Commentary on the Gospel of John

                                Chapter Five

                                                                                                                                      Verse 36

Jesus then preached that the miracles that His Father had given Him to do bore an exact witness from Himself that He was God in human form. But there had to be a difference between Jesus' miracles and those of the prophets because some of them had done most of the miracles that Jesus did including raising the dead back to life. The difference had to be that Jesus said that He came "to finish" the works that His Father gave Him to do. The Father's salvation of the human race could not be finished until Jesus rose from the dead. When Jesus died on the cross He said, "It is finished." John 19:30. Jesus also preached to His disciples that He had "finished the work" that His Father had given Him to do. John 17:4. Jesus proclaimed these prophecies before He was resurrected which finished His work. But God's Word is an eternal Word which means that God had finished all of His creative acts from the foundation of the world, and God has also just begun all of His creative acts. In eternity, everything has just begun, and everything has already been finished. In eternity, everything that begins ends something, and everything that ends begins something new. For that reason, God has divided eternity into different Ages. Hebrews 4:3; Revelation 1:8; Ecclesiastes 3:14-15. The Pharisees knew that Jesus claimed that He would rise from the dead, and when He did, they should have believed that Jesus was God because no prophet ever raised himself from the dead. Matthew 27:62-63.