John 3:30-36

Let's go back to John 3 again. Here we have a thought of John the Baptist's.

This thought actually ties together chapters 3 and 4. We are dealing here with a teacher of extraordinary quality and this theme is repeated very, very frequently—the theme that John the Baptist says in those five or six verses. It's done in different ways from somewhat different angles, but what John is getting across here is this: We are dealing with God who came to earth and only He is truly qualified to speak of the things of which He is speaking.

He speaks of things that He has seen, witnessed with His own eyes, heard with His own ears; things that took place in heaven. All of us who are men—we can't do anywhere near the job He did because we've never been there. We've never seen it. We've never experienced the things that He has experienced.

So Jesus came from heaven and He spoke with higher authority. He spoke from His own observation, not theory. He spoke the words of God, and that the love of God and the Father's love had caused Him to endow the Son with complete authority to execute His purpose.

Again, John the writer is elevating Jesus to His proper place in our minds so that we always are looking at Him and so that we understand that (though we are dealing with a man) we are also dealing with God. "Behold your God."

John 3:31-36

Now this paragraph, I guess we will call it, is an expansion on John's testimony, what he had just said about Jesus and him having to decrease now that Jesus had come on and really begun His ministry. The primacy of God is the theme here. The One who is from heaven is the most important, and we have to pay special attention to Him. Christianity focuses on Christ.

Now the passage here in John 3:31-36 summarizes then the main themes of the entire chapter and we could say the main themes of the entire book of John. That which comes from above, he says, is superior to anything earthly which is finite and limited. That is, anything earthly is finite and limited.

John 3:31-36

Ominous - very ominous words. In terms of faith, what John said in that last paragraph puts this chapter into a very different perspective. Everyone hearing God's word is confronted with a choice: believe it and obey it, or take the chance of dying.