Sermons – Grace Evangelical Free Church // Wyoming, MN

Romans 15:14-21 I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another. 15 But on some points I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God 16 to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. 17 In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to be proud of my work for God. 18 For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, 19 by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God—so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; 20 and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, 21 but as it is written,

    “Those who have never been told of him will see,
    and those who have never heard will understand.”

Early on in ministry, for several reasons, I found myself in charge of just about every aspect of ministry. As I’ve matured, and as the churches I’ve been a part of have matured, it’s been an increasingly and somewhat surprisingly great joy to see so many others use their gifts to build up the church in ways I never could. It is clearly God’s design for churches to be healthiest when they aren’t dependent on the gifts of any one person, or even any small group of people. Instead, God’s design is for churches to be healthiest when every member functions according to their Spiritual gifts for the glory of God and the good of the whole.

I love that in many ways, Missions Week is that. Missions Week is mainly put on by a group of men and women who have been gifted by God with the burden to see Jesus named in every corner of the earth and with the desire to see us joyfully join them in it. They work throughout the year to think carefully about missions, teach regularly on missions, promote missions among us, send missionaries into the field, and support the missionaries who have been sent. Missions Week is one piece of that larger ministry to and through us.

As always, therefore, I’m very thankful to the missions team for all their hard work in inviting us into what they’re working on all year; year after year. It is our collective prayer and aim that God would see fit to use this week to give all of us greater clarity in what God’s Word says about missions and a greater desire to engage in missions.

That’s what all of missions week is about. This sermon has a narrower focus, though. For it, my prayer and aim is twofold. First, I mean to help you understand the Apostle Paul’s life mission as articulated in Romans 15:21 (to preach the gospel where it has not already been named), where it came from (directly from God, and also from an overflow of the gospel he was proclaiming), what it cost him (every earthly comfort), and how he was able to joyfully endure the steep cost (through faith in the surpassing greatness of Jesus Christ). And second, I mean to call all of us to join him in his mind, heart, and actions in increasing measure.

That is, I hope and pray that the Spirit of God would be pleased to use this sermon/text (in conjunction with all of Missions Week) to help us focus especially on naming Jesus in the parts of the world where He has not yet been named. Right off the bat, then, before I pray and as we work through the text, I want to welcome you to Missions Week by asking you to consider whether or not the Jesus you’ve placed your faith in is worth it. Is your understanding of Jesus worth messing up your plans for? Spending your money differently for? Putting yourself and your family at risk for? Giving your life for? Let’s pray that we would all see that He is, x1,000,000, He is!

The first thing I want to help you all see is Paul’s mission. In other words, I want to begin by answering the simple question of what Paul had primarily given his life to. He tells us in our passage for this morning. Having expressed his pleasure in the authenticity of the faith of the Christians in Rome and the manner of their lives (full of goodness, understanding, and the ability to teach), Paul reminded them of his life’s work.

“16 to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit…

Paul had given his entire life to proclaiming the good news of salvation and life in Jesus Christ to the Gentiles. Other apostles (chiefly, Peter) spent their lives proclaiming Christ among the Jews, but Paul was specifically charged to do so among the rest of the world.

This is a staggering and somewhat surprising expression of the love of God. While most among Abraham’s children believed the Christ would be a political and military ruler who would lead Israel back to a place of great prominence among the nations, Paul’s life’s mission showed that God’s love would be expressed differently. Rather than a powerful king like David who would rule for the prosperity of Israel, the Christ would lay His life down for the prosperity—the salvation—of the whole world.

The last few verses in our passage (19-20), though, help us see that Paul’s mission was a bit more focused still.

19 so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; 20 and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, 21 but as it is written,

“Those who have never been told of him will see,
and those who have never heard will understand.”

Isaiah 52 and 53 promised a future Suffering Servant who would bless God’s people. Here Paul identified Jesus as the promised Suffering Servant. What’s more, he also understood himself to be a part of the fulfillment of the final part of the Suffering Servant prophecy of 52:15. By proclaiming Jesus (primarily) among the gentiles and (primarily) where Jesus had not been named, people who had never been told of Jesus were indeed able to see and those who had never heard of Jesus were indeed able to understand!

