The Apostle then shows that it depends on man himself, to receive or to reject this testimony; and that when received, it is necessarily converted from an outward to an inward witness. "He that believeth on the Son of God, hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God, hath made him a liar, because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son."

For him, who through that outward witness of the Spirit has been led to believe on the Son of God, it is no longer mere outward testimony. It has become a part of his own inner life. What God first testified to him from without, is now by means of his faith testified inwardly to his own living consciousness. He bears the divine witness in himself. It is the Spirit's testimony in his heart. Through his own inward experience of the divine life is it certain to him, that Jesus is the Son of God.

But he who believes not God in his testimony of his Son, has thereby made him a liar. By this very unbelief, he practically declares those divine facts, which testify of the Son of God, to be false witnesses, and in effect makes God a liar. If through the operations of his Spirit God thus testifies of his Son, and yet he is not received as the Son of God; what is this but saying, that God contradicts himself, while thus by these divine facts accrediting him as his Son who is not so? Unbelief cannot recognize God in his workings, as him that is true. It stamps the divine as the undivine. It can see in the ways of God nothing but contradiction.

From these words of John we may deduce a truth most important for our own age. That Jesus is the Son of God, as he has declared himself in his history, is attested by no resistless proofs, for such as will not recognize the witness in what God has wrought through the Gospel; for such as, having no susceptibility in themselves for receiving it, do not yield themselves with an humble and receptive heart to the witness of the Spirit, that it may thereby become to them an inward witness. It is the individual character and disposition that must here make the decision. It belongs to the individual will to decide, whether one will yield himself to that witness of the Spirit. or rather than this, will account God in his workings a liar.