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“Water and blood” is not the kind of phrase you expect to shape your faith, but John uses it to draw a line in the sand about who Jesus is. We’re nearing the end of our 1 John series, and we slow down in 1 John 5 to ask the question John won’t stop asking: why does it matter what we believe about Jesus? If you’ve ever felt the pull to admire Jesus’ compassion while treating the crucifixion like an awkward detail, this conversation is for you.
We talk through the strongest interpretation of John’s imagery, water as Jesus’ baptism and blood as his cross, and why John refuses to let us separate the two. Jesus is not only a teacher worth quoting. He is the Son of God who came in the flesh, suffered, and died as part of God’s saving work. We also unpack John’s language of testimony and witnesses: the Spirit, the water, and the blood agree, and the Holy Spirit keeps pointing the church back to the real Jesus when competing claims and “safer” versions start to drift in.
Then we sit with John’s promise of eternal life. Yes, it includes resurrection, renewed creation, and real hope in grief, but it also means knowing God now, restored fellowship that begins in the present. We close by drawing a sharp distinction between knowing about Jesus and trusting Jesus, and we bring it to the communion table with a question worth carrying all week.
Subscribe for the rest of the series, share this with a friend who’s deconstructing or rebuilding faith, and leave a review if it helps. When you listen, tell us your answer: are you trusting the Jesus God has revealed, or the version that feels most comfortable?
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And I mean, since this summer, we've been in this series in First John since maybe May or June. And we've been exploring through this text what it means to live an authentic life with God. Themes that have come up over the last few months through First John are things like obedience and forgiveness, discernment, and of course love. That's what he keeps coming back to. And underneath all of those questions, and maybe you've kind of caught on that some of these themes are a little repetitive in 1 John, but underneath all of it, he comes back to Jesus. We talked about obedience, back to Jesus, forgiveness, back to Jesus, discernment back to Jesus. Love back to Jesus. And throughout all of this, John is really telling us who Jesus is. This is the Jesus I saw, I heard, I touched. All of these things have to do with it. Now, what prompts John to write this letter, as we have learned, is that there was a painful theological disagreement within that Christian community. And people made competing claims about Jesus, and some separated from that core group that John knew. And now, as John approaches the conclusion of his letter, as I mentioned before when we were getting started, there's this week and there's next
week, and we're done with the series, he returns to this idea of who is Jesus and why does what we believe about him matter? I mean, that's kind of the question. Why does it matter? And so I'm gonna read from 1 John chapter 5, and I'm gonna read verses 5 and 6, in which John says, Who is the one who overcomes the world? But the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not only with water, but with water and with the blood. John begins this segment by asking a rhetorical question, in which he immediately answers. He says, Who has overcome the world? And his answer is the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God. You know, we don't presume that everyone here or listening shares the faith that we have, but John is saying for those of you who do, the Christian faith, you believe in Jesus, you overcome the world. You will overcome the world. And this directly connects with what we talked about last week: that overcoming the world isn't something you and I do. We don't muster it up, we don't like achieve some sort of spiritual superiority that's different from everyone else based on how many church services we attend, based on how many books of the Bible we've read, or how many times we've read through extraordinary discipline. It doesn't, you know, you don't get extra points necessarily or at all for waking up at 4 a.m. and and praying every day. He says, You who have overcome the world do so because of your faith in Jesus Christ and what he has accomplished, not you, but him.
And then John describes something that you're not going to see very often in the New Testament or the Scripture. Maybe it stood out to you when I read it, but John describes Jesus as the one who came by water and blood. Water and blood. I know for certain that's not how most of you describe Jesus when you're talking to him or about him, to friends and family. If he ever comes up, you're not Jesus, you know Jesus. Water, blood, that guy, it doesn't happen, right? Now, scholars actually are debating the meaning of this. It seems like John's audience already knew. John doesn't explain, he just says water and blood. And it's almost like you can imagine the early the guys and gals who are getting this message, you're like, Yep, yep, oh yeah, we remember that. But for us, 2000 years removed, without a reference, kind of elsewhere in scripture, we're like, what exactly do you mean? And so we get to go on an interpretive journey together. There are a few different ways. I'm going to save you some time so you don't have to read or deep dive into it, but the strongest interpretations by scholars understands the water as Jesus' baptism and the blood as his crucifixion. John's emphasis here, though, and both and Jesus came not by water alone, but water and blood. John never really explicitly states from beginning to end every detail of whatever controversy happened prior to him writing. But what we can reasonably conclude, and what he's given us kind of these hints throughout his letter, is that there were teachers who affirmed Jesus' spiritual significance while diminishing the importance of his suffering and death. And John doesn't let his readers, both then and now, separate those two. The Jesus revealed that his baptism is the same Jesus who suffered and died on the cross, water and blood. His crucifixion wasn't an unfortunate ending to an otherwise inspiring life. The crucifixion was part of the story, it was part of the plan. It was central to God's saving work. We've encountered this theme throughout the entire letter. John keeps telling us that Jesus' blood cleanses us from sin, that he is our advocate, and that he sacrificed his life, laid it down for us. This concern remains today. 2026, Madison, Wisconsin, United States, all over the world. We can, and people do, admire Jesus' teachings about compassion and love, while also treating his crucifixion as a secondary issue or topic or subject. We can appreciate him as a moral teacher while overlooking his identity as the Son of God who came on a mission to do a saving work for us. John insists that our faith rests in the Jesus Christ that God has revealed to us, the Son of God who came by water and blood. And if we picked up where we stopped reading verse six, kind of the end of it, John says, It is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is truth.
