Lecture XVII. The Witnesses

1 John V. 6—12.

This is He that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth], the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which He hath testified of His Son. He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.

St. JOHN told his Ephesian flock that faith in Jesus as the Christ the Son of God would give them a victory over the world. What world did they suppose him to mean? They were dwelling in the midst of a rich commercial city. Many of them might be engaged in commerce themselves. A system of thoughts, notions, habits, were connected with their commercial dealings; that system of thoughts, notions, habits characterised the commercial world. They were living in a city which had been colonized by Greeks, the most accomplished, subtle, imaginative of all people. A whole system of thoughts connecting the outward visible world and its doings, with the worship of beautiful beings whose forms could be represented in marble, and worshipped in splendid temples, had established itself in Asia Minor, had partly superseded the older faiths of that region, partly adopted them into itself. This system of thoughts and feelings with all the ceremonial, and modes of life in which it had expressed itself, surrounded these Ephesians continually; they were born into it; this was a Pagan religious world. But there were trading with these — Asiatic Greeks, settled in the heart of their city, a portion of the family of Abraham. They had brought with them their traditions, which were so unlike those of other people; they had their own synagogues, differing in all respects, outward and inward, from the Greek Temples; they believed there was one Temple, and only one, in which acceptable sacrifices could be offered to the true God. Those Jews formed a world within the other world, a world which touched that at a great many points, and yet was hostile to it. Many members of the Ephesian Church had actually belonged to that world; all were exposed to its influence and its persecutions. Once more; the rich commercial city of Ephesus had bowed down to a city that was not commercial at all, to a city on the banks of the Tiber, which starting from small beginnings had at last embraced the countries which the Greeks had acquired and civilized, the countries in which Jews had established themselves, Greece itself, Judea itself, within its vast dominion. Rome had introduced laws, institutions, maxims of government, of which Greeks and Asiatics felt the power, though they were conscious of having some kinds of wisdom which their masters wanted. Rome had a religion nominally resembling that of the Greeks, really different from it, seeing that it was inseparably connected with the State and its order. Rome had thus built up a world empire, and also a world within each city which it reorganised. Governors, magistrates, municipal officers, gave a new tone to every society it vanquished. They did not destroy the old local habits, but they grafted upon them new habits such as belonged to a race which believed that its destiny was to subdue all nations to itself.

Now St. John’s disciples of course understood him to say, ‘You know that the various tempers, and tone of thinking in all these worlds are not what you have learnt; that they contradict those old commandments which you heard from the beginning, and that new commandment which Jesus proclaimed; that all equally set at nought that name by which you are called. And over each of them, over all of them you can have a victory, if you believe Jesus to be the Son of God. You can be free from the world if you are bound to Him.’ This, I say, he must have meant whatever else he may have meant: in this sense his earliest readers will have understood him, if they merely regarded his words as admonitions and encouragements to themselves. But you will feel, I am sure, that this is not the only way in which we can read the words. That Ephesian commercial world has passed away; that Greek world with its idolatries has passed away; that Jewish world has passed away; that Roman world has passed away. Each has left wonderful traces of itself behind; but its forms, habits, thoughts, are obsolete. And the faith that Jesus is the Christ, is the Son of God, has established a dominion in all the countries in which these worlds had so mighty an influence;—in countries which they did not reach, which were not dreamed of when they were in their glory. This faith has, by some means or other, in some very remarkable sense, actually overcome these worlds. And then the question arises, By what means?—in what sense has it overcome the world? If we can get these questions answered, we may be able to answer others which are at least as important to us. What is it that is still to be overcome? Can it be overcome for us by any power which St. John makes known to us?

You will wonder, I dare say, at the words of St. John which follow these respecting the victory over the world, the words with which the passage I am to consider this morning begins,—‘This is He which came by water and blood, not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit which beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.’ ‘What has this to do with the battle between the Gospel and the world? If he had told us of the purity of the moral code of Christianity, of the simplicity of its worship, of its superiority on these grounds to the other religions of the earth,—we might, you will be inclined to say, have understood him; that might have accounted for some of the strange events which have happened since his day. But what can we learn from these incomprehensible extensions about water and blood?’

