As John says, a complete record of Jesus’s ministry would be impossible. To write them down one by one would be a mammoth task. John could’ve recounted another seven miracles—or another seventy. He could’ve included dozens of volumes of sermons, like we have for Charles Spurgeon and some of the other great preachers. If he wanted to, John could have told us what Jesus was like as a child: “He did many other things…” Yet John has told us about what is most important: the saving work of Jesus.
We want to know more about the bad stuff sometimes: the gossip, the bad news, someone’s dirty secrets. Other times we want to know about good things like the intricacies of creation or the complexities of God’s Word.
Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
This verse comes at the very end of the Fourth Gospel as an editorial aside. John wants us to know something about the story that he’s told as a witness of Jesus’s ministry. He acknowledges that in telling the story, he has had to be selective. When it came time to put pen to papyrus, he had to pick and choose.
When we place John’s Gospel alongside Matthew, Mark and Luke, we see how accurate his comment is. For among these four Gospels, John’s is quite different. For instance, he records only seven specific miracles, while the others record many more. There are important things absent from John’s gospel, like Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, and his parables, the first Lord’s Supper and the risen Jesus’s departure from earth. Compared to the other three Gospels, it’s obvious that John is only a partial account.
This is even more obvious when we set John’s 21 chapters alongside Jesus’s life. Just consider how long Jesus’s ministry was: roughly three years, more than a thousand days. Jesus used those years as full of opportunities to do his Father’s will: teaching, healing, helping, interacting with his disciples and crowds and Jewish leaders.
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