These Three Agree (1 John 5:6-9, Jeff Kliewer)

Testimony of men and women is enough to convince of the truth of what that person is saying.

When my wife and I were missionaries in inner city Philadelphia many moons ago, at least probably 12 years ago, there was a young man who came over to our house for dinner because the next day he was going to stand trial for a crime he had committed.

And we tried to work with him, but on the way out he grabbed our car keys and a credit card without our knowing it.

And later that night came back and stole our car. Well, that night was very eventful. We went to where we knew that he hung out, and we saw him driving it, and followed him, and called the police, and were able to go and reclaim our car from the young man who took it.

The next morning he was in the courtroom ready to stand trial for a different charge. At some point, just before he was called up, he decided to run rather than face charges.

He started to leave the building. Another trial was taking place, and his grandmother, who was there with us, called out, your honor,

I am trying to save my grandson in the middle of a different court case.

The judge turned his attention to the grandmother, who we were sitting right next to, and allowed her to speak.

She said, my grandson is just out of control. He's going to end up dead unless you stop him now.

He's on trial, and last night he stole the minister's car.

A gasp went up from the audience, and I stood up. The judge asked me to testify if that was true.

I said, yeah, that's true. And my wife also bore witness. The three of us bore witness, the grandmother, the pastor, and the pastor's wife.

The officer who was detaining this young man then searched his pockets and found my car keys and my wife's credit cards.

There was enough evidence at that point that there was no doubt that the charge was true.

Three witnesses who could testify to what they saw, not to mention the physical evidence. This morning,

I proclaim to you that Jesus is the Christ. He is the

Son of God. He was crucified on a Roman cross, but on the third day, he rose from the dead.

And the wonderful thing is we have witnesses to this effect.

It's not just what I say. It's not just what I've heard. It is more than the testimony of men, which can be trustworthy enough.

It is the very testimony of God. If you have a Bible with you, please turn to the first epistle that John wrote, 1

John, to the fifth chapter. And we're just going to look at four verses today, verses 6 through 9.

1 John 5, 6 through 9. The message is true.

Three witnesses invested not just with human authority, three witnesses testify that Jesus is, in fact, risen from the dead.

1 John 5, 6 through 9. Or you can just listen along. If you have a digital device, you can

Google it and find it in a couple seconds here. 1 John 5, 6 through 9.

This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ. Not by the water only, but by the water and the blood.

And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify, the

Spirit, and the water, and the blood. And these three agree.

If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater.

For this is the testimony that he has borne concerning his

Son. So we're told that three testify, the

Spirit, the water, and the blood. In a moment, we'll break down what that means. But let's go verse by verse and just look in the context of the passage.

Verse 6, it says, this is he, referring to Jesus, who came by water and blood,

Jesus Christ. Now, the text indicates and stresses that it's not only by water, it's also by blood.

Not by the water only, but by the water and the blood. And the

Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. So the question is, what is the water?

And what is the blood? The water refers to how

Jesus came and was identified to the

Israelites, to the people of God. He came and was baptized in the

Jordan River. This is how he was identified. Before that, he was sort of an obscure carpenter, just living a sinless life in Nazareth, going about doing the things that ordinary people do.

But on this day, it was a peaceful day. He came to the waters of the

Jordan River. And a man named John the Baptist identified him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

And entering into that water, he was dunked under the water and came up.

Light shone from heaven and an audible voice from heaven. The voice of the

Father said, this is my Son in whom I am well pleased.

The first scene I want you to picture in your mind is Jesus Christ baptized in the Jordan River, a peaceful and audible testimony to who he was.

But it's not by water only. There is a second testimony here that's called the blood, as peaceful as the waters of the

Jordan River were when that light shone from heaven. The second testimony is like the first because it identifies

Jesus. And yet this testimony is not peaceful. It's violent.

It's the testimony of blood where he's been beaten by Roman soldiers and presented and questioned, who are you?

Are you the Christ? And answering that inquisitor, he says, you say that I am.