I confess that this language of the Apostle satisfies my intellect as well as my conscience much better than that language about Christianity, and its moral code, and its pure worship, which is so much more popular, and, in the judgment of some, so much more philosophical. Supposing a better code of morals and a purer worship has established itself in the world, I want to know how. That is the fact to be explained; I must not take the fact as if it were the explanation. It cannot be assumed that men are naturally inclined to a worship and a code of morals which restrain and counteract their natural inclinations; to say so, sounds like a great paradox. And if you introduce a divine power, and say, ‘God has done that for men which they could not have done for themselves,’ I may be well inclined to accept the statement; I may admit that you have found the only possible solution of the puzzle. But since God has clearly not uttered a simple decree that men shall have a different worship and obey a purer code now than in the days of old; since no such decree could have effected that purpose, so long as we are constituted as God has constituted us; since there has been clearly a process at work, a process which has acted upon the minds and consciences of men;—I am driven again to ask, What has that process been? What testimonies have been borne to the minds and consciences of men which they have confessed by receiving the message of the Gospel?

In replying to this question, St. John does not, you perceive, introduce the word Christianity at all. No such word is found in the New Testament. Surely we may be most thankful for the omission. For what a vague phrase it is! How continually it stands for a hundred different meanings, or does duty for a meaning that is absent altogether! It is not Christianity of which the beloved Apostle and all the Apostles speak to us; it is Christ. It is not a collection of notions, habits, practices; it is a Person. ‘Jesus is the Christ’—that is the proclamation which was made by fishermen and tentmakers in the ears of a denying or a laughing world. We have seen that it meant something very serious to those who made it. The Christ was not an idle title, a name that was surrounded with no associations, that was capable of no definition. Ages of Jewish lawgivers and prophets had been spelling out its signification; ages of Gentile idolaters and philosophers had cast in the contribution of their necessities and their doubts, which it must satisfy, if it were what these lawgivers and prophets had said that it was. According to its simplest etymology, it must denote that whoever bore it was a King, and was endowed with a Spirit. The Apostles said that one had appeared who was the King of Men, who had received the Spirit of God. And that one, they said, was called a carpenter, and had been put to death as a malefactor.

If He had the dignity which was asserted for Him, how was it to be denoted? What were the signs of it? ‘This is He,’ answers the Apostle, ‘who came by water and blood, not by water only, but by water and blood.’ The Gospel interprets the language; history interprets it. He came by water. When He descended into the Jordan, it is said the heavens opened and a voice declared, ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ And the Spirit descended upon Him in a bodily shape. The narratives of the Evangelists start from this narrative. There are short records in St. Matthew and St. Luke, which I am convinced are genuine, concerning His birth and circumcision, and His coming into the Temple at twelve years old. But the Baptism opens the history of His ministry. The Baptism is the key to every record of it. Because He is declared to be the Son of God, and endowed with the Spirit of God, He is led up by the Spirit to be tempted of the Devil, each temptation turning upon His right to call Himself the Son of God. Because He is declared to be the Son of God, He goes forth in power of the Spirit preaching to the poor, healing the sick, casting out devils, calling Apostles, enduing them with power, giving them wisdom. All these were manifestations of His inward Spiritual power, of His Kingly power. That power is exercised in the name of His Father, and to glorify His Father. The more attentively you read any one of the first three Gospels, the more you compare them together, the more you will find that they derive their coherency from their relation to the Baptism, that by far the greater part of their story appears to be an explanation of the Christ’s ‘coming by water.’

But not all. If you read to the end of these narratives, still more if you add to them that of St. John himself, you will see why he affirms with such emphasis: ‘Not by water only, but by water and blood.’ We dare not say that the Baptism is the subject of the Gospels, when we read the account of the Passion. The death of Jesus, the shedding of His blood, that is, that must be, the great sign of what He was, the key to all the work that went before it. He tells His disciples so again and again; it was the part of His teaching which most utterly puzzled and confounded them. His rejection by the chief priests and scribes, the delivering of Him to the Gentiles, are the subjects on which He spoke to them, especially when St. Peter had confessed Him to be the Son of the living God, and when His glory had been seen on the Mount of Transfiguration. It followed speedily upon His entry into Jerusalem as the Son and Heir of David. The last passover fixed the conviction in the hearts of the disciples, that His death was to translate the old covenant into the new.

The conviction worked slowly in the minds of the early Christians; there were innumerable revolts from it and reactions against it. I have spoken to you of some who utterly refused to connect the Christ with death; who said that the death on the cross must have been only an apparent one, or else that Jesus must have ceased to be the Christ before it took place. The Gospel of St. John struck at the root of this opinion. Dwelling more than all previous Evangelists on the original glory of Christ, on His life before the worlds, on His eternal union with the Father, He yet dwells more than all others on His giving up of life, on His shedding His blood, as the very sign of His filial character, as the test of His divinity. He merely alludes to the Baptism, does not formally describe it. But he introduces the discourse (which contains the essence of all His discourses) wherein Jesus declares Himself to be the true Shepherd, and to be loved by his Father, because He gave His life for the sheep. The wonderful words belong to His Gospel: ‘My flesh is meat indeed, my blood is drink indeed.’

