6/10/07 The Witnesses

We return to our study of the 5^th chapter of the Gospel of John this morning.

Throughout the past 40 years of my own Christian life

I have read this Gospel many times,

and there are certain passages in it

that frequently make their way into my teaching.

But this is the first time I’ve ever taught the book as a whole,

beginning with chapter one and then working my way through it chapter by chapter.

It is a fascinating

and in many respects utterly unique account of the life of Christ.

When we began our study of this book a number of months ago

I mentioned that it was the last gospel to be written

and possibly the last book of the entire New Testament to be written.

We know that it was written by John near the very end of his life.

At the time he wrote

he was the only one of the original 12 disciples still alive,

the only one who had not been martyred for his identification with Jesus Christ.

He had not been martyred, but he had been banished to the Island of Patmos,

isolated from contact with the rest of society

with the hope that he would then be unable to influence others

or to call them to look seriously at the claims of this crucified carpenter from Galilee.

Interesting, isn’t it, how effectively God overrules in such matters.

When the Roman government imprisoned Paul with the hope of silencing him,

his imprisonment resulted in his writing what we now know as the books of Ephesians,

Philippians,

Colossians,

and Philemon.

When John was banished to Patmos in an effort to silence him

he gave us the Gospel of John,

the book of Revelation,

and 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd John.

And as we’ve moved through our study of John’s Gospel so far

we’ve seen that what he has given us

is not just the facts of the life of Christ

as we see happening in the first three Gospels.

What we have in John’s account

is a carefully constructed document

in which John chose specific incidents from the life of Christ,

and then offered them to us within the context of his own personal insight into what they mean for us.

He tells us clearly why he wrote it.

JOH 20:30-31 Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.

He tells us that he wrote

with the hope that what he shares with us

will make it easier for us to accept and embrace the truth that has the power to transform our lives -

the truth that this Man, Jesus, is God in human form.

I do understand that.

I understand what John was doing

because I find myself trying to follow his example when I teach.

Do you think I do this because it’s my job?

Do you think I enjoy mucking about in the world of religion?

When John was just a young man

this Jesus barged into his world

and changed the course of his life forever.

And when I was just a young man

He did the same thing to me

with the same results.

When it comes to our dealings with our God

I’m a firm believer in full disclosure.

And if you’re here this morning

simply because you’re looking for a warm fuzzy feeling,

or a safe place,

or some interesting ideas from the world of religion

you’ve misunderstood what we’re doing.

Mostly what I have to offer you

is an introduction to a God who, if you let Him in,

will cause tremendous upheaval in your life.

And the way He does it is utterly unfair

and completely unexpected.

If He would simply charge in, waving His list of Commandments in the air,

hurling lighting bolts at us,

causing the earth to shake,

demanding our absolute submission it would be fine.

We could clothe ourselves in the external form of submission

while continuing to play our little mental games with Him,

smearing on our external facade of obedience

without altering our own self-directed inner agenda.

But that’s not what He does.

What He does is to barge into our lives

and then openly declare His love for us,

right where we are, just as we are.

And if we dare to listen to what He’s saying

and look honestly at what He’s done for us, in spite of us,

the growing knowledge of the depth of His love

will begin to infiltrate and alter every aspect of our lives.

If He was just a strict, demanding, emotionally distant sort of deity,

like a huge version of some of the worst types of human fathers,

we could continue to keep our distance and play our religious games.

But what do we do with the God who really is,

the One who met that very young John on the beach that day

and simply, clearly offered him life and friendship as he’d never known it before?

Well, we know what John did with it.

He allowed his God’s love for him

to become the driving force of his life.

And when we read his Gospel

we cannot miss the urgency with which he writes

and his obvious longing that we, too, will discover the truth about our Creator.

There are a few places where his account overlaps what we have in the first three Gospels,

but there are many other places where it does not.

Most of what we have happening in Matthew, Mark, and Luke

is the account of Jesus’ public presentation of Himself to the Nation of Israel.

They offer us those events that were public property, witnessed by many people.

In fact, two of those Gospels,

the Gospels of Mark and Luke,

were written by men who were not members of the original band of disciples,

men who gained their knowledge through careful interviews

with those who had been there in person.

And what they preserved for us

was information that was well known to many who had been there at the time.

John, of course, was well acquainted with those first three accounts.

They had been in circulation throughout the young church for years.

And when he wrote

he did so knowing that there was some information he had

that no one else possessed,

information that he knew urgently needed to be preserved.

And what we have as we move through this 4^th gospel

is John allowing us to enter into the non-public life of Christ.

He allows us to listen to a number of private

and semi-private conversations between Jesus and individuals or small groups in His world.

And what we hear in those conversations

provides us with a clarity about Jesus’ presentation of Himself

that is nothing short of remarkable.

The passage we’re studying right now is an excellent example.

