Theological term
Only Begotten Son
3 sermons · All terms
The Context of John 3:16, Part 2
John 3:14–16 is set against the backdrop of Numbers 21, where God appointed a single, unlikely remedy for snake-bitten rebels in the wilderness — a bronze serpent lifted on a pole. The sermon argues that humanity's condition before God is morally terminal, that God alone has planned the only rescue in His Son, and that this rescue is as unlikely in human reckoning as a bronze snake healing the dying. Saving faith is a gift from God, its sole object is Jesus Christ the only begotten Son, and the imputed righteousness He secured is the believer's standing before God — sufficient ground for perseverance and the rejection of every false remedy.
The Truthful Testimony of the Lord
John 8:13–20 records the Pharisees' flat rejection of Christ's self-testimony — 'your witness is not true' — and his threefold response: the intrinsic truthfulness of his witness grounded in his divine origin and destination, the confirming unity he shares with the Father, and the law of two witnesses satisfied by Father and Son together. The passage closes with the Pharisees demanding to see the Father, only to be told that their ignorance of the Son proves their ignorance of the God they claim to worship. The sermon presses upon the hearer that to receive or reject Christ is to receive or reject the Father, and calls unbelievers to look in faith to the one mediator between God and men.
The Bread of Life Discourse, Part 3
John 6:41–51 records the Jews' grumbling rejection of Jesus as the bread of life and his pointed rebuke of their unbelief. This sermon expounds that rejection in two movements: the nature of the Jews' complaint against Christ's divine origin, and Christ's twofold response — his assertion of the Father's sovereign, efficacious drawing of sinners and his appeal to the prophetic scriptures that learning from the Father issues in coming to the Son. The doctrines of total depravity and total inability are drawn from verse 44 and grounded in parallel texts from John 1, Romans 8, and Ephesians 2, establishing that salvation is possible only because the Father draws whom he will. The sermon closes with an exhortation to look to Christ in faith for everlasting life, the sole remedy for the problem of human sin.