But I said that history, the history of the modern world, explained these words as well as the Gospels. You ask for the signs which distinguish those who acknowledge Jesus as the Christ from those who reject Him. You ask this question of some Jew or Mahometan, who can, of course, only point you to some external mark, who has a very imperfect notion of what the disciples of Jesus believe, who would not admit that they had any moral superiority. He would say, ‘They baptize their converts, and generally their children, with water; they hold a feast which celebrates the death of their Founder, for they say that the shedding of his blood was, in some sense or other, a sacrifice.’ This would be the observation of an impartial, intelligent traveller of another faith, who had not, perhaps, made himself minutely acquainted with the peculiarities of Christians, but who had ascertained in a rough way wherein their customs differed from his own, wherein they were like each other in different countries, as well as through a course of ages. And this, if we had no other evidence, would surely add a general confirmation to the words of St. John. It would indicate that a faith which had established itself amongst a number of different races, which had overcome the opposition of a considerable portion of the world, was faith in a Person who had come by water and by blood.

Still you are not satisfied. If any of those good results which we suppose to have followed from the spread of the Gospel have followed from it, you must demand further, ‘What relation was there between them and these signs?’ It would strike every one that water is a sign of cleansing. No one can read the Bible—I might say, perhaps, the book of any writer, professional or unprofessional, on the human frame—without feeling that the blood had some connexion with the life. To say that water is not the only sign of the coming of the Christ, that blood is also a sign of it—an equally important sign—might therefore appear to be equivalent with saying, ‘The Christ is not only a purifier, He is a life-giver; He does not only remove defilements from men, He imparts to them a quickening principle.’

We are advancing rapidly, perhaps too rapidly; for now the doubt presents itself; every page of Christian history raises it. ‘Yes! but what a wide gulf there is between the sign and the thing signified! You have the water sign on your foreheads, but where is the purity that answers to it? You have the blood sign on your door-posts, but where is the divine, holy, self-sacrificing life which it would appear to express?’ Certainly the doubt ought not to be evaded, or trifled with; but with solemn earnestness to be searched out. Will the last clause of the verse help us at all in the investigation? ‘And it is the Spirit which beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.’

We have seen that the very idea of the Christ, as St. John sets it forth to us, is of one who receives the Holy Spirit that He may impart it. When he speaks of Jesus as the Christ, he means this. If we accept his statements at all,—if we would understand them, even though we do not accept them,—we must allow him to tell us his whole meaning; one part of it must be imperfect without the other. He denies that the signs of water or of blood have any power apart from ‘the Spirit’ which was in Him of whose person, of whose work, they are the signs. But he says also that they are true signs, signs of an actual purity which belongs to our race in Him who has come by water; signs of a holy, self-sacrificing, divine life, which belongs to it in Him who has come not by water only, but by water and blood. Therefore he does not say that the Spirit makes any man that which he is not truly and actually in virtue of his being a man, but that He bears witness; that He awakens the spirit of man to know his true state, to understand and to claim the purity and the risen life which are his in the Son of Man, the head of the body whereof he is a member.

The Spirit, St. John intimates, is as truly given as the water and blood are given. One is as much involved in the coming of the Christ as the other. And this Spirit beareth witness because He is truth; beareth witness against the falsehood which is in us, the falsehood which disposes us to dwell in our own selfish impurity and death, when Christ has come to make us partakers of His own holy nature, of His own free and perfect life.

This subject is so important and so interesting that we long for more light upon it. St. John is ready to give it; but between the sixth verse and the eighth, wherein he explains more fully what he has just been saying, a verse has been interposed which appears entirely irrelevant: ‘There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one.’ Nearly all scholars, I believe, in our day, are agreed that this verse is spurious. If it was genuine, we should be bound to consider seriously what it meant, however much its introduction in this place might puzzle us, however strange its phraseology might appear to us. Those who dwell with awe upon the name into which they have been baptized; those who believe that all the books of the Bible, and St. John’s writings more than all the rest, reveal it to us; those who connect it with Christian ethics, as I have done; might wonder that an Apostle should make a formal announcement of this Name in a parenthesis, and in connexion with such a phrase as bearing record, one admirably suited to describe the intercourse of God with us, but quite unsuitable, one would have thought, as an expression of His absolute and eternal being. Still, if it was really one of St. John’s utterances, we should listen to it in reverence, and only attribute these difficulties to our own blindness. As we have the best possible reasons for supposing it is not his, but merely the gloss of some commentator, which crept into the text, and was accepted by advocates eager to confute adversaries, less careful about the truth they were themselves fighting for—we may thankfully dismiss it and proceed with the topic which has occupied us already: ‘For there are three that bear witness on the earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one.’

