FATHER & SON’S INSEPARABLE UNION

5:18. Jesus’ opponents instantly grasp the implications of his remark, including the fact that he was calling God his own Father. Perceived infractions against Sabbath laws were serious, and might provoke murderous intent; but a man making himself equal with God was challenging the fundamental distinction between the holy, infinite God and finite, fallen human beings. For this reason the Jews (cf. notes on 1:19; 5:10) tried all the harder to kill him.

Various first-century pagan religions were quite happy to obliterate distinctions between God and humankind. If the exile had convinced the Jews of anything, it was that idolatry was always wrong and that God was wholly Other. ‘To whom, then, will you compare God?’ Isaiah asks; ‘“To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal?” says the Holy One’ (Is. 40:18, 25). Even a Jew as hellenized as Philo can insist, ‘The mind is self-centred and godless when it deems itself to be equal to God’ (Legum Alleg. i. 49; cf. Dodd, IFG, pp. 320–328). The rabbis acknowledge that God may make some like himself (chiefly Moses, Ex. 7:1) inasmuch as they represent God to others, but the four who according to Scripture make themselves like God all stand under terrible judgment: Pharaoh (Ezk. 29:3), Joash (2 Ch. 24:24), Hiram (Ezk. 28:2) and Nebuchadnezzar (Is. 14:14; Dn. 4; cf. SB 2. 462–465). That did not mean it was easy to arrest Jesus on a capital charge for what he had said. From their perspective he had in some sense blasphemed, but the laws regarding blasphemy (at least, a little later) were tightly defined. By the time Mishnah (Sanhedrin 7:5) was written (c. ad 200) blasphemy was defined as taking on one’s lips the sacred name of God, YHWH (‘Yahweh’, ‘Lord’ or ‘Jehovah’ in English Bibles), though what passed for blasphemy may have been more loosely interpreted in Jesus’ day. It may have been sufficient that Jesus, a mere mortal (from the perspective of the Jews), was saying things that made him God’s equal (cf. 10:33).

Some have thought the Jews misunderstood what Jesus was saying—that Jesus was not really making himself ‘equal (isos) with God’. In the light of the argument from 1:1 to 20:28, it is hard to believe John took him that way. At the same time, John would be the first to insist that what the Jews understood by ‘equal with God’ was not exactly what either Jesus or John meant by it. The ensuing verses set out some of the parameters by which we may rightly understand that Jesus is equal with God (cf. Paul’s remarks, also with respect to isos, in Phil. 2:6). Jesus is not equal with God as another God or as a competing God: the functional subordination of the Son to the Father, the utter dependence of the Son upon the Father, are about to be explicated. So once again there is irony: the Jews take umbrage at Jesus’ implicit claim to deity, having rightly detected the drift of Jesus’ argument; but their understanding of Jesus’ equality with God needs serious modification, for Christians will not accept di-theism or tri-theism any more than the Jews themselves. The ensuing verses may therefore be seen, in part, as a defence of a distinctly Christian form of monotheism (cf. Lightfoot, p. 141), as much as an explication of the nature of Jesus’ equality with his Father.

5:19. Several scholars have argued that vv. 19–20a constitute a reworked parable: a son (the article in ‘the son’ is understood generically) who is an apprentice in his father’s trade does only what he sees his father doing, and the father, out of love for his son, shows him all that he does. Such a parable might have been formed in Jesus’ mind as he grew up learning the trade of carpentry from Joseph, until he in turn became known as the carpenter of Nazareth. It might be better to say that such a view of sonship is presupposed by Jesus’ words: most sons grew up in the trade or profession served by their fathers. However, it is doubtful that vv. 19–20a at one time constituted an independent parable, not least because ‘the Son’ is a standard Christological expression, not easily taken generically by either first-century or modern readers.

