Clough John Lesson 54

The Vine Imagery – John 15:1-6

We are studying that portion of John which is called by some the passion narrative. It is a complete and detailed exposition of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ during the last hours of His life and during the cross work, during the time He was preparing to go to the cross. Therefore these chapters give us a clue as to the content of Christ’s work, shows us some of the things that He wants, His closing words to the Church, therefore what we should have foremost on our minds.

Since we are moving into another section I think it’s good to look back and see where we’ve come. We’ve seen two sections and we’re about to start a third. John 13:1-30 dealt with the removal of Judas Iscariot from the group of believers. We had the incident of the footwashing and we had the incident of the sop and both of these incidents show the separation of Judas Iscariot from believers. Now that’s the head or that’s the lead-in to what’s coming up now in John 15 and certain things are going to be happening in John 15 which people slide all over the fence trying to interpret and it isn’t that difficult if you just simply relax and go to the context and see what John’s argument is. You’ll also notice that in the next to the last section, the section that we finished last time, Jesus Christ introduced His new commandment for the Church Age, that we ought to “love one another as He has loved us,” which leads me to a feedback card that was handed in.

If another believer is out of fellowship and apostate what should your attitude be toward that person concerning Christian love as enumerated in John 13:34? The answer would be what is Christ’s attitude to the believer who is out of and apostate. That’s explained in Romans 15; it’s explained in Galatians 6 and it can be seen in how Christ dealt with the disciples when they were fouled up. There are some things, remember we said that Christ loved wisely and there are certain things that you can express toward this apostate individual and there are certain things that you best leave God to express toward the apostate individual. For one thing, you do not elect yourself as a committee of one to handle all disciplinary affairs. You stay out of that, that is not your department. So when it comes to butting into the chastening of another believer stay out because the only thing you’re going to ever accomplish by doing that is getting between the Father’s paddle and the other believer’s rear end and you’re going to get squashed. So stay out of that area and concentrate instead of seeing whether the person is opened toward the exhortation based on the Word. Just simply pattern your response after Christ’s own response to believers as you see them operating in the Gospels.

This is why you ought to have a very thorough background on the life of Christ. In fundamental churches, it’s very interesting, one thing is often lacking and that’s a thorough exposure to the four Gospels. A lot of preaching from the epistles but very little done from the Gospels. For those of you who have been coming to the Gospel of John have a head start, we’ve concentrated a lot on Christ’s character. So we are getting background and this should pull it together as we go on through here.

But in this section, this last section, John 13:31-14:31 the Lord is answering a series of questions about the Church Age. Those questions involve questions such as why the delay, why is there going to be a time in history when the Messiah will be absent from the earth. This is something new, unexpected in Jewish circles, for a concealed absentee Messiah. Jesus says the answer for that is because I’ve got to go somewhere else to set up the New Jerusalem. The second question that they asked, what was the ultimate end of all this detail work and Christ’s answer was loud and clear that it was to bring men into the presence of God Himself; that is the only place where true happiness exists and that is the only place where any person in their right mind would want to be for all eternity. The third question that Jesus answered was that this future spiritual reality, or knowing God in a very definite way in the future is possible in the present. And that was completely new, that you could actually know God in the present moment as well as you would one day know Him in the future. And thus Philip asked, he thought, for a future physical manifestation or theophany, “show us the Father.” And Jesus said you can see the Father as well as you can ever see Him through Me.

And finally Jesus Christ answered the question of why the spiritual presence of Messiah during His physical absence, why the presence during His physical absence would be selective, that is, it would go unnoticed by the world at large. So you have a secret appearance of Christ on earth for 19 centuries. The only people that have a clue as to whether Christ is here in the present or not are born again believers. And this is why, of course at the end of this age, the rapture is also a secret rapture because that will be unobserved by the world at large also just as the whole church, basically, has been unobserved.

Now the heart of living in this age was assumed under the command that you “love one another as I have loved you.” And we have shown what this means, it doesn’t mean some gooey religious slap on the back or hand-waving ceremony at the door, it’s something deeper than that. It means concern, spiritually, for all other people for whom Christ is concerned, arguing that we are going to live forever together some day so we ought to get used to it and the place to start is right now.

Now the body of believers that is being developed now becomes the subject of conversation in this area of John 15 under the imagery of the vine. And this is a debated area of Scripture. We’ve gone through various passages of John 13 and 14 but not one quite like this one because the first five or six verses of this chapter are debated by people who argue this passage is clearly one that teaches loss of salvation. Others would argue that this passage is clearly one that teaches just discipline upon Christians. So we have to work with the passage, develop some precedents for interpreting it and reasons why we interpret it the way we do. You don’t just give an opinion, you give reasons for your opinion.

So we’ll begin by going back to the Old Testament and examining the vine imagery and I think many of your questions will be answered immediately when you see these passages. Turn first to Psalm 80:8 where we have a major Old Testament passage on the vine image. It begins in verse 8 and goes through verses 16 of this psalm. The psalm was “A Psalm of Asaph” and it’s a psalm written about the national discipline that had come upon the nation Israel as a result of the Mosaic Covenant. When the nation Israel would go on negative volition toward God’s Word then God would work in history to bring about degrees of pressure or degrees of discipline until finally He brought that tragic, very horrible fifth degree of discipline. Now the discipline is beginning upon the nation and Asaph, who is responsible for writing hymns, writes various prayers that are sung in the temple precinct, and one of these prayer psalms that is sung in the temple precinct is Psalm 80. It deals with their dilemma of why it was that the nation was suffering, so beginning in verse 8.

Psalm 80:8, “Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt; thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it. [9] You prepared room before it, and did cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land. [10] The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars. [11] She sent out her boughs unto the sea, and her branches unto the river. [12] Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that all they which pass by the way do pluck her? [13] The boar out of the woods doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field does devour it. [14] Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts; look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine, [15] And the vineyard which Thy right hand has planted, and the branch that You made strong for Thyself, [16] It is burned with fire; it is cut down; they perish at the rebuke of Thy countenance.”

