1 John 5:6 Commentary

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1 John 5:6

Comments

To strengthen our overcoming faith John draws our attention to the mode of Christ’s coming. ‘He that came’ is shorthand for the incarnation referring to Christ’s pre-existence, and stressing the divine purpose that brought him into the world. The Spirit testifies that ‘Jesus Christ is come in the flesh’ (1 John 4:2), but also that he ‘came by water and blood’. These words are generally understood by Reformed commentators to refer to Christ’s baptism and death on Calvary. It is said that John wrote to counter the heretic Cerinthus, who taught that the Christ came upon the man Jesus at his baptism but left him again before Calvary so that Jesus died a mere man. What the water and the blood testify is that the one who was baptised was truly God, and that he remained the God-man when he died on Calvary. He came by blood for his death was an essential element of his mission to the world. The Lord did not have simply an appearance of humanity, and, like the angels that manifested themselves in human form, return to heaven without experiencing death. The Spirit testifies to the incarnation in our hearts and we value this testimony just because it brings with it the Spirit’s seal to us that it is true. The reliability of his witness makes us need no other witness besides, and all witnesses contrary to his are to be refused because they do not agree with him.

Application

The mystery of the incarnation is so great that our hearts would stagger in unbelief unless God confirmed it by powerful witnesses. It is an essential element of the Christian Gospel that in Jesus Christ, God and man have been united in one person, but how could the infinite, eternal God humble himself to the extent that he took the nature of his own creature and joined himself to what is finite, mortal, and changeable? Although this is beyond our comprehension, without it there can be no communication between God and man, no atonement, and no hope for lost men and women.

Questions

Some see a reference to the water and blood that came from the spear wound in Jesus’ side, but the words ‘not by water only’ rule this out, for water and blood came out of his side together, and there could be no possibility of one without the other. Neither are the words an allegorical reference to baptism and the Lord’s Supper, for they speak of the nature of his coming not to the consequence of it. It may be that the word ‘water’ goes back further than Christ’s baptism and is used to refer to his physical birth, in agreement with Christ’s words in John 3:5-6, where the close parallel in those verses between being born of water and being born of the flesh will not allow the idea of baptism to be read into the passage. Here John may be using the same image, and arguing that Christ’s physical birth, foretold in the Old Testament, testifies to his true humanity, for no angel or spirit ever went through the process of physical birth. He experienced true birth and true death, both according to Scripture.

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1 John 5:6 Commentary and Bible Study