Last time, we ended with verse 17 where Jesus tells His disciples that they are blessed if they do what He has taught them by word and deed. But then He adds another revelation. Throughout His ministry He has told them many times that He is going to end up captured by His enemies and then crucified. And we are told that the disciples could not understand what He was saying… maybe they were assuming that He was using some sort of figurative language. After all, who would want to crucify the Messiah? Now He tells them, it’s about to happen.

I interrupted this Study at the end of John’s chapter 12. I stopped there because that is a natural stopping point in this gospel. The end of that chapter denotes the end of Jesus’ ministry to the people in general. From here on, we have a record of an intense, intimate, ministry to His disciples crammed into the short time He has left before He goes to the cross. For the balance of this study I am going to make my posts brief, single-themed, but post more than one a week.

I have always liked songs that tell stories. That is why one of my favorite Christian artists is Michael Card. In his collection of stories about the Life of Jesus, he has a song called Scandalon. It is the Greek word for a snare, the part of a trap that snaps to capture you. We get the word, scandal, from it. It is used in the Bible to describe an offense or a stumbling stone that can lead you away from faith. Yet, the plan of Salvation crafted by God the Father hinges on such a stumbling stone.

In going through the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, we find that during the time of the divided kingdom, the kings of the northern kingdom (Israel) went from bad to worse, but the kings of the southern kingdom (Judah) were for the most part good kings who remembered to obey the Lord. There is a lot to be learned from that contrast. I mentioned one of those kings of Judah two posts ago: Jehoshaphat.

Last time I tried to make the case (even if somewhat rambling) that if we want to distill the message of Salvation down to one essential, to the one thing that is absolutely necessary and sufficient to receive that Salvation, I would say it is “Solus Amor”; Love alone. And by Love, I mean the Love exemplified at the cross: the Love of God. If I have that, and if that is how I Love God above all things and my neighbor as myself, then everything else will (and must) follow.

Martin Luther’s rallying cry for the Protestant Reformation was sola fide: Faith alone! Faith is all that is required for salvation. But you could ask: faith in what? And although that should be obvious, given who Martin Luther was, clarification is necessary in the face of humanity’s never-ending search for loopholes. (In fact, we can look at the apostle James’ epistle as a response to this self-same trait of humanity rearing up its ugly head in the early Church.) So, we clarify the declaration by adding sola scriptura, solus Christus, sola gratia: Scripture alone is enough, Christ alone is enough, Grace alone is enough. How can four things “alone” be enough? Sounds like dicey arithmetic. The answer is: They are inseparable.