Now let’s look for some details that we can use to help us in John 15. First of all, notice in verse 8, “Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt, and you have cast out the heathen,” now the vine that God has brought out is very clearly in Psalm 80 equal to the nation Israel. So from the very beginning the vine has in the Old Testament the meaning, the national entity of Israel. Now the national entity of Israel involved two groups of people; it involved a set of people who were unbelievers and it involved those who were on positive volition, those who were believers. So therefore the vine is not a pure vine in the Old Testament sense; it is a mixed multitude and God has to deal with that mixed multitude all down through the centuries of the Old Testament. It began in Egypt. Now obviously the vine…forget the equivalent with the nation Israel for a moment and come back and look at the vine itself.

The vine represents production out of the plant kingdom for man’s enjoyment. So God is going to use a parallel. First we see that the vine is equal to Israel but to understand why it is we have to go down to a literal vine and set that literal vine in our divine viewpoint framework which begins with creation and God told man to subdue the earth. And out of the subduing of the earth would come production and one of the things that would be produced from this subduing of the earth would be joy and pleasure and the wine is a picture of that which man enjoys as he subdues the creation; it’s a picture of pleasure. It’s something that was enjoyed time and time again in the feasts of the Old Testament. C.S. Lewis in the second volume uses wine in all of the great feasts there, he stands in the historic tradition of the Church and not some little rinky-dink American legalistic thing against wine.

Wine in the Bible was not Kool-Aid; wine in the Scriptures had some alcoholic content. And the reason for the alcoholic content was man’s pleasure, it relaxed him and caused him to enjoy life. So there’s nothing anti-biblical about wine so let’s get that straight in case some of you have up-tight fundy friends that are worried about wine. Every once in a while we have a few people, and this is just a stumbling block to some of the less informed so that’s why we don’t have wine in our communion. Maybe someday as we mature as a congregation and people recognize what wine is and what it isn’t then we’ll have wine in the communion but I’m not going to make a federal case over it right now. In the Old Testament wine was used for pleasure; man enjoyed it. Some fundies have never understood, God likes people to enjoy Him. And oftentimes your legalistic people are so uptight in their self-righteousness I think they would crack open if they tried to smile. We found that out when we went through some of the humorous books of the Scripture, like 1 and 2 Samuel. There were people who sat stone-faced for a year and a half, they couldn’t stand all of God’s sense of humor during the workings of Saul and David. I laughed my head off as I translated those passages, I thought it was very funny and many of you did because you are grace oriented, you could relax with it and you could get God’s point out of it. But yet we have legalistic people who still burn and their temperature goes up and I wonder if I should call the usher over to pew number 8 to service somebody because they can’t handle it.

But God is to be enjoyed in the Bible. And so the vine is a picture of how man enjoys the result of his subduing the earth. Now the way this maps back here and corresponds to Israel is that Israel is to the vine and the pleasure down here for man is pleasure for God. So there’s a divine reason for the kind of pleasure you get from wine. It’s a picture of the pleasure of God gets from believers. Now put that on the fundy legalist bandwagon and see how it goes. God created wine for man’s enjoyment as a picture to communicate to man how God feels when He sees men producing the way they were designed to produce. It’s like a nice cup of good quality wine to God. That’s how God wants you to understand His pleasure at people who are oriented to the Word, who are producing in history.

Now God, therefore, in Psalm 80, says through Asaph that the nation Israel is this vine. Now certain other things are said; in verse 11 the vine expands until it reaches the sea and the river. The sea is the Mediterranean, the river is the Euphrates, and it obviously speaks of the peaking out of the territorial claims of ancient Israel under David and Solomon, the golden era when Israel peaked. But then in verse 12 begins the lament; the lament of brokenness, the lament of God’s discipline upon the nation, that the vine was cast out. Notice again the imagery in verse 16, the vine is burned with fire. As we go through these notice common themes. Everywhere you see the vine in the Old Testament standing for the nation Israel you see the theme of discipline, misery, sorrow and heartache. God plants the vine for the good kind of grapes that He can get good wine from. And what happens? When men do not subdue this particular plant, the vine, the grape vine, then the grape vine begins to degenerate; there are certain things you’ve got to do to keep good quality grapes on a vine. One of the obvious things you have to do is prune because the vine will tend to grow all over the place, it’s kind of a stupid plant, just like God picked out the sheep, a stupid animal to picture believers, He picks out stupid plants to picture believers. The vine doesn’t know what it’s doing and it exhausts its energy in leaves and vine all over the place and finally over produces and ruins the quality of the grapes. So there has to be a constant control of the vine to produce quality, and it’s not any accident that God set up the vine the way He did.

Now let’s turn to another passage, in Psalm 80 we’ve seen the initial identity of the nation Israel with the vine, we have seen the trend to identify the vine when it’s destroyed and disciplined upon the nation as something that’s cast out and burned. Turn to another Old Testament passage, Isaiah 5 and this will develop the imagery a little further. Jesus knew all this and the disciples knew all this. We are the ones that don’t know it and the worst way of finding out is to try to understand John 15 before you know the Old Testament.

Isaiah 5:1-7, here’s another passage about the vine. “Now will I sing to my well-beloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard. My well-beloved has a vineyard in a very fruitful hill; [2] And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress in it; and he looked for it to bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes. [3] And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, between me and my vineyard. [4] What could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I looked for it to bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes? [5] And now, I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it shall be eaten up; and break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. [6] And I will lay it waste; it shall not be pruned, nor digged, but there shall come up briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. [7] For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant; and he looked for judgment, but behold oppression; He looked for righteousness, but behold a scream.”

