NOTES for Joh 5:17-24
For the Jews who listened to Christ, the most astonishing and impossible thing was that He called God His Father. To a certain degree they were right: who among human beings would really dare to call God his Father? Only in the Lord Jesus Christ is the possibility of such adoption revealed to us, while within the framework of the Old Testament relationship with God this is absolutely impossible. And here we see that rare case when the Lord does not reproach the Jews for unbelief, but gives proof that He has the right to call the Father in this way: the works of Christ, in which the glory of God is unambiguously revealed. On the basis of these very works the Lord calls people to honor the Son as they honor the Father.
But then, in today's passage, the Lord says another astonishing and very important thing. The point is that a person's life outside the New Covenant concluded by Christ passes in one way or another in expectation of judgment and in preparation for it. From deep antiquity people understood this, which is why almost all ancient religions pictured the rulers of the underworld with scales in their hands, and why even the ancient Egyptians carved assurances to the gods on the walls of tombs in the name of the dead: "I did not kill, I did not steal, I did no evil..."
The Old Covenant also does not free us from this experience of all our actions, deeds, and thoughts being subject to judgment. That is what the law is for: to be judged by it... For the Gentiles, the Lord Jesus Himself also speaks of the Last Judgment, as the evangelist Matthew tells us in chapter 25. This judgment is a kind of checkpoint beyond which you either enter eternal life or do not enter it.
So the exceptional newness of Christ's covenant consists, according to His words, in the fact that the one who believes in Him is not judged and does not come into judgment, but has already passed from death into life. It goes without saying that the word "believes" does not mean someone who only "confesses with his lips," but someone who lovingly fulfills the will of Christ. For such a person the Kingdom of Heaven begins already now. When the Lord says, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near," He offers all of us entry into it.