This is Jesus telling John that He is Yahweh. Yahweh, often rendered in our Bibles as the Lord, is who we encounter in Genesis 1:1: In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth...
John already knew this, of course. John's Gospel, like the other three Gospels, is littered with accounts of Jesus confronting His people with this fact. Jesus is telling John so that John can continue to tell us.
Jesus told the Jews to whom He came that He was God in many different ways. One way Jesus does this in John's Gospel is by saying "I am". I am the true vine. I am the bread of life. I am the door. Before Abraham was, I Am. This is significant because God revealed His name to Moses as "I Am Who I Am". In other words, He is God, the self-existent one. He is the one who is, who was, and who always has been.
The Jews understood that Jesus was calling Himself God by calling Himself "I Am" and they tried to stone Him for it. That was the penalty for such blasphemy, recorded in Holy Scripture.
Except that it isn't blasphemy if Jesus claims it, because He is Immanuel, God with us.
This is the same message Jesus and the disciples preached: God came into human flesh as a man and died on the cross for us, as the ransom for our sin, so we could have forgiveness and eternal life.
This message is what Christianity is.
That Jesus is God incarnate is the only reason what He says is binding. If He were not God, His words would have no more weight or authority than those of other teachers. If Jesus is just a man, then His commands are just opinions. You know what they say about opinions.
So, do we listen to Jesus? If He is God, we had better. Jesus' resurrection proves that He is.
But what He tells us is not a list of rules to follow to please Him. He doesn't give us tasks to accomplish to make ourselves better, or to atone for our own sin. He tells us that He is God, and He has taken away the guilt of our sin by the shedding of His own blood. He offers that gift to us when we hear people proclaim His message, when people are baptized into Him, His death, and His resurrection, and when they eat His body and drink His blood in the Lord's Supper. He empowers us, through His Word, by the working of His Spirit, to believe it, and to turn away from our sin. He makes us who were dead in our trespasses - really and truly spiritually, damned-for-all-eternity dead - alive.
Only God can do that. ###
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