This passage develops the imagery further; it confirms our initial identification from Psalm 80 that the vine, in fact, is the nation Israel; that’s verse 7 in this passage. It confirms again our observation that every time this vineyard theme shows up we’ve got the counter theme, the counter point of discipline. God abandons the thing and He lets it be trodden down and absolutely ruined. Notice again the theme from Psalm 80, the synonym of this in verse 7, the vineyard and “his pleasant plant.” See, pleasure; the wine, what wine does to… now this is in moderate quantity, don’t someone walk out of here tonight and go souse yourself because Clough said wine gives you pleasure. Now obviously, let’s take things in context. The pendulum, I never can get this thing to stay in the middle, we have the licentious crowd and they go get crocked some place and then the legalistic crowd will walk out of here with their noses out of joint because wine was mentioned. So no matter what I do somebody always has a problem with it. So in this passage it is a pleasurable plant. Notice that, see the same theme, and God’s pleasure is in the grape that is produced by believers; that is this regenerate crowd in the nation Israel.

Now what was it that God looked for? It says here He looked for justice and He looked for righteousness, but if you hold the place and turn back to Deuteronomy 4 for His initial command to the nation you’ll see that when the nation Israel was set up God had a very definite idea for a calling. The elect instrument is Israel who corresponds to the vine. The elect instrument has a certain calling to produce. Israel is going to produce something in a moment here and of course the vine produces grapes and the grapes make wine and from the wine you have pleasure. Now the question is, on the analogy, what is the calling of Israel. In Deuteronomy 4:6, after the Torah was given, Moses reflected upon this corpus of civil legislation and he said: “Keep, therefore, and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations who shall hear all these statutes and say, Surely this is a great nation and a wise and understanding people. [7] For what nation is there so great….” And verse 8, “And what nation is there so great, that has statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?”

So what was Israel’s calling? Israel’s calling was to set up a divine viewpoint culture. That was Israel’s calling in history, not to evangelize the world. That’s the Church’s calling, it’s another dispensation. But under the discipline of Israel, Israel was to set up a complete exhibition of what it would look like on earth if God’s Law reigned. So let’s see, what was some things, if Israel had produced an orchestra in tune, if she had had all her parts coordinated spiritually, what would have arisen in the soil of Palestine? First there would have been a correlation of climate and agriculture. God promised that He would meteorologically interfere with the atmosphere to bring about maximum agricultural production. So you’d have a symphony between man and nature that would be unparalleled on the face of the earth. People would go there and they’d what fantastic… you guys plant your crops, the rain comes exactly at the right time, when your crops get almost to harvest and you don’t want rain it stops raining, who is this? What God is this on your soil that so correlates nature with your human activity? It’s obviously the God who is the creator of both nature and man; it would be their testimony to visitors to the soil of Palestine. And then think of some other things. If that nation had done what it was supposed to have done we would have seen the most fantastic exhibit of civil justice the world has ever seen. The nation in only its partial behavior produced that.

All of our great legislation comes basically out of Scripture. Hopefully in the fall we’ll have a conference on the theological foundations of law and remind a few people in the law profession that their profession rests entirely upon the inerrant revelation of God in history. It does not rest, as positivists maintain, upon human choices and human efforts at legislation. So there would have been a great divine viewpoint counterculture and from this the nations would learn, they would begin to absorb the divine viewpoint framework, they would begin to prepare themselves for the coming of the God-man and then the world would have been adequately prepared. Now this is all theoretically if everything worked out perfectly. But we know it didn’t and that’s what’s going on in all these vineyard passages.

Again, the analogy: Israel is the instrument to produce a divine viewpoint culture and that God would look down upon and He would have as much pleasure out of that as a man with a good glass of wine.

Let’s turn back to Isaiah 5:7, that’s what that verse is all about. “For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant plant.” In other words, the pleasure of the God of Israel comes from the nation Israel. Why? Let’s look at the end of verse 7, “…He looked,” He anticipated two things, judgment and righteousness. Where would that happen? By erecting a divine viewpoint culture on top of the Torah, using the instructions from the Old Testament. That would have been pleasurable to God.

Let’s turn to another passage, Ezekiel 15:1, this is a critical passage because it adds even further to our understanding of the vine image. “The word of the LORD came unto me, saying, [2] Son of man,” now Ezekiel gets down to the basics; I don’t know if you’re acquainted with that because few men have actually done a lot of work in Ezekiel but Ezekiel probably is one of the most clear cut Scriptures of just sheer supernaturalism, sheer imagery, sheer language of the street, of all the books of the Scripture and he doesn’t hedge, he doesn’t mess around with a lot of pious words, he gets down to basics and in Ezekiel 15 he gets down to the basics with regard to the vine. “The word of Jehovah came unto me, saying, [2] Son of man, What is the vine tree more than any other, or than a branch which is among the trees of the forest? [3] Shall wood be taken of it to do any work? Or will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon? [4] Behold, it is cast into the fire for fuel; the fire devours both the ends of it, and the middle of it is burned. Is it fir for any work? [5] Behold, when it was whole, it was fit for no work; how much less shall it be fit yet for any work, when the fire has devoured it, and it is burned? [6] Therefore, thus saith the Lord God: As the vine tree among the trees of the forest, which I have given to the fire fore fuel, so will I give the inhabitants of Jerusalem. [7] And I will set My face against them; they shall go out from that fire, and another fire shall devour them; and you will know that I am the LORD, when I have set My face against them. [8] And I will make the land desolate, because they have committed a trespass, says the Lord God.”