He doesn't plead his own defense. In fact, he's like a lamb silent before his accusers.

He doesn't defend himself and his innocence. Rather, he allows himself to be beaten and bloody and marred beyond any human recognition.

And then to carry the cross up the hill, be pinned to it, and die in agony.

The death of Jesus on the cross speaks to his identity. In a minute, we'll find out why.

The spirit, the water, and the blood. Look at verse 7. 1 John 5, verse 7, for there are three that testify.

Now when you read that language, it sounds very Trinitarian. You would imagine it to go on to say the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In fact, if you are reading a King James Bible right now, your

Bible will say there are three that testify in heaven. The Father, the Word, and the

Spirit. And the three are one. The modern translations, like the

ESV, which we're reading from here, don't have that. Easter Sunday is probably not the morning to do an in -depth

Bible study on the textual variant that happens here. It's called the Comma Johannium.

In one quick breath, it was introduced late into the Latin version of the

Bible. Jerome himself did not translate it into the Latin Vulgate. But later versions of the

Latin included the Comma Johannium. In fact, it wound up in the

King James because the translator, whose name was Deside Erasmus, translated from the

Latin and was forced to include it in his third edition. In his first two editions, he did not include it.

Long story short, it was not original to the text. The early manuscripts, which some of them date within 20 years of when the

Bible was written, did not contain the Comma Johannium. So why was it there?

Why did somebody write it in? Well, probably a priest, in translating the Bible, noticed the Trinitarian language.

And that's a good thing. The problem was he wrote notes that then became part of the

Latin version of the text. So look at verse 7 again. It says, there are three that testify.

Now what does the text refer to? What are the three? The spirit, the water, and the blood.

But don't miss the Trinitarian language there. The spirit is the spirit of the

Father and the spirit of Christ, because the three are one. The blood is testified to by the

Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And the water, picture

Jesus in his baptism. There is the second member of the Trinity. But as he's dunked underwater and is raised up, a light shines from heaven.

The Father speaks, the Son is present, identified in water, and a spirit, the Spirit, descends on him like a dove.

So the Trinity is testifying through these means.

Don't miss that language there. Now, moving on to verse 8, we're gonna dissect what are the spirit, the water, and the blood?

And how do they tell us that Jesus is in fact the Christ, the Son of the living God, that he was crucified, but that he rose on the third day?

Why is this not just the opinion of man? How is it that we can say this is the very testimony of God himself?

Verse 8, the spirit and the water and the blood.

And these three agree. Let's take them one at a time.

The spirit, the spirit is the Holy Spirit. How does he testify?

Well, his job in the economy of the Trinity is to put the spotlight on Jesus Christ.

He does that day in and day out. Through circumstances in your lives, through all kinds of things that happen, through movies that come out in the theater.

The Holy Spirit inspires Christians to do these things. Yes, the spirit is working, but there is one primary way in which he speaks through the word of God, the

Bible. The 66 books written by prophets and apostles are actually inspired by the

Holy Spirit. 2 Timothy 3 .16, all scripture is God -breathed, breathed out by God.

That word for breath there is pneuma, it refers to the spirit. The spirit inspires those who write the text.

And so we have two halves to our Bible, 400 years separating them. The first 39 books were written 400 years before Christ came and then just after his coming, the

New Testament, 27 more books written. And these 66 books are the testimony of God.

Well, testimony is subjective. When you or I are in a court of law and we're called to testify, it's up to the jury to listen and weigh what they hear, but there's a subjectivity to that.

How can we say that this is objectively the very testimony of God? In Isaiah chapter 44, verses six to eight,

God is speaking and says, this is how you know me, as opposed to all the idols of the nations, as opposed to every other

God who calls himself a God. I tell things before they come to pass.

I am able to tell you the end from the beginning. And so the 39 books of the

Old Testament foretell the coming of Jesus Christ in such a powerful and profound way that any who read it are convicted to see that this in fact speaks of Christ.

It is the very testimony of God. Let me give you a couple examples. We call Abraham to testify in this courtroom.