What a remarkable thing this is, Grace Church. God’s love, through Jesus, extended (as it was always intended to do) beyond Israel to the very ends of the earth and Paul was a chief messenger of it. Oh, how glad the world must have been to hear this news, right (we’ll come back to that in a bit)?!

Before we move on to where Paul’s mission came from, what it cost him, and why he continued anyway, let me ask you now to pause and prayerfully consider your mission in life. What is it? We are all living out of a mission. By God’s design, we are all driven primarily by something (and that’s our mission). Perhaps it’s to be as comfortable as possible. Perhaps it’s to be as rich or successful as possible. Perhaps it’s to be a good mom or dad. Perhaps it’s to be kind to others or do as much good as possible. Perhaps it’s to maximize your own happiness. Perhaps you’ve never thought in such concrete terms; you just sort of do what seems right as things present themselves to you. Perhaps it’s something more biblical like honoring God.

One of our aims in missions week is to help you consider whether or not your life’s mission needs to be recalibrated. Are you spending your life as fully as possible for the cause of Christ? That will look differently in each of us, according to our God-given gifts and burdens. But all of us are called to live as fully as possible within those things for the cause of Christ. Specifically, would you consider whether doing so ought to include a greater measure of working, like Paul, to bring the gospel to places where it does not yet have a foothold?

With that, and as you consider your own mission, it’s good to ask where Paul’s mission came from. In the opening lines of this letter (1:5) Paul answered that question, “through [Jesus] we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations…”. Paul’s mission to proclaim Christ throughout the entire unreached world came directly from Jesus.

Paul repeated this truth at the end of v.15 and into v.16 in our passage as well, “because of the grace given me by God 16 to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God…”. Paul’s mission was graciously given to him by God.

And so it is for you and me. Every one of us are made by God for a mission. And every one of our missions has been given to us by God in His Word. It is not up to us to create our own. Above all the Word tells us, our mission—all of ours—is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. But God’s Word also tells us that we glorify God and enjoy Him now in particular ways. Giving ourselves to missions is one such way; including giving ourselves to the particular mission of naming Jesus where He has not yet been named. Again, the heart of this Missions Week is to help all of us consider if and how we might give ourselves in increasing measure to that.

We read in v.19 that Paul had proclaimed Jesus “from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum.” His point is that throughout all that region he “fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ.” He proclaimed Jesus among the Gentiles in every place that Jesus had not yet been named there. That’s awesome.

Again, this was the love-driven mission of God, for Paul, to bless the world. The world must have loved God and Paul for this, right? If you reconsider your own mission and therein give yourself in greater measure to proclaiming Jesus into the far corners of the world, you should expect to be welcomed and thanked and honored, right? Well, perhaps. Perhaps, that’s what God would do through your ministry. I imagine, however, that it’s more likely that if you join in Paul’s mission, you will have to pay a similar price and receive a similar response.

From the moment he trusted in Jesus and accepted the call on his life, Paul was in a near-constant state of severe persecution and suffering, or at least the threat of those things. The kind of life Paul lived was about as far from the kind of life most people draw up for themselves and kids as is possible.

To help you see what I mean, we’ll do a brief flyover of Paul’s life in the book of Acts (which mainly comes from a list put together by another Free Church pastor) and then look at Paul’s own words in 2 Corinthians.

At the beginning of Acts 8, Paul (his name was Saul then) was working hard to persecute every follower of Jesus. He was a Pharisee (the same kind that Jesus kept having conflict with in John) who believed that Jesus was a blasphemer and God was honored by shutting down His followers.

The opening line of Acts 8 is, “And [Paul] approved of [Stephen’s] execution [by stoning, for proclaiming Jesus]”. By the beginning of Acts 9, however, while on the way to do further damage to the disciples of Jesus, the resurrected Jesus revealed Himself to Paul and Paul was subsequently converted to faith in Jesus in dramatic fashion and sent on mission by Jesus.

In 9:19-20 we read, “For some days [after his conversion] [Paul] was with the disciples at Damascus. And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.'”

From that point on, for over 30 years, Paul stayed on mission and consequently never knew another moment in his life in which he was free from suffering or the threat of suffering.