So once again we see the theme, once again the vine is the nation Israel, once again in the context we see disaster, we see everything ruin that vine. Once again we see why—it is God’s program of discipline. But in this case we are informed a little bit further about this business of why the vine is burned and the answer is in verses 3-5; the answer is that God has so supernaturally designed the vine, just as the sheep has been designed, it’s a special animal to illustrate doctrine, so the vine is a special plant that God designed. God, of course, is the perfect horticulturist, the perfect botanist and He decided when He created the world that He knew that we’d need some audiovisual aids so He set up audiovisual aids inside the creation itself. Now one thing about the vine is that if you’re are aware of all at a grape vine, I’m sure most of you are, it’s wood is rather useless, it doesn’t go straight for more than three inches and you can’t use it for anything. It isn’t even big enough to be used like driftwood is and have something pretty. So the vine, as far as its basic structure goes is a useless plant, except for one thing and one thing only, producing grapes. So God has designed in the botanical world a plant that is a picture of believers; a plant that is absolutely useless except for one thing, it’s calling. And the calling for that vine is to produce grapes so men can have pleasure. Now that pleasure can’t occur from the wood of the vine; if the grapes don’t come, if there’s no fruit on the vine its useless. You can’t use it for a thing; that’s God’s point and that’s going to figure into our interpretation of John 15.

One more passage, Hosea 10; we have an expansion on the kind of fruit that God looks for and that actually comes forth in the nation Israel in Hosea 10:1, “Israel is an empty vine, he brings forth fruit unto himself; according to the multitude of his fruit, he has increased the altars; according to the goodness of his land, they have made goodly images.” Now notice, Israel’s vine has brought forth a fruit but a fruit not to God’s pleasure. So again, the vine equals the nation; the grape, the vine of the grape equals what the nation produces or its culture and in this case instead of producing good quality grapes that would redound to man’s pleasure, instead of producing a divine viewpoint culture that would be pleasing to God, what has happened is they have produced a human viewpoint culture that is filled with idols. And when you have idolatry, remember you have idolatry begin with negative volition, negative volition sets up minus conscience so that man then begins to violate his conscience habitually and when he habitually violates his conscience he opens up his soul to human viewpoint and that eventually leads to hatred toward God and everything God is represented by inside history until finally it winds up in total frustration. That’s the story of idolatry, that’s the story of people’s souls, that’s what happens to people and we cal them mentally ill when they are not mentally ill.

Now let’s turn to John 15, having seen the background of the Old Testament. Jesus begins, He walks across the Garden of Gethsemane, to show you today how the vines occur, this is one small Arab vineyard we saw next to the highway, and you’ll see this go on and on and on and on, all across the nation. You notice the rocky soil they have to work but you’ll also notice some very strange thing where they use something to prop the vine up; they don’t have branches for the thing to grow on so they use rocks and you’ll see a rock under each one of those vines propping it up. They’re all slanted and the farmers had to go to every one of those things and put a rock under it and that’s how they keep the vine going, I guess, until it gets larger. So there’s a typical vineyard.

The site of the Garden of Gethsemane was covered with these kinds of vineyards in that day because the word “Gethsemane” itself means a wine crushing place; it was a production. So we assume that because the end of John 14 Jesus said let’s get up and get going, they are beginning to walk over to the place where He is about to be arrested, and as they do so, as they walk through this area, Jesus, being the Creator as well as true humanity, knows that He has created on the side, on that western slope of the Mount of Olives, He from all eternity had in His mind to design a plant that would one day be an audiovisual aid for doctrine. And so as they begin to walk up the slope toward the ridge, the top part of the Mount of Olives, where do they walk but through a vineyard, and what an excellent place Jesus says to Himself, now My disciples will learn doctrine from this visual aid that I have created in the plant kingdom, so He begins.

He begins with a rather shocking statement, if you follow it carefully what we have done from the Old Testament, “I am the true vine,” and with that He clarifies the complete doctrine of the vine from the Old Testament. In the Old Testament the vine was always getting smashed, it was always getting destroyed, Yahweh was always giving up on His vine because that vine He planted and it wouldn’t come up and that was because the nation had a mixture, it had negative volition people of the unregenerate percent of the nation and it had those people who were true believers. Now as this nation went on down through history the percent of true believers became very small and the percent of unbelievers became very large so there was a very, very small remnant. And that’s why that vineyard wasn’t producing. Now representative of this remnant in the nation, it was called out by John the Baptist to prepare for Messiah, out of that remnant comes the Lord Jesus Christ and as He comes out He, of course, identifies Himself with that remnant; that remnant becomes an association with Him, the true vine.

So He says, “I am the true vine,” I come from the nation Israel, I have the genes of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I represent in my person the nation; the Messiah stands, as He does in many texts, for the nation corporately. And so I am the real vine, He says, “and My Father is the husbandman [vinedresser].” Now we have to be careful and I won’t go into the details of why I mention this tonight except in family training we’ll go into the Father-Son relationship, when you see the Father here in John it is the Father looking down at the Son who is in union with true humanity so the Son actually means God the Son plus true man in one person and that’s called the Son. So when it says “My Father is the husbandman, it means that as Jesus Christ is God-man and as the society of the redeemed cluster around Him the Father is going to begin to handle Him like man has had to handle his vine to produce true fruit. Again, the concept that God is going to get pleasure from this.

