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John’s aim in writing his gospel, many years after Matthew Mark and Luke, was to unveil Jesus’s divine identity.  Despite all Jesus's miracles and teachings, His compatriots had failed to grasp who He really was.  

  

John summarises his gospel's primary theme by saying, “We beheld His glory!”  Revealing Christ’s glory was key to others believing in Him, and believers experiencing Christ's life - the twin goals John had set himself:-

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(1) To bring others to faith, he picks out seven miracles, each demonstrating an aspect of Jesus’s glory and grace.  And he records a series of teachings in which Jesus urges His hearers to believe in Him as the Son of God.  He portrays the cross as Christ drawing all men to Himself; and the ascension as the restoring of His pre-incarnate glory. 

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For him, the foundational truth of the gospel was that ‘Jesus Christ has come in the flesh’: that the eternal Word of God took flesh and dwelt among us.  Accepting Christ’s dual nature as both fully God and fully man (i.e. the incarnation) was absolutely central.  It was the acid test by which anti-Christ spirits, such as drove the  heresies in the early church, could be discerned.

  

(2) To bring fellow believers into the fullness of Christ's life, John records Christ’s teaching the disciples about living union with Him.  Evangelicalism has largely lost any sense of the experiential nature of this union, having limited its application to our justification.  But despite being in his nineties, in exile and confronting grievous heresies, John could still describe his spirituality in these words:  ‘Our fellowship is with the Father and His Son!’  The thrill of knowing Jesus was still vivid, & a source of deep joy to him.

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Like all commentaries, you’ll find stuff about the social and political context of Jesus’s time, geographical references, and key Greek words. But to avoid blunting the impact of John's prologue, I’ve placed background on the gospel’s authorship, date, themes and purpose in an appendix; and studies of the symbolic meanings of some key words, in a second appendix.  Finally, there are some questions to help you reflect once you’ve finished.

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Unlike other commentaries, however, I hope you’ll find you can see a bigger picture, especially in Christ’s teaching at the Last Supper.

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It can seem hard to follow Jesus’s train of thought, because:-  

  

• John’s gospel was the result of a lifetime’s worship and meditation on the person of Christ.  His memory has filtered out all irrelevant details, leaving a condensed but logically integrated record.

• In the context of the disciples’ dread, Christ was teaching stuff so new that He had to use an iterative approach: returning to the same themes repeatedly but going a little deeper each time round.  

  

But it all makes sense, and flows naturally, when seen as the disciples’ entry point into a new dimension of life: eternal life, life communing with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - zoe life.

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Each chapter of this book is about a fifteen-minute read. The final chapter is longer however, being a review of all John’s major insights about Christ.

  

The headings refer you to the relevant section of the gospel’s text: so read with your bible open beside you, and your heart open to what the Holy Spirit is saying.                                  

Enjoy!