Commentary on the Gospel of John

                                    Chapter Fifteen

                                                                                                                                              Verses 1-5

Jesus compared Himself to a grapevine that bears copious amounts of good and edible fruit. Jesus taught that He creates the fruit on the vine, and His Father empowers His creations. Jesus used this grapevine to symbolize His creation of the world and especially of humanity.

God creates every human to be good; that is, to produce only good works. God can never lose anything He has ever created. Ecclesiastes 3:14. God loves every human that He ever creates and that Love can never fail. I Corinthians 13:8.

God is Omniscient, but He is also innocent. Habakkuk 1:13. God can only use His free will to choose to create good systems. When God gave free will to His special creation called Lucifer, God did not know that he could use that free will to choose to rebel against God and become evil. God knew nothing about evil when He gave free will to Lucifer, but that does not mean that God is not Omniscient. God possesses an infinite set of good ideas that He can use to create an infinite set of good systems. Good systems happen to be the only positive systems. Only positive creations can possess reality. Evil cannot be real, and yet, it possesses some kind of negative power. The Old Testament consistently refers to sin and evil as being vanity; that is, pride and emptiness. The negative power of evil happens to be anti-knowledge and anti-creative since it only seeks to destroy all that is good. In a sense, evil equals absolute nothingness, but it only assumes real power in its attempts to destroy creativity. Evil seeks to reduce all creativity to absolute nothingness, including creativity and knowledge. All this means God is Omniscient in creativity and reality, but He knew nothing about evil, which is anti-knowledge, until Lucifer's rebellion.

God created a free will system outside of His own free will to be solely a creative system, but He discovered that outside of His subjective Being, it could be misused to choose to do evil. The fact that Lucifer could persuade some of God's angels to also rebel against God demonstrated that doubt about the Almighty Power of God's Love to protect His creations had entered into His creations. But God knew exactly how to create a system, using humanity and His own ability to become a human, to thoroughly purge all sin and evil and the Devil himself from all of His creations so that He could cleanse it all and recreate it all. II Peter 3:9-13; Romans 8:18-23; I Corinthians 15:20-28; Colossians 1:15-23; Matthew 13:36-43; Revelation 21:1-5; John 5:28-29; John 12:31-32; I John 3:8; Revelation 22:11-12.