Introducing the Gospel of John

00:00:01:03 – 00:00:25:28
Clint Loveall
Hey, friends. Welcome back. Thank you for joining us. It’s good to be back with you. It’s good to be back in this routine of looking at Scripture together. And today, as we start a new season, we start a new book, The Gospel of John. One of the four Gospels, the first four books of the New Testament. And you have to be careful using words like most.

00:00:25:28 – 00:00:47:48
Clint Loveall
I don’t know if you’d say it is the most interesting. It is the most unusual of the four. It is the least like the others. The Gospel of John has generated a lot of attention, and it does stand out for being different. And we’ll try to today, as we kick off the study, talk about some of those differences.

00:00:47:52 – 00:01:11:06
Clint Loveall
You may know this. The first three of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, are often referred to as the synoptics, a word that means they look alike. They are similar. And John, by virtue of not being in that club, is the different one the kind of odd one out. And we’ll talk about some of the reasons that we think about the Gospel of John that way.

00:01:11:11 – 00:01:38:11
Clint Loveall
That has given John, I think, Michael, an interesting following. People are very interested in those differences. It’s not that John tells a different story, but he certainly tells it in a different way, with a different distinctive. It’s probably overstated to say that Christians have a kind of love hate with John. John causes John causes some issues.

00:01:38:11 – 00:01:57:33
Clint Loveall
And we’ll talk about why that is. If you if you love the idea that all of the Jesus stories line up seamlessly and don’t leave any gaps and don’t cause any problems, John’s a tough book. John isn’t going to play along very well with that. And John’s a favorite of yours. Yeah.

00:01:57:34 – 00:02:18:16
Michael Gewecke
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Part of that comes from, you know, the importance of educators in your life. And I had a class once with a scholar of John who was a scholar. Because of his love of this book. It really reaches back to what you’re just saying, Clint. Some people have been gripped by the ways that this book tells Jesus’s story.

00:02:18:16 – 00:02:43:08
Michael Gewecke
Because it does. It emphasizes different aspects of who Jesus is and his teachings, and even some of the chronology which you’re alluding to. The chronology of how Jesus, is portrayed in this book. It follows different paths than what you see in the other three synoptic gospels. So I had a professor for whom this was a lifelong discipline studying this book.

00:02:43:08 – 00:03:12:07
Michael Gewecke
And, I very much in the midst of that caught some of that fire, I think. But there’s also Clint, the thing that that you’ve got to give John, I think, is there is this more intimate connection to the teachings of Jesus throughout this book. There’s this there’s these long discourses where Jesus often times it ends up being very confusing because of its theological depth.

00:03:12:12 – 00:03:37:10
Michael Gewecke
I get the sense sometimes that then John almost portrays Jesus as as flying above the heads of everyone in the room by about 20,000ft, that that Jesus is always saying and doing things that people haven’t caught up to yet. And this book portrays that in some really meaningful and deep ways, and that is some aspects of the portrayal of Jesus that I think are personally meaningful to me.

00:03:37:10 – 00:03:55:57
Michael Gewecke
I like being, not overwhelmed. I like those moments where you realize that you’ve got more than I understand. I like those moments where you get, oh, there’s way more depth here than what I first saw. And John has that page after page, and I think it’s one of the reasons I love it.

00:03:56:06 – 00:04:17:20
Clint Loveall
If you’re a person who’s been hanging in with us for a while on Bible studies, you may have gone through the Gospel of Luke with us. And I think Luke is a good contrast to John because right in the Prolog of Luke, we have this idea of a person trying to do history, right? Luke says in his dedication, I sought to compile a history.

00:04:17:21 – 00:04:44:26
Clint Loveall
I sought other sources. I wanted to put a proper account of Jesus life that’s very different than the approach John takes, which is to tell a kind of spiritual story, less historical. And by that I don’t mean that that these things didn’t happen. I don’t mean that’s the simplest way to understand that. And that’s, I think, not helpful.

