1 John 5:7-8

1 John 5:7-8. For there are three who bear witness [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness on earth], the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and the three agree in one. The bracketed words, if genuine, would, in their present position, be unconnected with the context, making a sudden ascent to the testimony borne by the Three Persons of the Trinity in heaven or from heaven to the Incarnate Son: by the Father generally and at the great crisis of the history of the Redeemer, by the Son to Himself in His exalted estate, and by the Holy Spirit in the administration of redemption. These heavenly Witnesses are but one; and to Them ‘the testimony of God' in 1 John 5:9 refers. Then the three witnesses on earth must be supposed to be, in relation to that other testimony, ‘the witness of men:' testifying to the perfected Gospel of the ascended Lord under the influence of the Spirit, to the baptism of our Lord and our baptism, to the finished atonement and the sacramental commemoration of it. This introduces a very violent abruptness into the apostle's strain. Without these words the sense runs smoothly on. The Spirit now takes precedence as being still the one and only witness, who bears the testimony throughout revelation and in the history of the Christian Church. But He bears His witness to Christ now and continuously through the records which gather round His baptism ‘in water' and His baptism ‘in blood;' and through the effects of the faith in His name as the dispenser of pardon and renewal. ‘And these three agree in one:' they had been made three, and two of them personified as witnesses, because of the supreme importance of the anointing of the human nature of Christ by the Holy Ghost and of the pouring out of His blood. If there is any allusion to the ‘two or three witnesses' by which truth must be established, that allusion is very faint. The apostle hastens to say that the threefold witness converges to one truth, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, faith in whom overcomes the world.