Abraham, of course, was given the promise that through his seed, all the nations will be blessed.

The seed of Abraham was a young man named Isaac, and from Isaac, all the world would be blessed.

But there came a day when God said to Abraham, take your son, your only son, and bring him to a place where I will show you and sacrifice him there.

In that moment, Abraham made a sacrifice in his heart and was forced to do what

God had compelled him to do. In obedience, he went. And then after that event, not long after he dies and lays down with his fathers, his spirit ascends to heaven.

And 2 ,000 years later, seeing the events of earth, he watches the

Son of God crucified and tortured. He killed on that tree. And here is what

Abraham would say to every one of us. What happened to me was not for me.

It pointed to Jesus Christ. Consider this. The story of Abraham and Isaac is the story of a father sacrificing his son.

Fathers, let that sink in. It's so weighty. I get the chance to baptize my son today.

And the love of a father for a son is hard to describe. And yet in the story, a father is called to sacrifice his son, and the stress is given in Genesis 22, verse one, your only son.

The story of Jesus is the story of the father sacrificing his son, his one and only unique son, the

Son of God. And that son is led on a three -day journey and told that on the mountain of the

Lord, it will be provided. And the son questions, but father, where is the sacrifice?

And the father says to the son, behold, God himself will provide the lamb for the sacrifice.

And then the Son of God takes the wood of the cross, now prefigured in Isaac, taking the wood of his own sacrifice and carries the wood up the hill, up the mountain, and willingly lays down upon that wood to be sacrificed by his father.

All of this points to Jesus Christ, not to Isaac alone. And yet just before killing his son, the angel stops him and provides a ram caught in the thicket to be a substitute.

And so begins sacrificial animals to stand in the place of sinful people until the

Son of God himself is sacrificed. The book of Hebrews tells us one more thing.

Abraham receives his son back from the dead. He never physically killed his son.

The angel stopped him and spoke to him, a voice from heaven saying, don't do this. And yet figuratively, his heart, having made up his mind to sacrifice his son on that day, he receives his son back from the dead.

Hebrews 11 tells us he reasoned like this, that God is even able to resurrect the dead, and that's how the promise would be fulfilled.

Abraham receives his son back from the dead. Genesis 22 is what we call prophecy.

It's a foreshadowing of Christ, and the details are so specific, going up a mountain of sacrifice to be the sacrifice that takes away sin.

It was impossible that Isaac would ever be that person. He was a sinner like us.

He was merely human. Only divine blood can take away the sin of the world.

This was done as a foreshadowing of the things to come. Spent some time on Abraham, but we could call each of the witnesses of the

Old Testament, Moses, to talk about the Passover lamb and how the Israelites were delivered by blood, put on the doorposts of their house, and the angel of death would pass over, and in the death of the lamb, the

Israelites are set free. They go through the Red Sea, picturing the waters of baptism.

But it gets even more specific than that. There is foreshadowing in the story of Abraham.

There's foreshadowing in the story of the Passover that Moses would testify to. But as the testimony of the

Old Testament continues to unfold, it gets more and more specific. Call on King David to testify.

He wrote the 22nd Psalm. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And writing of his own experience, he talks about his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, his bones out of joint, being surrounded by dogs, being pierced through his hands and feet.

Those things never physically happened to David. He was never pierced through his hands and feet.

He spoke of his own experience symbolically, and yet he wrote of the sufferings of the son of David, the descendant of David, who was pierced through his hands and his feet, whose tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he said,

I thirst on the cross. Soldiers gambling for his clothes at the foot of the cross.

Psalm 22 points not to David, but to Jesus. If time permitted, we'd talk more about Isaiah, who foretold the virgin birth, chapter seven, verse 14.

Isaiah 53 talks about the wounds that Christ bore being for our healing.

By his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, but the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all.

Micah foretold that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem. Zechariah foretold that he would ride in on a donkey and be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver.

