It is very striking how the Lord’s word and the Lord’s voice are emphasized in this gospel. As is often the case in this gospel, the Lord bases His teaching on a preceding miracle. In this chapter He made a lame man to walk. He had heard and obeyed the Lord’s word to “Arise, take up thy couch and walk.” He received physical healing, but in our verse the Lord is speaking of spiritual healing.

In a similar way, the Lord says that whoever hears His word and believes has, not restored natural life like the lame man, but life eternal. Why does the Lord say, “believes on Him that sent Me?” Certainly if we believe in the Father who sent the Son, that implies that we also believe on the Son who was sent!

Eternal life is a wonderful blessing! “Eternal” describes not only the duration of that life, but the character of it. It is a life of fellowship (cf. Jn. 17:3; 1 Jn. 1:2–3).

The verse goes on to say that we not only receive eternal life, but we are completely exempted from judgment. We will never be judged for our sins because Christ Himself “bore our sins in His body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). He took our sins and the judgment for us.

Even more, we learn that we have completely passed from the place of death to the place of life. This tells us the completeness of Christ’s work for us. “The wages of sin is death,” but Christ has so fully answered God’s claims and taken our wages that we earned, that there will be a generation of believers who will never die (1 Th. 4:16–18). And even for believers who die, death is no longer the “king of terrors” (Job 18:14) but simply a servant to bring us into the Lord’s presence.