Spoken Gospel

Water shows up in nearly every chapter of John's Gospel, and it's almost never simple—sometimes death, sometimes life, sometimes the boundary between them. Having spent the last episode tracing the theme of water through the Old Testament, David and Christine return to John to watch all those waves crash together into one story. They walk through Jesus' baptism, the wedding at Cana, the woman at the well, the storm on the sea, and the water that flows from his pierced side, showing how John presents Jesus as the living water who has come to cleanse an unfaithful people and make a dead and thirsty world new.

Water flows through nearly every chapter of John's Gospel. From Jesus' baptism to the woman at the well, from healing beside a pool to walking on the sea, John uses water imagery to describe Jesus' ministry.

David and Christine dive into the Old Testament to trace the theme of water through the biblical story and how rescue from chaotic depths and provision of life-giving streams are images that prepare us for Jesus, who invites all who are thirsty to come to him and drink.

The Gospel of John is structured around seven signs that build toward an eighth—the resurrection of Jesus. To understand what John means by a "sign," David and Christine walk through the biblical story, tracing where and how signs appear in Scripture. From the heavenly lights of creation to the plagues that fell on Egypt, John shows that Jesus' signs reveal that he is God in the flesh who has come to bring new creation and salvation to humanity.

John opens his Gospel not with a birth narrative or a genealogy, but with a stunning claim about who Jesus has always been.

David and Christine walk through John's prologue and talk about how the Word of God appears as a visible divine person over 100 times in the Old Testament, how the logic of creation itself proves Jesus is uncreated and therefore God, and why the incarnation—God becoming flesh and dwelling among us—is not just something we celebrate at Christmas but the very means by which God saves and restores the world.

John's account of Jesus' life and Gospel has long been noted for its uniqueness compared to the synoptic accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

In this episode, David and Christine begin the series on the Gospel of John, exploring who John is as a unique eyewitness, his purpose for writing, and the importance of reading John on his own terms to see Jesus as the God who incarnates and fulfills Scripture's images, themes, and patterns.