As a Christian, I love all the Bible, and all the Gospels. But the Gospel of John is a bit nearer to me. I find my praying, my preaching, my teaching are all far more shaped by John than by any other book of the New Testament, with Hebrews and Revelation not far behind.
Tomorrow I’m beginning a sermon series on the Gospel of John in my Bible study group at Ninth and O Baptist Church here in Louisville. As I get ready for this, I thought I’d mention the resources I find most helpful for studying John.
D.A. Carson’s commentary, The Gospel According to John, in Eerdmans’ Pillar New Testament Commentary is thorough. While conversant in critical and technical matters, it is not so obsessed with them that is loses focus on the text itself. Herman Riddberbos’s The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary is focused specifically on the themes present in the Gospel, with a keen awareness of John’s Old Testament foundation. Perhaps the best commentary on John available right now is Andreas Kostenberger’s volume in the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. A marvelous yet little known work on John is Robert Reymond’s John, Beloved Disciple: A Survey of His Theology. Reymond rightly understands that one approaches John in conversation with the apostle’s other works in the Epistles and the Apocalypse.
Devotionally, I love songwriter Michael Card’s The Parable of Joy: Reflections of the Wisdom of the Book of John. Card engages the imagination about the friendship and the followship that fueled the apostle to confront heresies with the One who is both grace and truth. Card speculates in his introduction of what it must have been like to write as the last living apostle:
“He wrote for the children in the fellowship he so dearly loved. For the fathers he sometimes pitied with tears because they could not begin to imagine all they had missed. For the young men who only had him to tell them, with his words that so often felt clumsy, like fish flopping out of a net. He wrote because they wouldn’t leave him alone until he did, because he missed the sound of Jesus’ voice so much sometimes he thought his heart would break. Perhaps he wrote in the hope that through the words of just one of his sentences, he might hear once again the familiar sound of His voice.”
I suppose Card’s words sum up what I hope most of all will come from a study of John: to spur us to long for the sound of a voice we haven’t heard. But, then again, we have heard it. That’s everywhere in the Gospel. God hears the voice of Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb. Lazarus hears the voice and walks. The religious leaders don’t hear the voice of God from the heavens, but Jesus does. The dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, Jesus says, and them that hear will live. My sheep hear my voice, Jesus says, and they follow Me.
John tells us he wants us to know. But he also wants us to see, and to hear, as he will put in another volume, what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
