John 5:23,24 - He who believes has life

5:23

Jesus continues with His provocative statements: “so that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father”. Now just consider how blasphemous this statement would be if Jesus is not the Son of God, is not equal with the Father! The deity of Christ is not founded on a few obscure texts, but is the only sensible explanation of what the gospels tell us, and indeed of Jesus’ own words.

Moreover, if someone does not honour Jesus then they are not honouring the Father. Now this means that Jews who do not believe in Christ are not honouring God, no matter how devout they may be in other respects. And remember that the Pharisees were nothing if not devout. It is impossible to over-emphasise the importance of Jesus Christ.

5:24

Let’s just recap on what is going on here. Doing a book verse by verse is good, but the danger is that we look at each verse on its own, forgetting how it fits into the whole. So back in verse 18 Jesus was accused of making Himself equal with God. He was also accused of breaking the Sabbath, but that equality with God is now the big issue.

Jesus’ response was to say yes He is equal with the Father and to go on to expand on how He is equal with the Father. He does only what He sees the Father do. So He is equal but also submits to the Father. As an aside there is an important point about submission. Some people get very het up about wives submitting to husbands thinking it means wives are inferior. It does not. Submission does not imply inferiority. The Father loves the Son and shows Him all things, and this is only going to get greater.The Son gives life, just as the Father gives life. All judgement has been entrusted by the Father to the Son, and if we are going to honour the Father we must honour the Son.

Now we come to the implication of all this for us, and we get another “truly, truly”. If we hear the words of Christ and believe “Him who sent Me” then we have eternal life. Note that believing Jesus means believing the Father, the two are one and the same. If we do this we will not be judged and have passed from death to life.

This is amazing stuff. Jesus is the word of God and we had better listen to Him. If we reject Christ then we reject God.