Dennis Tuuri

# John 7:14-36 – Repentance in the Modern Mind

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. John 7 beginning at verse 14.

Now about the middle of the feast, Jesus went up into the temple and taught. And the Jews marveled, saying, “How does this man know letters, having never studied?” Jesus answered them and said, “My doctrine is not mine, but his who sent me. If anyone wants to do his will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God, or whether I speak on my own authority.” He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory.

But he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is true, and no unrighteousness is in him. Did not Moses give you the law, yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill me? The people answered and said, “You have a demon who is seeking to kill you.” Jesus answered and said to them, “I did one work, and you all marvel.” Moses therefore gave you circumcision, not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers, and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.

If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath? Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment. Now some of them from Jerusalem said, “Is this not he whom they seek to kill? But look, he speaks boldly and they say nothing to him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is truly the Christ?

However, we know where this man is from. But when the Christ comes, no one knows where he is from.” Then Jesus, saying, “You both know me, and you know where I am from, and I have not come of myself. But he who sent me is true, whom you do not know. But I know him, for I am from him, and he sent me.” Therefore, they sought to take him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come. And many of the people believed in him, and said, “When the Christ comes, will he do more signs than these which this man has done?” The Pharisees heard the crowd murmuring these things concerning him.

And the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him. Then Jesus said to them, “I shall be with you a little while longer, and I go to him who sent me. You will seek me and not find me, and where I am, you cannot come.” Then the Jews said among themselves, “Where does he intend to go that we shall not find him? Does he intend to go to the dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? What is this thing that he said, ‘You will seek me and not find me, and where I am, you cannot come’?”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the gift of the Holy Spirit. We thank you for the work of the Savior. We thank you for this day, the day of the resurrection of our savior. We thank you that you have shined upon us this day through your word. We pray now that your word would indeed illumine itself to us, that your spirit would take this text and help us to understand it. Illumine the dark corners of our heart, Lord God. Bring us to repentance that we might be healed. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

In this text, Jesus continues to track holy time, right? The text has a delineation mark to it. It says that in the middle of the feast, he began to teach. And we said that here in this central section of John, it’s all structured according to holy time, so to speak.

Jesus is observing the Old Testament liturgical calendar. Okay? The liturgical year was ordained by God to be kept in Jesus’ mind—the liturgical year. Liturgy simply means the service or work of the people. And in the purpose of God, the people were to work in a particular sequence of events as the year progressed, and Jesus is here in the middle of a feast. Now we said that two weeks ago when we started this section on John 7-8. The whole thing begins with the discussion with his brothers.

Shall he go to the feast or not? He says, “I’m not going to the sort of feast you’re talking about. I’m not going with you.” He goes to the feast later though, and we said that God confronts the world. Jesus tells his brothers that their time is always ready, but his timing is a matter of the Father’s will. So he contrasts the world’s sense of time and his own sense of time. And he says that he is going to bring conviction to the world. And so they hate him. “The world doesn’t hate you. You’re of the world, but the world hates me.”

So what’s going to happen in John 7 and 8 is we’re going to see the world hating Jesus. But this is all set in the context of holy time. In the providence of God, today is the first Sunday in Lent. Now we do not have a divinely ordained or inspired church calendar this side of the cross. God had put the annual cycle of the Old Testament. It has found its fulfillment in the work of Jesus, and that’s a major theme of chapters seven and eight—that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles.

Nonetheless, the church has historically thought it good to track the life of the savior, beginning the church year with Advent looking toward his coming and his incarnation, then this sequence of Lent leading up to the celebration of Resurrection Sunday, and then Sundays kind of going through the rest of the year correlating to the life of the savior and his resurrection and ascension. So this is the first Sunday in Lent. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday in the liturgical churches, and it finds its completion in Resurrection Sunday. Lent means lengthening of the days. It’s from a Latin term—lengthening—and it refers to springtime. So the days are getting longer. That’s what Lent really means. But it’s a period of time in which people have taken to meditate on the suffering of the Savior.

You know, it begins on Ash Wednesday when people would put ashes on their forehead, begin a season of fasting and prayer, awaiting the coming of Resurrection Sunday. And so it’s a time that the church has self-consciously tried to enter into the sufferings of the Savior, to think about his passion for us. And it’s a time to kind of put off sins. You know, we’re so easily conformed to the unbelieving world round about us that it’s good to sort of go out of whack with it a little bit and sort of think, take a look during this particular season at the world and say, “You know, we don’t want to be conformed to the world. We want to be transformed by the power of God’s word.”

And so the time that the church has used for this is Lent. It’s a time of reflection on the sufferings of the savior. It’s a time you give up certain things for Lent. Some people might do that kind of thing—there’d be fasting that might go on—things to help us to meditate and come to conviction for our own sins. And then those sins were carried by the savior as he went to the cross and lifted off us in the resurrection.

So Jesus kind of prepared us for that a couple weeks ago. He says that he’s going to talk in this section of the scriptures where, in the providence of God, we’re at—on the world hating him. And we see that evident here. Killing Jesus is all over these few passages, these few chapters here in the middle of the book. Remember in the beginning of John’s gospel we read in the prologue that he came to his own, but his own did not receive him.

And so this section of the gospel leading up to the last supper, when he’ll be with his disciples who did receive him, is a picture of him coming to his own, to his own nation, to the world, but the world not receiving him. And so that’s kind of the setup for what’s going to happen in these middle sections of these chapters. So here in this section, it’s the middle of the feast and he’s going to do some teaching here in the middle of the feast.

So this feast—the Feast of Tabernacles—it can be in the middle of it because it’s seven, yea, eight days long. Seven days, okay? And then an eighth day appended to it, another Sabbath at the end of that. All these things determined by God’s word in the Old Testament. So this is the Feast of Tabernacles. Remember, it’s the harvest festival. It’s the culmination of all things. And Jesus, on the last great day of the feast, which we’ll deal with next Lord’s day, he gets up and makes a very important declaration in terms of who he is.

