 Does it matter if John's Gospel doesn't tell us to repent? I previously alluded to this in video number three, when we looked at the question do we have to repent to be saved? So although we sort of looked at this question briefly in that video, we will focus a little bit more on the issue in this video so that you can really sharpen your sword on this particular issue. You may have heard it said that John's Gospel never mentions repentance, therefore it cannot be required for salvation. The counter argument to this is that we can't expect every commandment or requirement to be repeated in every book of the Bible. After all, Matthew's Gospel technically speaking doesn't command us to be baptized, it's only documents that people were baptized, but we know from other parts of the Bible that we ought to be baptized, not for salvation of course, but as a covenantal sign. Jesus never personally uttered the word grace in any of the four gospel accounts, and yet we are saved by grace. The book of James doesn't mention Christ dying for our sins, but James must have been perfectly aware of this event. John's epistles never mention the gospel, yet Jesus said to his disciples, preach the gospel to every creature etc etc. Now for those of you who haven't seen the third video, you may wonder why is this even a debate? So what if John's Gospel doesn't mention repentance? Surely we don't expect every book in the New Testament to mention every single tiny little fact over and again. Well the reason why it matters is because John's Gospel is the only one of the four gospel accounts, or even the New Testament actually, to be specifically written that the reader would have everlasting life. It was written for that purpose. It says in John chapter 20 verses 30 to 31, many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through his name. So we see that John's Gospel is written for this purpose, that you would believe and have everlasting life. No other book makes such a claim. We must allow John's Gospel to fulfill the purpose for which it is written. If John wrote a book that was meant to get us to believe and have eternal life, but we cannot do this sufficiently using the information and commandments from John's Gospel, then his book failed to meet its purpose. So herein lies the core of the debate. John wrote his Gospel to get us to have everlasting life, but he didn't mention repentance, either as a noun or as a verb, repent. Yet many people will say that this step is absolutely crucial, that repentance is part of the Gospel, it's tied in with the forgiveness and the remission of sins in other Gospel accounts and in the book of Acts as well. So then some people might say, so what if John doesn't mention repentance after all? He never mentioned the Gospel outside of the title, yet the question is essentially whether we can preach the Gospel from John. He only mentions the Kingdom of God in one chapter, in chapter 3 verses 3 and 5, even though it is interchangeable with everlasting life, and Jesus talks about the Kingdom very extensively in the synoptic Gospels. He never mentioned hell, but that is what we are being saved from, since it is the antithesis of everlasting life. Hell is inferred when John mentions condemnation, so why then shouldn't repentance be inferred also? And that's a good point, right? Even if John's Gospel doesn't tell us to repent with that exact word, if repentance is somehow implied or inferred, then technically you could say well he did tell us to repent, just not using that specific word. Furthermore, although John's Gospel doesn't mention repentance, and even John's epistles don't mention repentance, John did also write the book of Revelation, and the book of Revelation does mention repentance. This suggests that John himself was not opposed to repentance and would happily document Jesus using this word. Also, John's Gospel does say sin no more. Even if this isn't using the verb repent, most Christian preachers who tell you to repent, and by that I mean of your sins, they are also essentially telling you then to go and sin no more. And now, once again, we have this same old problem that I keep tackling in this series, is that when other people hear the word repent or repentance, they think it's about sin. But I have already demonstrated multiple times in this series that repentance is not automatically about sin. Sometimes we are commanded to repent of something else, such as unbelief. Sometimes God repented, and God has no sin. Sometimes repentance is simply not about sin. Sometimes we are commanded to repent towards something, but we are not told explicitly what to turn away from. So previously in the series, when I said, basically yes, we do have to repent to be saved, I was arguing that we have to repent in our faith, we have to change our mind from not believing the Gospel to believing the Gospel, or we have to turn towards the Christ when we see him coming, or if we understand the heavenly perspective of what's really going on when we repent, it's Christ going out for his lost sheep, it's got nothing to do with our behavioural correction. So if John's Gospel tells us to believe in Christ, and if we don't, then we're condemned, well then in a manner of speaking, he has told us to repent, repent of not believing in the Christ to believing in the Christ, he's just not used the word repent. The issue is not whether we have to repent for salvation or not, and whether this is consistent with John's Gospel or not, this is simply the wrong question. The question only exists because so many Christians distort and misunderstand the definition of repentance for salvation. These are the questions we should actually be asking. Can we adequately preach the correct Gospel from John's Gospel account? Does John's Gospel account record Jesus as presenting the correct Gospel? Is John's Gospel consistent with the Gospel