The principal thrust of v. 19 is that whatever ‘making himself equal with God’ (v. 18) might mean, for Jesus it does not mean complete or even partial independence from his Father (cf. 7:18). The truth is that the Son can do nothing by himself—or, better, ‘on his own initiative’ (aph’ heautou, lit. ‘from himself’). Though he is the unique Son of God (cf. notes on 1:49), and may truly be called God (1:1, 18; 20:28) and take to himself divine titles (e.g. 8:58) and, as in this context, divine rights (5:17), yet is he always submissive to the Father. Not only does the Son always do what pleases the Father (8:29), but he can do only what he sees his Father doing. In this sense the relationship between the Father and the Son is not reciprocal. It is inconceivable that John could say that the Father does only what he sees the Son doing. That would be preposterous not only in the cultural understanding of father-son relationships, but also in John’s understanding of the relationship between Jesus and his heavenly Father (against Gruenler, who tries to make the Father/Son relationship perfectly reciprocal by saying that each ‘defers’ to the other—but this is a ‘fudge’ category that blurs the obvious distinctions). The Father initiates, sends, commands, commissions, grants; the Son responds, obeys, performs his Father’s will, receives authority. In this sense, the Son is the Father’s agent (cf. Bühner),¹⁰ though, as John goes on to insist, much more than an agent.

The Greek text of verses 19–23 is structured around four gar (‘for’ or ‘because’) statements. The first introduces the last clause of v. 19. The thought runs like this: It is impossible for the Son to take independent, self-determined action that would set him over against the Father as another God, for all the Son does is both coincident with and coextensive with all that the Father does. ‘Perfect Sonship involves perfect identity of will and action with the Father’ (Westcott, 1. 189). It follows that separate, self-determined action would be a denial of his sonship. But if this last clause of v. 19 takes the impossibility of the Son operating independently and grounds it in the perfection of Jesus’ sonship, it also constitutes another oblique claim to deity; for the only one who could conceivably do whatever the Father does must be as great as the Father, as divine as the Father.

5:20. The second For (gar) explains how it is that the Son can do whatever the Father does: it is because the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. That the Father loves the Son has already been articulated in 3:35, there with the verb agapaō, here with the verb phileō. There is no difference in meaning: cf. the shifts in 11:3, 5, 36, and the notes on 3:16, 35; 21:15–17. If it is true that the Father loves the Son, it is no less true that the Son loves the Father. The love of the Father for the Son is displayed in the continuous disclosure of all he does to the Son (here in v. 20); the love of the Son for the Father is displayed in the perfect obedience that issues in the cross (14:31). The love of the Father and of the Son may be perfectly reciprocal in its purity, but not in the way the love of each is displayed.

If the Father out of love for his Son shows him all he does, and the Son in consequence and out of love for his Father obeys him perfectly and does whatever the Father does, such that people observe the Son and wonder at what he does, then two important truths follow: (1) The Son by his obedience to his Father is acting in such a way that he is revealing the Father, doing the Father’s deeds, performing the Father’s will. The Son is ‘exegeting’ or ‘narrating’ the Father cf. notes on 1:18). (2) This marvellous disclosure of the nature and character of God utterly depends, in the first instance, not on God’s love of us, but on the love of the Father for the Son and on the love of the Son for the Father. The same theme is developed in chs. 14–17: the achievement of the divine self-disclosure in Jesus, climaxed in the cross, was supremely the outflow of the reciprocal love of the Father and the Son within the Godhead.

To put the matter another way, if Jesus the Son of God stands with human beings, over against God, in dependence and obedience, he stands with God, over against human beings, in authority and revelation. Granted the incarnation, it is hard to see how God-made-flesh could reveal himself in any other way. The very obedience and dependence that characterize Jesus’ utter subordination to the Father are themselves so perfect that all Jesus does is what the Father wills and does, so it is nothing less than the revelation of God. Small wonder that Jesus will later declare, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (14:9; cf. Carson, pp. 146–162). In the immediate context, this means that Jesus’ implicitly claimed ‘equality with God’ (vv. 17–18), as real as it is, must never be taken to mean (as the Jews apparently assumed) that God himself was compromised (if the claim were given any credence) or demeaned (assuming it were false). Far from it: the claim was true, but God was thereby revealed.

Indeed, the Father will show the Son even greater things than these that have been done: the healing of a particular disease (vv. 1–9), his teaching on this point, his instruction regarding the Sabbath. The Son, in obedience to what the Father shows him, will perform ‘greater things’: he will assume the authority and prerogatives of God himself and give life to the dead (v. 21) and pronounce final judgment (v. 22).