As we’ve seen,

this is an event that took place during the second year of Jesus’ public ministry,

one of only two events from that entire second year

that John chose to include in his account.

And as we’ve also seen during the past few weeks,

the reasons for his decision to include it are obvious.

The 5^th chapter begins with the account of Jesus’ healing of a man

who had been sick for 38 years.

It was a healing that started with Jesus asking this man,

“Do you wish to get well?”,

a question that we spent several weeks on

because of it’s significance to us.

From there we went on to witness the attack this man received

from the religious leaders who accused him of violating the Sabbath

because he was carrying the little bed he’d spent most of his life on.

Then, most recently we looked at Jesus’ attack of those who had attacked this man,

an exchange in which He chose to reveal Himself,

His power,

and His purpose at a level we have not seen up to this point in His life.

And two weeks ago we spent most of our time

listening to Jesus’ comments about Himself in verses 17-30,

comments in which He describes the relationship between Himself and God

with a clarity and vividness that make His enemies furious.

They are comments that forever remove from the human race

the option of viewing Jesus as simply a wise man,

or a great teacher,

or even a divinely inspired prophet.

When we hear His words

the only possible options are that He truly is God in human form,

or that He was insane.

Jesus began by identifying God as His Father

and Himself as the literal Son of God on this earth.

And He used the words in a way unlike anything anyone had ever done before in the history of Israel.

He was not talking about some sort of generic “we’re all children of God” relationship,

though in truth no Jew had ever dared to do even that.

Jesus used the Father/Son terms in a way

that clearly identified a direct personal union between Himself and God,

even talking about the way in which the Father loves and delights in His only Son.

And that was just the beginning.

From there we listened to Jesus go on to describe in detail

the kind of position, and power, and authority that His Father God has given to His Son.

In verses 19-20 Jesus tells His listeners

that God has given Him the ability

to perfectly duplicate the will and works of God on the earth.

In verse 21 Jesus says that God has given Him

the authority to give life.

In verse 22 He tells us

that God has given Jesus the authority to judge the human race.

Then, in verse 23,

Jesus tells His listeners that

those who do not honor Him do not honor God.

To attack Jesus is to attack God.

For a person to claim that they are honoring God

while at the same time refusing to bow before Jesus Christ as the one and only

perfect image of God on this earth is either foolishness, stupidity, or wilful self-deception.

And then, in verses 24-27

Jesus takes this judgment thing one step farther.

He tells His listeners

that those who choose to believe Him,

those who choose to believe He is who He claims to be

and who choose to believe that He is telling us absolute truth,

those who hear His words and believe them

will bypass judgment altogether

and He will personally grant them eternal life.

Jesus clearly, simply states

that God, His Father,

has given Jesus the authority to give eternal life to all who come to Him.

That’s just a summery of what He says,

but even with this it’s easy to see why John wanted this conversation preserved.

He wanted us to know

the clarity with which Jesus identified Himself and His purpose.

He claimed for Himself the exclusive right to stand in judgement over the human race

and to grant to all who come to Him

forgiveness and eternal life with Him.

Now that’s just about, but not quite, where we stopped in our study of this passage.

Before we stopped we saw that

having clearly claimed His deity,

having declared Himself as the physical manifestation of God,

in verses 31-47 He then offers His listeners

five witnesses who all testify to the truth of His claims.

And then we looked at the first of those five witnesses,

the most impressive witness a person can ever have - God Himself.

Of course Jesus knew this witness alone would not convince His attackers

because He knew they had already stopped their ears to God’s voice in their lives

and replaced Him with their religious system.

In verse 38 He told them with brutal honesty,

“You do not have His word abiding in you, for you do not believe Him whom He sent.”

He says simply,

“I know you cannot hear His voice

because you refuse to hear mine.”

But that’s just the beginning of His witness list.

The second witness He calls in His defense

doesn’t mean a whole lot to us

because we’ve never experienced a John the Baptist in our culture.

In a very tiny way

I suppose maybe Billy Graham might help us to understand John a little.

They have some strong parallels.

John was used to impact the entire Nation of Israel in the years just prior to Christ’s appearance.

Billy Graham, to a lesser degree,

has been used to impact a broad spectrum of our society,

though not nearly to the extent that John did.

Both were used by God to call their nations to repentance and submission to God.

Both lived public and private lives of visible purity and righteousness.

But the truth is that John’s impact on Israel

vastly exceeded Billy Graham’s impact on our Nation.

When John spoke

the spirits of those who heard him trembled.

He had been given by God

a measure of authority in the lives of those who heard him

that was unlike anything anyone had seen for several hundred years.

He didn’t discuss,

he didn’t debate,

he didn’t negotiate,

and he certainly didn’t compromise.

He was the greatest prophetic voice ever heard in the nation of Israel,

and as such possessed tremendous authority and credibility in the nation,

an authority and credibility that vastly surpassed any other person in the nation.

