John 5

     5:1-9.  The third sign.  Here again, Jesus is in Jerusalem during a feast.  Nothing is required of the sick man except the desire to get well (6).  Jesus commands, and he is healed instantly of a thirty-eight year condition.  It is no accident that this is done on the Sabbath (9).  Jesus is deliberately confronting the religious leaders, exposing their hardness of heart and abusive misuse of the Law to enslave and bind people.  This leads to the controversy and discourse that follows.

     5:10-18.  The point in v.14 is not that there is always a direct correlation between our sin and the misery that befalls us, but that there are worse consequences of sin than what happens to us in this life.  The irony is that the Jewish leaders were promising the man that something bad was going to befall him for obeying a man who cured him by the power of God.  Their anger at Jesus was turned to murderous fury when he pointed out to them that this could only be by the power of God, and even called God his Father.  They understood him perfectly that he was “making Himself equal to God”,  (17-18).

     5:19-47.  This discourse is Jesus’ defense, in which he lays out his case that he and the Father are one God, and brings the required witnesses forward to support his own testimony (31 ff.).  If they will not believe his word, or John the Baptist’s witness, then believe the witness of the Father in the works of power that the Son does, and the testimony of the Holy Spirit given in the Scriptures.  In them Moses himself sets forth Christ in everything he wrote (46).

     Wm. Gouge, commenting on Heb.1:10, cites John 5:17-20 to prove, “That the three persons in the sacred Trinity are one in essence, mind, will, and work.  Wheresoever mention is made of any act of God in reference to a creature, it is most properly the act of the Son, for the Father doth all by the Son.”

     This includes the act of judgment (22).  It is fitting that man be judged by the Mediator, who is both the Son of God, and the Son of Man (27).  Judgment will include the raising of the dead to life.  There are two resurrections involved here.  The first resurrection (24-25) is the same as in 3:3 ff. (3:16) and 4:14.  It is both coming and is happening now (25).  The dead in their trespasses and sins are hearing the voice of the Son of God, and are being raised to eternal life (cf. Eph.2:1 ff.; Col.2:13; Rev.20:4, 5b).  This is the resurrection of conversion (of which the sign and seal to the believer is baptism).

     The second resurrection (28-29) is the general resurrection of both the just in Christ and the reprobate, at the last great day, cf. Mt. 25:31-46; Heb.9:27-28; Rev.20:11 ff.; Jn.11:24; Acts17:30f.; 24:15.  These passages, taken together, are devastating to the wildly complicated end time theories of Dispensationalists (especially those “left behind”).

     V.36 gives the reason for miraculous signs, and why we do not see them anymore.  They are the Father’s witness to the Son, and to the truth of his word once delivered by him and his apostles.  How could signs witness to the Son if he did not uniquely possess these powers?

     V.40.  “There’s your free will!” said Charles Spurgeon, citing this verse in Free Will, a Slave.