00:04:44:31 – 00:05:11:34
Clint Loveall
John isn’t concerned with telling history because he’s proclaiming Jesus. And if that doesn’t make sense yet, I think it will. As this book unfolds and I think we, you know, as right off the front end, we can try to give you some sense of what are the differences you’ll see in the Gospel of John or here in the Gospel of John, as opposed to if you’re familiar with Matthew, Mark or Luke.

00:05:11:34 – 00:05:37:12
Clint Loveall
And one of the big ones is, as Michael already alluded to, Jesus in John’s Gospel is prone to make these long speeches. I mean, sometimes covering multiple chapters. And we don’t see that in the other gospels. Jesus also, you can you could argue this a little bit, but essentially there are no parables in the book of John.

00:05:37:22 – 00:06:07:48
Clint Loveall
Now, are there things that can be thought of as parable? Maybe, but they don’t exist in the way that they exist in the other gospels. John just doesn’t use them. So if you think of Jesus as telling a parable, the Good Samaritan, the unforgiving servant, what it that didn’t come from John? Jesus is he’s he’s simply he doesn’t have that same kind of teaching style in this book.

00:06:07:53 – 00:06:31:22
Clint Loveall
Also, this one gets a little hard to flesh out. Michael, I would argue that John is a little bit more of a spiritual gospel. Satan looms large in this, or the powers of evil are always kind of lurking behind the scenes. And another one of the distinctive in the book of John that Jesus has no wavering.

00:06:31:22 – 00:06:52:04
Clint Loveall
There’s no let this cup pass for me. Jesus always knows what people are thinking. He always knows what he’s going to do. There’s no indecision. This portrayal is is the incarnate Christ who is above every earthly power. And that shines through, I think, pretty strongly in the Gospel of John.

00:06:52:17 – 00:07:18:46
Michael Gewecke
So John is interesting because it it really has no interest in any kind of what you might think of this Christmas story. And now we have had John at Christmas this year at First Press, partly because I clinched his, I’ll allow it. But I think, you know, what John’s interested in is the cosmic understanding of the Son of God from the beginning of all time.

00:07:18:46 – 00:07:52:50
Michael Gewecke
Who is the word with a capital W? We’re going to see when we get into the text and that Jesus takes on flesh with a very specific purpose. And and all of the Gospels have a very clear purpose. But I think John weaves that purpose throughout the book in such a consistent way. Jesus is the one, and this book was written for the purpose of us knowing everything we need to know so that we can believe in him, so that we can see what he has been about from the very, very beginning.

00:07:52:55 – 00:08:22:31
Michael Gewecke
Another distinctive of before we rush past that, Clint, that I think it’s worth noting is in the Gospel of John, Jesus has frequent and and high intensity arguments with the Jews. There is a significant level of combativeness in John. Now, I want to make it clear he he has that in Matthew. Certainly. And towards the end of Luke, we saw that ratcheted up very quickly.

00:08:22:31 – 00:08:50:55
Michael Gewecke
But throughout the Gospel of John, really, from day one, Jesus and the Jews are at odds. And for that reason, scholars throughout history, different seasons that this book has been a source of a lot of even Christian readings of anti-Semitism. And as time has gone on, Christian scholars have admitted that. And so there are ways you can get off track reading, John, that has happened historically, and I certainly think that we’ll point those things out as we see them as we go.

00:08:51:00 – 00:09:13:37
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think you’ll also we’ll try to circle back to this regularly, but you’ll also hear things John does a lot with light and darkness. That that’s a powerful theme. Again, these things exist in the other gospels as well. But I would say it’s a matter of degree in John. John is thought to be late.

00:09:13:42 – 00:09:47:24
Clint Loveall
John, generally, scholars think that John may have been the last gospel written, which is particularly interesting given how much of the material and the other gospels John doesn’t include, whether he had access to it or just chose not to use it is still debated by by history, but by scholars. But it’s not in there. The parables, the sermon on the Mount, some of the beloved stories, the Last Supper, the, the communion part of the Last Supper.

