When Jesus says in the farewell discourse that his disciples know the way to where He is going, Thomas replies: “We do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus answers Thomas, but He gives Thomas more than he asked: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by Me.” In the preceding dialog, Jesus and the disciples have not been discussing either truth or life. So how are these two things relevant to the conversation?
By way of explanation, many commentators point out that both truth and life are major themes in the book of John. But they are not the only themes—in John we read of Christ as Word, Son, Lamb, and King, as Healer and Savior, as Shepherd and Sheep Gate, as Bread and Light and Vine. Why did Jesus pick out truth and life to go along with His claim to be the way?
The answer may not lie so much in the immediate context, but instead at the very beginning of Scripture, in the opening chapters of Genesis. When Jesus revealed Himself as the way, and the truth, and the life, He claimed to be restoring what was lost in man’s first disobedience: the way back to the tree of life, which was itself the way back to the Father.
If Jesus’s words “the way, and the truth, and the life” are meant to recall the final words of Genesis 3, “the way of the tree of life,” then we ought to go back to the opening chapters of Genesis to see how the three themes of way, truth, and life function in the creation and fall narratives—and how they connect to Jesus’s theme in John 14, going to the Father. Let’s look at these themes one by one.
Life
The last word of the triad, life, is also the final word of Genesis 3, but life has been a big deal since Genesis 1. On the fifth and sixth days of creation, the waters “swarm with swarms of living beings” (Gen. 1:20), and then the earth brings forth “living beings” (1:24), all by the word of God’s command. In the detailed account of man’s creation in Genesis 2, God breathes into man’s nostrils “the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7).
God then causes the tree of life to grow up in the center of the Garden of Eden, a tree whose fruit gives eternal life to its eater. Beside this tree is another, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Anyone who eats the fruit of that tree is doomed to die. A major concern of Genesis 1-3 is this very matter: will man choose life or death?
When man chooses death, he is driven from the Garden, and thus denied access to the tree whose fruit would make him live forever. But life is not at a complete end. Before the man and woman are expelled, we are told the woman’s name for the first time: Eve, chawwah, because she is the mother of all the living, chay. So mankind lives on, and produces new life, but the days of their lives are numbered, and full of painful toil. The now inaccessible tree of life becomes a distant memory, with no hope of return.
Truth
The second member of the triad in John 14:6 is truth, a word that appears nowhere in the opening chapters of Genesis. But truth nevertheless plays a crucial part in the story of man’s creation and fall, because it was at this point that the serpent attacked. “Did God really say…?” he asks, misrepresenting God’s command as a prohibition on all the fruit, and thus inviting the women to doubt that such a command could be reasonable. He then denies the promised penalty, death, and offers an alternative explanation for the command: God is holding back something good for Himself.
The serpent wants to convince the woman that she cannot be certain either of God’s words or of His love. God’s word, the serpent says—the very word that brought the heavens and earth into existence, providing all good things for man—is not to be trusted.
Our first parents’ free decision to count God as untrustworthy, and His word untrue, led to the bondage of their descendants, an inability to take God at His word. In any relationship, the loss of trust in someone means the loss of the person himself. When mankind stopped trusting God, he lost God altogether—unless God might somehow restore man’s trust in his truthfulness and goodness.
Way
And that brings us to the first item in the list, the way. In the Genesis account, the first we hear of any road is after the fall, at the end of chapter 3, when God sets a guard of cherubim and a flaming sword to watch the road against any who would return to the Garden. This road is identified as “the way of the tree of life.”
But Genesis makes it clear that the now closed path is connected to more than just the tree of life: its closure means that man’s access to God’s direct presence is henceforth barred. Two details suggest that Moses intends us to think of the road this way.
First, there was only one way into the garden, from the east. This fact reminds us of the tabernacle, the sanctuary of God’s presence in the wilderness, which also had only one way in, from the east. Further, the Garden way was guarded by cherubim, just as the cherubim were woven into the curtains hanging on the walls of the tabernacle and before the ark of the covenant, and placed over the ark itself in hammered gold. So then, Genesis, read in the context of the rest of the Pentateuch, depicts the way of the tree of life as a type, prefiguring the way into God’s presence in the tabernacle.
If the way to the tree of life was also the way to the Father, then eternal life and the presence of God are inseparable gifts. Will the way to life, the way to God, ever be opened again?
John 14:6 and Genesis 3 in Conversation
Now when we come back to John 14 and read about Jesus as “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the only one who can bring us back to the Father, we see that we have found direct answers to all the woes of mankind that began in Genesis 3.
When man lost the way to the tree of life, he lost his way back into God’s presence. Although God provided alternative, partial ways back—through sacrifice, prayer, and especially through the tabernacle and temple—the way was never completely restored, because man was not yet fit to enter God’s presence as he was in the beginning. Only in Christ, the final and perfect Way, could man—any man, any woman—go all the way back to God and stand in God’s presence. By His atonement, Christ, the way, makes us fit for God and brings us as near to God as He is Himself.
We also see that man’s loss of God involved a loss of trust, not because God proved unreliable, but because man chose to count Him as untrustworthy. Jesus came not just to tell the truth about God, but to demonstrate in His person the trustworthiness of God. By fulfilling all of the Father’s promises, Jesus was the seal on God’s truth. Jesus’s participation in human flesh and offering of Himself in death demonstrated that God’s love can and must be trusted: God really is for us, not (as the serpent claimed) against us. Jesus is the truth of God made flesh.
Finally, the loss of God meant the loss of eternal life. In creation, God’s breath, His very Spirit, was the source of man’s life, and the hope of eternal life was directly tied to continued access to God’s presence in the Garden. Thus, when Christ restores His people to God’s presence, He restores them to eternal life, but in a way that pre-Christian readers of Genesis could never have imagined. The way back to the tree of life is life Himself, because “as the Father has life in Himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in Himself” (John 5:26). Being in the Way, in Christ, means dwelling in the very life of God, a life that cannot end.
Everything man lost in the Fall, he lost by losing God. And everything God restores to us, He restores by giving us Himself: not in carefully measured out portions, but in all His fulness, because God gives of Himself in His Son. And His Son gives us the Father and all the gifts of the Father not from a distance, but directly, in and through Himself, just as a road doesn’t merely point to a destination, but brings its travelers all the way.
Joshua Jensen is a Bible translator in northeast Cambodia, where he lives with his wife, Amy, and their little multitude (count them if you can).