The goal of fallen man is self-deification, to be as God (Gen. 3:5), whereas the goal of the redeemed is to be God's covenant man. Christ's perfect humanity is our standard, not His deity. We cannot have Christ as our God if we will not have him as our man, as our federal head. In the first Adam, we are born into sin and death; in the last Adam, we are born into justice or righteousness and life.

In this commentary the author maps out the glorious Gospel of John, starting from the obvious parallel to Genesis 1 (“In the beginning was the Word”) and through to the glorious conclusion of Christ’s death and resurrection. Nothing more clearly reveals the Gospel than Christ’s atoning death and His resurrection — they tell us that Jesus Christ has forever destroyed the power of sin and death. John therefore deliberately limits the number of miracles he reports in order to point to and concentrate on our Lord’s death and resurrection. The Jesus of history is He who made atonement for us, died, and was resurrected. His life cannot be understood apart from this, nor can we know His history in any other light. This is why John’s “testimony is true,” and, while books filling the earth could not contain all that could be said, the testimony given by John is “faithful.”