1 John 5.10

v 10 Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son.

One should accept testimony not by the nature of the content itself, but based on the veracity of the witness, of the one who testifies. The testimony itself may be good or bad news; it may be warnings of imminent peril or glad tidings, but such should not impact the receipt of the news. Displeasing as it may be, the testimony is given credibility by the one who testifies, and often when the header most rejects and opposes this testimony, we know it is because he has heard what he now knows to be the truth, that he has heard what he would rather never have known and he knows it to be regrettably true. So it is with the testimony God has given about his Son, and the reaction of man. Man may react like the proverbial tax collector, who stood at a distance from God, who would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ (Luke 18.13). Confronted by the Son of God coming in the flesh, and his death upon the Cross, every man realizes his salvation was paid for by the condemnation of an innocent man, that his life came by an innocent death, that his blessing came from the messiah being cursed. Man is ashamed by the depravity of his sinfulness upon recognition that there is and was no other Way. Man is humbled by his insufficiency of will power and piety to discover his righteousness would never attain the standard of fellowship with God. And even upon receipt of the gift by which God makes man into his own miracle, the delivery of sinner to saint, the saint is poor in spirit, mourning, and meek. No saint is free from the need for confession (“If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us” — verse 1.10). No saint is free from mourning for the world which is still rebelling against the life and freedom in Christ (“He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” — verse 2.2). No saint is free to choose for himself what to love and what to hate of the world based on his passions in the flesh (“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.” — verse 2.15). He is blessed to be poor in spirit, to mourn, and to be meek, for in these things he participates in the miracle already worked for him, he believes in the Son of God and accepts this testimony that by belief in his name man is saved by the miracle of God’s already prepared Grace. By belief in the Son, the sinner becomes the saint who is part of God’s miracle in history and the flesh, himself being God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for him to do (Ephesians 2.10). What then of the man who is confronted by this and does not believe God? Revelation of the Son of God is no claim or testimony of the flesh, for it does not find its purpose in the things or ordering of things in the flesh. Were the testimony of the Son of God only pertaining to how light and power and righteousness and authority were to be exercised in the world of flesh and history, it could be seen as a testimony or contrivance of man. This testimony is of the one who came by water and blood (5.6), and so while related to who came in the flesh, it is unworried about the things of the flesh at hand but is exceedingly focused on the things of the Spirit which are to come, is looking beyond the relationship of past to present and of man’s knowledge of good and evil, and looks above to the relationship of the Father to the Son, and of the witness by the Spirit to truths which man can only understand in part yet must accept in full. It is not a testimony of man, even if it comes by man, nor is it a testimony of the flesh, even though it is of the flesh borne by the Son of God coming to walk within history and his creation: it is God’s testimony (5.9) and whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar. It is not the messenger who is insulted when a message is not accepted; it is the one who sends the word. And in the case of the Testimony of the Son of God, it is God who sent his Word to emphatically declare to the world; This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased! (Matthew 3.17). It is God who paid an immeasurable price which man could not equal, that of the Son living as flesh unto an innocent death on a cursed tree, to declare for the world that in his Son’s life and death the glory of the Father’s name: I have glorified it, and will glorify it again (John 12.28). In the testimony of God the believer sees the mystery of the fellowship with the Father and the Son by the Spirit that is God’s miracle for those whom he calls. In the man who rejects God’s call to believe, there may be a confluence of worldly wisdom and explanations including even man’s purported knowledge of good and evil, but undeniably too he has made God out to be a liar, and set his own heart and truth against the testimony of God. For such a man, he does not believe in what God has made knowable, nor love what God has provided as perfect love, nor accept what God has willed for man’s freedom from judgement and death; he has rejected the testimony by God of the Son. Even if man has nothing more than the minimal foundational belief in Christ, it is better to have not made God out to be a liar, so that by this belief in the testimony of God he may be saved — even though only as one escaping through the flames (1 Corinthians 3.15). Such is the Grace of God, which by no miracle by man, makes man into God’s miracle.