All this, Jesus says, will be to your amazement—or, more accurately put, ‘in order that you may marvel’. This does not mean that Jesus derives some sort of cheap thrill at people’s astonishment, and therefore shapes his mission to generate more of it, like a second-class illusionist who lives for the next round of applause. Jesus is here dealing with opponents. Because they are opponents they do not rest their faith in him. How then shall he communicate to them more of the Father’s gracious self-disclosure in the Son? His progressively revelatory ‘works’, including his ‘signs’, teaching and divine authority as life-giver and judge, are designed in part to make his opponents marvel (cf. 10:38). That may be their first step toward faith.

5:21. The third For (gar) introduces an exemplification of the principal truth articulated in vv. 19–20. That the Son does whatever the Father does, owing to the Father’s perfect self-disclosure to the Son, is nowhere better seen than in the perfect parallelism expressed here: just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. The Old Testament writers presupposed that the raising of the dead was a prerogative belonging to God alone: ‘Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life’ (2 Ki. 5:7). The same presupposition is amply attested in later Jewish tradition. Rabbi Johanan asserted that three keys remained in God’s hand and were not entrusted to representatives: the key of the rain cf. Dt. 28:12), the key of the womb (cf. Gn. 30:22), and the key of the resurrection of the dead (cf. Ezk. 37:13, SB 1. 523–524, 737, 895). Elijah was sometimes recognized as an exception: he served as a representative of God in raising the dead. But Jesus’ authority in this regard goes beyond that of Elijah, for the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Although the Son ‘can do nothing by himself’ (v. 19), his will, his pleasure, his choices are so completely at one with the Father that it is no less true to say the crucial decisions are his. Unlike Elijah, Jesus is no mere instrument of divine power. (The point is further enlarged in v. 22.) Just as he chose one man out of the crowd of ill people by Bethesda (v. 6), so he chooses those to whom he gives life (cf. 15:16).

The two clauses of this verse are so parallel that ‘raises the dead’ must in the first instance refer to the same thing as ‘gives life’. In Jewish literature of the period, resurrection from the dead belongs to the age to come: not even God himself characteristically contravenes that restriction (cf. notes on 11:24). Inevitably therefore, this verse assigns eschatological resurrection to Jesus (cf. vv. 25, 28–29; 1 Thes. 4:16). The person who has read this entire Gospel cannot help but think of John 11 as an anticipatory picture of the end—but still only a picture, since Lazarus is raised to a resumption of his earthly, mortal life, while the eschatological resurrection is to the life of the age to come.

Bultmann (pp. 256–257) understands vv. 21–23 to expound one simple thought, viz. that Jesus on behalf of his Father serves as eschatological judge, with power both to give life and to condemn. This right is certainly affirmed by the text, but the interpretation is too narrow, for it overlooks the emphasis John lays on the Son’s redemptive work. Both the miracle of 4:46ff. and the one in this chapter display Jesus’ power to grant life and strength, to bring wholeness to those at the point of death. If the Son does all that the Father gives him to do, that work is not merely revelatory and judicial; it is also atoning (1:29; 6:51; 11:49–52; 12:23–24) and quickening (5:21–24).

At the same time, Jesus’ authority to ‘give life’ on the last day cannot be abstracted from the spiritual life he provides immediately to those who hear his word and believe him (cf. vv. 24, 25; 3:15, 16, 36). Both are contextually required. That in turn demands that we see in the life the believer may now obtain from Jesus not only a foretaste and an anticipation of the resurrection life to come, but something of its real substance—a downpayment of it (even if that category comes from Paul’s pen).

5:22. This verse begins with the last of the four gar (‘For’) connectives. If this one is taken as parallel to the one that begins v. 23, niv’s Moreover is correct: i.e., the demonstration that the Son does whatever the Father does (vv. 19–20) is found not only in the Son’s authority to give life to the dead (v. 21) but also in his authority to give judgment on the last day (v. 22). However, it is more likely that v. 22 provides further reason and ground for the great claims of v. 21. The two clauses of v. 22, unlike the pair of clauses in v. 21, are not strictly parallel. In v. 21, just as the Father raises the dead, even so the Son gives life; but in v. 22, the Father judges no-one, for the sufficient reason that he has entrusted all judgment to the Son. The roles of Father and Son are parallel in v. 21; there is a distinction introduced in their roles in v. 22, determined by the Father. The flow of thought between the two verses, then, can be put like this: The Father and the Son both enjoy the prerogative of giving life (v. 21), for the Father has determined that it will not be his direct task to judge anyone, but has instead entrusted all judgment to the Son. Seen in this light, the authority to give resurrection life is the entailment of the authority to judge on the last day. Once articulated, the connection is obvious. Cf. also the relation between v. 26 and v. 27.