presentation and explanation made in any other book of the Bible, even if those books are not purposefully about eternal life? Now the problem that you get with questions like this is that a lot of Christians read the Bible like a very, very badly written instruction manual. So they read the Bible like they would read a furniture assembly manual for something that they bought from Ikea, that is listing a bunch of steps we have to complete for salvation. You would expect a furniture assembly manual to start with what you need, the parts that you need, and then it would go step one, step two, step three, step four, in logical sequential order. But the Bible isn't written in this logical order. There's no passage in the Bible that says, well, first you've got to listen to the guy screaming in the streets and then you have to confess and admit that you're a sinner and then you have to promise to forsake your sins and then you have to find a church and then you have to demonstrate your changed life to other Christians and then you have to... There is no list in the Bible like that. The commandments and ordinances that are in the Bible are in all kinds of different chapters and books and the authors are talking about so many different things. Not all of them are actually about salvation. But because people think that the Bible is written like that, this is how they understand the Bible. They just pluck all of these random verses and commandments from all across the Bible, join them together as if they're all talking about the same thing and go off in all of these different directions. And so that's why everybody that trusts in works has all these different lists of pet things that they want you to be doing. You know, the Catholics obsess over the bread and wine and the Seventh Day Adventists obsess over the Sabbath and so on and so on. But the Bible simply isn't written like that. Okay, now if we take a book like, say, Romans, it's an epistle. So it's a book about doctrine. It's meant to be taken as a whole. It's not really meant to be written chronologically like this happened and that happened and that happened, which is what you'd get from, say, Kings or Chronicles. It's a theological book. It explains doctrine, specifically about all the intricacies that tie in with our salvation. So John's Gospel is unique in the purpose for which it is written, but it is still a Gospel account. It is written in the style of a Gospel account, just as the synoptic Gospels are Matthew, Mark and Luke. A Gospel account is a witness testimonial wherein the author documents a series of different events, stories and conversations of Jesus' life for the purpose of sharing those accounts with others. From one chapter to the next, each author may have his own way of linking one account to the next, which is not always strictly chronological or consecutive. Now we considered this in Video 12 when we saw how Luke bridges denying self and taking up the cross with the disciples, preaching the Gospel, because he groups them into the same chapter more or less, whereas Matthew and Mark, there's several chapters between these two, so they don't group those two things together. Throughout these accounts, Jesus travels to various places and speaks to various different people. Sometimes he's speaking to a crowd, sometimes he's speaking to his disciples, sometimes he's speaking to one person, sometimes he's speaking to friends, sometimes he is speaking to foe, sometimes he is speaking to a crowd that has listening ears, sometimes a crowd with dull ears, and sometimes a crowd with evil intentions who want to trap him on his words. Understandably, the lingo Jesus seems to use in John's Gospel is very different from the lingo he uses in the Synoptic Gospels. In fact, it almost seems like he is a different person. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, he often talks about the kingdom, whereas in John, he talks about eternal life. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, he often makes short Pithy Gospel statements, such as repent he and believe the Gospel, whereas in John, he usually gives much more thorough detailed discourses that take up much of the chapters. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, he explicitly warns about eternal hellfire and torment multiple times. In John, he is quite vague about eternal consequences after death, just saying things like, he is condemned or you will die in your sins. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, he often says, you're or our father, as if God the Father belongs to the group of people that he's speaking to, whereas in John, he says the Father, as if the Father God doesn't belong to the group that he's speaking to. John's Gospel was probably written from John's own perspective, whereas the other Gospel accounts depended on a multitude of witnesses other than the authors themselves. We ought to assume that John didn't have it in mind to deliberately avoid using the word repent to make some kind of point about salvation by faith in his account. He simply documented what Jesus said as he felt appropriate to do so. He may have rephrased Jesus' words ever so slightly, so as to make his records more understandable to the reader, but not to bend the doctrine or to change the meaning of the dialogue though. Now, this is just a guess on my part, and I don't like to guess too often, but I suspect that the reason Jesus speaks very differently in John's Gospel is because Jesus had many disagreements with people in this particular Gospel account in multiple chapters, and not just with the Pharisees, but the Jews in general. And not many miracles or parables are recorded in this Gospel compared to the other three. So maybe the accounts in John's Gospel wouldn't have spread so far and wide because they were not as popular or well known, or they were not necessarily