John 15:2, “Every branch in Me that bears not fruit He takes away: and every branch that bears fruit, He purges it, that it may bring forth more fruit.” Now with this verse we begin to answer the contested territory because this is all the world, say many, surely this verse teaches loss of salvation. Surely it says, “Every branch in Me,” now obviously say those that this means “in Christ” and doesn’t Paul say that everyone who is “in Christ” is regenerated and that everyone “in Christ” has received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and therefore is part of the body of Christ, and therefore isn’t the One who is “in Me” a believer, and therefore isn’t it possible for this believer who bears not fruit to be taken away, for him in fact to lose his salvation? Isn’t that possible, it would be argued. All of that argumentation is based on one fatal premise and the fatal premise at the very beginning of the argument is this: that John and Jesus are using the “in Me” like Paul uses it. That’s the presupposition of that argument and that presupposition has never been proved. It must be proved on independent data. When Jesus uses “in Me” does He mean the same thing as Paul means? Does He mean literally “in Christ” or does John and Jesus mean something else by that “in Me?” We have to go on the basis of John’s writings, not Paul’s writings, to find out what’s going on here. And of course since this is the famous abide passage and since we can study many, many passages where “abide” occurs, all we have to do is turn to 1 John 2:19, John himself explains what he means. “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have abode [no doubt have continued],” that’s the same word meno, abide, they would have abided “with us, but they went out, that it might be clear that they were not all of us.” Now what kind of language is that? I don’t think you could get more explicit than the fact that John is arguing that it is possible for people to be socially and physically identified with Jesus Christ who have never been touched by His spirit, who have never been regenerated. And John simply says these hangers-on, these people will eventually be purged that it might be clear that they were never of us in the beginning.

Now you know we have in the immediate context we’re studying language similar to the end of 1 John 2:19, “they were not all of us.” Turn back to John 13:10-11; back in John 13 at that footwashing episode, Jesus uses extremely similar language and what does He say, “He that has been bathed need not do anything except wash his feet, but is clean entirely; and you are clean, but not all of you. [11] For He knew who should betray Him; therefore He said, You are not all clean.” We know now what He’s talking about. What Jesus is talking about “in Me” does not refer to regeneration, it is social identification with the Messiah in that day and He’s saying that Judas Iscariot, typifying the unregenerate follower of the Messiah, Judas Iscariot and others were identified in close physical relationship with true believers. Now what has Jesus just done before the upper room discourse began? He got rid of Judas, didn’t He? And so within the last… say, however long this took, maybe an hour or so, within the last hour there’s been a fulfillment of this very thing of John 15:2, “Every branch in Me that bears not fruit He takes away;” and the disciples only 60 minutes before have seen the Father take Judas Iscariot off into the night, far away from ever again being identified in any way with the Christian movement, with the Messianic crowd.

So “every branch in Me that bears not fruit” is not talking about believers. “Every branch in Me” represents the Judas Iscariots, represents the unregenerate followers, the imitators, the professing believers. “In Me” signifies that these professing people apparently openly identify with Christ. Judas Iscariot slept with Christ, he ate with Christ, he heard Christ teach, he took care of Christ’s various physical needs, he went on and from all intents and purposes he appeared to be a believer. He had fooled all the other men into thinking he was a believer and yet Jesus says you never were with me, I never knew you. Just like He says on the Sermon on the Mount, “many will say in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not cast out demons in Thy name, did we not teach things in Thy name, and I will profess unto them,” not that you were a believer and lost your salvation but I will profess unto them there never was a point in time when you did know Me. You never were regenerated and lost the regeneration; you were never regenerated ever, you never knew Me, said Jesus. The same thing is taught here in John 15:2, “Every branch in Me,” every Judas Iscariot who follows, He will take away, whatever the fruit is that’s coming up, that fruit Judas did not have. Remember in Matthew, “you shall know them by their fruits” and ye shall tell the wolves in sheep’s clothing and you can tell them by their fruits; sooner or later evil will show itself.

And so “Every branch in Me that bears not fruit He takes away; but every branch that bears fruit, He purges,” now the word “purge” is interesting because it’s not the word that you’d expect. It’s actually the word cleanse, a strange word for a vine, isn’t it? Do you go out with soap and water and wash down a vine? Not normally. Well, then why is the verb “cleanse” used here. You’d think it’d be “prune.” You would think it would follow exactly here, that every branch that bears fruit He prunes it, that it may bring forth more fruit. But no, that’s what we would expect, that’s not what Jesus Christ said. “Every branch that bears fruit, He cleans.” Now obviously what He’s doing here is to focus attention on something He taught before. This verb was used exactly in the passage I just showed you, in John 13 and that doubles up our proof for our interpretation, that the cleansing refers to regeneration and subsequent sanctification. The Father, every branch that bears fruit, the branch is a regenerate branch, it goes on for a while, grows, produces clusters of fruit and then the Father comes along and He purges it, He cleanses it. Now the picture here is the pruning, of course, the literal picture, but Jesus wants us to emphasize the cleansing, spiritual application of that literal picture, so that’s why the verb “cleanse” is used and not the word “prune.” But before we understand the cleansing we do have to go back to the literal image of the pruning.

Let’s see if we can work out some spiritual applications of this imagery of pruning. Obviously one prunes a grape vine to keep down growth as the vine grows solidly and begins to produce fruit, along with this are many, many different branches that grow on here, you get a tremendous amount of other growth on which there are no grapes. There is a lot of extra growth on that vine but the growth occurs by action of the chemicals in the plant, the same chemicals that are producing the growth in the grapes are the chemicals that are producing the growth in the surplus vine. After the grapes are harvested, then the plant is cut back to permit better quality grapes. If that were not done the fruit’s quality would decrease and maybe even go to zero in quantity.

Now let’s see if we can think why this is a picture of the Christian life. After an initial surge of sanctification God will trim back things in our life to get started at the same time the good fruit gets started. Let’s use two Biblical illustrations. One illustration will be the Church at large and the other illustration will be an individual believer. First, the illustration of the Church at large. On the day of Pentecost the Church began to grow; it began to expand on that day, just like a vine would expand, and much fruit was born. Remember the thousands and thousands of people until we estimated out of 30,000 people in the city of Jerusalem 10,000 believed, a tremendous amount of fruit was born. But Jesus says from My perspective, from My divine perspective, as I look down at that vine, even though the grapes give me pleasure, I know that that production can’t continue because of a surplus growth that occurred along with the grapes. And in this case on the Day of Pentecost, what was the surplus growth that had to be trimmed off. And everyone that has been coming to the series on the book of Acts ought to know.