God had long been recognized as ‘the Judge of all the earth’ (Gn. 18:25). Throughout the pages of the Old Testament God had frequently exercised judgment in the lives of his covenant people and in the surrounding nations. But at the end of the age, there would be the last, great assize, when all would be judged, both small and great (cf. Rev. 20:11–15). Here, however, the Son insists that the office of judge, whether in the present or at the last day, has been entrusted to him. This does not mean Jesus will exercise judgment independently of the Father, for even the judgment he exercises is a reflection of his consistent determination to please the one who sent him (v. 30).

There exists a certain tension between 3:17 and 5:22, but it is more formal than real. The Father does not send the Son into the world to condemn (krinō) the world, but he does entrust all judgment (krisis) to the Son. The resolution turns in part on the semantic range of krinō and its cognates: it can refer to a (usually judicial) principle of discrimination, or to outright condemnation. John 3:17 speaks of the latter; John 5:22 refers more broadly to the former—though, clearly, any judicial discrimination issues in some condemnation. More importantly, John 3:17 refers to the purpose of the Son’s coming: it was not to bring condemnation. By contrast, John 5:22 refers to the distinctive roles of Father and Son: the Father entrusts all judgment to the Son. That leaves room for the purpose of the Son’s coming to be primarily salvific (3:16, 17), even though all must face him as their judge, and even though the inevitable result of his coming is that some will be condemned. Cf. also 5:26–27; 8:15–16.

5:23. The reason why the Father has entrusted all judgment to the Son is now disclosed: it is so that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father. Whatever functional subordination may be stressed in this section, it guarantees, as we have seen, that the Son does everything that the Father does (cf. notes on vv. 19–20); and now Jesus declares that its purpose is that the Son may be at one with the Father not only in activity but in honour. This goes far beyond making Jesus a mere ambassador who acts in the name of the monarch who sent him, an envoy plenipotentiary whose derived authority is the equivalent of his master’s. That analogue breaks down precisely here, for the honour given to an envoy is never that given to the head of state. The Jews were right in detecting that Jesus was ‘making himself equal with God’ (vv. 17–18). But this does not diminish God. Indeed, the glorification of the Son is precisely what glorifies the Father (cf. notes on 12:28), just as in Philippians 2:9–11, where at the name of Jesus every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, and all this is to the glory of God the Father. Because of the unique relation between the Father and the Son, the God who declares ‘I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another’ (Is. 42:8; cf. Is. 48:11) is not compromised or diminished when divine honours crown the head of the Son.

Granted that the purpose of the Father is that all should honour the Son, it is but a small step to Jesus’ conclusion: He who does not honour the Son does not honour the Father, who sent him. In a theistic universe, such a statement belongs to one who is himself to be addressed as God (cf. 20:28), or to stark insanity. The one who utters such things is to be dismissed with pity or scorn, or worshipped as Lord. If with much current scholarship we retreat to seeing in such material less the claims of the Son than the beliefs and witness of the Evangelist and his church, the same options confront us. Either John is supremely deluded and must be dismissed as a fool, or his witness is true and Jesus is to be ascribed the honours due God alone. There is no rational middle ground.

Such a statement also betrays a strong salvation-historical perspective (as the church Fathers of the first three centuries understood). Jesus is not saying that Abraham, Moses and David were not truly honouring the Father because they failed to honour the Son who had not yet been sent. Rather, he is focusing on the latest development in the history of redemption: the incarnation of the Word, the sending of the Son. Just as there were many who did not listen to the prophets of old, leaving but a remnant who faithfully obeyed Yahweh’s gracious disclosures, so now with the coming of the Son there will be some who think they honour God while disowning God’s Word, his gracious Self-Expression, his own Son. But they are deluded. Now that the Son has come, the person who withholds the honour due the Son similarly dishonours the Father (cf. 14:6; Acts 4:12). The statement not only makes an unyielding Christological claim, but prepares the way for the obduracy motif that dominates ch. 12.