So this is also, in the providence of God, the first Sunday in Lent for us. And the word Lent comes from the lengthening of days as we approach the vernal equinox, when the day and night are the same length—March 21st. Okay.

So what’s going to happen here? I talked in our Proverbs class this last week. We’re listening to a tape by Bruce Waltke analyzing the Proverbs, and he talks about Janus verses. Janus was the household god of the Romans. Two faces looking either way. You’d put it on the doorway into your home. So it looks out and it looks in. And so a Janus was something like a transition point, right? So it looks back and it looks forward.

Well, this section here that we just read in John 7 will look forward to something. It’s going to be repeated. In the next section of John chapter 7, what we’ve got is teaching here by the Savior, speculation on the people in terms of who he is, and then an arrest attempt. And we’ll see that same thing play out as we go into chapters 7 and 8. But this section also looks back—it’s Janus. It doesn’t just look forward; it looks back also at John chapter 5.

And in fact, some commentators who don’t like the way the scriptures have come to us say that really there were mistakes made, and what we just read should have been in John chapter 5. It’s out of place here, they say. And the reason they say that is because it sounds so much like the line of argumentation going on in John chapter 5.

Do you remember John 5? That’s where Jesus heals the man who had been lame for thirty-eight years—a picture of coming out of the wilderness. He does it on the Sabbath. The very center, the heart of the matter in the narrative structure in John 5, is this little sentence: “Now, it was on a Sabbath day.” So the Sabbath day is this day of new creation, healing. And Jesus does this thing. And Jesus alludes back to that in what we just read in John chapter 7.

In verse 21, he says, “I did one work and you all marvel.” And the one work he’s talking about is that healing on the Sabbath—long before this—of the man who had been lame thirty-eight years. And then he told the guy he could take up his bed and walk. And remember, they wanted to kill him because he broke Sabbath and he equated himself with God in John chapter 5. Well, this text kind of takes up that same story. It’s a parallel account, as it were. It looks back on chapter 5. And that’s important for us to notice here, for a particular reason, which I’ll mention in just a minute.

In verse 23 of what we just read, Jesus says, “If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath?” See, in the composition of this gospel, we’re supposed to think back to chapter 5 when he starts talking about this one work—making a man completely well on the Sabbath.

And there are parallels between John 5 and John 7. For instance, in John chapter 5—you may or may not remember this; probably don’t—we read in verse 44, “How can you believe who receive honor from one another?” So in John 5, as Jesus brought conviction to these men who are trying to say that he was guilty of breaking God’s law, he says, “Your big problem is you’re trying to receive honor from one another.”

Well, the same thing happens here in chapter 7, in verse 18, that we just read. “He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory.” See, Jesus says, “If you’re trying to figure out whether I’m true or not, you know, I’m true because I’m not seeking my own glory.” So this idea of seeking one’s own image, one’s own glory, one’s own value is repeated in John chapter 5 and chapter 7.

The law is also a common theme between John 5 and John 7. “Don’t think that I shall accuse you to the Father,” he tells him in John 5. “There is one who accuses you: Moses, in whom you trust.” Remember, you know, in John 5, he heals a guy and the people come to him and say, “You’re guilty of Sabbath breaking,” and he defends himself. But what he does is he turns the tables on them and he brings charges against them. That’s what happens in John 5.

They think they have him on trial, but he really is trying them. They accuse him of Sabbath breaking, and he says, “I obey Moses. You’re the one who breaks God’s law.” Well, he does that same thing here in chapter 7. He says, “I made the guy whole on the Sabbath.” He doesn’t distance himself from Moses. He brings Moses to bear.

So in John 5, they accuse him of sin. He accuses them of seeking their own glory. John 7, he says, “You’re seeking your own glory.” John 5, he says, “You’re breaking God’s law. The knowledge of God is not in your heart. You don’t really submit and know God’s word.” And he says that they are killing him. They are seeking to kill him. They reject the lifegiver.

In John 5:18, we read that the Jews sought all the more to kill him because he healed on the Sabbath and he claimed himself to be God. And here in John 7, Jesus reminds them, “I did one work and you sought to kill me. You’re trying to kill me.”

So the text deliberately stitches together, as it were, in chapter 7. And I think the important thing we want to take away from that is that we remember that in John 5, when they attacked him and accused him of evildoing, he turned the tables and ended up bringing charges against them. This is the way it always is. People want to try Jesus. They want to evaluate Jesus. Maybe some of you who come here today—people do go to church—say, “Well, we’ll see what Jesus has to say. I will put him on trial. I will determine whether he and his word have something valuable to add to my life or not. I’ll, you know, neutrally evaluate his claims upon my life, and then I’ll make a decision.”

Well, you know, that’s what we think. But Jesus is always sovereign, and he is always trying and evaluating us by his word. Even as these men move to bring charges against him, he is charging and evaluating them. And the same thing’s true here in John chapter 7. Here in the middle of the text, at the middle of the festival, in the middle of the harvest, he’s bringing accusations against them even as they are speaking and trying to evaluate him.

You see, it’s a matter of: do we understand that as we come to church, as we go to God’s word during the week—one of the biggest things that we should repent of in this season of Lent is thinking that somehow we are evaluating Jesus as opposed to him always evaluating us. When we seek to evaluate, try, or judge Jesus, we are in reality being tried or judged by him.

So chapter 7 and chapter 5 go together. And who’s on trial today? No matter what you might think in your minds, who is on trial? Who’s being evaluated today? Who’s being sifted by the word of God? And it is us.

As we enter into—perhaps some of us—a consideration of this season of Lent, a meditation on our sins and a need to repent for our sins, you know, we would be good. God’s word sifts, evaluates, and tries us.

Today’s talk, I’ve entitled it “Repentance in the Modern Mind.” This text has things to say about us, calling us to repentance. And so we’ll look at the text now and see some of these things.

