John Explained: Understanding the Book and Its Message for Today

Of the four Gospels, John is the one that begins before the world did. Where Mark opens mid-action and Matthew opens with a genealogy and Luke opens with a carefully composed prologue, John opens in eternity: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

John Explained walks readers through the most theologically developed of the four Gospels — its world, its structure, its seven signs, its I am declarations, and its most searching demands. It examines why John's Jesus speaks in sustained discourse rather than brief pronouncements, why the raising of Lazarus is placed where it is, why the cross in John is glorification rather than defeat, and why the Gospel was written explicitly for people who were not there — which is every reader since the first century.

Part of the Bible for Modern Life Series.