In speaking of the state of mankind since Jesus was born into it, two facts require to be explained: 1. How any change has been wrought in the moral condition of the world. 2. Why that change is not greater; why, at times, we are disposed to deny it altogether, and to think that we are worse than the generations of old?

Supposing there were a Spirit continually witnessing with the spirits of men concerning a purification from evil, concerning a spring of good which all are meant to enjoy; does it not seem to you that we have an explanation of both these facts? A man heeding this witness, suffering himself to be governed by that Spirit who is bearing it to his heart and conscience, acquires an internal righteousness, an energy to do what he ought to do, to be what he ought to be, which a man without the same revelation, without the same assurance of a divine presence and co-operation, cannot have had. And yet, though this righteousness and Life are internal, the same revelation compels the man to declare that they are not his; to attribute all that is good in him to another, with a confidence which no man in the old world can have felt. The Spirit, the water, the blood, agree in this testimony; all alike signify to the man that the more inward his purity and regeneration are, the more entirely they must be referred to Christ, not to himself.

But supposing this inward testimony is borne to the conscience and heart of a man—for to that it must be addressed—and rejected; may there not be, must there not be, an internal impurity, an internal death, such as no man in the old world could have realized? Or what is more frightful still, a self-righteousness, a self-glorification, to which he must have been a stranger? To whom such states of mind are to be attributed, is happily beyond our knowledge. The Judge of all the earth, of quick and dead, only is able to discriminate. But does not each one know enough of what has passed in himself, of his struggles with a good Spirit, to be able to say, ‘Such a state, so far darker than that of any Jew or Heathen, may be the portion of one who has been brought into the Christian covenant, just because he has been brought into it, just because the Spirit, the water, and the blood agree in their witness to the blessings whereof we have been made inheritors?’

One point more has to be recollected, that the great enigma which was started may be solved, so far as it is needful for our comfort and peace that it should be solved. Reflect that the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood all agree in the testimony that Good is mightier than Evil, that Christ has come to destroy the works of the Devil, and has not failed in the purpose of His coming. Thus we may explain the fact which would be otherwise unaccountable, that, though the numbers of those who reject the witness seem to our human eyesight immensely greater than that of those who accept it, yet that the former have failed, and the latter have succeeded. The meek have inherited the earth. They have had a power over it, a power to transform it in spite of the continued resistance of a majority possessed of all appliances and means to keep it in its degradation and darkness. So you may understand the progress of civility, the breaking the fetters of the serf, the existence of politics, of freedom, of humanity, in spite of that increased malice and devilry which the Gospel has called forth. So you may dare to anticipate all that holy men and prophets have said should be, and may be certain that the Spirit, the Water, and Blood are agreed in witnessing that it shall be.