Now, the way I’ve structured the outline is that in terms of the text itself, there’s an opening and there’s a closing. Jesus begins this section by teaching in the temple, and at the end the Pharisees are saying, “Is he going to go into the world?” So we’ve got temple and world as the brackets—the inclusio—the brackets, the beginning and end of this little section.

Now, this entire section of John 7 and 8 begins with Jesus teaching in the temple, and it ends with him leaving the temple. And in between, there’s another departure and return to the temple when he heals the woman—or rather deals with the woman taken in adultery—in the middle of it. So it kind of in the middle of 7 and 8 is this story of the woman taken in adultery. But the whole thing is one big section because he goes to the temple to teach, and at the end of chapter 8 he leaves the temple. And then we’re on to a different scene in chapter 9.

So these all kind of go together, and this little section also goes together because it starts in the temple and ends then with the Pharisees saying, “Is he going to go into the world?” Now we know that’s the end of the section because the very next verse says, “On the last day of the feast Jesus got up and said thus and such,” and we’ll deal with that next week.

So the first part of chapter 7 is: Jesus going to go or not? Now he’s at the feast, and it’s the middle of the feast that he gets up and starts to teach. And then next week we’ll deal with the end of the feast—this Feast of Tabernacles.

So he’s in the context of the temple, and he is teaching. Now, I asked the kids here—actually, I didn’t read my own notes, but I’m on Roman numeral one—what I say is “In the middle of the harvest feast on the day of ten bulls, Jesus teaches in the temple.” What does that mean?

Well, during the Feast of Tabernacles, they had to start slaughter. They slaughtered thirteen bulls on the first day of the feast, twelve on the next, eleven on the next, ten on the next—nine, eight, seven. So over the seven days, they kill these bulls. And this is the middle day. So there’s ten bulls being killed. This is the middle of the festival. And I’ll go back to that at the end of the talk, as to why I bring that up now. But you can just think about it: Why did he talk about those ten bulls at the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles?

What does Jesus do in the middle of this feast? He teaches. Now his teaching, of course, is always marvelous. But the text here tells us that the Jews marveled at his teaching. And you know, these gospel accounts—particularly John—it’s always a little ambiguous, right? What’s he talking about in terms of living water to the woman at Samaria, being born again to Nicodemus? You know, what’s going on? It’s always the thing: What’s the bread of life? Is it real bread? Is it Jesus? These things are somewhat ambiguous. And here it’s the same way.

Are they marveling because they really liked it? Maybe. But Jesus says later, “I did one work and you all marvel.” Not in a positive sense, in a pejorative sense. So we don’t really know what they’re doing. But we know that God wants us to consider: when we read that word “marveled,” you bet! If we hear Jesus teaching, it is a marvelous thing to hear our savior teach.

So it prepares us for what he actually says here in response to these Jews. What is the marvelousness of his teaching? The marvelousness of his teaching in terms of the next few verses at least—his response to these Jews who talk to him—is his subject matter and how he handles it.

Now, the Jews in the account, they’re not sure what to make of this because Jesus doesn’t quote rabbinic sources. Jesus doesn’t have the proper credentials for a teacher at this time. You had to have studied under a rabbi and had a rabbinic master. And if you were going to be any kind of good teacher—instead of just an average Joe who didn’t know how to do just the Old Testament—you had the Old Testament, the Jewish commentaries that had been developed. And that was what you were supposed to cite as authority. It’s like if today you get up and you talk from the Bible, and people say, “Well, you know, he’s not seminary trained, and he’s not citing the Westminster Confession of Faith to prove his points. Therefore, we don’t know if what he’s saying is true or not.”

See, well, that’s what was going on here. And so this is why the Jews say, “Well, you know, who is this guy? He doesn’t know letters.” In other words, he hasn’t studied these rabbinic commentaries. And yet his teaching is pretty interesting.

Jesus’s reply to that, of course, is that his source of his doctrine is not the commentaries that have been written on the scriptures. He knows the father who wrote the scriptures. So his authority is directly from the Father in heaven. And he tells him that in verse 16: “My doctrine is not mine, but his who sent me.”

Again, Jesus forms this absolute identification of himself with the Father in heaven. He and the Father are one. Remember in John 5, that was the whole point in his defense of himself. He said, “Hey, me and the Father are one,” and that’s why they wanted to kill him. And here’s the same thing. “I came from him. I teach whatever he tells me to teach. I desire to do his will. We’re one,” is in essence what he’s saying.

So Jesus claims the authority of his Father in heaven. And then he says something very important for repentance in the modern mind. In verse 17, he says, “If anyone wants to do his will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God.”

You see, Jesus—that’s a very important verse for us, okay? They’re trying to evaluate the truth claims of what he’s told them. And he says the way to evaluate and understand anything is to have a desire to do the Father’s will. He’s saying that knowledge is at its base not intellectual. Knowledge, at its base, is ethical, okay?

Do you desire to do the Father’s will? If you do, then you’ll get knowledge. If you don’t desire to do the Father’s will, you labor in blindness. That’s what he says here.

Jesus speaks in this marvelous teaching about knowledge. How is knowledge obtained? And what Jesus tells us quite clearly is that you must desire to do the Father’s will to understand a matter—to certainly know concerning this doctrine whether it’s from God or whether I speak on my own authority. But I think he’s making a far more general statement about what knowledge is. If the source of their knowledge or evaluation of his words must be an ethical submission to the Father and his words—underline all other truth, as the scriptures do—then what we have to take from this is that knowledge is not neutral.

Knowledge cannot be understood simply by intellectual pursuits. That idea—the modern mind at its worst and at its strongest today. And our savior says we should repent of those kinds of thoughts. He talks about true knowledge.

And then he talks about glory. Verse 18: “He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory. But he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.”

Jesus says the difference between me and you. Now remember, he’s told his brothers that the world hates him because he testifies to its evilness. And I think he’s breaking it down here. How is the world evil? The world is evil, first of all, because it seeks knowledge apart from an ethical submission to the creator of the world. And the world is evil, secondly, because the world seeks its own glory. You and I are part of this world. We seek our own glory.

