Commentary on the Gospel of John

                                 Chapter Fifteen

                                                                                                                                              Verses 15-17

Jesus turned from preaching to His disciples as individual believers, and He began to preach to them as a collective body; that is, His Church. Jesus considers all of His true believers in all of His churches to be His friends. Jesus has a personal relationship with every true believer in all of His churches just as He did with His disciples. Jesus makes His friendship different for every individual believer because He has a different plan for each of their lives, and yet, Jesus expects His churches to work together as a team to produce its fruit which are new converts. I Corinthians 12:4-31. Jesus informed His disciples, and His Church, that He had given them His Father's Word by which He meant that the New Testament would be written and the final Bible (KJB) would be completed.

When Jesus told His disciples, and His Church, that they had not chosen Him but He had chosen them, He did not mean that He had predestined some humans to be saved by grace and all others to be lost. God never loses anything He has ever created. Ecclesiastes 3:14. When God ran His plan for His creation through His Mind as to how He would order the history of the human race, He knew that every human would inevitably choose to sin because of the influence of spiritual death that the Devil would inject into their inner beings, but He also knew that every human would also choose to do some good works that He had given them to do because of His image that He had created in them. Acts 15:18.

When God created humans in His image and gave them free will, He knew that free will had a weakness in it that could cause humans to fall into sin which would cause them to become subject to the Devil who would inject spiritual death into them which would inevitably cause them to sin. Genesis 2:16-17. But God also knew that they might overcome that weakness in them and choose to eat of the Tree of Life which would mean that they would choose complete devotion to God and eternal life. Genesis 2:9. But as God saw His plan develop in His Mind, He saw that Adam and Eve would succumb to the weakness within them and choose to sin. Spiritual death cannot come from God. It can only come from the Devil. But in His plan, God also knew that He had the Almighty Power and the Almighty Love necessary to sacrifice Himself in the place of all humans to forever purge all spiritual death and the sin that causes it from the entire human race. John 12:47-48; John 12:31-32; I John 3:8. Since Christ came to utterly destroy all of the evil works of Satan and Satan himself, then He must also utterly destroy the spiritual death and sin in every human. Revelation 20:10; Hebrews 2:9-15. God knew that if He displayed His great Love and compassion for humanity endangered by eternal death in His sacrifice and victory for them, then the faith that He had put into every one of them when He created them in His image would cause them all to choose to repent and believe in Him as the Lamb of God so that He could save them all, some by His grace and all others in a great worship service near the end of the world. John 5:24; John 1:29; John 12:31-32; Revelation 5:11-14. In other words, God overcame and eliminated the weakness in free will by the use of free will itself, and thereby, He proved that His Almighty Love can never fail. Ecclesiastes 3:14; I Corinthians 13:8.

As God ran His plan through His Mind, He noticed that there were some humans who were capable of choosing to return to faith in Him while they were still alive in the flesh in the world. God chose to save these types of humans by His grace and give them the righteousness of His own Son so that He could accept them into Heaven to be with Him forever. God knew that He could use these humans saved by grace to influence others to become saved by grace. So humans saved by grace became very special to God. John 17:24; II Corinthians 5:21. God chose to give His salvation by grace to every human who repented and believed while still alive in the flesh. John 6:37. But no matter how much any human repented and believed, they could not be saved by grace until God chose to save them. In other words, humans can in no way save themselves. Humans can only be saved by grace when God chooses to extend His salvation to them when He sees their repentance and faith. This is what Jesus meant when He told His disciples that they had not chosen Him, but He had chosen them.

As God ran His plan through His Mind, He could also see that there were many humans who were incapable of becoming saved by His grace. So God had His gospel preached to drive these types of humans away from pretending to accept salvation by grace so that they would not effect a bad influence on His true believers. Isaiah 6:6-10; John 6:60-66. Even so, the Devil sends many heretics and troublemakers into God's true churches in the Devil's attempt to ruin them.