‘If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which He hath testified of His Son.’ You will remember that this subject of Testimony was brought before us in the very opening of St. John’s Epistle. He had seen and handled that which was about the Word of Life; He had been sent to bear witness of that Eternal Life which was with the Father, and had been manifested to men. In speaking of this passage, I remarked that the Ephesians must have been often exercised with the question whether they should not know less of Christ after the Apostles had left the world than they did then, and whether their sons and grandsons would not lose something of what they retained. I showed you how directly St. John’s words met this doubt, how they vindicated for him and the eleven their true position as eye-witnesses of that which could be seen of the Christ; how they declared that the Person who was manifested to them might be as fully known in the nineteenth century as in the first. Those who know what endless anxieties have arisen in all ages since, out of the inquiry how much testimony we have respecting the Christ, what testimony is of worth respecting any events that have been recorded of the past, what testimony it is possible for us to receive respecting anything which is supernatural, may be thankful that St. John did not hastily dismiss this topic, that he returns to it again, that he expresses his full judgment upon it. What that judgment is you might guess from the previous sentence; but it is well worthy of a careful examination. Starting from the belief that God is, and that it is God’s purpose to reveal Himself, he boldly declares that we are not dependent for our faith upon the testimony of Apostles, upon the traditions of past ages, upon the authority and interpretation of doctors and Churches. Whatever value you may attach to these testimonies, whatever may be their respective degrees of credibility, there is a Great Judge, a standing Court of Appeal to which these decisions may and must be referred; one who is separating the chaff from the wheat in them every moment; one who alone is able to give them any weight over the Conscience and Reason and Will of man. The witness of men may be great, the witness of God is greater. This, I believe, is sound philosophy, in which we must all at last acquiesce. I conceive the Scotch philosopher, Hume, was right, that no mere human testimony, or combination of human testimonies, could be of weight enough to procure credence for anything that transcends the limits of human experience. He had of course to explain, as well as he could, how it is that men in all countries of the world have been dreaming of God, have been feeling that they could not exist without God. He had to account as well as he could for the manifold experiences of what is supernatural, of what is higher than themselves, which men, not in one country but in all countries, have spoken of. There are but two ways; one was Hume’s way, that of supposing that all the deepest and most earnest thoughts of the most earnest men in the world pointed to nothing. The other is to suppose that they pointed to some Person, whom they could not reach; that all their confused guesses were calls to Him to make Himself known; that He Himself had awakened those calls; that He was testifying to men of Himself; that He was purposing to testify to them fully of Himself. Between Atheism, in its most direct and absolute form, and the conviction that God is manifesting Himself, and that His testimony to us is above all human testimony is the ground and strength of all human testimony—I believe we shall soon find that there is no alternative. Those who have put forth the doctrine of Positivism in our day are driving us to this discovery. We owe them infinite thanks for it. They are bringing the battle to a point. It will be fought out, not as it has been in former ages of the world, with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood, but with burning and fuel of fire. Everything will be involved in it. Wit, letters, science, humanity will for a time be glorified, as if they were substitutes for God. Then they will go down into the unfathomable pit of Atheism. Or they will be seen to have derived their greatness and glory from the God who so loved the world as to give His Son for it; they will rise to a new life; humanity will have that excellence in the Son of Man which men have fancied they could win for it by casting off His yoke. The earth will come forth a bride adorned for her husband, shining with the radiance of her Creator and her King.

‘He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made Him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.’

As there has been much talk among us about external testimonies and the weight that is to be assigned to them, so there has been much talk about an inward witness, which some might claim and others not. Here St. John speaks of this inward witness very emphatically, ‘He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself.’ In fact, he could not understand any witness to a man which was not a witness to a man in himself. A mere vision presented to the eyes, if it was the clearest possible, was nothing, unless it signified something to him who used the eyes; unless it entered into his heart and conscience. But St. John never for an instant sanctions the vanity and self-glorification of those who say that Christ is for them and not for the world. If they believe in the Son of God, they believe in a Christ for mankind. The inward witness is of such a one. And if they believe not in a Christ for mankind, a Christ who has reconciled God and Man, St. John is very broad and simple in his assertions respecting them: ‘They make God a liar.’ They deny the revelation He has made of Himself in the Baptism and the Death of Jesus; they deny the witness which the Spirit and the water and the blood are together bearing respecting Him.

Good men—some of them men whom I honour and revere—want to get rid of all outward testimonies of God’s love,—of the water and the blood,—and to dwell exclusively on what they call the internal testimony of the Spirit. I do not undervalue their doctrine as a counterweight to much that is coarse, sensual, external, in the language of Churchmen; I think God has appointed it, as a protest against our idolatries. But I do not admit for an instant that they are wiser than St. John, or that they know as well as he did what the witness of the Spirit is. I find them continually setting aside His witness by confounding Him with the thoughts which He inspires in them; with the spirits to which His witness is borne. I think they must do this, and must become very exclusive, and also very often the victims of casual impressions, of nervous ecstasies or depressions, if they are not willing to receive God’s testimony to others as well as themselves. This is the blessing of the ‘Water and the Blood.’ They speak of a gift, a gift of eternal life to Mankind; a gift not bestowed upon those who are conscious of it, but upon all, in that Son who died for all and lives for all.

The words which follow contain the only possible limitation of this gift, and they are in very truth not a limitation but an expansion of it, ‘He that hath the Son hath life: and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.’ We have no life, we can have no life in ourselves. The Spirit does not witness to us of a miserable, partial, selfish, new life, which is given to us because we are Christians or believers, or have certain rare emotions. He testifies to us of a Universal and Everlasting Life which dwells in the Son of God; which we may enjoy, if we do not desire to be separated from the great family in heaven and earth that is named in Him.