The last prophet in the Old Testament, Malachi, strangely, left the

Old Testament with an awkward ending. He talked about one coming in the spirit of Elijah, who will make a straight path for the

Messiah, and then the prophets went silent until 400 years later,

Jesus appeared, and John the Baptist, standing in the power of Elijah, the last of the

Old Testament prophets, says, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And that brings us to the second point, the water.

The water testifies that Jesus is the Son of God. He goes into the water, emerges from the water,

God himself speaks from heaven, and the spirit descends like a dove. How does that continue to speak to us?

Well, Jesus went to John to be baptized, and John at first said, no, no, no,

I can't baptize you, I can't even untie your sandal, I'm not worthy. And Jesus said, no, it is necessary to fulfill all righteousness.

And so he set an example for us, that those who would believe in him would be baptized in water.

And now for 2 ,000 years, the testimony of the resurrected

Jesus is proclaimed through the waters of baptism, day after day after day, in every country on planet

Earth. I was just getting my hair cut a couple days ago. She cut me a little closer than I expected.

I got the military cut going. She was from Thailand, and she said, I asked her about what

Christianity is doing in Thailand these days. I said, is it like 10 % of the population now? She said, oh, from what

I can tell, it's 20, 25 % at least. The gospel continues to run.

In China, it's the same story. In India, Sub -Saharan Africa, there's never been a time like this where the gospel's going forward, people being baptized one after another, each one testifying, to what?

Baptism, son, and for all of you being baptized. Is an identification with Jesus Christ.

His waters of baptism identified him as the Son of God, the Christ. When we get baptized, we identify with him to say that we belong to him.

Romans 6, three and four, explain that as Christ was crucified and buried and rose on the third day, in the same way, we die to ourselves.

We no longer live for ourselves. But the old man is dead and buried, and we are resurrected to newness of life.

We're identifying in his death and resurrection, saying that we now are dead to ourselves.

We live for him, not for us any longer. That's the identification that takes place when we're baptized.

There's a few other symbols that baptism stands for. In 1 Peter 3, 19, there's a comparison made to Noah when he built that ark and he preached the gospel, proclaiming

Christ prophetically, calling people to repent and to enter the ark, to escape judgment.

And in that time, no one wanted to hear it. Except eight people,

Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. And those eight entered the ark, and we're told that that ark represents baptism, because they escaped the water of judgment.

They're saved from the judgment that was owed to us on account of sin. When we go under the water and come out, we're brought safely through.

That's the picture of baptism. We identify that Christ has saved us. Acts 22, 16 says it also represents a washing away of sin, symbolically.

An interesting one is 1 Corinthians 10, verse two. It says that when

Moses led the people out, they were baptized in the cloud and in the sea.

They were baptized into Moses, we're told. What does that mean? When the

Israelites were set free from Pharaoh in the land of Egypt, and they came through the Red Sea, God split the waters, they go down under the water, they come out on the other side, that symbol baptizes them into Moses.

In the same way, we who are baptized into Christ are declaring our allegiance to him.

We belong to him, and we follow Christ the same way those Israelites followed Moses.

It's an allegiance that we're declaring, that this is my master, this is who I follow.

And yes, there's many leaders in this world. There's many who proclaim what they believe to be truth.

Some of them declare that there is no truth, but Christ is our leader, and he is the way, and he is the truth, and he is the life.

And no one comes to the father but through him, so we follow him through safely. An allegiance to him, that's the water.

And guys, it's gonna be special to see today. Six people declaring their allegiance to Jesus Christ, proclaiming that they are crucified with him and resurrected, proclaiming that they are safe from the waters of judgment on account of Christ.

We'll see that in just a few minutes, but we have one more to talk about, and that is the blood.

The scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit, prophets that testified in the Old Testament, New Testament, you have apostles who were eyewitnesses to his glory.

They say, look, we touched him, we heard him, we saw him resurrected from the dead.

These apostles were willing to die for what they saw. So we have the testimony of the prophets and the apostles, and that testimony is sure.

