7/22/07 The Jerusalem Debates

Our study of John’s Gospel

brings us this morning to a section of the book

that I’m not altogether sure how to approach.

I guess it’s a bit unwise for me to tell you that

because supposedly as your teacher I should know these things,

but the truth is that our time together once a week is so limited,

and there are some sections of God’s Word that we simply cannot effectively handle

in the tiny time slots we share together on Sunday mornings.

And the section we are moving into

is that type of section.

So what I’ve decided to do with this part of John’s Gospel

is to hopefully build for you

a mental framework that will enable you to understand what’s happening here and why

with the hope that you’ll then look more closely at the passage on your own.

Several weeks ago we finished our study

of the events that John includes from the first two years of Jesus’ public ministry.

As we have moved through our study of those first two years

we saw Jesus’ dramatic rise in popularity

as He carefully, systematically presented His credentials to the Nation of Israel.

They were the credentials of the promised Messiah,

the credentials that established Him as far more than just a prophet,

the credentials of One who even the most casual observer recognized as being

in some way obviously, deeply linked with God Himself.

Through the accounts of those first two years we have listened to some of His early teaching,

we have seen His selection of His inner circle, His 12 disciples,

we have seen His apparently limitless authority over sickness,

over disease,

over deformity,

over the physical world and all of the normal rules of nature,

and even over death itself.

And then we watched as His presentation of His credentials

culminated at the end of that second year

with a feast unlike any other in the history of the nation,

a feast in which Jesus supernaturally fed thousands and thousands of His followers

with just five loaves and two small fish.

But then at the end of chapter 6 John allowed us to take one more step with the Master

as we watched Him cross a bridge over which only a very few were willing to follow.

Those who shared in that great feast that day

had grown accustomed to Jesus simply dispersing His kindness

without explanation, without qualification.

He healed all who came to Him,

He showed kindness and compassion to all who would receive it.

And He required nothing from them in return.

It’s no wonder that that marvelous feast

culminated with those people then seeking to take Jesus by force

and crown Him the new King of Israel.

And what else would we expect?

He did all things well.

He’d dramatically, publicly demonstrated

both His willingness and His power to heal all who came to Him,

and not just to heal,

but to provide an apparently endless supply of free food for His followers.

Who wouldn’t want to crown Him King?

Never had there been such a Man.

Never had there been such a leader.

And He was all the more amazing

because He seemed to have no hidden agenda,

no ulterior motives,

no demands He was placing on those who came to Him.

He simply gave what He gave freely.

He didn’t even take up a collection!!

And during that first phase of His presentation of Himself to Israel

He was certainly everything His followers hoped He would be and more

right up until that discussion that took place between Jesus and the multitude

on the day following the feast.

We saw three weeks ago

what happened when Jesus took His revelation of Himself to the next level,

telling His hungry followers

that what they truly hungered for was not another free meal

but rather what they truly hungered for was their spirits reunited with their God.

He promised them food for their souls that would satisfy forever

and that food was Christ Himself.

But they would not have what He was offering

and in the end nearly all of them turned away.

He’d begun to introduce truths

that they were simply unwilling to accept.

Do you remember how that conversation between Jesus and the mob ended?

JOH 6:53-58 Jesus therefore said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also shall live because of Me. This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate, and died, he who eats this bread shall live forever."

It was truth, all of it,

but it was truth they couldn’t even begin to understand at that point,

and truth that offended them deeply.

They didn’t get what they wanted from Him,

and what they did get they could not understand.

And John says,

JOH 6:66 As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew, and were not walking with Him anymore.

And to be honest,

I think many of them were relieved.

I think many of them found in that discussion

exactly what they’d been looking for - a reason to pull away.

Our interaction with our God is a tricky thing.

On one side,

we love the idea of a loving, caring, deeply compassionate Deity

who reaches into our lives and offers us strength, and hope, and healing.

But even in the early stages of our dealings with our God

we know within our spirits

that there is no way we can enter into true interaction with God Himself

without it having profound consequences in our lives.

And I find it interesting

that at the end of chapter 6

the only ones who remained united with the Master

were those who had already made peace at some level

with the disruption His presence brought into their lives.

They had already “left all and followed Him”.

They had already given Him the right to disrupt their lives.

All the rest of them turned away.

The party was over,

Jesus was no longer doing what they wanted,

and they simply turned their backs on Him and left.

And these things at least have not changed much in the past 2000 years,

and they never will.

We all bring our agendas,

our shopping lists to our God

with the hope that He will hear and respond.