things that people would have deliberately spread. So John needed to give us these things as a closer witness, in a more verbatim way where he documented the words of Jesus more literally, or at least he documented them as he understood them, because there were not so many willing witnesses to the events that say Matthew, Mark and Luke could inquire. Whereas in the synoptic Gospels, his more famous and widespread and positively received teachings and miracles, or even his parables spread far and wide, and so such news would have probably travelled far more successfully. And so they wouldn't require John's personal witness because Matthew, Mark and Luke could acquire those from various other witnesses, but because they were getting them from different witnesses, that's why the dialogue is ever so slightly different in each account, and they may have not necessarily written what Jesus said quite as literally as John might have done, or they might have not recorded quite as much detail in the dialogue. And that is just my opinion, of course, you don't have to agree with it. So just to give you an example of this in the latter half of John 3, verse 36, John the Baptist is quoted as saying, He that believes on the sun has everlasting life, and he that believes not the sun shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. Now in the synoptic Gospels he's not quoted as saying this, instead he is quoted as saying things like, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And remember from video four when we looked at John the Baptist's repentance, we proved from Matthew 21 32 and Acts 19 4, among other proofs, that the repentance was to believe on the Christ, which is perfectly consistent with John the Baptist preaching here in John's Gospel. So there is no contradiction between the Gospels, it's the same message of salvation preached throughout, even if the other Gospels are not specifically written to get you to have everlasting life. They give the same message, but worded in a different way. Within any given conversation, if it is about the Gospel, we must allow that given conversation to be somewhat self-sufficient with the person Jesus is speaking to. And we must assume that John faithfully documented what he reckoned Jesus said, without deliberately omitting or editing Jesus' words to fit some agenda. We must also understand the difference between when Jesus is specifically and intentionally preaching the Gospel and when he isn't. Now sometimes if Jesus is preaching to his own disciples, or he is preaching to a crowd where he says, your father or our father, that kind of conversation is arguably more aimed towards a saved audience, generally speaking. So obviously his teaching is going to be a lot more complicated. So for example, if he's preaching on the Sermon on the Mount, and he teaches the law, he's giving the law and he's explaining how we should obey the law, and then he goes on to say, you need to enter into the narrow gate. Well, we don't just lazily say, oh, well, you have to follow the law for salvation. That's just a lazy way to study that passage. Because we understand that this teaching is more complex, we can bridge it with what else the Bible teaches, like how we're not justified by the law, and how Jesus even showed people from the law that they still fall short. And also we can see that Jesus is not really intentionally preaching the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. Because when he preaches the Gospel in John and he's talking about everlasting life extensively, he talks about himself a lot, like the Son of Man must be lifted up, and whoever believes in me, I'm going to do this, and I do that, and I am this. Whereas in the Sermon on the Mount, he's not really talking about himself a lot, he's really talking about you and what you do, and your doings are not the Gospel, they're not the good news. But if Jesus is speaking to an individual person who he might only interact with once, or he's speaking to a crowd in a particular place who he might not interact with again, or it's evident that he is preaching the Gospel because he's talking about himself, and he's talking about eternal life, you know, he's using all the right buzzwords for everlasting life, well then we need to understand those dialogues through the lens of the people that heard that dialogue, okay, how would they have walked away from that conversation, what impression would they have got, assuming that they understood Jesus' words correctly? So let me give a passage to substantiate this. In John chapter 3, Jesus has a personal conversation with Nicodemus, and he tells Nicodemus that to enter or see the kingdom of God, a man must be born again. Now I don't know if you've had the same experience, but multiple times I've seen people confuse or conflate being born again with repenting of sins, and I once challenged somebody in the street, hey can you show me in the Bible where it says I need to repent of my sins to be saved, and she took me to John chapter 3 where it says be born again, and she says we'll see right there, but then I said well it doesn't say repent of your sins, it says be born again, I'm asking you where it says repent of your sins, but then she just said well it's there because that's what it means, and I've seen people even in YouTube comments where they say things like well of course we have to repent of our sins because the Bible says be born again, so they confuse those two things as if they are the same thing. John chapter 3 is the only chapter where Jesus is ever recorded as telling someone to be born again, so only John chapter 3 can define what it means. If repenting of sin isn't mentioned in this chapter, then repenting of sins is not what born again means because it's not the context defining it. Now the conversation in John chapter 3 is definitely about the Gospel. Jesus mentions