00:09:47:29 – 00:10:12:25
Clint Loveall
John does away with that either because he didn’t have that information or because he wanted to tell it differently, remembered it differently. The other thing that’s interesting about John, John falls a very different timeline. In the other gospels. Jesus spends about a third of his time in Jerusalem. In John that happened. Almost this entire book takes place in the last part of Jesus life.

00:10:12:25 – 00:10:47:42
Clint Loveall
There’s not a lot of lead in because John is, intensely focused on the saving work of Christ, on the cross and the conflict that occasions that sacrifice. And so, John is going to center this story really in that area to the extent that some things that happened in other places in the Synoptics happened in Jerusalem. And, again, I know that if you’re a person who wants all of that to line up, you can do that.

00:10:47:42 – 00:11:23:49
Clint Loveall
It’s tricky. There are people who try to do it. I think that’s the most difficult way to read the Gospel of John. I think a much better way to read this book is simply to enter into it, to not compare it with those other things. I mean, that’s interesting in terms of scholarship, but if we just take John as himself and if we take this story more or less at face value, I think it has some very interesting things and some very challenging things to present to us about Jesus.

00:11:23:54 – 00:11:58:03
Michael Gewecke
We’re going to talk about the beginning with much more fullness as we turn our attention to it. But I just think to illustrate your point, Clint, you’re going to have in the Gospel of Luke a historical account of a census being taken. Right. And and Matthew, you’re going to have a genealogy of where Jesus is going to fit into the human lineage as it relates to the people of Israel, of old in John John’s not interested in giving us a historical play by play like we as modern people might be interested in not.

00:11:58:04 – 00:12:23:42
Michael Gewecke
John wants us to understand that there’s something cosmically true about who Jesus is that that if you looked at Jesus, John would want us to know he’s a fully human individual. He’s he’s a person you can touch. He’s a person who you can have a meal with. He’s a person that you can embrace. But but John wants us to know that that’s not all who Jesus is.

00:12:23:42 – 00:12:46:26
Michael Gewecke
He wants us to be fully aware. Thousands of years later, he wants us to have an account that when you saw Jesus, you saw more than just a man. You saw the beginning. In the end, you saw the Savior of the world. You saw a person who not only lived and breathed, but a person who was the breath of God.

00:12:46:26 – 00:13:16:21
Michael Gewecke
And that is deep. It is unbelief, wobbly, challenging mentally. And scholars do talk about how this book has what they consider some of the most advanced theology of the gospels, because it was written later, it was that disseminated later than the other Gospels in the sort of historic account of the of those writings and so now not only is the theology a little bit more fleshed out, but in some ways, I think the account of who Jesus is.

00:13:16:26 – 00:13:37:12
Michael Gewecke
John didn’t need to write another gospel about the ordering. What John was trying to do was to help us see something that we need to see, and that is that there’s way more to Jesus than what meets the eye. In fact, there’s so much more of Jesus than meets the eye that this isn’t a book that thousands of years later, we’ve cleaned up.

00:13:37:16 – 00:13:59:49
Michael Gewecke
We don’t have all of it. Tie nice knots. We don’t have it all figured out that there’s messiness in this book today, because there are so many layers upon layer within it. That’s why I love it. I think if you come to a book like this and want it to be a orderly historical account, you will find some interesting things as we go along.

00:13:59:58 – 00:14:30:05
Michael Gewecke
If you come open, if you open your heart to the book of John, to just see the journey that John’s going to take us on, it’s going to take us to some wild places through some journeys, through some characters that are deeply compelling, highly even, say, moving. And as you make your way along that path, at some point, I think you look up and realize, oh my goodness, not only do I have a deeper understanding of who this Jesus is, but I too have something that I think need said to witness to those around me.

00:14:30:05 – 00:14:33:41
Michael Gewecke
And that’s the mastery of John. If you go along the journey with us.

00:14:33:55 – 00:15:02:52
Clint Loveall
Yeah, if there’s a if there’s a contrast that is helpful, it may be with the gospel of Mark, which Matthew and Luke give us some clues about who Jesus is. In the Christmas stories. Mark jumps into the story, and there’s this kind of ongoing question who is this? Whenever someone figures out that Jesus is Jesus, Jesus tells them, we, you know, don’t tell anyone.