And this was the person Jesus called as His second witness.

In verses 33-35

Jesus points to John the Baptist,

reminding them of his clear affirmation of Jesus’ true purpose and identity.

JOH 5:33, 35 "You have sent to John, and he has testified to the truth. ...He was the lamp that was burning and was shining and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light.”

If they claimed to believe John

they would have to accept his clear validation of Jesus.

Then, in verse 36 Jesus offers His third witness,

one that He says is even greater than John.

And it is.

JOH 5:36 "But the testimony which I have is greater than the testimony of John; for the works which the Father has given Me to accomplish -- the very works that I do -- testify about Me, that the Father has sent Me.

Jesus points them to the works He is doing -

His remarkable credentials.

LUK 7:22 ...the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the gospel preached to them.

Pretty good credentials!

They had their ways of getting around it, of course.

With this healing here in the 5^th chapter

they refused to accept it as being of God

because Jesus performed it in a way that violated their religious system.

It’s fascinating how powerfully religion does that.

Do you know what religion is?

It’s our way of controlling God.

We create a box for Him,

a box in which we define and determine who He is,

how He is to operate,

and what He can and cannot do.

And then we give this box of our own creation

authority over God Himself.

Anything that does not happen within the box

we refuse to accept as being from God.

And in so doing

we proclaim our submission to God

while in truth keep absolute control over Him

by defining what He can and cannot do.

I know it seems absurd to us

when we see these men confronted with the healing power of Christ

and then see them utterly denying His divine power.

They did it because the alternative was unacceptable -

they would not submit to this Man at any cost.

But there are many who do the same thing today,

and they do it for the same reason.

For the past forty years

I have been a close observer to the work of Christ in our world.

Certainly I have seen my fill of those who are playing religious games,

publicly claiming submission and allegiance to Jesus Christ

while continuing to live out their own selfish, self-centered little lives.

But I have also seen what Jesus Christ does in the lives of those who truly come to Him.

I have seen the way He recreates those lives from the inside out.

I have seen the way He breaks the power of addictions,

the way He creates within the human spirit a hunger and thirst for righteousness,

the way He frees His people from the poison of bitterness,

they way He literally takes broken lives and reconstructs them into people who bring a tremendous impact for good into this world.

And I have also seen the determined skill

with which some who observe what Christ is doing in the lives of His people

so skillfully deny its reality.

And just as these 1^st century Pharisees

saw the works of Christ

and then attacked Him because He did those works on the Sabbath,

even so there are many in our world today

who, when confronted with the redemptive work of Christ in the lives of those around them,

will choose not to see the truth

because the implications of that truth are simply not an option.

Well, let’s get back to our witness list.

God Himself testified to the truth of Jesus Christ.

John the Baptist testified to the truth of Jesus Christ.

The very works Jesus performed proclaimed His identity.

And then in verses 38-40

Jesus points His attackers

to the united voice of the entire Old Testament,

telling them that if they had understood those Prophets and those writings correctly

they would have recognized that they all point directly to Jesus.

JOH 5:39 "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me...”.

And then, finally,

in verses 45-47 He offers His final witness - Moses,

the greatest prophet and leader of the Jewish the race.

And He concludes His interview with these petty little men by saying,

JOH 5:46-47 "For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?"

It is a remarkably impressive list of witnesses,

and all the more impressive when we consider His Jewish audience.

Jesus took the united voices

of everyone these men claimed to trust and respect the most

and then showed His accusers how they all pointed directly to Himself.

But the relationship between evidence, truth, and belief is a tricky thing.

In the end there is no evidence

and there is no amount of truth that, when presented,

has the power by itself

to bring a person into submission to Christ.

Left to ourselves

we will always find ways to reject the evidence,

ways around the truth

so that we can maintain the illusion of logic

while retaining control of our own life

and avoiding submission to our Creator.

Funny how it is...

The very thing we think we gain when we refuse Him entrance into our lives

is the thing we can never truly know without Him,

the thing He alone can give us.

In His closing words to these Pharisees

Jesus said it perfectly.

JOH 5:44 "How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?”

What we long for most

is to feel truly good about ourselves and about our lives.

But Jesus told them

that, as long as they chose to turn to one another for the answers to those questions,

as long as they sought glory from one another,

as long as they had delegated to those around them the absolute right

to tell them who they were and why they had value,

they would never be able to hear the voice of their God or find the answers they so desperately longed for.

Only when they turned to their God for those answers

would they find what they were looking for.

It probably wouldn’t bring them social prominence,

or power,

or the kind of success they were seeking.

But it would bring them peace - with themselves and with their God.

But with these men, at least, the price was too high - submission to Christ on His terms.

If only they could have known that what He longed to give them,

what He longs to give all who come to Him

is not judgment or condemnation

but life - real life lived in the presence of His love forever.