And Jesus says, when you seek your own glory, you really can’t understand anything either. “He who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.” He says your knowledge is all messed up. And one of the reasons that is: your view of glory is all messed up. You should be seeking to bring glory to God and not glorify yourselves. Remember chapter 5: you seek honor from one another, not from God. Jesus says, “That’s one of your big problems.”

And then he talks about—in this marvelous teaching—he talks about their death wish for him. He says in verse 19, “Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill me?”

See, he sums up here the evilness of the world in its view of knowledge, in its attempt for its own glory, being puffed up on its own. And the end result of that is the world desires to kill the lifegiver—the one who is life incarnate, who flows with life and is life from the Father. They seek to kill him.

My wife, I mentioned to her last night what I would be preaching on, and she said, “Well, gee, you know, I said it’s glory, knowledge, and life again.” And she said, “Well, how do you always manage to see that?” It’s because it’s truth. It’s because those three topics are exceedingly important topics, and they’re repeated over and over and over.

We didn’t set up the view of worship here—where you receive glory from God and knowledge from his word and life at the table—because we thought it was a neat idea. We saw because it’s reflected throughout the scriptures. It’s of the essence of fallen humanity: false knowledge, false glory, and death. “All those that hate me love death,” God says. And it’s of the essence of Christ that he has true knowledge, that he seeks the glory of the Father, and that he is life. And as we are in Christ, it’s supposed to be true of us as well.

So Jesus brings conviction to these people, and he tells them what their problems are in very succinct terms. What is their evil? He tells them. What do we have to do then? What should we do to have true knowledge?

Do you want to understand the sermon today? You want to understand it? I mean, sometimes I speak incomprehensibly, and that’s not your fault—it’s mine. But ultimately, if we want to understand a matter, we must begin with a desire to submit to the will of the Father. We want to submit to the word. And if we have that ethical desire to do the will of the Father in heaven, God will open it. But if we don’t—if it’s just an intellectual curiosity or it’s kind of a “who knows”—well then, no, you’re not going to understand a whole lot.

Jesus, you know, the people that heard Jesus didn’t understand a lot. Why? Now we know why: because their ethical base was not in place. They didn’t seek to do the will of the Father in heaven.

In order to understand, to have true knowledge, we must submit to God. The Jews sought to glorify themselves. They sought to glorify themselves instead of glorifying the Father in heaven. People that don’t submit and that seek their own glory love, the Bible tells us, death. “All them that hate me love death,” God tells us. And that’s what these people were like.

Okay. The Jews then respond to this in an incredibly stupid manner, and Jesus exhorts them to righteous judgments. They say, “Well, you have a demon who’s trying to kill you.”

Now, think of the stupidity of that kind of public declaration. This is a man who fed the five thousand, who walked across the water. And if you go to the synoptic accounts, he’d done all these miracles, helping people, healing people. The blind receives sight, people walk. You know, he’s bringing, you know, like I said, bread to the five thousand. He feeds four thousand. I mean, he’s doing all these great things for the people that are obviously examples of life—bringing life—and they say that he’s demon-possessed.

I mean, that is, in terms of public relations, that’s sheer stupidity on their part. And it just shows the great evil again of the world: to accuse the savior of demon possession.

He answers them in verse 21 and says, “I did one work, and you all marvel. Moses therefore gave you circumcision, not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers. And you circumcise a man on the Sabbath. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath?”

See, his argument is: it’s okay to circumcise guys on the Sabbath. You know, you do that because, in a sense, you’re trying to help him. But the essence of circumcision, the essence of lawkeeping, is making people well. And I made a man completely whole on the Sabbath. And if you think about it, you know, he’s really saying, “I restored life to members of this lame guy, right? And you’re going to accuse me of Sabbath breaking?”

Jesus is not distancing himself from Old Testament Sabbath regulations. A commentator named Barrett put it this way. He said, “This gives a striking and important turn to the Sabbath controversy, which plays so large a part in the synoptic gospels, but is never really explained in them. Jesus’s attitude is not a sentimental liberalizing of a harsh and unpractical law.”

That bears repeating. Jesus’s attitude is not a sentimental liberalizing of a harsh and unpractical law. That’s not what Jesus is saying. Nor the masterful dealing of an opponent of the law as such. He’s not just playing, you know, games with them or literary games. It’s rather—Barrett says—the accomplishment of the redemptive purpose of God towards which the law had pointed.

Jesus is the fulfillment of the Sabbath regulations. The whole purpose of circumcision was to demonstrate a new creation—a cutting off of the Adamic nature and a recognition of God’s sovereign movement into the new world, which is what the Sabbath is all about. It’s a day of new creation. And Jesus says, “I didn’t just give a picture of that. I actually brought a guy into new creation. I took him out of the thirty-eight years of the wilderness. I brought him into the Sabbath land. That’s what Sabbath rest is all about.”

So Jesus equates himself with Sabbath-keeping. And more than that, he shows that he’s the fulfillment of all the Sabbath laws. He’s not changing them. He’s bringing them to their completion.

Now, Jesus then tells them again something very important for the modern mind, and particularly the modern Christian mind, to hear. Verse 24: “Don’t judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”

So Jesus says it is your obligation to judge. Problem: you’re judging or making evaluations. You have to. But what Jesus is saying is, don’t judge according to what you think is right or what appeals to your mind or your eyes. Judge with righteous judgments. Well, he’s just cited the Mosaic law to them, just as he did in chapter 5. Righteous judgments are judgments in accordance with an understanding of the law of God.

And so Jesus says to the unbelieving world that their system of evaluation is all messed up. You got to make evaluations and judgments, but you’re supposed to do it righteously, not unrighteously. You’re supposed to do it according to the word of God.