1. The Jews plotted to kill him in Damascus (just three verses after his conversion) (9:23).
2. The Twelve were initially afraid of him and rejected him when he tried to join them in Jerusalem (9:26).
3. The Hellenists (Greek-speaking Jews) sought to kill him in Jerusalem (9:29).
4. He was persecuted and run out of Antioch (13:50).
5. An attempt was made by both Gentiles and Jews, with their rulers, to mistreat Paul and stone him (14:5).
6. He was in fact stoned and left for dead in Lystra (14:19).
7. He was opposed by believing Jews who insisted that Gentiles must obey the law to be saved (15:1-2).
8. Paul was forced to separate from his close friend and co-worker, Barnabas (15:39).
9. He was dragged before a Philippian counsel, attacked by a crowd, beaten with rods by the magistrates, and thrown into prison (16:19-24).
10. He was cast out of Philippi (16:39).
11. Jealous Jews in Thessalonica formed a mob of wicked men that tried to attack him before forcing him to leave the city (17:5-7, 10).
12. The same jealous Jews followed him to Berea and forced him out of there too (17:23-24).
13. He was mocked in Athens (17:18)
14. He was the victim of a coordinated attack and taken before the tribunal in Corinth (18:12).
15. In Ephesus, he was opposed by a man named Demetrius to the point that the city became enraged with him (19:23-41).
16. He was plotted against by the Jews in Greece (20:3).
17. Jews from Asia tracked Paul down in Jerusalem and stirred up a crowd which seized him and dragged him outside of the city gates, yelled at him, beat him, and sought to kill him (21:27-36).
18. He was arrested and detained by the Romans and stretched out to be flogged (22:24).
19. He was put in jail (23:10).
20. More than forty Jews made a plot against him and bound themselves by an oath to neither eat or drink until they had killed Paul (23:12-22).
21. He was detained by Felix for more than two years in Caesarea (24:22-27).
22. He was shipwrecked on the island of Malta (27:41-44).
23. He was bitten by a viper (28:3-5).
24. Paul was placed on house arrest in Rome for two years (28:13-15, 30).

How’s that for a response to the love of God shown through the sharing of salvation for the world in Jesus? But that’s not all. There’s more. Paul himself described what his life was like (including some of what we just saw from Acts) in 2 Corinthians 11. Just consider Paul’s own words as you consider the cost of his mission.

2 Corinthians 11:23-28 [Compared to other followers of Jesus, I have endured] far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. 24 Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; 26 on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; 27 in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. 28 And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.

I asked you earlier to consider your mission in life. I told you that we are all made by God to be on mission. And I asked you to consider joining Paul in his mission of proclaiming Jesus where He has not yet been named. But so as not to hide the cost Paul paid for accepting and holding fast to his mission, I shared with you the unvarnished truth of Paul’s suffering.

And so now, I ask you again, will you join him? Will you consider giving yourself to the cause of reaching the unreached? Will you consider praying that your kids will and encouraging them toward pioneer missions? Maybe the better question to ask is, is there anything you can think of that would make that kind of mission worth it?

Again, then, why would Paul willingly pay that price for over three decades, and ultimately with a martyr’s death? In a sense, answering that question is why Paul wrote his letter to the Romans. In the first eleven chapters of the letter, Paul described the gospel of Jesus he believed and proclaimed. And then the rest of the letter describes what it looks like to live in light of the gospel. In other words, Paul understood his chapter-fifteen mission to reach the unreached as the necessary outworking of the chapter-one-through-eleven gospel. Grace, the good news of Jesus Christ is such good news, that no cost was too high to pay! Do you know that gospel?!

Paul wrote that that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (1:16), salvation from the death and wrath of God that is upon all of us for our sin. (3) The gospel of Jesus was not new. Even though so many had missed it, it was woven and promised throughout the entire OT, planned from eternity past and promised from the beginning. The gospel is the good news of salvation not for people whose sin made it impossible to even want salvation. Paul explained that the heart of the gospel is the fact that God has made a way for mankind to be saved apart from keeping the law; by grace, through faith, in Jesus who died in our place!