everlasting life and eternal life in 2 verses 15 and 16, he mentions heaven multiple times across 2 verses 12 and 13, he contrasts eternal life with condemnation and explains that this is what we are saved from in verse 17, this is the only chapter in John where Jesus mentions the kingdom of God in verses 3 and 5 and its inclusion in this chapter shows that entering the kingdom and everlasting life are synonymous. So Jesus is not talking about the Christian life and discipleship or end times, prophecies, he's not encouraging the brethren to do mighty works in this chapter, he is talking to Nicodemus about everlasting life and the requirements in order to obtain it, there is a repetitive instruction that Jesus is giving to Nicodemus to gain eternal life in multiple verses. In verses 11 to 12 Jesus reproves Nicodemus for not receiving the witness that he needed to believe in heavenly things and he didn't believe. And it was believing the witness, it's got nothing to do with his faithful obedience and his works. He then says in verses 14 to 15 that the Son of man must be lifted up, that whosoever believes in him, so the requirement again is to believe in him. And then of course one of the most famous and most favorite verses in the whole Bible and rightly so again says that we have to believe in him. We go to verse 18 and again it's believe on him. Now there is of course verse 36 which I mentioned earlier but Jesus is no longer speaking to Nicodemus at that point. So we see a theme here, Nicodemus was told by Jesus that he needed to believe on him in order to not perish and have everlasting life. Jesus did not tell Nicodemus to turn from his sins to have everlasting life. Jesus did not tell Nicodemus to get baptized and drink bread and wine in remembrance of me to have everlasting life. Now a lot of people say that born of water means being baptized, I've already disproven that in other videos on my channel. Jesus did not tell Nicodemus to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy to have everlasting life. So you probably know where I'm going with this. If you insist that one must turn from their sins to be saved and to not do so is to fail to preach Biblical repentance, you must accuse Jesus of preaching a false gospel to Nicodemus because he failed to preach repentance from sins. Now this is the stage where false prophets will get very desperate to win arguments and so they might take John 3 and say something like Don't you think that verses 19 to 21 are about repainting off your sins? But this just shows you their foolishness that they rewrite the Bible to say what they want it to say because as per verses 11 and 12 they do not receive the witness, they do not believe in heavenly things. Now I can see in verses 19 and 20 where it says men love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil and they hate the light lest their deeds be reproved. But does it say that men must come to the light by turning away from their deeds though? No it doesn't say that. Turning from deeds is not the remedy to this problem. I can see in verse 21 where it says he that does truth comes to the light. But does it say he that does works meet for repentance? Does it say he that does the commandments? Does it say he repents of sin? No it says he does the truth. And they will of course say well that means the same thing! No it doesn't mean the same thing because of what words mean. To do the truth you have to believe the witness because that's what 11 and 12 in this chapter told you to do. That's how Jesus is framing what it means to do truth. And when someone does the truth it's not because they're super awesome and contrite and so unimaginably repentant. It's because his deeds are wrought in God. It's God's work that makes a person do truth. It's not their own good deeds. It's not their turning their life around and submitting their will to his will. Now think about what Nicodemus would have taken away from this conversation. You can't just quote mine verses like if you love me keep my commandments because Jesus only said this to his own disciples. Nicodemus would not be aware of this statement. You can't just quote mine James 2 faith without works is dead. The book of James was not in existence at the time of John 3. Nicodemus could not possibly be aware of this teaching. You can't just quote mine going sin no more because Jesus didn't say this to Nicodemus. He said it to somebody else. Nicodemus should have been aware of Old Testament passages about turning from sin but Jesus didn't quote any such verses to him. If Nicodemus learned anything from this conversation he would not have walked away from it thinking that he needed to turn from his sins to be saved. Now as a key figure among the Jews he probably lived quite a righteous life. Assuming that he is the same Nicodemus described later in John's Gospel he seems like a decent guy at least compared to a lot of other Jews that Jesus encountered in John. But he stumbled at the concept of being born again, where he stumbled was that he needed to believe on the Christ to be born again because that's how John 3 describes it. If Nicodemus was so sinful then there is no reason that Jesus could not point his sins out and tell him to start living a clean holy life. Such a conversation never took place. Now those of you who are familiar with my channel and you've looked at a lot of my content you will probably be aware of the altercation I had with seeking the one saved several months ago. And I confronted him about this like how does he justify all of these? And I just pointed out one passage but loads of passages where Jesus preaches the Gospel to people and doesn't tell them to repent of their sins to be saved. So let's see how he answered. So he's saying because he caught the Apostle Paul preaching the death burial and resurrection of Jesus in a moment without saying the words