Should we make judgments? Certainly. Certainly, certainly we should make judgments. But what should be the standard for every one of our judgments? He doesn’t say just when it gets around to church things or worship or your personal devotional life. He says, “Judge righteous judgments.” And the implication is: in everything in life.

Every evaluation you make should be righteous, which means in accordance with God’s law. So the law of God—all sixty-six books of the Bible—has to be the basis for the evaluations you make today: of this sermon, of the songs we sing, of your vocation tomorrow, the things you’ll have to do, how you’re going to raise your kids, how you’re going to love your wife, how your wife is going to love you. All that stuff. All the decisions we got to make every day.

We’re going to make evaluations and judgments. They have to be on the basis of God’s word—the scriptures.

Who wanted us, after all, to make judgments apart from God’s word? Well, that’s the sin of our parents in the garden. That was the devil. Satan came to Adam and Eve in the form of the serpent, and he said, “Make your own judgments. Make your own evaluations. Don’t tie yourself to the word of God.”

We look at a chiastic structure in Proverbs. I don’t remember which chapter now. The kids might remember. But it’s real interesting. I think it’s chapter 13. It’s all about the garden. There’s a lot of garden illustrations right at the center of chapter 13 about being a fountain of life. And then whether you despise or reverence the word. And then it talks about the river. Let’s see—it starts with tree of life. Then it says word despised or reverenced. And then it says fountain of life right at the center of a set of proverbs that had to do with the Garden of Eden.

The word of God as our standard. Will we reverence it or not? And if we reverence it, then we’re a tree of life. We’re a flowing fountain of life into all the world. But if not, then we work in terms of what these people worked in terms of: death.

So Jesus gets right to the nub of the matter in terms of their evaluations.

Okay. Next, Roman numeral 4. The Savior’s origins are debated, and he asserts their culpable knowledge of him.

I think—not sure of this last statement—but then they start to think, “Who is this guy?” Now, some of them from Jerusalem said, “Is this not he whom they seek to kill? But look, he speaks boldly, and they say nothing to him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is truly the Christ? However, we know where this man is from. But when the Christ comes, no one knows where he is from.”

Now, what’s going on here? Well, one of the verses in the Old Testament said the Christ will appear in the temple. And so they had built up a whole understanding that when Messiah comes—when Christ comes, Messiah—he would come in kind of a miraculous bolt out of the blue. He wouldn’t be, you know, raised up thirty years in a family. He would come in an abnormal, miraculous way.

And since Jesus had not come in that way—he’d kind of grown up, taught, done great things, but it’s kind of a continuum of life going on with him—they rejected him. There’s a sense in which we might be able to see here that people think that God only involves himself in the world in a miraculous intervention kind of way.

They rejected the Christ who was there all the time and manifested himself in increasing art. But they will—and the modern mind, in the evangelical church today, all too often—that’s what we want. We want a bolt from the blue. I think the Rolling Stones say something about it: “I don’t want to hear about Jesus. I just want to see his face.” I want an epiphany. I want a manifestation. I want a miracle.

If God is who he is—now the value of looking at things that way, to the modern mind, to the pagan unbelieving mind—is that if that’s how God reveals himself, then he’s not there most of the time. So that leaves ninety-nine percent of the time to ourselves. We’re on our own for most of the time, and occasionally God will come and manifest himself to us, and we’ll have to do something about that.

Well, that’s what they were saying here. Jesus didn’t come in an extraordinary, miraculous way. And men want that. We want that kind of thing because we don’t want God here most of the time. You know, we want a God who’s away and occasionally beams in or does something miraculous in the context of the world, because we don’t like God always around us, always imminent in the context of our world.

So they rejected Jesus.

Is what he tells them. In verse 28, he cries out as he taught in the temple, saying, “You both know me, and you know where I am from, and I have not come of myself. But he who sent me is true, whom you do not know. But I know him, for I am from him, and he sent me.”

Well, what does that mean? Well, I’m not sure. It could just be that he’s telling—most commentators take it this way. He’s saying, “Yeah, you know me. I came from Bethlehem. Or actually from Nazareth. You know who I am. But you don’t know who sent me.”

Some people take it in that way, and maybe that’s it. But I think that there’s a sense in which we can read here that really the world does know who Jesus is. You know, it’s not as if the world is walking around in neutral ground and doesn’t have the revelation of God shouting to them from every element of creation that Jesus is the Son of God, that God is, and it needs to be worshiped.

I think there’s a culpable knowledge that Jesus says they have. Now, they don’t know the Father—because that knowledge is an intimate knowledge of the Father—but they do know that God is who God is and that he should be worshiped. They know who Jesus is. Their problem is not a lack of intellectual knowledge of who the Christ is. It is rather that they’re suppressing the knowledge of Christ in unbelief.

And this is, I think, also being alluded to—although I’m really not that sure now. Jesus, you know, is equating himself here with God. He claims to be God. He’s equating himself again with the Father. He’s making a claim, and he’s claiming that he is the one that must be worshiped by them.

C.S. Lewis—what we could meditate on here for just a moment—is the claims of Christ to these people. You’ve heard the apologetic: Jesus must either be Lord, lunatic, or liar. And that didn’t start with Josh McDowell. That really probably started much earlier than this. But at least we know that G.K. Chesterton wrote about this in “The Everlasting Man.” And C.S. Lewis also wrote about this in “Mere Christianity,” which was originally a series of BBC radio broadcasts.

And I want to quote from what Lewis had to say. There suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if he was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says he has always existed. He says he is coming to judge the world at the end of time.

Now let us get this clear. I’m trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really silly thing that people often say about Jesus: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That’s the one thing we mustn’t say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He’d either be a lunatic, on a level with the man who says he’s a poached egg, or else he’d be the devil of hell. You must make your choice.

Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else—or something worse. You can shut him up. You can shut him up for a fool. You can spit at him and kill him as a demon. Or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us. He didn’t intend to.

