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I’ve always found it odd that when John sets out to tell us who Jesus is, he doesn’t reach for big words. He reaches for water and blood. Not lightning, not thunder from a mountain. Water and blood, the two most common things there are. They show up at every birth and every wound.
But the strangeness is the point, and it runs deeper than the words. By the end of these few verses, John is going to tell us something that quietly undoes how most of us think. He's going to say truth isn't mainly something you have. It's someone you meet. Hold that thought, because everything else here is leaning toward it. This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. (1 John 5:6) I would rather not walk you through this verse by verse. I'd rather pull out a few ideas that I don't think any of us can really stay neutral about once we've seen them. The Man Who Came from Outside Most of the people we look up to started somewhere. They were born, they grew up, they became someone. John keeps pointing out that Jesus is the exception. Jesus didn't start here. He came here. That one word, “came,” tells you a lot. You wouldn't say someone “came” from the next room. You’d say it about someone who traveled a long way to reach you. And John is telling us Jesus traveled the longest way there is. He was already there before time began, and then he stepped into it. He came in two ways, and that's why we get both water and blood. Now, people have read “water” in more than one way. Some hear baptism in it, and that’s a fair instinct in a letter like this. I take it to mean his birth, his arrival as a real human being, and I think the pairing with blood points that direction. You can read it differently and still arrive at John’s main point. So, take water as the birth, a real one. Nine months in a womb, a body that got tired and hungry, a life you could have watched grow up. Whatever else Jesus was, he wasn’t a rumor or a story that got bigger every time someone told it. He was a man you could have stood next to. Blood is the death. And this is where it gets interesting. Blood usually means something has ended. But in Jesus’ story, blood means rescue. It’s the word for sacrifice, for one person stepping into the spot meant for another, for a price being paid so somebody else can go free. Put those two together and you see a life that was never an accident. He was born in order to die, and he died on purpose. That leaves me with a hard question about my own life. If his suffering meant something, what about mine? John doesn’t let us pretend otherwise. He never promised that following God and avoiding pain were the same road. When Truth Stops Being Something You Have and Starts Being Someone Watch what John does with the Spirit. He could have said the Spirit speaks the truth or shows us the truth. Instead, he says something much bigger: 6 …the Spirit is the truth. (1 John 5:6) Read that again. Not tells the truth. Is the truth. We don’t usually think about truth that way. For us, truth is something you have, a fact you got right and can keep in your pocket. But John is talking about truth as a Person, someone you either know or you don’t. That changes the whole thing. You can’t research your way in. You must actually meet him. And here’s where it costs us something. If truth is a Person, then I am not its author. I don’t get to assemble it to my liking. I receive it from someone outside myself, the way I’d receive the word of an honest friend. That’s a humbling place to stand, and it’s exactly the place our age refuses to stand. We've all heard people say, “That’s true for you,” or “You have to find your truth.” It sounds open-minded and kind. But look at what it really does. It makes truth something we invent instead of something we find. And once truth is something we make up, we can get rid of anything we don't like, God included. We end up treating the world we can see as if it had nothing to do with the God we can’t. Don't rush past that last line, because it’s the quiet mistake underneath so many loud ones. The visible and the invisible were never meant to live in separate rooms. The God we can’t see made the world we can, stitched meaning into it, and then stepped into it himself. To cut the seen off from the unseen is to live in half a world and call it the whole thing. John won't go along with that. He gives us three witnesses, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and he says they all agree, the way honest witnesses always do. The world we see and the world we don't are telling the same story, and Jesus is where they come together. He's the one holding it all in one piece. And here's what really gets me. If Jesus' whole life was a testimony, and we're supposed to be his body now, then our lives are meant to say what his said. People are reading us the same way they once read him. I have to ask myself what they're finding when they do. You Can’t Quietly Disbelieve God We’d all like to think there's a safe middle, a polite shrug where we don't really accept Jesus but don't really reject him either. John takes that option away, and he's blunt about it. 10 Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar… (1 John 5:10) Look how strong that is. John is saying that when God goes to the trouble of sending his own Son to settle the question, leaving us no real reason to doubt, then brushing it off isn’t a neutral move. It’s an answer. It’s looking God in the face and telling him you don't believe him. That’s hard to hear, but I think it’s honest. Most of us don’t reject God with a raised fist. We do it with a shrug, with a “maybe later,” with an excuse so reasonable we never notice we've just called him a liar. John is only saying out loud what the shrug already means. And the shrug is never as harmless as it feels. Unbelief always travels somewhere, even when it moves slowly and quietly and never once raises its voice. Maybe that’s worth praying back to God, not as some grand statement, just an honest one: I don’t want to believe any more lies. I don’t want to be run by them or fooled by them or made comfortable with them. It’s a harder prayer to mean than it looks. The Sentence It All Comes Down To After all of that, the witnesses, the warning, the weight of it, John ends on one line so plain a child could carry it: 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. (1 John 5:12) That's the whole thing. The water and the blood and the Spirit, the entire case, comes down to whether you have the Son. Not whether you earned life or built it for yourself. You receive it, because it was a gift all along, and it was only ever in one place. Have the Son, and you have life. I know how simple that sounds. Believing it is the work of a lifetime. But take heart, because the One who hands us this life is the same One who keeps walking toward us to give it. He isn’t waiting for us to figure him out. He’s still doing the very thing John wrote all of this to show us. If something here got hold of you, stay with verse 12 this week. Read it slowly each morning and ask yourself one question. Not “do I agree with this?” but “do I have him?” That’s the question John was asking all along. Copyright 05-30-2026, Dane Boyles
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"By the rivers of Babylon," there we sat down and wept. It is one of the most beautiful opening lines in the Hebrew Scriptures. By the end of the same psalm, the poet is asking God to bless anyone who would seize Babylonian infants and dash them against the rocks. Most of us, if we are honest, have no idea what to do with that.
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