repent of sins that's supposed to prove something. No that's not the case. Take for example if I wear a t-shirt that says Jesus saves. I just preached the Gospel. It doesn't have to say you need to repent of your sins. Okay so no I wouldn't accuse the Apostle Paul because he said Jesus saves and he didn't at the same time say all the other details of the Gospel and salvation at the same time that we're preaching a different message. I do the same thing. Okay I tell people Jesus saves and okay and then I might catch my bus and not see them. All right so that's that's nonsensical. But this is ridiculous he dodged the question. Was Jesus running for a bus in John chapter 3 and wearing a t-shirt because he was in a hurry? Oh believe in me Nicodemus by. No that didn't happen. This is a detailed conversation. Okay he had every opportunity to tell Nicodemus to turn from his sins and John had every opportunity to record it if it was so important for Nicodemus to do that in order to be saved. John 3 is just one example but if we continue to read John's Gospel we would see this pattern repeated over and again that Jesus told many people to believe on him without telling them to turn from their sins. It would be incredibly blasphemous to accuse Jesus of not preaching the full Gospel in these passages. Now yes there were times when Jesus pointed out people's sins such as the Pharisees that sought to kill him and the woman at the well but he didn't say to them that turning from their sins was the remedy to their problem though and we could apply this not just to repenting of sin but really any works that people want to make salvific. So if you say that we have to be baptized to be saved well then Jesus and the apostles told many people how to be saved without mentioning baptism and why did Paul say that he was sent to preach the Gospel and not to baptize if it was so important that would be very irresponsible or if you say that we have to keep the Sabbath to be saved like that false prophet who causes channel Bible flock box okay well again why isn't Jesus telling everybody to observe the Sabbath or you say well they were the Jews they were already observing the Sabbath okay why didn't Paul go around telling the Gentiles to observe the Sabbath he didn't and another one when the Catholics preached the Eucharist out of John chapter 6 well why would Jesus tell a completely random group of Jews among anybody else he could have told to observe an ordinance that doesn't even exist yet his disciples don't even know exists in a church that hasn't even been founded yet that makes no sense and this is the problem with work salvation is that everybody just picking their own list of random works doing it's the same thing when people tell you to repent of their sins oh it's just a lifestyle change or oh no it means all of your sins or oh it just means this like they just all pick what they want it to mean and you can't just say oh well there is all these other Bible verses that say turn from sins but well the thing is the New Testament doesn't exist yet when Jesus is preaching to Nicodemus or all these other people in John's Gospel and Jesus didn't quote those passages when he was preaching the Gospel either so it still doesn't make any sense so to bring this to a conclusion we should adequately be able to preach the correct Gospel from John's Gospel account it was written for that purpose and in this account Jesus is recorded as telling many people to believe on him without telling them to turn from their sins if we make turning from sins a part of the Gospel we are essentially accusing Jesus of preaching a false Gospel to multiple people multiple times including Nicodemus in John chapter 3 John's Gospel often has more detailed narratives than the synoptic Gospels about eternal life so John doesn't need to use the words repent because Jesus instructions are far more clear and detailed in John whereas in Matthew and Mark and Luke we often only get short summations of certain conversations such as John the Baptist and Jesus message of repentance so the word repent is a shorter summation of the requirement to believe on the Christ as sat out in John as we have previously seen in the series Matthew 21 32 and Acts 19 for prove that John the Baptist message of repentance was to believe it wasn't something as well as believing since repent is just a short verb that means change of mind it can encompass any idea where there is a change of course in the case of the Gospel one is turning from not believing to believing this is a type of repentance so it doesn't matter if Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us to repent and John doesn't the message is still the same the good news is still the same but it is more detailed and thoroughly explained in John's Gospel whereas it is only briefly summarized in the other Gospels so John's Gospel account should take precedence when defining our Gospel presentations so no it doesn't matter if John's Gospel doesn't tell us to repent so long as we are defining repentance correctly in the application of the Gospel of salvation to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ that you shall be saved but I would like to end this video with a question that needs to be addressed what about going sin no more if repentance is an encompassing word shouldn't it also encompass turning from sins after all sin no more is said twice in John's Gospel the Gospel that is written specifically to tell us how to have everlasting life should we not then assume that this is an essential component of repentance for salvation well that is a very good question but for the sake of time we're going to have to stop this video there that will be the topic of the next video when we look at going sin no more this is no nonsense Christianity reminding you that nowhere in the Bible does it say repent of your sins to be saved