Except Through Me

We're all familiar with John 14:6, at least the first part, which states:

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. 

We probably know the second part of the verse also, just not as well:

No one comes to the Father except through me.

When we put the two parts of the verse together, it will be all the explanation of Christianity that we'll ever need. God is whom we worship, Christ's death and resurrection removed the barrier of sin between us and God, and the Holy Spirit allows us to come to the Father. That's it--anything else is embellishing a simple message.

John 14-17 is amazing, in that we can see that even after three years in the presence of Christ, the disciples were still very confused on not only who Christ was, but what his purpose was as well. I'll discuss it at length with regard to tomorrow's reading, but even in today's, we saw no shortage of total and complete confusion on the part of the disciples as to what was happening before their eyes. All of John 14 is basically Christ talking with them and the disciples not getting his point at all, and as I've repeated over and over, we can't just "tut-tut" them and call them shallow and silly--Christ was upending their lives, predicting their deaths and establishing a whole new method of worship in one fell swoop. That's a lot to take in at one sitting.

And, as I've repeated over and over, the fact that we hold this Bible in our hands and can reference it, as well as an almost infinite amount of scholarship and commentary in seconds removes any excuse we ever might have had for not understanding this today. We know what Christ's duty was, and we know what our duty, no, our privilege is as a response to that sacrifice--find those that don't know it, and help them find the way and the truth and the life. No one will come to the Father except through Christ, but we just might be the conduit through which someone finds Christ in the first place. 

Scott