5:24. This verse, introduced by the solemn formula I tell you the truth (cf. notes on 1:51), develops one theme introduced in the preceding verses. The Son, John has told us, ‘gives life to whom he is pleased to give it’ (v. 21). Who these people are is now presented in different terms: whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me (the Gk. construction makes this a single, co-ordinate description) has eternal life and will not be condemned. Just as the Son healed the invalid by the pool of Bethesda by his word, so also is it his word that brings eternal life (cf. 6:63, 68) and cleansing (15:3), or judgment (12:47). The one who belongs to God hears what God says (8:47). Hearing Jesus’ word is identical to hearing God’s word, since the Son speaks only what the Father gives him to say. Hearing in this context, as often elsewhere, includes belief and obedience. The belief is spelled out, and its object is the one who sent Jesus—not because it would be inappropriate to specify Jesus as the object of faith (e.g. 3:16; 14:1), but because the immediate context is concerned to show how the Son in all he says and does mediates the Father to us. As the words and deeds of the Son are the words and deeds of the Father, so faith placed in the Son is placed in the Father who sent him.

The one who hears and believes in this way has eternal life and will not be condemned (krinō, here meaning ‘judged adversely’, as in 3:18). The idea is virtually indistinguishable from the negative component of Paul’s doctrine of justification: the believer does not come to the final judgment, but leaves the court already acquitted. Nor is it necessary for the believer to wait until the last day to experience something of resurrection life: the believer has eternal life and has crossed over from death to life (cf. Col. 1:13). This is perhaps the strongest affirmation of inaugurated eschatology in the Fourth Gospel. Nevertheless, it does not mean the Evangelist has adopted the error of Hymenaeus and Philetus (2 Tim. 2:17–18), who insisted the resurrection had already taken place. The following verses (especially vv. 28–29) demonstrate that John still anticipates a final resurrection. But the stress on realized eschatology is typically Johannine.

5:25. The tension inherent in Christian eschatology between what belongs to the ‘already’ and what belongs to the ‘not yet’ is teased out in this and the following verses. For the expression a time is coming and has now come, cf. notes on 4:23. By v. 28, where the eschatology is orientated entirely toward the future, the ‘time’ or ‘hour’ is coming; John does not say it ‘now is’. Here, however, the coming hour already is: the resurrection life for the physically dead in the end time is already being manifest as life for the spiritually dead. It is the voice of the Son of God (or his word: cf. v. 24; 6:63, 68; 11:43) that calls forth the dead, and those who hear (cf. notes on v. 24) will live. Such a voice, such a life-giving word, is nothing other than the voice of God (cf. Is. 55:3), whose vivifying power mediates the life-giving Spirit (cf. 3:3, 5; 7:37–39) even to dry bones (Ezk. 37).

5:26. The logical For (gar) is important: this verse explains how it is that the Son can exercise divine judgment and generate resurrection life by his powerful word. It is because, like God, he has life-in-himself. God is self-existent; he is always ‘the living God’. Mere human beings are derived creatures; our life comes from God, and he can remove it as easily as he gave it. But to the Son, and to the Son alone, God has imparted life-in-himself. This cannot mean that the Son gained this prerogative only after the incarnation. The Prologue has already asserted of the pre-incarnate Word, ‘In him was life’ (1:4). The impartation of life-in-himself to the Son must be an act belonging to eternity, of a piece with the eternal Father/Son relationship, which is itself of a piece with the relationship between the Word and God, a relationship that existed ‘in the beginning’ (1:1). That is why the Son himself can be proclaimed as ‘the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us’ (1 Jn. 1:2). Many systematicians have tied this teaching to what they call ‘the eternal generation of the Son’. This is unobjectionable, though ‘the eternal generation of the Son’ should probably not be connected with the term monogenēs (sometimes translated ‘only begotten’: cf. notes on 1:18). In the immediate context, it is this eternal impartation of life-in-himself to the Son that grounds his authority and power to call the dead to life by his powerful word.

