Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to John · About this commentary
A Man Sent From God
John 1:6-13
6 There came a man sent from God, whose name was John. · WEB
A witness is introduced, and then the shortest and saddest sentence in the prologue.
There came a man sent from God, whose name was John John 1:6.
After five verses in eternity, a man with a name and a date. The change of register is deliberate and it is the prologue's first move toward the ground.
And notice how carefully he is bounded. He came; the Word was. He is sent; the Word is the sender's own. Three times in three verses the account says what he was for — to testify about the light — and once it says flatly what he was not: he was not the light John 1:8.
That correction is unusual enough to be worth asking about. Nobody troubles to deny a claim nobody is making, and there were people who thought very highly of John Acts 19:3. The writer honors him and puts a fence round him in the same paragraph.
That all might believe through him John 1:7. The purpose of a witness is not to be looked at.
The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world John 1:9. True here means genuine as opposed to derivative — the light itself rather than a lamp. And everyone is the first appearance of this Gospel's reach, which will run to a Samaritan village, a Greek delegation, and a shepherd with other sheep not of this fold.
Then three sentences that narrow like a funnel.
He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world didn't recognize him John 1:10. The middle clause is what makes the third unbearable. This is not a stranger being turned away; the maker was unrecognized in his own workshop.
He came to his own, and those who were his own didn't receive him John 1:11.
The first his own is neuter in the Greek — his own things, his own place, home. The second is masculine — his own people. He came home, and the household did not take him in. It is four words long and it is the tragedy of the whole book, stated before the story starts.
But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become God's children, to those who believe in his name John 1:12.
The door that closed in verse eleven opens in verse twelve, and it opens wider. The category is no longer national — as many as, whoever — and what is given is a right, a standing, something conferred rather than achieved.
Receiving and believing are set side by side as the same act, which is this Gospel's consistent way of describing faith: not an achievement but an acceptance.
Who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God John 1:13.
Three denials and one affirmation. Not by descent, not by desire, not by anybody's decision — which rules out, in order, ancestry, appetite and human initiative. What produces a child of God is God, and the verse is the prologue's quiet preparation for a conversation with a man who comes by night and is told he must be born from above.
settled What this mark means