What was also happening, the Church was becoming ingrown, so whereas you had the positive factor of the thousands and thousands of people who trusted in Christ you have the negative factor that it was becoming fixed in Jerusalem; it was growing all right, but it was growing all in one direction. It was like the vine sending this branch out with fantastic…bearing all sorts of bunches of grapes on it but it was all bearing it in one direction. Let that go and maybe it’d even tear the vine apart because of the weight problem. So what did God have to do in Acts 6, 7 and 8 to the Church at large? He had to prune this off, and how did He prune this off? By causing physical persecution against the Church. We’re going to see that; that’s why Stephen died, that’s why Saul stood there and why Saul is going to be given orders on the part of the Pharisees to go out and kill, destroy, arrest, inform on believers wherever you find them, smash the back of this new movement, crush it. And Paul did his very best to crush that Christian movement but because God was in control all that Paul did was trim it for the Lord. He just pruned it so it’d bring forth more grapes, much to Paul’s frustration and the Pharisee’s frustration. So everywhere they pruned more grapes would pop out; they’d persecute believers over here, they’d just dissipate further and go witnessing over into India, witnessing into Parthia, witnessing up into Armenia, wherever they were pushed the thing kept on growing and so instead of crushing the movement what did the first persecution do? It spread the movement. So there you have one historic illustration of the Holy Spirit’s pruning ministry. He started with something that was tremendous but along with great spiritual growth there comes a lot of extra surplus stuff that has to be cleared out.

This happens in the Church, in history so far as revivals go. Wherever we have had great revivals there have been great weaknesses grow up simultaneously with that great revival and so God then has to spend an entire generation to purge out, sniff out, prune, cut and work that church over so it’s strong, because if He allows just a lot of new converts who all of a sudden there’s a revival and 3,000 people accept the Lord and everybody claps, great work. Yes it is, but God isn’t even satisfied with that because God is not concerned with the present but the future and He says yes, 2,000 or 3,000 people trusted in Christ today, what about tomorrow. And so thinking about tomorrow God begins to work on the weaknesses, and sometimes there’s even church splits, sometimes there’s doctrinal fights, sometimes there’s all sorts of things that happen.

In the first six centuries of the Church you had one fight after another about the person of Christ, so much so that Gibbon in The Fall and the Decline of the Roman Empire comments sarcastically about the fact that in one of the great Christological disputes they said they worried about one iota. This is where our expression, I don’t give one iota for something, it’s a Greek little letter, and the theologians were debating over an iota in the middle of a word. But you know that debate was necessary because the question was is Christ’s humanity real or like a man. That was why that was why that iota was there and that iota had to be fought and it was fought over for 100 years in church councils. Men got up and they gave great [can’t understand word] to try to understand what is it, which way shall we go, shall we put the iota in the word or shall we take it out of the word; should we say that Jesus is God and man or should we say that He is God and man-like. Our salvation rests on the answer to that question because if Jesus is not true humanity we have no true sacrifice, we have no true mediator and we have no salvation. So the iota did count.

And people would say why, as they look upon the Church from the outside, as they look on the Church without the Bible, they say look, isn’t this strange, Christianity grows, it mushrooms, everybody is loving one another, it’s great and then all of a sudden the theologians come in and they ruin it and for 600 years there’s one debate over another and they just ruined the whole thing. No they didn’t, that was God pruning the vine to build up a powerful Christology that would last for 1900 years. That had to happen, that fight and that discussion. So when you see these kind of… the Holy Spirit advances and then you see like setbacks happen, the setbacks are the pruning ministry. In Africa we had expansive areas where people trusted in Christ and all of a sudden persecution hits the Church. Why? I think one reason why is that God sees this vine is weak, there’s something missing in this vine, I’m pleased that it brings forth grapes, new African believers, but I see something in the long run that’s weakening to this vine, and if I don’t trim out this extra growth in the vine then the vine 50 years from now won’t be producing any more grapes in Africa. What is it that God sees? No local churches, no pastor-teachers teaching the Word of God, it’s a weakness, so therefore God puts the church in a crunch, He trims it, He puts the heat on, it’s His way of trimming out that extra growth, that disorganization that many missionaries imported from their fundamental church backgrounds where they came out of a program church and they’d go to Africa and they’d have program churches instead of giving out kites at Sunday School they’d give out coconuts or something, and this goes on and instead of teaching people doctrine we have little games going on and nobody learns the Word. So what does God have to do? He has to purge it.

That’s the Church as a whole, but we can even site an example from Scripture of an individual who after a great spiritual advance was pruned. His name was Paul, and he tells in many of his epistles the pruning process; God gave him great vision, God gave this man a titanic intellect, the breakthrough opportunity to form the entire doctrinal status of the New Testament, and yet as the grapes blossomed in Paul’s life, as Paul came out with New Testament doctrine upon New Testament doctrine which was the great fruit of his life, God saw that along with this something dangerous in Paul’s soul, there was a lot of vine growing all over this and it was a vine that was very dangerous to Paul because Paul tended to have a fat head and so God had to cut it out and He did by putting a demon in Paul’s body and that’s explained in 2 Corinthians, “I received a messenger from Satan in my flesh to buffet me, lest I be puffed up.” And so again the pruning process. So you see, the pruning process is just part of sanctification, it’s to keep the vine going in the long run, even though in the short run if you were the vine you’d say why do you cut me down, look at this, I’ve got branches all over, I’ve got 15 feet of branch that I grew this summer and I gave you grape bunch after grape bunch and you sat there and you munched grapes off me and now you come along with a slaw and a clipper and you cut me off. Now that isn’t showing much love. But God, from His point of view is looking on the tomorrow, on the next season of production; we are not. We are always fouled up with present-centered viewpoint. Let’s go on and see some of the other things that are taught in this passage.

