“YOU may know that you have life everlasting, you who put your faith in the name of the Son of God.” So wrote the apostle John to fellow followers of Jesus Christ toward the close of the first century. (1 John 5:13) More than half a century earlier, the apostle Peter had told the Jewish supreme court or Sanhedrin: “There is no salvation in anyone else, for there is not another name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must get saved.”​—Acts 4:12.

WHAT THE “NAME” EMBRACES

Obviously we cannot put faith in someone if all we know is his name, any more than we could put faith in some remedy for an illness just through knowing the name of the medicine. The apostle John shows that life-bringing faith is actually not placed just in the words composing the name “Jesus Christ” but in the person it identifies. That is why John says of his Gospel account, that it was “written down that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and that, because of believing, you may have life by means of his name.” (John 20:31) So knowledge of God’s Word the Bible and all that it tells us about his Son, the Messiah or Christ, is essential to have that lifesaving faith. Do you have such knowledge?