So Jesus, in saying these sorts of things about unity with the Father, claims to be the Lord God of the universe. I mean, it’s clear. And if that isn’t the case, then what he’s saying is either a horrible, awful lie, or he was just plain nuts. And so that’s the only option for us.

And if he’s the Lord of the universe, then we must understand that when he teaches us about knowledge or glory or life, we had best pay close attention to these things.

Okay. Jesus then speaks of his coming departure.

Roman numeral 5. In the face of united opposition, the Savior speaks of his coming departure and their coming inability to find him.

Verse 30: “Therefore, they sought to take him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.”

I mean, the sovereignty of God is never threatened by the affairs of men, right? He doesn’t have to tell us why it didn’t work, what tactics were used. His hour had not yet come. No matter what man does—until the Father’s hour of turning the savior over to crucify those that would crucify him comes—he’s not going to be arrested.

So there’s a blatant perspective here in verse 30: a blatant truth that God is sovereign in the affairs of men.

Verse 31: “Many of the people believed in him and said, ‘When the Christ comes, will he do more signs than these of what this man has done?’ The Pharisees heard the crowd murmuring these things concerning him. And the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take him.

Then Jesus said to them, ‘I shall be with you a little while longer, and then I go to him who sent me. You will seek me and not find me, and where I am, you cannot come.’”

Notice that the Pharisees and the chief priests are united to crucify Christ. Now the Pharisees and the chief priests were two different parties in Israel at this time. They didn’t get along on much. But the world will become unified in their hatred of the Lord Jesus Christ, even though they fight with one another.

And so we have a picture of the united opposition of the world, as pictured by the Pharisees and the chief priests, seeking to arrest him. But Jesus says, “I’m going away. You’ll seek me, and you will not be able to find me.”

It would be good for us to pause just a moment and talk about this, because there’s a chilling aspect to this verse that we shouldn’t move on from too quickly. The chilling aspect is that there may come a time when people seek for Jesus but he will no longer be accessible to them.

Now, I don’t know that I understand that. But I know it’s clearly taught in the scriptures—and not just here.

In Hosea 5, we read this in verses 4 and following: “They don’t direct their deeds toward turning to their God, for the spirit of harlotry is in their midst, and they do not know the Lord. The pride of Israel testifies to his face. Therefore, Israel and Ephraim stumble in their iniquity. Judah also stumbles with them, with their flocks and herds. They shall go to seek the Lord, but they will not find him. He has withdrawn himself from them.”

Again, in Proverbs, in Proverbs chapter 1—I remember years ago, you know, when we used to have the heads of household rotate through doing communion talks on Proverbs—I remember these verses having to be spoken of, and I thought, “Boy, these are just such powerful verses, and we must not try to water them down.”

We read that in verse 24 of Proverbs 1: “I have called you and you refused. I stretched out my hand and no one regarded, because you disdained all my counsel and would have none of my rebuke. I also will laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your terror comes. When your terror—expression or destruction rather—comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you, then they’ll call on me, but I won’t answer. They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me, because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord.”

Young people, adults: understand that Jesus tells us to seek him. Seek him when he may be found. Because Jesus says there may come a time when he has called out to you, wisdom has called out to you, you’ve refused. And then when you get into difficulty, he will not hear you anymore.

I don’t necessarily understand that, but that’s what the word of God says. Seek him. Seek him while he may be found. Understand your need for him today.

And then, finally, in the text:

Roman numeral 6. Ironically, the Savior will indeed go to the dispersion, teach the Greeks, and save the world.

They say, “Well, where’s he going that he can’t be found? Maybe he’s going to go to the dispersion and teach the Greeks—the Jews in the dispersion, the Gentile God-fearers. Maybe he’s going into all the world.” And the ironic thing is that’s true. That’s exactly what he does. He sends his disciples into all the world to preach the gospel, and he converts all nations. That’s what the Christian era is all about.

They were right. Jesus was going to go to the Greeks. And the ironic thing is that this is accomplished by them getting just what they want. They want to kill him. They want to crucify him. And when they do, and in his resurrection and ascension, he gives all power to his church to accompany them. “Lo, I am with you always as you go to the seventy nations of the world.”

Now, in Genesis, the nations are listed, and there’s seventy of them. I mentioned these bulls—ten bulls. Right? Well, if you add up thirteen, and twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven—add up those seven days of bulls being slaughtered—the total number comes to seventy. Israel had from the beginning of the sacrificial system the message contained in the context of the sacrifices that all seventy nations of the world would come to salvation through the work of the one that they were commemorating in their Harvest Festival.

The harvest wasn’t just for the Jews. The harvest was for the nations. The Jews were supposed to be ministering to them.

The wonderful truth that this passage kind of ends on a note that must have brought a smile to the original readers of John’s gospel—to the early church. When they read this verse: “Will he go to the dispersion?”—they must have smiled and almost chuckled, sitting in the pews. Yes, indeed he will. And he’ll do it through the very mechanism that you think will put an end to him—through the crucifixion.

So the scriptures give us this kind of neat little complete account. It begins with him teaching in the temple and ends with a prediction on the part of the lips of his enemies that he will indeed bring this message of glory, knowledge, and life to all the nations of the world.

What does this mean to us today? What application can we make of this? Lots, I suppose. But you know, I read recently a quote from G.K. Chesterton about books. We were discussing on a BBS list a movie—”Fargo”—and how I kind of like the movie “Fargo” because it brings you into the character of the guy that is sinful, and little things at the beginning of his life end up in having horrific consequences.

I think I said that. I think good movies sometimes bring you into that position of fear and anxiety to warn you against the consequences of what we think are small sins. I was in the prison last week, and you know, you come out—Dave and I said when we were leaving the prison: “We do not want to come back here and be locked up like some of these guys are for the rest of their lives.” It has a sobering effect on you. And a good movie does that same thing. It warns you.

And in this story—I’ve said this before—but in this story we kind of want to identify with Jesus, and there’s a sense in which we should. But I wish we were also kind of identifying with the people that he’s bringing these convictions to, these statements of their sin.

