believe in Jesus

What does it mean to believe in Jesus? In this week’s readings from the eighth chapter of the Gospel According to John (NABRE), Jesus talks to the Jews who believed in him about freedom. This passage contains a fascinating suggestion about what it means to believe in Jesus.

In a previous column, we examined the three different past tenses of Greek verbs and their aspects. In the Gospel According to John 8:31 (NABRE), the phrase “those Jews who believed in him” uses the perfect tense, which represents a completed past action that continues into the present time.

The grammatical implication of this passage is that believing in Jesus is not  something that occurs a single time but rather is a continuous action that we must keep doing over and over. Do you believe today as much as you did when you first believed?

related topics: belief; faith; justification; light; little faith

you also may like our study of the book of Exodus
You Shall Have No Other Gods: The Book of Exodus, a 28-lesson Catholic Bible study with an imprimatur, provides an in-depth look at how significant events in biblical history that occurred thousands of years ago to descendants of Jacob remain relevant and even critical for present-day Christians to understand. The deliverance of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and the giving of Ten Commandments are examined along with the development of Moses’ relationship to God. Click here to view a sample of the first lesson.

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