Our "I Am Not's" Become Jesus's "I AM"
The Eschatology of John Part 3: An Overview of John Part 2
Read the first post in this series here:
Read the previous post here:
In the previous article, we looked at the purpose of the Gospel of John, which is to inspire continued belief in John’s disciples that they might have life through the name of Jesus. Specifically, we looked at the incarnation and miraculous ministry of Jesus. These episodes give us an inside look into the person of Jesus, the character of God, and the nature of the kingdom.
They also give us an inside look into our own condition and God’s unstoppable love for us.
The wedding host said, “I am not enough.” The Samaritan woman said, “I am not worthy.” The royal official said, “I am powerless.” The paralyzed man said, “I am hopeless.” The 5,000 said, “I am paralyzed by scarcity.” The disciples said, “I am so afraid.” The blind man said, “I am full of sin from birth.” Martha said, “I am abandoned.”
Jesus’s answer: “I AM.”
In taking on flesh, Jesus entered en our darkness and delusion. Working from the inside out, the great Light exposes the Original Lie and invites us into the life of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In this article, we will do another overview of John, but this time we will focus on three of the seven “I am the…” statements of Jesus. In the next article, we’ll look at the remaining four statements.
I Am the ________
As I mentioned in the first article, there are several sets of sevens in John’s gospel. A quick search online brought up several articles that outline various takes on the use of seven in the Gospel of John. While the lists differ, one thing is certain: John likes the number seven.
One thing that all lists have in common, though, is the fact that Jesus identified himself seven different times with the expression “I am the…”
Mark Keown wrote,
One of the distinctive features of the Gospel is the so-called “I am” sayings in which Jesus states aspects of his identity through the formula egō eimi (“I am”). While there are other “I am” sayings, seven have a predicate and are designated the “I am” sayings, which define Jesus metaphorically. Each has important theological significance.1
He then offered this list, which we’ll be using in this article:
I am the bread of life [and variants] (John 6:35, 41, 48, 51).
I am the light of the world (John 8:12; 9:5).
I am the gate (John 10:7, 9).
I am the good shepherd (John 10:11, 14).
I am the resurrection and the life (John 11:25).
I am the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6).
I am the true vine (John 15:1, 5).
I am the Bread of Life
The Temptation of Jesus Repackaged
In John 6, Jesus fed 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. In response to Jesus’s power and generosity, the people, recognizing Jesus as the prophet like Moses from Deuteronomy 18, wanted to take Jesus by force and make him king.
This was a very real temptation for Jesus. Notice the similarities between Jesus’s temptation in the synoptics and this event:
Temptation 1: miraculously create bread (Matthew 4:3)
Temptation 2: perform a public sign to win over the people (Matthew 4:5-6)
Temptation 3: bow before Satan and the empire will be yours (Matthew 4:8-9)
I have argued before that these were not selfish temptations; instead, Jesus was being tempted to be the Messiah the people wanted for the sake of the people. He knew their suffering. He knew their hopes for a king like David. He knew they longed for the redemption of Israel (Luke 24:21).
But Jesus also knew that this was the easy way out. Conquering Rome, killing Israel’s enemies, and miraculously producing bread for the people would make a lot of people happy, and they would have a great life; they might even say they “believe” Jesus, kind of like the royal official in John 4 believed in Jesus’s power but hadn’t yet believed in Jesus himself (John 4:48-49, 53).
In John 6, we see the relationship between the first two and the last temptation in Matthew 4. We also begin to understand why Jesus told those whom he healed to “go and tell no one” in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 1:44). Jesus doesn’t want people to follow him because he can do miracles; Jesus wants people to follow him because of who he must be as evidenced by the signs. With these themes in mind, let’s look at John 6.
Jesus (1) was asked to feed the people, (2) Jesus performed a very public sign, and (3) the people offered Jesus an earthly kingdom.
The first two movements in the story, like the first two temptations, lead directly to a people who feel empowered to follow Jesus wherever he would lead. This last point can be seen even more clearly in Mark 6 where the people “sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties” (Mark 6:40).
Craig Keener acknowledged this reading in his commentary on the biblical background of the New Testament, which is one of my favorite resources:
The purpose is to facilitate the distribution of food, but some scholars suggest that some people in the crowd may have thought that Jesus was organizing them as ranks for a messianic army (cf. Jn 6:15). (The Old Testament and Dead Sea Scrolls show such organization into ranks for armies. Mark records this organizing, however, simply to emphasize the great numbers fed.)2
So the question now is how Jesus will counter their expectations? How will he discourage the crowd from pursuing this course of action?
As we’ll see in the next section, Jesus will use the same argument he used against Satan in the synoptics.
But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ” Matthew 4:4
The “I Am…” Statement
After the people reconnected with Jesus, they asked for another sign. Notice how they connect this miraculous feeding with the Exodus:
So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us, then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” John 6:30–31
They make this connection for a number of reasons, but the most important one is that they see Jesus as the new Moses. In John 6:14, they had reasoned that Jesus must be the prophet who was to come into the world. They got this idea from Deuteronomy 18, which says,
The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet…I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable. Deuteronomy 18:15–19
Of course, this is a valid observation. The New Testament writers were continuously drawing from Exodus imagery to talk about who Jesus is. The difference is that they used the imagery to speak of a spiritual deliverance from the bondage of sin, not a physical deliverance from the empire.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus embodies three gifts that were given to the people in the Exodus: bread, water, and light. The bread was given in the morning dew in the from of manna. The water was given from the Rock, which Paul says was Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4). And the light guided them by night.
Jesus responded to their reasoning by saying,
Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. John 6:32–33
This heavenly bread gives life to the world, but what is it?