(4) Paul continued to expanded on the good news, teaching that in Jesus we are not only forgiven by God, but also (5) that we have perfect peace with God because of the gospel. While we were united with Adam in sin and death, through faith we are now united with Jesus in righteousness and life. (6) Our old slavery to sin is gone. We’ve been set free from its mastery and are now free and empowered to do the good works we were made for. We are also dead to death and alive to God in Christ.

(8) Grace, in Romans Paul taught that the gospel is the good news that there is no condemnation for anyone who is in Jesus. God did for us what our own obedience could never do. Jesus provided us with the righteousness we need. And the Holy Spirit of God lives in us to empower us to live as God intends as His beloved children. (9) And all of this comes from God’s sovereign choice to save a people for Himself according to His perfect wisdom and love; not because of anything in us that makes us able or worthy.

(10) What’s more, as if all of this wasn’t overwhelmingly good already, the gospel is for people of every tribe, tongue, and nation; to anyone and everyone who will confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in their heart that God raised Him from the dead.

All of that was to help you see something simple, but important: The gospel is the greatest news of all time. It is such good news that to believe it is to know that it is worth any cost to receive and give away. We simply don’t really understand the gospel of Jesus if it (that is, if He) is not our greatest treasure.

That is exactly what Paul meant when he wrote, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

And it is exactly what he meant when he wrote Philippians 1:21, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

If I told you that this building was on fire, the only reasonable response would be to get out quickly and help others do the same. It would be inconvenient and a bit scary, but nothing else makes sense.

If I told you that you have cancer, the only reasonable response would be to go see an oncologist. That would definitely be inconvenient, painful, and expensive, but again, nothing else really makes sense.

If I told you that someone had hidden a great treasure for you on the back of a mountain in Montana, the only reasonable response would be for you to begin an expedition to go get it. You might need to learn some new skills (like orienteering, mountain climbing, etc.), you’d probably need to step away from your job for a while (thus, taking on some significant financial risks), you’d possibly be putting yourself in a danger you wouldn’t otherwise know, and your friends and family might think you were crazy for believing me. And yet, if the treasure is truly great, nothing else would make sense.

To be clear, the heart of what Paul was describing in our passage includes all of that and more. It includes a life that is far less convenient than what we might otherwise live. It includes danger and fear that we might not otherwise experience. It includes the need to work hard at learning new things that you might not otherwise need to learn. It includes a financial cost and risk that makes living the American Dream much less feasible. And it includes relational difficulties that a “normal” life likely wouldn’t incur. And to be clear, in Missions Week and in this sermon in particular, we’re asking you to move in that direction; because it’s the only thing that makes sense in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

People need the gospel. They cannot be saved without it. “For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” 14 But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? 15 And how are they to preach unless they are sent?” (Romans 10:13-15). Being sent will cost you, but in the gospel, you already have a treasure far greater than any inconvenience, even death itself!

So what do we do with all of this? Let me close very briefly with a few practical steps you might take in response to this sermon; that is, in light of the supreme treasure of the gospel.

1. Learn the gospel. You probably know it, but I promise that there are greater depths to plumb. If you are to be increasingly moved by the gospel into the world, it will be because you are increasingly learning the glory of the gospel. Spend time, real time, learning the gospel.
2. Believe the gospel. Knowing the gospel and believing it are two different things. Our lives constantly reflect not only our understanding of the gospel, but more significantly, our belief in the gospel. It’s one thing to be able to explain its basic tenants. It’s another thing entirely to trust fully in them; to truly live as if every one of them were truly true. Fight with God’s help to grow in your belief in the gospel for every area of your life.
3. Share the gospel. Share it with those around you and watch the power of God change minds, hearts, and lives. Marvel at God’s kindness and goodness. Learn it’s power by faithfully sharing and watching it work!
4. Take the gospel. Share it where you are and take it where it isn’t. Again, that’s the heart of missions week this year. It’s what we most want you to consider growing in. Begin praying about and working towards taking the gospel to places it doesn’t already exist. Consider Engage Global or working with Marty this summer.
5. Support the takers of the gospel. Renew your commitment to and actual supporting of our sent missionaries. Regularly read their newsletters, pray for them, check in on them, visit them, and financially support them.
6. Pray the gospel. All of this is only possible with God’s help. Honoring God in our learning, believing, sharing, taking, and supporting those who have taken the gospel are all gifts from God. Pray for yourself, those in our church, those who we will share with, and for those at the ends of the earth to receive and grow in the gospel in faith. God is perfectly spreading His kingdom throughout the earth, through the Church’s discipleship of the world. Pray that God would grant you sufficient understanding, faith, love, urgency, courage, and awe, to join God in that.

