones who testify are three. But I think there are three who testify probably sets up better for verse 8.