We have the testimony of water, of every baptized Christian proclaiming that Jesus is alive in the billions on this planet who have been baptized.

Finally, we have the blood. The blood speaks loudest of all. The blood refers to the death of Christ.

We're told in 1 Corinthians that the message of the cross is the power of God.

Oh Lord, help me to represent this. The blood is the death of Jesus on the cross.

The proclaiming of that message, according to Galatians 3, depicts and portrays

Christ as crucified. Here's where faith comes from.

The message of the cross. We have the testimony of the scripture, the spirit bearing witness.

We have the water as others stand up and bear witness, but it is this gospel message that changes a heart.

There has never been a love like the love of Jesus Christ. Yes, we follow a leader who claims to be the truth and there is no other, but this leader was willing to go to Calvary and lay down on a wooden cross and be killed, knowing that there was no other way for our sins to be forgiven.

Hear this, greater love has no one than this, the one who lays down his life for his friends.

Hear that message. Let it be confirmed to your heart. While we are yet sinners,

Christ died for us. The righteous for the unrighteous to bring us to God, the innocent for the guilty to take away our guilt.

The Holy Son of God laying down on that wooden cross and his blood speaks a better message than the message of Abel's blood.

Cain killed his brother Abel and his blood poured out on the ground, calls to God for justice, avenge me from my killer.

But the blood of Jesus that dripped from his body, torn on that cross and fell to the ground, that blood speaks a better message.

It says, father, forgive them, they know not what they do. This blood speaks mercy over us.

The blood cries out from the ground, father, forgive them. And so all who come to him find cleansing by water and by blood.

When his side was pierced as he hung on that tree dead, water and blood poured out and that's the cleansing that we need.

Not just the washing of water, baptism itself cannot save, but the washing of blood.

To believe that he is the crucified Son of God, that his sacrifice atones for your sin and that he rose again.

The last verse, verse nine, if we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater for this is the testimony of God that he is born concerning his son.

Did anybody here think that you were the jury, that the testimony is offered and you are the jury to decide, is this testimony true?

No, you're not the jury. You're the one that stands condemned already on account of sin.

I am the guilty one. I am the one who robs and steals. I am the one who has taken the

Lord's name in vain or told a lie and become a liar. I am the one who's guilty and this message, this testimony is the mercy of God going out into the world through the spirit, through the water, through the blood.

It's not like the testimony. Anybody here sat on a jury before? I sat on a jury, it was very interesting.

But that's not our position in this text. The testimony of God is different than the testimony of men.

He offers us this testimony as a mercy to you.

Turn from your sin and believe, for there's no other way. In fact, he'll go on to say, he who has the son has life.

He who does not have the son does not have life. So in closing, there are three that testify, the spirit, the water, and the blood.

And these three agree. Each one speaks even now.

This Bible continues to be the most printed and sold book in the history of the world.

I looked it up and within the last 50 years, number two is the writings of Mao Tse Tung. Number three is

Harry Potter. And then you have Lord of the Rings and the Twilight Saga and a few others.

But if you take all the next nine and put them all together, you're still only at a fraction of how many

Bibles have been sold within the last 50 years. And that has been the case since Gutenberg created the printing press.

Into every language, they're still translating into some of the lesser known tribal tongues.

This testimony is going out to all the world, old and new, confirming the truth of who

Jesus is. The water, we're gonna turn to that now. The testimony of who

Christ is and the blood, which speaks the loudest of all. Let's close in prayer. Father, thank you for giving us this testimony.

It's not only believable, it is absolutely true. It is our only hope because we are sinners and deserve the penalty of death.

So we thank you that in your mercy, you have sent your son to die on that rugged cross and be resurrected on the third day.

Lord, my prayer is that on this Easter, every person within the sound of my voice would believe the testimony that you have given about your son.

In Jesus' name, amen. All right, now you guys are gonna stand and sing and I'm gonna run quick and get changed.

And within a couple minutes here, we're gonna baptize. So if you're getting baptized, you go ahead and get a t -shirt on.