For there are three that testify the spirit and the water and the blood, and the three are in agreement. That's confusing to me as well as you when I read this. I gotta dive into some commentaries and say, what is going on? John introduces three witnesses. He says there's the spirit is a witness, the water is a witness, and the blood is a witness, and that all three of them agree. This may echo for some of you kind of theology nerds. This may echo Deuteronomy 19, 15, where we're told that it needs at least two witnesses are required to establish a matter, and three really seals the deal. Here, the three testimonies agreeing can concern Jesus. You'll recall from a couple weeks ago the podcast episode that was released this week was that John says we can test the spirits. There are false prophets out there making competing claims about Jesus. And he reminds his listeners that the spirit is truth. The Holy Spirit in our lives, working in us and through us, isn't like some sort of alternative version of Jesus, but one that testifies the Son of God who came in the flesh, suffered, and died. This echoes John's words, or Jesus' words that John records in John chapter 15, verse 26, where he says the Spirit of truth will testify about him, Jesus. And although Jesus's baptism and crucifixion happened in history, the Spirit continues to bear witness of him today. What God accomplished through Jesus is just as significant today as it was 2,000 years ago. And now finally, let's read from verses 9 through 12. If we receive the testimony of people, the testimony of God is greater. For the testimony of God is this that he has testified concerning his son. The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. The one who does not believe, God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in his testimony, the testimony that God has given him concerning his son. And the testimony is
this that God has given us eternal life. And this life is in his son. The one who has the son has life. The one who does not have the son of God does not have life. John begins this segment here. Penn, you know, he's writing, he says, We accept human testimony all the time. All the time you accept human testimony. Much of what you and I know about history or science or even our family histories, that comes from people telling us things that we haven't personally encountered or experienced or witnessed. And John just kind of reasons if we can accept human testimony, how much more weight should we give to God, revealing what he has revealed about his own son, himself? In verse 10, John says that refusing God's testimony is effectively treating God as a liar. And that that is strong language. But it's not condemnation of asking or having honest and hard questions or struggling sincerely with your faith. That's not at all what John is getting at. It's completely possible to believe in God and still have struggles with your faith and to deconstruct and reconstruct. And we talked about that last week, how that is a part of our faith. And exercising our faith is to constantly shatter and break down whatever we think God is or who God is. What John is trying to just emphasize is the seriousness of rejecting what God has revealed about his son. He tells us in verse 11 this is the testimony. God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his son. So
let's talk about eternal life for a moment. When we hear the phrase eternal life, all of us have different ideas of what that means. We've all heard different things. We've thought about it, we've wrestled about it, and most of the time we're thinking about what heaven is like or what happens after we die. And yes, eternal life has to do with that. The Christian hope, the hope that you and I have through Jesus includes the resurrection of the body, the defeat of death, and the sharing in God's renewed creation, the renewing of creation. And I also want to kind of sidebar here that because I know that there are people here today listening who are grieving unexpected loss of life this week. And for those who, for those people, those who belong to Christ, the promise of resurrection is especially precious. Especially precious. It doesn't take away from the pain of losing someone. It certainly doesn't answer every question we're left carrying. It doesn't make the grief suddenly go away, but it reminds us that our hope is that death does not have the final word over us. And yet, eternal life does mean much more than what happens after we die. It's not just a then and there thing, it's a here and now thing. John 17, 3, Jesus describes eternal life as knowing the eternal, the one true God and Jesus Christ, whom God has sent. And in this life, this eternal life is a restored fellowship with God through Jesus that we experience right now. You and me, as we sit here today, are experiencing eternal life in the form of a renewed and restored relationship with God, which brings us back to the opening of John's letter where he describes eternal life revealed in Jesus and invites his readers into fellowship with God. That's how we began. And now, dear, we're getting to the conclusion. John declares that God has given us life through his son. One of the things I want to point out in this text that we can get that can get lost is that God has given us eternal life. It's a present reality, but it's a gift. It's a gift. It's not something you and I have earned. Now knowing about Jesus isn't the same thing as trusting Jesus. Okay, knowing Jesus isn't the same thing as trusting him. We can study about his life, admire his teachings, and still stop short of entrusting ourselves to him. To have the Son is to trust in Jesus, to recognize our own need for forgiveness, that we all mess up, we hurt people, whether we intend to or not. Even though we try hard and we do our best, we're still going to come up short. But we can receive grace through from God. And that leads us to an ongoing relationship. And as we have a relationship, not just with God,
and we can probably see this through our earthly relationships with friends, with family members, if we have romantic partners, as we get to know someone, we begin to recognize assumptions that we might have had about someone that we need to change. Doesn't just happen with people, it happens with God. Things that we need to confront within ourselves. Oh, these are my bad habits. These are the things that I've been ignoring that come out. Areas of life that we need to surrender. Now, throughout this letter, John has described how that life takes shape first through belief and then through love and then through obedience. In other words, the source, God, what he has done, his work comes first and before any of our responses. Jesus is the one who gives us life. And so as we enter in and we're going to lean into our time of reflection, examination, response, and communion, let's remember John's words. God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his son. And so our question for reflection today is Am I trusting the Jesus that God has revealed, or am I holding on to a version of Jesus that I've become comfortable with? And as we receive the bread and cup, may we remember the Jesus who gave himself for us. We don't come to the table because we have a perfect understanding, or because we've already completely surrendered every aspect of our lives. We're invited, and we come to the table because God's grace has been given through him.
