NOTES for Joh 5:25-47
“The hour is coming, and is now here”—in John's Gospel we hear these words when the Lord speaks about His mission on earth. The first Christians often understood the promises of the Lord Jesus as a description of the fact that the Day of the Lord, the end of this world, would soon come, when He would judge the living and the dead after the universal resurrection of the body. But if we assign this event to the future, whether near or distant, then, first, it is unclear what it means that the hour “is now here”; and second, words about the future may be important as a promise of our resurrection, but not as a description of what is really happening now. Yet the Gospel is a very real book. It was written so that we might have life now, not merely be frightened by the future Judgment and begin to behave well. If this is so, then acquittal at the judgment of the Son of Man and the Father's eternal life are already at work, are already taking place in the life of the one who has believed His words, and His voice even now brings to life “those who are in the tombs.”