1 John 5:6-12

1 John 5:6-12 English Standard Version (ESV)
Testimony Concerning the Son of God
6 This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. 7 For there are three that testify: 8 the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree. 9 If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. 10 Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. 11 And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.

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I'll be honest that this passage doesn't make total sense to me yet, so I'm going to do something that I don't normally do and turn to some commentaries to help me here.  The best commentary that I know of points back to the idea of purification from the Old Testament and that in some situations to be made ceremonially clean you would need to wash yourself on the outside with water, but this was insufficient to make you clean on the inside and a blood sacrifice would need to be made to cleanse you from you sin that was on the inside that could not be washed away by water.  God wants us to be clean on the outside and on the inside, and Jesus was the only one that was both and this is why He is the only acceptable sacrifice for us.  The Spirit of God gives testimony to the fact that we have been cleansed because we know that He lives inside of us once we have been born again and all things have been made new and our sins have been taken away (not just covered over like they were in the Old Testament system).

Why then should we allow men or ourselves to tell us that we are something other than what God has made us in Christ, and why would we listen to them when they try to make Jesus out to be anything other than who we know Him to be--our Lord and Savior.

Jesus is the only one that can give us eternal life.  We'll see this throughout the book of John and the other gospels as we go back to study them.