G.K. Chesterton said that a moral book was one which was about immoral people. It didn’t have whitewashed and squeaky-clean characters doing nice things. It presented people doing bad things. He said something like this: “If the characters are not wicked, then the book is.”

If the characters aren’t wicked, then the book is. Why would he say that? Because in the words of Bob Marley, they’re all supposed to be “redemption songs.” Novels, literature, film—it’s supposed to be about redemption. And redemption isn’t accomplished unless there’s some degree of conviction for sin, unless it moves us forward, unless it causes us to go from glory to glory.

A book about nice, good people is not about reality, because that’s not ultimately who we are in the person and work of—in the description of the scriptures about us.

The season of Lent is all about repentance. Repentance. And repentance involves—necessarily, and this is what it means literally—a change of mind. A change of mind.

Now, in the Bible, we might think of that as just an intellectual change of knowledge. But if we remember what our savior just told us here, then we’ll repent. We’ll have a change of mind about a number of things that we engage in frequently.

**Number one, the way of application:** We should acknowledge our fallen intellect and repent of our Adamic tendency to see knowledge as neutral.

You know, again, here God drives home the point. Jesus says, “If you want to do the will of the Father, then you’ll have knowledge. And if you think that knowledge is somehow some kind of abstract truth”—that is absolutely wrong.

Rob Rayburn put it this way in his notes on this passage: “There’s a moral dimension to finding and knowing the truth. Those who have faith in God and seek to be submissive to his will discover the truth.” Modern philosophers call this presuppositionalism. One cannot assess the truth, as it were, from the outside, from some position of neutral objectivity.

Rushdoony, in his commentary on the Gospel of John, says this: “What our Lord says in this text—that you must desire to do the will of the Father to know things—argues against everything in the philosophical and intellectual tradition from Plato down to the present. The modern mind is the same mind as the Greek mind two thousand years ago. That’s where it came from.”

And the Greek mind said we could know things apart from an ethical dimension, that knowledge was intellectual and intellectual only. This is not true. Rushdoony goes on to say: “That heritage insists on the ability of man’s reason—whether pure or practical—to come to a knowledge of truth irrespective of the moral character of the thinker. This means that on every kind of issue, the reasoning of a murderer, a homosexual, a habitual liar, or criminal is as good as the reasoning of a moral man. So we can read the Greeks, even though a lot of them were homosexuals. They had good reasoning. This is what our savior says is absolutely wrong.”

“The premise of such thinking is that moral character has no effect on thinking. Such thinking denies the fact of the Fall. Evangelicals within the church believe that the ungodly can be converted by rational proofs, which means that they discount the Fall and human depravity and insist on a neutral rationality common to all men. It’s this that our Lord rejects totally. Man is not objective reason. He is a fallen created being who is at war with his maker. Romans 1: suppressing the truth of God and unrighteousness. There’s not a neutral bone in his body, and his every atom is part of his revolt against God.”

A prayer from Calvin’s Geneva—which I’ve probably quoted from before in the pulpit—symbolizes this truth as well. This is a prayer that was used every day or so at the Geneva school that went on under Calvin there. And in this prayer, the student is to pray that God would give him knowledge. And here’s a phrase from it: “That the student is to pray that you would grant to me by enlightening my mind, which normally labors in blindness, that I may be enable to acquire knowledge.”

You see, at the height of the Reformation, they understood that apart from an ethical submission to do the will of the Father in heaven, our minds labor in darkness, blindness. We must repent of the idea that we can know a thing, understand a thing, come to any kind of knowledge in this world without an ethical submission to God the Father in heaven. It is only as we grab ahold of a thing and give God thanks for it that we can rightly understand what it is that God has given to us.

Now, if this is true, then what it means is that when the unbelieving, pagan scientist discovers some truth about how some piece of medication works in a particular cure of a disease, who gets the glory for that? If his mind can only labor in darkness, if apart from a will to desire to do the will of the Father in heaven he can’t know anything—how did he figure that out?

It’s the gracious gift of God, pure and simple. We have these categories, and somehow we understand what I just said in terms of spiritual knowledge. But we don’t really believe it in terms of all knowledge. But the scriptures say that in every aspect of man’s being, he is fallen. And that includes his intellect. He’s under the curse of God. He’s trying to suppress the truth of God and righteousness.

How is it that he can come up with logical deductions that bring life-giving medications to the world? He can’t. He can only do it, I think, clearly, if the Father in heaven graciously grants to man the ability to see these things.

God says that he may give such knowledge, but it is purely his gift. No man claims to know things, to know a matter, apart from ethical submission to the will of the Father. The modern mind is pride incarnate. And that is perhaps one of the greatest indications of man’s pride: that he thinks he can know things apart from an ethical submission to God in heaven. It is our pride that wants to assert that thing: “We can figure it out. Give me the puzzle. I can do it. I don’t need God to help me to have knowledge.”

Pride, pride, pride. We need to call people, we need to call ourselves and the world round about us, to repentance for this great sin.

A man—I think Machen said that the problem with the evangelical church today is it tries to call the righteous to repentance. Doesn’t confront the modern world with its sinful tendencies. It doesn’t bring conviction of sin. It simply wants to say, “Believe in Jesus. Jesus in addition to everything else that you believe.” And we say no. We need to bring ourselves and the modern mind to repentance for its initial prideful statement that it can know something apart from God.

Again, that’s the temptation of the deceiver in the garden: “You can understand whether you should eat this fruit or not, based upon your own thinking.”

We have a tremendous amount of pride in the context of our lives. And Lent—this season of repentance—should involve, first of all, repentance for the great evil we have of being prideful in terms of our ability to know things apart from the revealed will of God.

How about you as you go about attaining intellectual knowledge this week? Whether you’re a student, whether you need knowledge to go about your vocation, whether you need knowledge to teach the children in your homeschool, or whether you need to understand things in order to do what you have to do at home—and if that’s your vocation—do you have a dependence upon the Father in heaven? A desire to do his will as the underpinnings to whatever intellectual truth you seek to attain?