John 15:3, “Now,” says Jesus, “you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.” Now it’s dia in the Greek, there are two constructions, the preposition dia, and one has the accusative and one has the genitive and in this passage it is the accusative and what that means is that it’s not “through the word,” but “on the basis of the word,” on the basis of the word you are clean. Now what is the word that Jesus Christ has spoken? The word that Jesus Christ has spoken is the New Testament doctrine, what exists of it at that time. And so that’s the plan of God. So let’s structure it this way; we have the foundation or the basis, the plan of God spoken by Christ about the Church. Jesus says that we are cleansed through that. Now we’re cleansed at the point of regeneration because of the gospel; we are also cleansed by 1 John 1:9, but to show you the four steps in the way the Word actually cleanses us in experience, turn to 2 Timothy 3:16-17.

At the end of the last part of verse 16 the Word of God is said to do four things. And historically and experientially this is what happens when we come in touch with the Word of God as the Holy Spirit illuminates our hearts to it. “It is profitable for doctrine,” that’s the first step, you become acquainted with the content of the Word of God, you have to know doctrine, there is no shortcut, you must know doctrine, not experience, it doesn’t say somebody gave their glowing testimony 40 times, it says doctrine. So, “it is profitable for doctrine,” and then the second step, the word “reproof” actually means convincing or proof, I don’t know why it’s reproof, but proof. So the second step as the Word of God grips you is that you become acquainted with the content and then gradually as it soaks deeper into your soul you become convinced that it’s true. This takes time, you can’t sit in a closet and work up faith, gotta believe, gotta believe, gotta believe, that kind of thing; it doesn’t work so forget it, just think on the Word of God and gradually the faith will come. Then the third step, “correction,” that means the Word of God cuts off that which conflicts with it; one of the first applications of doctrine should be correction. After you learn a doctrine you should ask yourself, now what am I doing wrong in the light of this new doctrine. How can this new doctrine change my life; what areas of my life need straightening up because of this new truth that I have learned from the Word of God. So correction, and it’s a thing that goes on and on and on. Then the fourth thing, “instruction in righteousness,” that’s the positive side. The negative, correction; the positive, instruction in righteousness. The negative habits have to be changed, they have to be replaced by positive habits.

So there’s the process of the Word of God cleansing the soul. It is done, of course, by the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit, a lot of details in this, Jesus Christ does not stop at this point to go into these but involved is the Word of God; the Word of God is taught by a pastor-teacher inside a local church using the body of doctrine developed over the centuries of the Christian church; involved is the Holy Spirit who causes you to be illuminated, involved also is the Holy Spirit who prays sanctification prayers for you, Rom. 8:26, the groanings which cannot be uttered, which are not tongues, they are quiet communication that only the Father and the Son hear. Now if we could hear the prayers of Romans 8:26 with the Holy Spirit in our heart praying to the Father about changes He’d like to see we’d become scared. But the Holy Spirit sees that certain things have to be changed and says Father, this change ought to be made now in this particular believer’s life so let’s go, let’s get started. And it’s all secret, the only inkling you get of it is when the roof falls in or something happens and then you decide that well, maybe the Lord’s doing something with me today. That comes later, after the Holy Spirit has made the prayer. But all of that is not discussed, Jesus just deals with the basics here, you are clean on the basis of the Word which I have spoken to you; I have given you doctrine, you have responded to that, so you’re clean.

Now the command in John 15:4, “Stay in Me,” that’s the word “abide,” be careful; you read some Christian devotional materials and it has these spooky thing about abiding in Christ and it’s like a mysticism, walk into the closet, turn out the lights and abide in Christ. And they have some idiot thing like this. Now that’s now what’s taught in this passage; if all people would do is look at the context they’d see that that couldn’t be what’s taught in the Bible; for one reason you can’t read the Bible when the lights are out and one of the things about abiding here is that you have to know Christ’s command, “Abide in Me” is nothing more than responding to the New Testament doctrines that Christ has taught. That’s what it means. It does not mean to feel your way through some dark closet in an ecstatic experience; it means to submit, bow down to, and follow the orders of our Savior, that’s what it means. You may not like those orders, you may personally think better but you know better than to question His long term omniscience so you say, chokingly sometimes, Yes Sir, and move on.

Let’s see what He says, “Abide in Me, and I’ll be in you,” in other words, result. “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, you can’t [no more can you], unless you abide in Me. [5] I am the vine, you are the branches.” So He straightens us out as to where we stand with Him. “He that stays [abideth] in Me, and I in him, the same brings forth much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.” So twice in verses 4 and 5 Christ has made it very clear that apart from submission to Him and His will moment by moment we will produce zero in the Christian life. Again the circle of fellowship, unless we are in the fellowship circle we cannot produce, it’s that simple. And it’s emphatic in the Greek, it’s the strongest negative construction in the Greek. In verse 4, “Unless you abide in Me you in no way can do anything.” And in verse 5 it’s repeated; twice Jesus makes the point, you have got to learn, believer, that you cannot produce grapes unless you’re in the vine.

Now we’ve got to deal back to modernize that Old Testament picture. See in the Old Testament we said we had vine, Israel, grapes, the divine viewpoint culture. Now we’ve got to bring it up to date; now in the Church Age, the Church in Christ is the vine, the true vine, and what is the grapes? All right, what’s the context of John 13-15, “love one another.” The fruit is the righteousness in the individual life, you’d say divine viewpoint but it’s not Israel’s culture because God hasn’t given us New Testament commands as law for every area, He’s given us wisdom principles in every area. So this is a divine viewpoint that reflects out from the body of believers.

