John then adduces three tokens, by which Jesus as the Son of God has revealed himself; indicating the same time three combined relations, in which he presents himself to the christian consciousness, as the One incarnate Son of God. "This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus the Christ; not in water only, but in water and blood. And it is the Spirit which beareth witness, for the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that bear witness: the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and the three have reference to the One." [3]

While thus presenting the three tokens by which Jesus as the Son of God has revealed himself, it is at the same time his object to combat those, who (like that Cerinthus and others of whom we have spoken in the Introduction) did not rightly recognize the connection of the divine and human in the person of Christ, the unity of his divine-human person, of his life and of his work, -- rending asunder that in him which should be conceived of as one. From the heavenly Christ, who descended from the higher spirit-world and was the true redeeming Spirit, they separated Jesus, who in their view was a mere man, and with whom as man this higher Spirit connected itself at his baptism. The dove, which then descended upon him, they regarded as a symbol or embodiment of this Spirit. Thenceforth this Spirit, through the man Jesus revealed the hidden God and announced divine truth; it bestowed on him the power of working miracles; but before his Suffering, it forsook him and withdrew again into its own higher regions. To them also, as to the Jews, The Crucified continued to be an offence. They could not understand the mystery of his sufferings; suffering had, in their conception, no place in the work of redemption. They could acknowledge a divinely teaching, a divinely working, but not a suffering Christ. To them, the life of Christ was not a divine-human life from its very beginning. On the contrary, the Divine, whereby Jesus was to be distinguished from all other messengers of God, had at that definite point of time suddenly taken up its temporary abode in him, and had again in a like manner departed from him. The Divine, in the servant-form of the incarnate Son, from his birth to the crowning point of self-abasement in his suffering, -- the crowning point also of his moral glory, -- was something which they could not comprehend. They sundered the high from the low, instead of recognizing the truly high in the low. In opposition to such, John now declares Jesus to be the Christ, as revealed not merely in water at his baptism, but also in his Suffering. By water we must not here understand, as some have done, the baptism instituted by him. It is the baptism to which he himself submitted; and at which the dignity of Jesus, as the Son of God, shone forth in the manner described by John in his Gospel. Since the blood has immediate reference to the person of Jesus, being the designation of his Suffering; the water also must designate something which has a personal reference to himself, viz. his baptism. Accordingly, there is here set forth the one reference of his baptism and his Suffering, -- that it was the same Jesus, who in his baptism and in his Suffering manifested himself as the Son of God, the Christ. Both must combine in order to make him known as the Son of God; both belonged to his redemption-work.

Still a third witness, a third token by which Jesus reveals himself as the Son of God, is introduced by John; the witness of the Spirit, the Spirit absolutely, the divine or holy Spirit.

In accordance with the relation of the three ideas to each other, -- as by the water we must understand something precedent to his Suffering, and by the blood the Suffering which followed his baptism, -- so by the Spirit's witness must be understood something subsequent to both. It must be, therefore, those manifestations of the Holy Spirit, which followed the triumphant ascension of the suffering Christ, that continued working of this Spirit, which since its first outpouring has testified, wherever the Gospel is preached, of Jesus as the Son of God; that divine Witness, to which Jesus himself appeals in those last discourses recorded by John. Upon this testimony John lays special stress. It was indeed the witness which must be added to the two other tokens, in order that the Jesus who was baptized and had suffered, might be accredited, in a manner perceptible to all, as the Son of God. Hence he emphatically adds: "The Spirit is the truth." Truth itself, as revealed in the divine workings of the Spirit of God, of him who is The True, -- this cannot lie. And these three bear witness. The Spirit (now placed first by John, since by it the two other witnesses are confirmed) the Water, and the Blood, all have reference to one and the same object, and all concur in revealing and accrediting Jesus as the Son of God.

The reading, followed in the above translation and explanation, must certainly be regarded as the true one. It has the authority of the oldest manuscripts in its favor, while the commonly received reading has grown out of explanatory additions to the text. It is also favored by the connection, in which these additions appear as something wholly foreign and discordant; for in this connection, the writer is concerned only with facts occurring on the earth, as signs and evidences that Jesus has revealed himself as the Son of God, -- not with witnesses in heaven. Such a reference to the latter would have wholly distracted the reader's attention, from that which it was the sole object of John to set forth in this passage.

In our own age, as already remarked in the Introduction, are repeated those same tendencies, by which are sundered the divine and human in the person of Christ, and the one is exalted at the expense of the other. The divine-human Christ, as manifested from the beginning, in the words of eternal life uttered by him as a public teacher after his baptism, in his miracles, and in his sufferings, is not recognized in his undivided unity. To such tendencies, wherever found, these words of the Apostle are applicable. They apply also to the case of those, who do not recognize as actually true and real the harmonious image of this Christ presented in the Gospel record, and convert the true historical Christ into a vague form of mist. If his baptism and his sufferings are events of the past (though in their import and influence still making themselves ever present) yet it is otherwise with the witness of the Spirit. This is something belonging not merely to the past. True, in the wonderful period when John wrote this, it was manifested in an extraordinary manner. Yet in that unceasing, connected agency with which it continues to work through all time, it still remains a present witness for ourselves. The church being the perpetual organ for the operations of tile Spirit, the progress of its history has been continually adding, even down to our own time, a succession of new witnesses to those of the past, through which we as christians live in connection with that witness of the Spirit in the apostolic age. The more widely Christianity diffuses itself among the savage races of humanity; the more various the modes in which it reveals its all-subduing all-transforming power, and the forms which it calls into being from the moral putrescence of human life; the more often it goes forth victorious from the conflict with superstition and unbelief, to new and still more glorious conquests; so much the more is revealed the witness of this Spirit, which is the Truth. If the same Spirit, which then imparted to the preachers of the Gospel the power to testify of Christ through their word, their life, and their blood, is now working through them in a greater number of nations than at any period since the apostolic; if through this Spirit, martyrs have again been raised up among heathen nations to seal their faith with their blood, as seen of late in the Isle of Madagascar; this is but the continued and renewed witness of that Spirit. What is now being wrought, through foreign and domestic missions, is part of that same witness, and connects itself with all which had been testified by that Spirit, and which it continued to testify, when these words were written. And on this will we ever take our stand, in opposition to those who seek to veil the historical Christ in a cloud of mist: that the Spirit, which is the Truth, testifies of him whose image they would obscure, of that Jesus who, in water and in blood, revealed himself as the Son of God.