God says we need very thing. We have far too high opinion of our own abilities and our own worth. It kind of reminds me of Garrison Keillor, you know, talking about Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. Well, that’s the way we think of ourselves—high to an inflated view that we can attain knowledge apart from the will of God.

Listen to some statistics and see what you would say about this. These are statistics from kids that took the SAT. And they gave them another poll or quiz to ask them about their views and who they are.

Seventy percent of the kids that took the SAT rated their leadership ability above average. Seventy percent. Two percent of them rated their leadership ability below average. Now average is the middle, and half of them were below average. But only two percent thought they were below average.

Getting along with others: zero percent rated themselves below average in being able to get along with other people. Twenty-five percent rated themselves in the top one percent. In other words, I said, “Are you in the top one percent of getting along with other people?” And one out of four kids said, “Yeah, I’m in that top one percent.” Nobody said they were in the bottom percent.

Another study revealed this: Ninety percent of business managers rated their performance as superior. Ninety percent of all managers rate their performance as superior. Superior to what? If there’s a mean, you can’t have ninety percent of the people being superior.

Eighty-six percent of employees rated their performance better than average. Eighty-six percent—better than average. Among divorced couples, ninety percent insisted that the breakup was the other spouse’s fault. So you got one hundred people. Ninety of those people said the fault for the divorce was the other person’s fault.

This is related to this great truth that we need to repent for thinking that somehow we can understand things. You see what blindness we labor in apart from a desire to submit to God?

**Secondly, we should acknowledge our fallen hearts and we should repent of our glorification.** We are always engaging in attempts to glorify ourselves. What do you do in a conversation? Do you listen to people? Do you seek to get together to know what they’re about? Or do you just wait for an opportunity to speak to your own knowledge? Do you humble yourselves before your fellow man? We think we do. But if we think about it very much at all, we’ll recognize that we are way too easily involved in seeking our own glorification.

Now, one of the ways we do this is to justify our actions to ourselves. Quoting from Rob Rayburn here: “Rarely did evil look better than in the devout, upstanding lives of the moral crusaders who put to death the Prince of Glory. These people were trying to justify their hatred of the Savior by saying it was part of their religious obligations as he committed blasphemy. Blood lust paraded itself as love for God. Jealousy and envy are righteous indignation.”

Just as today: the father who is cruel to his children is only concerned to raise them correctly. The gossip is only speaking the truth in love. The spendthrift is only taking advantage of a great deal and being a good steward of his money. And on and on it goes, in every conceivable aspect of life. Lust is justified as love. Greed becomes healthy ambition. Pride becomes self-esteem. The refusal to sacrifice for others becomes the assertion of one’s rights and liberties. And indifference to questions of truth and right becomes tolerance and public-spiritedness.

We are always in our fallen estate seeking to glorify ourselves, to justify even our sinful actions.

**Third, acknowledging our fallen nature, we should repent of our pride and death-like ways and seek the Savior and life.** You know, people hate God. And we pace that over. We think that we’re much more friendly to God. Jesus brings them to conviction for their desire to kill him. We should recognize that when we seek our own knowledge, when we seek our own pride, then we’re just like these men—the world, the modern mind—in seeking abstract knowledge, in seeking self-esteem, pride, and self-glorification.

Its ways are the ways of death. Leonard Cohen, in a song called “The Future,” said, “I’ve seen the future, baby. It’s murder. Abort another fetus now. We don’t like children anyhow.” Abortion is the big picture of this, but many other ways could suffice as well. The death-style of homosexuality—another craving for death, almost as it were. Death, death, death is what our modern culture brings to pass. And it does so because all those that hate God love death.

Of Cohen, in that same song, the chorus goes, “When they said repent, I wonder what they meant.”

What does the church mean? If the church simply calls the modern mind to repentance over particular actions and comes to faith in Jesus, it has failed in its job. The church must call the modern mind, the modern world, and ourselves to repent of the deeply ingrained sense we have of abstract knowledge—of a desire to justify our own actions—because it is those things our savior says leads to seeking the death of not just life around us, but of God as well.

**Fourth, acknowledging our regeneration, we should commit ourselves to making proper word-based, life-giving evaluations.** Again, here Jesus says, “Judge not with unrighteous judgments, but judge with righteous judgments.” Rushdoony, in his commentary on John, says there are those in the church who think we shouldn’t make any kind of evaluations or judgments at all. Now, I don’t know if he used that term loosely, but maybe he used it in its classical sense. An idiot was someone who did not go into the public square. That was the technical definition of the root word.

The Christian church must engage ourselves in the ability to make righteous judgments according to the word of God.

And then **finally, acknowledging the Savior’s mission, we should look forward expectantly to the future.** The word of God goes into the pagan world. And the end result of the text is that all the nations of the world will indeed be the subject of the savior’s knowledge and proper glory and life-giving authority and power.

God calls us to a season of repentance. He calls us today to consider whether our thoughts have been submitted to doing the will of the Father, whether we seek self-glorification and pride, and whether our evaluations therefore are based on the word or not.

How do you make decisions? Is it on the basis of what feels good? Is it on the basis of what is practically or pragmatically good? Or is it on the basis of seeking the glory of the Father in heaven, desiring to do his will, and therefore becoming a dispenser of life in the context of the world? That’s what God calls us to do today.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you, Lord God, for this season of Lent. We thank you for bringing us to repentance for thoughts that are not submitting to you and for seeking our own glory. Help us, Father, to be dispensers of life in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for the great truth that the Sabbath is about new creation, that you’ve forgiven us all of our sins and brought us into a marvelous future because of the work of the Savior.

We thank you for his departure that he spoke of, for his life-giving death on the cross, and for his resurrection and ascension. And we thank you, Lord God, that we are therefore the grateful recipients of the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ to the Greeks.

In his name we pray. Amen. Amen.