Pun intended. Don’t you love a good manna joke?
Jesus explained, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35).
After these sayings of Jesus, the people began to complain. Many of them abandoned him. Public perception of Jesus began to shift. The Cross was in sight.
Later, Jesus privately told his disciples that what he was really talking about was his teaching, not his physical flesh. “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63).
Or another way to say this might be in a reimagined line from the Gospel of Matthew:
“One does not live by bread alone, but by the Eternal Word of God who is the bread of life.”
I am the Light of the World
Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” John 8:12
The Gospel of John has a lot to say about light and darkness. In fact, John even picks up on this theme in both Revelation and his epistles. Earlier, in the introduction of John, the apostle wrote,
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. John 1:3–5
Not only is life in Jesus, but Jesus is Life and Light. Through taking on flesh, Jesus entered into humanity’s delusion and shone Light upon it. The darkness tried to overtake Jesus by putting him to death, but through death, Jesus shined even more brightly. Through death comes life.
When we follow Jesus, we no longer have to walk in darkness. Those feelings of separation from God should evaporate. Those ideas that we aren’t loved or special or valued or good enough should be banished.
As Paul said, we should give thanks because the Father has “enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light” and “has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:12–14).
Walking in light means that we are engaging in war against any darkness that we might see in the world. This doesn’t mean fighting against humans but fighting on behalf of humans. What does this look like? Paul told the Corinthians,
Indeed, we live as humans but do not wage war according to human standards, for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ. 2 Corinthians 10:3–5
Jesus won the victory through the Cross, but through the preaching of the Cross we can continue to help dispel the delusion that is still in the world as evidenced by continued greed, war, poverty, and violence of all kinds. We do this by destroying arguments and anything that veils the knowledge of who God actually is as revealed by Jesus.
I am the Gate
In John 10, Jesus calls himself “the gate” (“the door”—KJV) twice:
So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. John 10:7–10
In this context, Jesus is both the shepherd and the gate through which the sheep would enter their rest. Craig Keener points out that Jesus had no problem mixing metaphors, but he also highlighted an interesting practice of the shepherd lying across the opening in a temporary pen, himself serving as the gate:
As opposed to the apparently walled enclosure in 10:1, some suggest that the sheep pen here might be a temporary enclosure topped with thorns, closer to pasture for seasonal grazing; lacking a separate door, it could depend on the shepherd to sleep across the gateway, a practice sometimes reported in modern times.3
Jesus serves as the One who guides people to the Father as well as the Way to the Father, as we’ll cover later in this series.
Jesus said something fairly shocking here: “All who came before me are thieves and bandits…the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.”
In other words, as John established in the introduction to his gospel, Jesus is the only one qualified to tell us who the Father actually is. When we look at God without a Christocentric hermeneutic, our view of God is inherently veiled, and this brings that sense of separation or death that Jesus has come to release us from (2 Corinthians 3:6-18).
Jesus has come to give us abundant life.
Before Abraham Was…
Before we close, let’s look at another kind of “I Am” statement in the gospel of John. This kind doesn’t have a predicate. The following conversation comes from John 8:
Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad.” Then the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple. John 8:56–59
I want to share a clip from a resource I have on this subject, but before I do, here is one more “I Am” statement of Jesus:
Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” They answered, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus replied, “I am.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, “I am,” they stepped back and fell to the ground. John 18:4–6 (“he” is not in the Greek)
With this background information, read this brilliant excerpt on the force of this phrase.
However, in 8:58, Jesus is clear: he is stating that before Abraham was born, “I am,” that is, “I exist”—this both suggests his existence before Abraham and his divine status, as seen by the response to kill him (John 8:58). In the garden, as Jesus says, “I am” to the arresting party, they fall to the ground (John 18:6). This speaks of Jesus’ power and likely points to his changeless theophanic divine authority. These two and the force of the predicated “I am” sayings suggests that John does not use the construct neutrally or merely as an identification device. Most likely, they point to Jesus’ divinity in terms of Exodus 3:14 (LXX): “I am the one who is” (egō eimi ho ōn). It also calls to mind Isaiah 40–55 where “I am” is used as a title for God (Isa 43:10, 25; 45:18; 46:4; 51:12; 52:6). This is confirmed by the Jews’ response; they recognized it as a radical claim to divinity and sought to kill him (John 5:18; 8:59; 10:33).4
If Jesus really is invoking the burning bush account here, he is making a radical claim: not only am I the new Moses, but I am the very one who led you out of Egypt in the first place! I was in the cloud and in the fire. I was the Rock. It was my Spirit that parted the waters.
If this is true, and I think it is, then we can see why Jesus is qualified to invite us to let our “I am nots” to become his “I AM.” When we understand that we are in Christ and he is in us, then our whole world is transformed. Or to say it like Jesus did, we truly do have life to the fullest.
If you want this series to continue, please like, comment, or message me to let me know of your continued interest. Also, ask questions, point out typos, and engage in kind discussion.
A Few Questions You Might Answer
Did you learn or see anything new in today’s study?
Was there a point that resonated with you?
Which of the rereadings of the “I Am” statements of Jesus stood out to you?
Is there a particular point or passage you would like to know more about?
Keown, Mark J. Discovering the New Testament: An Introduction to Its Background, Theology, and Themes: The Gospels & Acts. I. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018. Print.
Keener, Craig S. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. Second Edition. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2014. Print.
Keener, Craig S. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. Second Edition. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2014. Print.
Keown, Mark J. Discovering the New Testament: An Introduction to Its Background, Theology, and Themes: The Gospels & Acts. I. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018. Print.