That’s not wrong, that’s just human.

We have things we want Him to fix in our lives,

things we want Him to fix in our world.

And sometimes He does exactly what we ask.

But there are other times when He does not.

And it is those times most of all

that define the true nature of our relationship with our God.

Those who view Him as a resource for the fulfillment of their own agenda

will walk away when He fails to do what they want done.

As long as God is a means to an end

He is not really God in our lives.

It’s only when we first bow before Him as God,

no matter what the consequences in our lives,

giving Him the right to do with us and in us whatever He chooses to do,

only then can we relate correctly

to His responses to our requests.

And I would also say that if there is one thing I have come to understand

in the past forty years of my Christian life

it is that I am nearly clueless in what I really need for a truly fulfilling, productive, and meaningful life.

When I look back over so many of the things I have asked my God for

I can see now that it was His grace,

His kindness,

His compassion,

and His love that motivated Him to say no.

And the truth is that now days

although I still ask Him for things at times,

mostly I find myself asking on behalf of others

and then when it comes to my own life I just find myself thanking Him

both for what He’s given and for what He has not.

“He gives and takes away...blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Do you know where the words to that song came from?

It’s a book that rarely makes it onto people’s top 10 favorites,

a book that is at certain places extremely difficult to read,

the book of Job.

In Job 1:21, immediately following Job receiving the news of the death of his seven sons and three daughters in a single day,

Job says, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, And naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

What do we do with a God who doesn’t do things the way we want them done?

What do we do with a God

who allows our lives to be touched by evil,

and who at times allows our hearts to be broken?

What do we do with a God whose actions at times simply make no sense to us whatsoever?

What do we do with a God

who reserves for Himself

the absolute right to mold the clay into any form He chooses,

making one lump into a vessel for honor

and another into a vessel for dishonor?

There are two truly terrifying things in life,

and the second is by far the more terrifying of the two.

The first is when we cry out to our God

and wonder if He’s really there and if He hears or cares.

And the second is when we cry out to our God

and suddenly discover that He is there

and He does hear

and He cares as no one else has ever cared before in our lives.

To reach that point at which we desperately need our God

and are not yet sure whether He’s even aware of us is a frightening thing.

But when He responds to our cries

in a way that suddenly confronts us with the indisputable reality of His presence with us

and His love for us

and His direct, personal response to our requests

it can be even more terrifying

because it changes the rules of life forever.

Ever walked into a room that you thought was empty

and then suddenly realized that there was someone else there?

Now imagine what it would be like

to walk into a room that you thought was empty

and suddenly discover that God Himself was there, with you, waiting for you.

And then imagine what it would be like

if He was there in every room you entered,

and He was sitting next to you when you got into the car,

and He was standing next to the bed, waiting for you when you opened your eyes in the morning.

And wonder of wonders, He is.

But adjusting to that truth

and learning to live in His presence is no easy thing for us

because if requires us to think differently than we’ve ever thought before.

And what I’m sharing with you right now

is far more personal than most of you would realize.

I have known for years

and taught for years that our basic concept of God

is deeply rooted in our childhood perceptions of our father.

When we enter our adult years

the basic concept of God that we carry with us

is simply a huge version of whoever our dad was.

If dad was big on discipline,

our God will be big on discipline.

If dad was impossible to please,

our God will be impossible to please.

If our dad made promises he didn’t keep,

our God will make promises He doesn’t keep.

If our dad was more concerned about projects than relationships

our God will be more concerned about projects than relationships.

If our dad accepted us when we did what he wanted

and rejected us when we didn’t do what he wanted,

then our God will accept us when we’re good and reject us when we’re bad.

And part of our growth battles as Christians

is working through those misconceptions

by holding up our dad concept next to the person of Jesus Christ

and seeing where the two differ.

That is not an easy process by any means

but it is an essential part of our ongoing discovery of the truth about our Creator.

Now, I’ve known this for most of my Christian life.

I’ve known it for others,

but somehow I sort of forgot that it applied to me as well.

I think I forgot because my own dad was and still is a very nice man.

And because he was nice,

my God was nice.

And because my God was nice,

it never entered my mind

that there was anything more I needed to know about Him.

But even though my dad was very nice man,

he was also emotionally distant.

I think probably because no one ever attached to him emotionally when he was growing up,

he had no idea how to attach to me,

or how to enter my world,

or how to feel what I felt,

or how to communicate a true, deep, personal delight in me as his son.

He was good,

he was nice,

and from my perspective he was emotionally distant to the extreme.