Grace, the gospel is the good news that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Jesus died because we have all fallen short of God’s glory. You will not go to heaven because you get missions (or anything else) perfectly right. Jesus died for your missions-apathy as much as for your lust and anger. But because you are going to heaven, because the gospel has taken ahold of you, God is already working a missionary heart in you. Let us, therefore, with God’s help, name Christ everywhere, no matter the cost, in the certain knowledge that the gospel is the power of God to save and worth every cost!

John 7:1-13 After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him. 2 Now the Jews’ Feast of Booths was at hand. 3 So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing. 4 For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” 5 For not even his brothers believed in him. 6 Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. 7 The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil. 8 You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.” 9 After saying this, he remained in Galilee.

10 But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly but in private. 11 The Jews were looking for him at the feast, and saying, “Where is he?” 12 And there was much muttering about him among the people. While some said, “He is a good man,” others said, “No, he is leading the people astray.” 13 Yet for fear of the Jews no one spoke openly of him.

Our passage for this morning picks up about six months after the end of chapter six. We know that because chapter six ended with Jesus at the Passover Feast while chapter seven begins with the Feast of Booths (or Tabernacles), which is six months after Passover. The other three Gospels tell us a good deal about what Jesus was doing during that time (mainly ministering to the Twelve Disciples in the north), but John, for his own God-inspired purposes, skipped over it all.

In this scene we find Jesus interacting with His brothers concerning the kind of participation He would have in the Feast of Booths—each according to their own frame of reference. According to the will of their flesh, Jesus’ brothers wanted Him to go all in, fully functioning as the Messiah. But according to the will of the Father, Jesus determined to go in a more subtle way, in private because His time had not yet come. Their interaction helps us to see some important points about the mysterious providence of God, the nature of unbelief, godly interaction with unbelievers, and the perfect obedience of Jesus.

The main thrust of the passage and sermon is that our God reigns! Whether we realize or acknowledge it or not, there is no corner of creation and no moment in time that God is not perfectly ruling over all. That leads to faithful obedience for all who believe and growing hostility for all who don’t. Therefore, the main takeaways for us are to trust wholly in God and boldly live in light of that every minute of every day, regardless of how the godless respond. We see an example of that in Jesus and an example of not that in Jesus’ brothers and the Jewish crowds. Let’s pray.

Our passage opens with John describing a strategic move by Jesus. The works and teaching He’d done in the south, in and around Jerusalem, had made it so that things were too volatile for Him to continue ministering there without being murdered. That is, the Jewish leaders were so upset with Jesus that if He returned, as the end of v.1 says, He would likely be killed.

1 After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea, because the Jews were seeking to kill him.

That, of course, begs the question of why Jesus was so reluctant. Hadn’t He come to die? Wasn’t that the very reason He was on earth? We’ve briefly considered this before, but since it comes up again here (and will come up again and again throughout John’s Gospel), I’d like to draw your attention to a few additional aspects of it.

Through a strange encounter with His brothers (which we’ll come back to in a few minutes), it becomes clear quickly that it’s not a question of if Jesus would willingly give His life, but when the right time was for Him to do so. Again, then, after being challenged by His brothers to head to Jerusalem in spite of the opposition, Jesus explained why He wouldn’t…twice.

In v.6 we read, 6 Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come…”. And again in v.8 He said, “I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.”

It’s important for us to see, once again, that this is an echo of something Jesus had already said back in chapter 2(:3-4), “When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ 4 And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.'”

What’s more, we’ll see Jesus continue to repeat this line throughout John’s Gospel. For instance, after another scuffle with the Jewish leaders (in John 7:28-30), they tried to arrest Him, “but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.” Likewise (in John 8:17-20), after claiming the Father as His witness and rebuking the Jewish leaders, the Jewish leaders again tried to silence Jesus, “but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.”

