John 15:6 and What Vine Wood Is Good For
Nobody makes a peg out of a grapevine. Ezekiel asked about it six hundred years before Jesus, and he wasn't being poetic. Vine wood grows soft and crooked. You can't build a stool from it or hang a pot on it. A grapevine is good for grapes, and once it's cut off, it's good for the fire.
You probably met the vine in John before you ever met it in Ezekiel, and in John it comes with a line that's hard to read on a bad week.
If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. (John 15:6)
Here's how it's usually taught. Jesus is the vine, you're a branch, and abiding is your end of the deal. Stay close, stay faithful, keep producing, because a branch that stops producing gets cut and burned. Plenty of sincere teachers put it exactly that way, and they mean to keep people from drifting. But read it in the season when you can't find a single grape on your life, and it sounds like Jesus standing over your branch with the shears. If that's how God treats His plants, most of us would rather be weeds.
Who He Was Talking To
So who's listening? Eleven men, on the night before the cross, somewhere between the upper room and the garden. Jesus has just said one hard thing about fruit.
Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. (John 15:2)
The verb behind takes away is the ordinary word for lifting something up, and a vinedresser's first move with a branch lying in the dirt is to lift it back onto the trellis. Abide In Me walks through that verse. Then, before He says anything about fire, Jesus tells the eleven where they stand.
You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. (John 15:3)
Clean comes before the fire. Before Jesus describes a branch with no vine, He settles where these men stand, and He does it with His word, not their record. A few verses later He tells them how they got onto the vine in the first place.
You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain... (John 15:16)
He picked the branches before they ever picked Him.
What Vine Wood Is Good For
So what is verse 6 describing? Go back to the prophets. Israel had sung about itself as a vine for centuries. You have brought a vine out of Egypt, the psalmist says (Psalm 80:8), and Isaiah calls the house of Israel the vineyard of the Lord. Ezekiel asked the hard question about that vine.
Is wood taken from it to make any object? Or can men make a peg from it to hang any vessel on? Instead, it is thrown into the fire for fuel... (Ezekiel 15:3-4)
Ezekiel's point was judgment. In the next verses God says He'll treat the people of Jerusalem like that wood, because they had persisted in unfaithfulness (Ezekiel 15:6-8). So the fire in John 15 isn't a soft image, and nobody should make it one. But listen to what Jesus calls Himself on the night He says it. He's the true vine. The old vine, the one the prophets kept describing, produced nothing worth keeping and went to the fire. He's the vine that doesn't fail, and the branches in Him live on His life, not on their own record.
Whether Jesus had that exact chapter in mind is interpretation, but every man walking with Him knew what cut vine wood was for. A branch off the vine doesn't become a smaller, weaker branch. It becomes kindling. Verse 6 describes life apart from Him, and it ends where Ezekiel's wood ended. Jesus had said the same thing one verse earlier without the fire: without Me you can do nothing.
He doesn't aim the fire at eleven clean men. For a believer, losing sight of the vine doesn't mean being snapped off. It means living as if you were on your own, and that kind of life has nothing of lasting value to show for itself, the way a dry stick has nothing to show for a summer.
The Other Verse About Cut Branches
The strongest text for the fearful reading comes from Paul, writing to Gentile believers in Rome.
Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God: on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise you also will be cut off. (Romans 11:22)
Read cold, that sounds like John 15:6 with a condition attached. But Romans 9 through 11 is one long argument about Israel and the Gentiles, and Paul names the reason for the warning a few verses earlier. Gentile believers had started boasting over the branches that were broken off (Romans 11:18). He's humbling a group that had gotten proud, and he'd already settled the personal question three chapters earlier: nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ (Romans 8:39). The Romans 11:22 study takes it verse by verse.
Cast Out Is a Phrase He'd Used Before
John's Gospel has another sentence with "cast out" in it, and Jesus said that one too.
All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out. (John 6:37)
By no means. Same Gospel, same Speaker. The two verses fit together. John 15:6 tells you what a branch is without the vine, and John 6:37 tells you what the Vine does with anyone who comes to Him. A few chapters later He adds that no one can snatch His sheep out of His hand (John 10:28). The one who comes to Jesus is not cast out.
Hours after the vine talk, He went to the cross and secured that union once and for all. You aren't perfectly right with God because your branch looks productive this month. You're right with God because of what Jesus did, and the cleanness came from His word, not from your fruit, just as verse 3 says.
Staying put can still be hard. On the morning after you've done the thing again, everything in you wants to walk out of the vineyard and stand at the fence until you've earned your way back in. Abiding is the opposite move. You stay where His word put you, and you let Him do the gardening.
Ezekiel was right that nobody hangs a pot on vine wood. A branch was made to hang on the vine itself, and it's the Vine who told you you're clean.
