“Truly, truly, I say unto you, Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
— John 12:24

As the “Lamb of God” Jesus died to take away our sins (John 1:29, 36), and as a “serpent” He died to deal with our serpentine nature (John 3:14). These are the first two symbols the Holy Spirit uses in the Gospel of John to picture the Lord’s death, and they portray the negative aspects of that death, i.e., those aspects of it that deal with the negative matters in our situation.

In the verse above we see the third and final aspect of the Lord’s death as it is pictured in John, His death as a “grain of wheat” that fell into the earth and died to produce “much fruit.” Unlike the first two aspects, this is not something at all negative; rather, it is a very, very positive aspect of His death.

John opens his gospel by telling us that in the beginning “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1), and that “all things came into being through Him” (1:3). Then, just after that, he says that

In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
— John 1:4

In these verses John seems to be saying that, from the very beginning, even before anything was ever created, there was something within God that He desired to communicate to others, and that something was His divine life.

However, when the Word became flesh in the person of Jesus (1:14), the divine life was, so to speak, concealed within Him, as far as His humanity was concerned. People could approach Him and contact Him and talk to Him and even live with Him, without realizing who He really was or what was within Him. But, through the process of His death and resurrection, the “shell” of His humanity was broken open and the divine life within Him released to uplift His human nature with the divine nature; to be sure, no one who saw Jesus today would doubt who He is! (cf. Acts 9:3-5).

And because He has gone through that process, He can now, as the glorified God-man, impart His divine life to His fellow human beings.

This is what Jesus meant by giving us this picture of the grain of wheat falling into the earth to die, to produce the many grains. That is, He is the one grain, and we are the many grains produced in His resurrection to be exactly the same as He is in terms of our life and nature (Rom. 8:29-30), because His life has now been released through His death and resurrection for us to receive.

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—  12 October 2024 —