HILLFAITH STUDIES: Jesus’ Sixth Great ‘I AM’ Claim – “The Way and the Truth and the Life”
“Jesus said to him: ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No man comes to the Father except through me.'” – John 14:6
When Jesus tells His disciples that He “is the way and the truth and the life,” He is literally only hours away from His arrest, multiple trials, crucifixion and burial. And He makes this profound summary statement about who He is to comfort them, having just given them what was likely the most devastating possible news.
That news was actually a three-fold gut check: One of them would shortly betray Him, Peter would deny Him three times, and He was about to die a horrendous death that to all appearances signified His utter failure, and that of His disciples. They were no doubt in a state of comprehensive shock, confusion, fear and anger, none more so than Peter.
Jesus’ way of comforting them is, at first glance, incredibly unsympathetic. He could have reached out and literally hugged each of them, then muttered some reassuring, but ultimately hollow, platitudes about everything is going to work out just fine, chin up old boy, and go on.
Truth, Not Sentimentality:
But instead Jesus tells them the single most important fact they can possibly know — who He is. He is saying, in effect, “don’t worry about the immediate appearance of things, be comforted by the enduring reality of who and what I am.”
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the Gospels, this verse is where Jesus most justifies C.S. Lewis’ statement that, given what Jesus said about Himself, He must be either a lunatic or liar, or He is exactly what He said He is. There’s no middle ground here for Him to be a “great moral teacher,” a “wise man,” or anything else short of God Incarnate.
Think about it: Mohammed never claimed to be God. Neither did Confucius, Buddha or any of the Hindu leaders. None of the pagan pantheons of gods and goddesses included a deity who came to Earth from Heaven in order to sacrifice his own blood for the sins of his guilty followers.
There literally is none other like Jesus in all of history.
Every Knee and Tongue:
Only Jesus claimed that He, a man, is also fully God and that He is the only way to spend eternity in Heaven, through a living, personal relationship with Him as Lord and Savior. And let none of us forget that, eventually, every knee will bow and every tongue confess the truth about Jesus.
You can scoff at His claim, laugh at it, or deride it. What none of us can do is ignore what Jesus said about Himself, because if He is what He claimed, then each and every one of us, regardless of our station in life, must acknowledge that He is “the Way and the Truth and the Life.”
Troubled by this? Wrestling with questions about Jesus? Then let’s talk, confidentially. Email me at mark.tapscott@hillfaith.org and we’ll set something up. Don’t worry, I don’t preach, I mainly listen and humbly provide answers based on His Word and my experience of a life-altering relationship with Him since 9:15 am on March 1, 1991.
Schedule for Jesus’ Great I AM Claims Posts
July 6: Introduction
July 13: “I am the bread of life.” John 6:35
July 20: “I am the light of the world.” John 8:12 and 9:5
July 27: “I am the gate for the sheep.” John 10:7
August 3: “I am the good shepherd.” John 10:11
August 10: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” John 11:25-26
August 17: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” John 14:6
August 24: “I am the true vine.” John 15:1
Make a note on your calendar to be sure and check back here each Tuesday, Regardless if you are already a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ working on Capitol HIll, or a congressional aide who is curious about Jesus, skeptical about Him or just plain apathetic about the whole thing, I promise you will gain some valuable new insights and understanding as a result of following this study.
And it might change your life forever.
While you are here, check out this incredible scene from “The Chosen” where Jesus explains what it means to be “born again:”
John Frame, a professor of theology and philosophy at Westminster Seminary, thinks that comprehending any truth at all must rely on the Lord. He describes philosophy as (my summation, not his) something similar to a dog chasing his tail. Philosophers, he wrote, are either analyzing a thing by breaking it into its component parts and analyzing the parts in similar fashion, or they are combining things into a sort of unity and treating it all of them together as one thing.
So where does truth come into play? Frame says that, in the world of modern philosophers, truth is a mere abstraction. The problem with a mere abstraction is that its existence can never be more than hypothetical, and raises the question of whether it really does or even can exist. Furthermore, it’s hard to understand how a mere abstraction can hold authority over anyones lives or thoughts.
For example, the number 3 is an abstraction. Question: does it exist outside of our minds? That is, is its existence merely subjective? And if so, what would it take to see it as having an objective existence?
For Dr. Frame, the answer is that God exists and this is how He thinks. If God knows and understands the number 3, then that number (and by extension all arithmetic) achieves an objective existence and the answers to the calculations in which the number 3 participates will possess a certain authority.
When the mind of God knows something to be true, it is objectively true *and* it turns truth into a personal thing. Why? Because God is a person and the Three-in-One are also persons. That’s the only way the number 3, or any number, can become part of an objective truth. And the same holds true of other things that, without God, would only exist as abstractions: goodness; kindness; friendship; love; bravery… and of course their flip sides: evil, malice, vilification, hate, cowardice… If God sees something as good, it is good; if He sees something as bad, it is bad. He has but to think it, and that makes it objectively real. After all, He spoke our entire universe into existence.
This is diametrically opposed to the Marxist materialistic vision that physics is everything and everything is physics. This materialistic vision rejects any notion of a metaphysics that can inform us about our physics and what it depends on.
There is no mystery about how postmodernism came about. Philosophy had rejected the Lord, and the Modernists floundered around for over a century trying to make sense of the claims of truth given that there were no God. The postmodernists popped the party balloons. Without God, there is no truth. And they were right. BUt they concluded, therefore there is no truth. Bzzzt! Wrong answer.
Why? Just for starters, it’s self-contradictory. If there is no truth, then postmodernism cannot be true. But postmodernists would simply respond, you only say that because you believe truth exists. It that’s where logic takes them, fine, but then they shouldn’t turn around and pretend that logic only works when they find it useful. It also works for rejecting what we think is worthless.
Thus, Jesus made a philosophical statement when He proclaimed, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Jesus is the personification of truth, along with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus told us that truth has an objective existence because He is truth, and would be with us always, even unto the end of the world.
Well said, Reformed Trombonist, well said. I don’t claim to be a philosopher or a theologian, but your “dog chasing its tail” summation of Frame resonates with me, as I’ve long thought that in an ultimate sense, the philosopher’s search for truth is necessarily a failure because he lacks infinite knowledge. It is nevertheless a worthy endeavor, if only as a helpful (for some) preparation for the study of the Word.