One spring morning before breakfast, I asked my mom if I could go out and look at the trees that were starting to bud in the woods. “Okay,” she said, “but make it quick. Breakfast is almost ready. And don’t go too close to the creek. It’s been raining a lot.”
I was seven years old, and we lived not far from St. Louis, across the Mississippi River in Illinois. We had moved into a little brick house on the outskirts of the city of Alton. From our back door, you could see the edge of a forest that hugged a series of tiny hills that stretched all the way to the Mississippi cliffs.
A minute after asking my mother, I had walked down the gentle slope between our house and the edge of the woods. I approached the sloshing creek—what a sight! I found myself edging closer for an ideal view and stepped on a brown patch next to the water, thinking it was a flat, mud-stained rock. Then I hopped onto it with both feet.
There are moments you regret for the rest of your life. This was one of them. Within seconds, my shoes and the lower half of my legs disappeared. I was being sucked into the squishy brown mud at the creek’s edge. I thrashed my legs, trying to find the bottom. It was futile. Deeper and deeper into the mud I sank as I struggled. I remembered a TV Western we had just seen, where a cowboy and his horse stumbled into a huge pit of quicksand and sank up to their heads. My one thought: “I’m gonna die!”
I started screaming, “Help, help! Somebody help me!” Nothing happened; no one was coming to help. My parents and three older brothers didn’t hear me. I kept on screaming. Before long I heard a man shout, “I’m coming!”
I looked to my right. I saw a man running toward me; he was working on a farm near our house and had heard my screams. He vaulted over a fence and ran straight at me now. “Hold on!” he said, as he neared the creek side.
As he approached, he found a rock to plant his foot on, and said, “Give me your hand!” I reached out toward him, and he leaned over and grabbed me. With a mighty pull and a loud sucking sound, I was hauled out of the mud pit, dripping brown goo. It was one of the most unforgettable moments of my life. The farmer had saved me! He had rescued me, and I didn’t die in the mud after all!
I was reminded of this story as I reread one of the Bible’s most famous books, the Gospel of John.
In John chapter 8, Jesus warns some religious leaders in Jerusalem that their “religiosity” won’t save them. Our own effort is not the answer to being made right with God. (This shouldn’t shock us; the prophet Isaiah even says our “good deeds” are like “filthy rags”!1)
Jesus warns the leaders who’ve rejected him that if they don’t have a turnaround, they will “die in their sins.” Our sins are like a huge pit of mud into which we find ourselves sinking. Without help, we will die. It’s a true nightmare scenario, but Jesus did something about it. He came to rescue us. He came to snatch us from the vat of our own nasty junk. Amazingly, as his bonus, he provides eternal life!
That might seem “too good to be true.” We’ve all used those words at some point. Sometimes when we hear super-good news, it just seems way too amazing.
I had many thoughts like this over a period of ten months, as some friends and I met every other Wednesday morning to discuss John, chapter by chapter. Most of us live in Tampa Bay, but now a few are scattered geographically (including me), so we decided to meet via Zoom technology.2
Speaking of Zoom, let me zoom in on some favorite “too-good-to-be-true” gold nuggets—one in John 11 and another in John 5.
In chapter 11:23-25, Jesus’s friends Mary and Martha were torn up with grief over the death of their brother Lazarus. Jesus said: “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
This is a huge shock of good news: it seems too good to be true. Anyone who “believes” in Jesus Christ as God and Savior will never die. A very muscular Greek word is used here for “believe”—pisteuo. It really packs a punch. It means “to firmly trust in someone or have complete confidence in that person.” In other words, if you are totally trusting in someone and their promise, it means you are counting on them. You are placing all your weight on that person as being reliable, just as I had to trust in the farmhand who pulled me out of the mire.
So eternal life comes to one who “trusts” Christ. For clarity, we can look at John 1:12, where this same word is used. John says: “But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name.”
So, when a person trusts in Christ, it means that they receive or embrace him as their boss, head coach, and rescuer. Think of it as opening the door of their heart to him, saying, “I believe you died for me and came out of the grave alive.”
Just after this John 11 bombshell, Jesus really dazzled Mary and Martha. He showed his power over death as he walked over to the tomb and raised Lazarus from the dead. All this took place a couple of days after Lazarus’s burial. Jesus’s control over death could not be more vivid!
This lines up with the fantastic news in John 5:24, where Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word, and believes Him who sent me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.”
Another shocking promise! God gives us eternal life as a “right now” possession. We don’t have to wait until we die to experience a beautiful, strong, and flourishing life that never ends. Too good to be true? Seems so, but all this great news doesn’t depend on us. Eternal life comes when we place our trust in Jesus’s promise. We come to him and receive the gift of life he bought for us.
We simply need to call out to Jesus and ask him to yank us out of that awful mud pit of the broken things we have done during our lives. The moment we call out to him (trust him), he pulls us out of that pit. He rescues us. And eternal life begins in that moment. Just as Jesus promised.
One big lesson is clear. We can’t save ourselves. Eternal life comes from trusting in the One who died in our place and then smashed death to smithereens when he arose. John 3:16 (the most famous verse in John, as we know from many pro football games) says it all:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes (trusts) in him should not perish but have eternal life.
Tom Woodward
Tom is the founder and a senior lecturer at Apologetics, Inc. He is the former Executive Director of the C.S. Lewis Society and has been a professor at Trinity College of Florida, since 1988, teaching courses in science, philosophy, theology, anthropology and communications. He is a graduate of Princeton University, obtained his Th.M. in Systematic Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. from the University of South Florida. He is an international speaker and the author of several books including Doubts about Darwin, a 2004 Book of the Year–(Christianity Today magazine).
References:
1 See Isaiah 64:6: For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; and all of us wither like a leaf and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
2 Our yearlong study (just completed) was an incredible experience. Two things stood out: First, John was an eyewitness of Jesus’s power. His power on display is a theme of the book; he is both fully man and fully God, and to show this, eight of his miracles are recorded in detail. Second, since he is recording very emotionally intense encounters, often in the city of Jerusalem, his words are extra-riveting. See especially chapters 5, 6, 8, 10 and 11 which are all simply spectacular.