5:27. As the Father has imparted life-in-himself to the Son (v. 26), so has he also given him authority to judge (cf. vv. 21–22). But an additional ground for this gift is provided: the Father has granted this authority to Jesus because he is the Son of Man. Because the title is anarthrous (cf. Additional Note), some have taken its meaning to be ‘man’, ‘human being’: Jesus is qualified to be the judge of human beings because he himself is a human being. He is one of us, and has shared our experiences. By itself that is wholly inadequate, for this condition would be met by every other human being. It is hard to believe that at this point John is neglecting the common heritage of Christian use (cf. notes on 1:51; 3:14–15); an allusion to the apocalyptic Son of Man of Daniel 7:13–14 is altogether likely, though here as elsewhere the title is not so stereotyped that it was instantly clear. In other uses (e.g. Ezekiel) it is God’s way of addressing a very human prophet. Jesus could therefore shape the title to suit his own understanding of his role.

In this context three strands come together. Jesus is the apocalyptic Son of Man who receives from the Ancient of Days the prerogatives of Deity, a kingdom that entails total dominion. At the same time he belongs to humanity and has walked where humans walk (cf. Schlatter, p. 152). It is the combination of these features that make him uniquely qualified to judge. Third, judgment in the Fourth Gospel is often linked with revelation (3:19, 8:16; 12:31; 16:8, 11). Judgment descends because men love darkness rather than light. Now ‘the Son of Man’ has already been used in revelatory contexts in this Gospel (1:51; 3:14–15). The entailment of rejected revelation is judgment. Throughout this section (5:19ff.) Jesus’ revelatory role has been emphasized, primarily under the title ‘the Son [of God]’. But he who is the Son is also the Son of Man. His authority to judge becomes all the more understandable if it is based not only on his apocalyptic identity and his oneness with the human race, but also on the revelation he has so graciously imparted and which has so often been ignored and rejected (cf. Moloney, pp. 84–86). For these reasons God ‘has given him authority to judge’. One could almost say this authority is but an entailment of his revelatory and life-giving functions in the midst of a dark and dying world (cf. notes on v. 22).

5:28–29. Do not be amazed at this refers to the teaching of the preceding verses, in particular Jesus’ insistence that it is his voice that will call forth all who are in their graves on the last day. The words for a time (lit. ‘hour’, hōra) is coming are no longer qualified by ‘and now is’ (cf. notes on v. 25): the future, final apocalyptic resurrection is in view. The voice of the Son is powerful enough to generate spiritual life now; it will be powerful enough to call forth the dead then.

It has been argued that the resurrection envisaged here does not include believers, since they have already been ‘raised’ spiritually and do not come into judgment. Only the unbelievers are raised, and they are then divided into those who have done good and those who have done evil (cf. Barrett, p. 263). This will not do. Elsewhere John draws a close connection between those who experience spiritual life now and those who will rise to live at the last day: it is precisely they who enjoy eternal life now, by faith in Jesus and in the one who has sent him, whom Jesus will raise to life at the last day (6:40, 54). In the context of the Fourth Gospel, ‘those who have done good’ (or better, ‘good things’) are those who have come to the light so that it may be plainly seen that what they have done they have done through God (cf. 3:21). Conversely, ‘those who have done evil [things]’ ‘loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil’ (3:19). John is not juxtaposing salvation by works with salvation by faith: he will shortly insist, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent’ (6:29).

Some have assigned these two verses to the hand of a later ecclesiastical redactor, largely on the ground that the futurist eschatology reflected here is out of step with the main stream of realized eschatology in this Gospel. That assignation is severely mistaken: the interweaving of the two strands lies near the heart of all Christian eschatology, including this book. That believers who already experience eternal life must rise on the last day is not incoherent: their new, resurrection-life existence will be the ratification and confirmation of the life and freedom from condemnation they already enjoy. Others, Jesus insists, will rise to be condemned (lit. ‘to the resurrection of judgment’), for in fact they have been ‘condemned already’ (3:18). And if realized eschatology predominates in the Fourth Gospel, it is partly because John emphasizes what Jesus actually accomplished during his ministry and by his death/exaltation, partly because of his strong emphasis on individual renewal, and partly because he focuses on the transformation of people (including their ultimate resurrection) and not of the universe.