And for much of my Christian life

I lived with a God who was absolutely good,

and very, very nice,

and emotionally distant to the extreme.

He was certainly a God I was not ashamed of,

a God whom I wanted others to meet,

a God who was absolutely worthy of our worship and our submission,

but He was not a God who felt much of anything when it came to me personally.

And then the God who really is,

the God who isn’t just nice,

who isn’t just good,

but the God who, for reasons I will never understand,

is deeply emotionally involved with me, His son,

the God who delights in my existence, and in my presence with Him,

that God began a very long,

very carefully designed reeducation program for me

in which He sought to move me into a realization and acceptance of the truth

about how things really are between Him and me.

There were many times along the way

when He would pick me up and hug me,

touching me deeply emotionally,

but I always came away from those hugs

assuming that the feelings were all on my side,

because of course God has far too much going on in His world to actually feel anything for me.

But then, after many years of preparation,

at a time when I was in tremendous pain,

as I cried out to my very nice, very distant God,

in an instant He answered in a way that made me realize for the first time in my life

that He knew, and He understood, and He felt it all -

He felt my pain,

and He knew the roots of that pain,

and He cared more deeply than I could even imagine,

and He knew how to heal.

And it scared me,

suddenly being confronted with the knowledge that He was there,

and that He’d been there with me all along,

and that He literally felt my pain and fought for my healing.

You see, it rewrote the rules of life as I knew it.

And its complicated things when it comes to my public teaching

because I know that what you long for most

I can never give you.

I can give you knowledge,

truth,

principles,

facts about your God.

But I cannot give you an awareness of His love.

Only He can do that,

and with most of us

only after a great deal of personal preparation in our lives,

bringing us to the place where we can finally hear His voice and believe.

But what I can do for you

and what I will do to the best of my ability

is to create for you a safe environment in which you can grow in your knowledge of Him.

And I will not try to create religious substitutes to His love.

Do I want you to know the richness of life

that can only come through righteousness?

Do I want your lives reshaped step by step into conformity

with the image of Jesus Christ?

More than I could ever express.

But I also know that none of the typical religious motivational tools -

fear, guilt, promised rewards, shame, social pressure -

none of them can produce the kind of deep inner change that must take place.

The only thing that truly has the power

to bring about that reconstructive work in your life

is your discovery at some level

of your God’s love for you

and your response to that love.

Unless you trust Him,

unless you trust His love for you

there is no adequate basis for change.

Well, obviously I ended up going a little different direction than I’d intended this morning,

but let me just quickly bring us back to John

and finish my introductory comments about these next four chapters

and then we’ll pick up our study of them again next week.

The events at the end of that second year of Jesus’ public ministry

were a major turning point in Jesus’ presentation of Himself to Israel.

Having clearly stated what He came to offer,

and having that offer decisively rejected,

increasingly He turned His attention away from the masses

and onto His faithful few

and, He turned His face directly toward the cross,

He began equipping His disciples with the knowledge they would need

for the establishment of His Church following His crucifixion and resurrection.

Certainly His disciples had no clear idea what He was doing at the time,

but following the end of that second year

Jesus aggressively began to put in place

all of the pieces that would be necessary

for the perfect fulfillment of the central event of human history -

God’s death for the sin of the world as His ultimate expression of His love for us

and His victory over death, both His own and ours, that would follow.

And what we have taking place in John chapters 7-10

is a key ingredient

in Jesus’ preparation for that ultimate showdown between good and evil.

You see, there were certain roles in the overall plan

that those holding positions of human authority within the nation

were appointed to fulfill.

And Jesus needed to prepare them for those roles.

The material we have in these four chapters of John,

chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10

is material that does not appear in any of the other gospels.

It is the account of events

all of which took place during the third year of Jesus’ public ministry.

And it is almost exclusively the account

of events that took place in Jerusalem.

We have the introduction of some new personalities into the account -

especially a woman caught in the act of adultery

and a man born blind who’s sight is restored by Jesus.

But the center of everything we have taking place throughout these chapters

is the intense, hostile debate taking place between Jesus and the religious leadership of the Nation.

Those who held positions of authority within the Jewish community

were so threatened by Jesus,

so terrified both of what He said

and of the power He held over His followers

that they were determined to do anything within their power to destroy Him.

And most of what John has recorded for us in these 4 chapters

are the accounts of several private and semi-private exchanges

that took place between Jesus and those committed to His destruction.

And next week we’ll take a closer look at those exchanges.