So let’s look at it a little bit more. Verse 6, “If a man does not abide in Me,” that is if you don’t follow My commands, “He is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Now out of the Old Testament background why does Jesus say verse 6? If you listened when you went through the Old Testament background you should have the key and why verse 6, verse 5, verse 4 are all saying the same thing. The vine is a useless plant without grapes; if the vine isn’t producing any grapes you can’t use it for a thing except as in the Old Testament burn it. So in verses 4 and 5 Jesus is simply giving the condition for fruitfulness and in verse 6 the opposite, if you don’t bear fruit you’re useless and you’re going to be thrown out and cast into the fire. It’s that simple.

Now who are those who are cast out? Again, the same thing in verse 2, those who are cast our are the unbelievers; they are people in the Messianic movement who refuse to go with New Testament doctrine. See what happened was this; we forget this because we live 20 centuries away from it so just back up a moment in time and look back at a time line and see the problem. Up until the cross and the resurrection of Christ, Christ taught basically Old Testament doctrine. After that time… of course He taught New Testament doctrine to His intimate circle but that wasn’t really public; that became public as the Holy Spirit developed the New Testament canon through the apostles, so for about 50 years afterwards you had the teaching of the apostles which was the teaching of Christ and then you had followers in the Messianic movement, they were following Christ and following Christ because they could under this umbrella of the Old Testament. But when they came face to face with this New Testament doctrine that was coming down, wow, and so they melted off, and you had a lot of people just phase out of the movement, many, many people phased out when they saw that He was headed for the cross, that Palm Sunday crowd that was saying Hosanna, Hosanna, save now, save now. How many of them were around just six days later?

So all during this area there’s a time of purging; that’s what’s referred to here and over the history of time the doctrine… this has been pulled together in a doctrine that the great Reformers called the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints; you may know that under a different title called eternal security. But the official name in church theology is the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. Now that doctrine can be summarized, we have done it many times, but I want to conclude by summarizing that doctrine under three points.

The first statement that we wish to make on the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints is that… by perseverance we mean just what Christ means here, that this person, this man whom we suspect is a Christian, stays in the Word. That’s what it is, perseverance, they persevere, they don’t come in and hotshot it for a few nod to God services at 11:00 and then drop out for 20 years; that’s not perseverance. Perseverance are the people who are positive to doctrine, take it in, take it in, take it in, they have their waterloos at times but they manage to pull through and come back and stay in the Word. That’s perseverance.

Now the first thing about the doctrine of perseverance as we’ve stated it, that is the evidence of election and justification. See, if God elects us and if He’s justifies us He’s not doing this hypothetically some place, He’s doing it with real people in real space/time history. And there’s got to be some results. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. Did God chose the nation Israel? The answer is yes. How do you know that God chose the nation Israel? Because they survived what no other nation survived. Israel has persevered physically in history and that becomes evidence that God specially selected Israel for its destiny. So also, if God really elects believers, then He’s going to hound them and keep after them. So if someone who professes to have accepted Christ doesn’t last, phases out, and you see no spiritual growth, you can question, you can’t condemn because you’re not omniscient but you can say at least I’m not convinced they really accepted Christ. That is your right to have that reserve about that individual. You have no evidence for that. So that is the fact that is your evidence of election and justification. Romans 9 is another good passage to study this.

The second point under the doctrine of perseverance is that it leads to the assurance of salvation. Passages like here and Colossians 1:21-23, basically the same thing as the first point, that the assurance we have of our salvation is that we are persevering.

Finally the third thing and this is quite important from our point of view today, 20 centuries removed from this time: our perseverance tonight, the fact that you are here studying the Word of God, the fact that you have survived various temptations to just kiss it off, forget it, wipe out, go on a toulie trip never ending, the fact that you are here tonight and you’ve come through those things is only a result of daily intercession for you by the Lord Jesus Christ in heaven. It is not a result of His cross work. Be careful here; Jesus Christ died for yore sins on the cross but Jesus Christ in addition to dying for your sins on the cross must maintain His priestly work of making intercession for us, Romans 8:34 and Hebrews 7:25.

In His high priestly work Christ constantly takes that reservoir, that finished work of His cross, and daily applies it to our account; reaches into the infinite reservoir and applies it to our account, reaches in again and applies it to our account, day after day He makes intercession for us so that each day grace is fresh, out of the pool of His finished work on the cross. We’re not arguing that He re-sacrifices Himself, that’s Romanism, that’s not Protestantism, but we have to say what many people forget is that don’t neglect, out of your passion to talk about Christ’s finished work on the cross, which is perfectly legitimate, don’t ever forget those other verses which say Christ ever lives to make intercession for us. Why? Because it’s necessary. And so the fact is that at any point in your Christian life you can say thank you Lord because today I am here and Your mercies are renewed, as Jeremiah says, every morning and you are my faithful high priest. I can have something to be thankful every day because Christ that day has exercised His grace toward me. Said another way, if… and this is only theoretical, but if Christ were to get tired and stop praying for you, if He would look down at one of us and say well, I’ve had enough of that clod, and turn off the intercessory prayer, we would go to hell; we would lose our salvation. The fact we don’t lose our salvation is due to His faithfulness… HIS faithfulness, not ours. We don’t hang on to our salvation by our faithfulness. Christ hangs on by His faithfulness and we know from the elective decrees will surely be successful in so doing.

One last observation in verse 6, the tense of the verb. It’s very strange, maybe not too much can be made of this but it is a point to watch. There’s a strange shift here from the present tense to the aorist. It occurs in that first sentence in John 15:6, “If a man is not abiding in Me, he is cast forth,” aorist tense, which seems to be saying that if this man, a Judas Iscariot for illustration, if this man you see is not abiding in My words, is becoming progressively hostile to the Word of God, you know what that’s a sign of? That’s a sign of he’s already been cast, he’s been cast out and his lack of perseverance is the sign, the empirical evidence that he has been cast out, I have rejected him.

Next week we’ll continue on the vine discourse and get into some of the techniques of the Christian life that are used to stay in submission to Christ.