Love and Testimony

If I alone testify about Myself, My testimony is not true. (John 5:31)

I find this statement both fascinating and disturbing.

Why is it that testifying about one's self makes it not true? Is that what this is saying? Or is this dichotomy unique to just the testimony of Jesus?

O.K., He is not exactly saying that here. He says that if His is the only testimony then it is not true. That aligns with the principle of needing more than one witness to verify anything in judgment.

But I see more than that in this verse. There is something much deeper here that needs to come out into the open.

God is love. The very nature of love itself is that it is not self-focused, is not seeking to exalt itself above others but always seeks to bless and serve others.

Jesus came to this earth to reveal the heart of the Father, the originator of all love.

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

This is the core of the testimony of Jesus. God loves and gives as a result. Jesus testified to that fact and lived it out all throughout His life on earth. But in this statement about testifying Jesus declares that if He is the only one claiming this truth then it would neutralize the very meaning of what He was claiming about being our connection to love.

God had to exist as a Trinity or otherwise love could not exist. The reason there are three persons of the Godhead is because for love to exist at all there must be others to serve and to be the recipients of love. Therefore, the only way that love could function and remain alive from eternity past was for each person in the Godhead to serve another. In addition, three-way bonds of love are more important than just two-way bonds. That is why the Trinity is the perfection of love.

But love wanted more than just three and so it created many more beings to be included in the ever-growing circles of love. God created all kinds of beings with varying capacities to enjoy love and give love. But everything and everyone He created were designed to function optimally in perfect harmony with the core principle of love – service and focus on others.

Belief and trust are a vital part of this life-giving circuit of love. Belief in God's ways and in love allows us to stay connected in that circuit and continuously receive and give life as a component in the giant circuit of love. Belief and testimony are like two sides of the same coin, for the whole purpose of testifying is to create belief and credibility in the minds and hearts of others. Belief may be something like an analogy of a receptacle through which we connect to the power that we choose to motivate and inspire us and from which we expect to receive life and energy.

Sin is the pulling back from service to others by a focus on getting more than giving. Sin created the first short-circuit that caused malfunction in the perfect design of God's great circuit of love. Sin is the opposite of love, a desire to exalt one's self in order to feel value instead of exalting God as the only real Source of value and worth. Sin cuts off a person from living within the life-giving circuit of love while siphoning off benefits and misappropriates them by hoarding them instead of passing them along to others. This creates all sorts of problems in the circuitry that was designed to nourish and strengthen the whole and creates massive imbalances and weaknesses.

We are so used to living in a sinful system that we have very little idea left of what love even might look like or feel like anymore. That is why Jesus came to this earth as a human – to show us what real love looks like and to reconnect us to the outside circuit that will infuse life back into this dying planet. We have been largely cut off from the life-giving circuit of love which feeds all the rest of the creation of God, but Jesus came to hook up an emergency life-line to infuse massive amounts of new life, hope, grace and healing in order to restore as many as possible back into functionality with the society of heaven.

So when Jesus says that His testimony would not be true if He were the only one to testify, He was in essence speaking of the reality that love cannot justify itself or be focused on itself without shorting out. If Jesus did not have the support of receiving testimony about His true identity and validity from the only Source of truth and love in the universe, then by default anything He would have to claim about Himself would not make any sense and could not be valid.

Interestingly I am beginning to see the dim outlines emerging from the fog of close connections between love and testifying. It is not yet clear to me but I am starting to sense it vaguely. It also helps to clarify why it is that vindicating ourselves almost always creates real problems and blocks God from being able to vindicate us. Because the nature of love is other-centered, if I am to benefit from tapping into that circuit of real power I must be in alignment with the principles that govern that power just as an electrical circuit is required to have electrical components arranged according to valid principles of electricity.

One cannot safely apply electrical current to just anything anywhere. Electricity is inherently powerful and dangerous and most people are aware that you don't just going around willy-nilly applying electrical current to anything you please. The more powerful the current and voltage the more important it is to respect and obey all the rules of electricity. The very same is true of the power of love.

Testimony is somehow an act of plugging into the circuitry of this power to vindicate some truth or claim or position. Testimony is almost always associated with judgment which is itself the act of revealing what is normally hidden. What I believe I am starting to see here is a link between Jesus' claims to be the expression of the Father's love to this fallen planet and the need for further testimonies to validate His claims of being the legitimate emergency connection sent to save us from our dying condition of being disconnected from love.

Love is the only power that can bring life into our lives and help us to function according to our God-given internal design. The more lacking in love we are the closer to death we come, along with all the associated pain and suffering and other negative emotions we experience along the way. Jesus was sent by the Father to show us the real truth about love and how much the Godhead loves us. But He could not do that at full exposure or we would be overwhelmed and destroyed by too much power.

When 'normal' levels of electrical current are applied to a damaged or faulty circuit, serious damage and destruction are almost sure to follow. The only way to keep some life in place without destroying the very objects for which He came to save was for the intense power of God's love to be dialed back to a level that we could handle until our damage is repaired enough to handle greater levels of power.

This verse is the introduction to a section of this chapter dealing with the issue of testimony and witnesses. Jesus begins here to list different sources of testimony about Himself that are given to validate His credentials and cause us to believe in Him as our only hope of being salvaged. I suspect there is a lot more in the following verses that will increase my understanding of this issue about testimony, but so far this is what is coming to my attention.