00:15:02:52 – 00:15:29:51
Clint Loveall
There’s this kind of secret thing that gets unveiled way at the end of the gospel. That’s the complete opposite of the book of John. In John, we start with crystal clear knowledge of who this is. This is the incarnate Word of God. This is the Messiah. And so the question in the Gospel of John that that hangs over all of the text isn’t much less who is this?

00:15:29:56 – 00:15:58:23
Clint Loveall
And much more will you follow this one? Who is who he is? And I think that it’s a simple distinction, but I think it’s a helpful distinction as you come to this. John’s not spending all these chapters to try and convince you who Jesus is. He’s going to tell you that in chapter one, and then he’s going to show you what it means to follow him the rest of the book in some in some way, shape or form.

00:15:58:28 – 00:16:08:58
Clint Loveall
And I think that’s a helpful way to enter, John, that this isn’t a mysterious book in the way that Mark is. It’s very, very different in that regard.

00:16:09:03 – 00:16:27:27
Michael Gewecke
So I think it’s worth noting here, as we come to the end of this time, that this book is going to be a real commitment. There’s going to be a long set of steps ahead of us as we go through it. And I think that that’s the gift of it. Actually, the way that we do these studies does linger in some places.

00:16:27:27 – 00:16:47:56
Michael Gewecke
And so I’m just going to tell you there’s going to be some discourses of Jesus coming ahead that that we’re going to get through, but they’re going to they’re going to give us some weight and some time. And I think that now’s a good time. Invite others to go with us on this journey, that you can have conversations and you can, you know, hey, what did you see when you were on that text with us?

00:16:48:07 – 00:17:05:50
Michael Gewecke
Get subscribed if you haven’t already. So that you can join with us. Yeah. As we go through each episode, this is going to be a book, I think that builds, and I think that you’re going to want to be with us every step along the way, because once we get to the end, there is a kind of mountaintop of this.

00:17:05:50 – 00:17:28:44
Michael Gewecke
But you see Jesus in ways that I think are compelling and that are beautiful. And though the book has twists and turns that are unique, it also is telling a very, very consistent story. And I want to make that clear. John’s not telling us about the different Jesus. John is introducing us to Jesus the Christ, the same Jesus we see in the other three gospels.

00:17:28:58 – 00:17:37:33
Michael Gewecke
But John’s going to give us a witness to it. That I think is is beautiful and compelling. If you’ll join us for the whole, the whole journey.

00:17:37:44 – 00:18:01:30
Clint Loveall
This is a powerful book. And I think one of the ways that bear that out is, as we go through this, you will recognize things. There will be things that you know about Jesus that are only in John’s Gospel. You will recognize stories and you will see things that you’ve heard or knew. But they’re only here. The only place you could have gotten them was the Gospel of John.

00:18:01:35 – 00:18:22:55
Clint Loveall
And you will, I think, maybe be surprised by how many of those show up. And I think that speaks to the impact of a book like this, that the way that this book has spoken, even though it is a little bit of an outlier, the way it’s spoken to the church’s conception of who Jesus is. Yeah, I think you will be surprised.

00:18:23:00 – 00:18:33:06
Clint Loveall
You will be surprised of some of what you may not have known was in John or what we don’t know what to do with. You will also be surprised by how much of John you already know, I think.

00:18:33:10 – 00:18:51:22
Michael Gewecke
I think it’s a great summary. So that leads us to what can you do? Like this video helps other people find it when they’re wanting to study the book of John. Like we are certainly subscribe so that you can stay with us as we go along the journey on YouTube. You can hit that notification bell so you get notifications when the studies come out so you don’t miss them.

00:18:51:27 – 00:19:05:46
Michael Gewecke
And then of course go to the comments. Let us know what thoughts and questions come to you as we go on this journey together. Friends, it is a gift that we get to begin another study with you. So glad to spend this time together and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

00:19:05:51 – 00:19:06:37
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.