Jesus’ answer (because His time had not yet come) to the first question (why was Jesus worried about being killed by the Jews since He came to die?) is clear, but it only leads to a couple more questions: (1) Time for what? and (2) When was that time?

There are two passages later in John that shine a lot of light on these questions.

In John 12:23, which takes place at the beginning of the final week of Jesus life, Jesus says “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” But what does that mean” John 13:1 provides some helpful clarity. “Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

Combined these verses help us to see that Jesus’ time had not yet come (at this point in Jesus’ ministry/John’s Gospel) for Him to be glorified by expressing the full measure of His love in His life and then finally in His death. There was a kind and amount of love, assigned by God, that Jesus would give to the world while He was on earth (being an example and revealing God’s will) and another kind that he would give in His death (suffering the wrath of God for the sins of the world). Evidently, at the time of John 7:1-13, Jesus had more love to give on earth before giving His life in love. But His time was coming soon. By His third year of ministry, by the end of John 12, just six months from the events in John 7, the time would come and Jesus would make His way to the cross by handing Himself over to the same murderous intent of the same Jewish leaders.

It is both interesting and important for us to note (from the passages I just read), that the fact that Jesus’ time hadn’t yet come influenced both (1) what Jesus did and (2) what others were able to do to Him. Knowing that His time was not yet, Jesus chose not to go to Jerusalem. But at the same time, because His time had not yet come, the Jewish leaders were somehow unable to arrest Him. Jesus’ choice not to go to Jerusalem seems conscious and deliberate. He knew His time had not yet come, He knew what would happen if He went to Jerusalem, and so He chose to stay back. On the other hand, it seems that the Spirit of God somehow prevented the Jewish leaders from doing what they otherwise would have been able to do, but without their even knowing that’s what was happening.

The main point for us to grasp here, is that the mysterious providence of God governs all; sometimes in ways we see and understand, and often in ways we are entirely unaware of. In both cases, God perfectly governs all of His creation for His greatest glory and the greatest good of His people. There is such sweet rest and hope and joy in that for all who will receive it in faith.

For all of these reasons, Jesus’ ministry was confined to the North from this point forward… until His crucifixion.

And that leads us to the most shocking aspect of this passage. Jesus’ brothers (James (epistle writer and leader in the early church), Joseph, Simon, and Jude (epistle writer)), the men he’d grown up with, who had undoubtedly heard the stories of the miraculous birth and the prophesies of His mission, who’d watched Him live a sinless childhood, speaking nothing but truth and doing nothing but good, and who’d witnessed Jesus’ perfection closer than anyone, did not believe in Him.

We’ve talked about how counterintuitive and surprising it is that people could be in the presence of the Messiah and not believe. How could they be so blind, we think?! Far surpassing that in craziness, in my estimation, is the unbelief of Jesus’ brothers. Consider with me vs.2-9.

2 Now the Jews’ Feast of Booths was at hand.

The backdrop of these few verses was the upcoming Feast of Booths (Leviticus 23:42). This was one of the three feasts that God required all Jews to attend annually. It was essentially a festive, week-long camping trip. Everyone would set up some kind of tent/temporary structure (a booth or tabernacle) and live in it for just over a week. It was to remind them of their time wandering in the wilderness after the Exodus. And that was to help maintain a corporate sense of their identity, as well as of God’s power and blessing. For that reason, it was a reasonable expectation of Jesus’ brothers that Jesus would attend.

3 So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works you are doing. 4 For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.”

It’s not entirely clear what’s going on here. At the very least, as the next verse makes clear, Jesus’ brothers were misguided. Perhaps they were like many of the others who followed Jesus in the hope that He’d free them from Roman oppression as the military/political Messiah they’d been longing for. If so, them urging Jesus to go to Jerusalem, go public, and go big would make a lot of sense. Understandably, the Jewish people were tired of being under the thumb of Rome and the idea of God’s promised deliver being in their presence was highly appealing.

John states plainly, however, that at the heart of their appeal was their unbelief. “5 For not even his brothers believed in him.”

The request of Jesus’ brothers was rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Jesus’ nature and mission. And that is the functional equivalent of unbelief. As we’ve talked about many, many times, Grace, belief (even blood-earnest belief) in something other than Jesus, as He is revealed in the Bible, is not belief. We are not free to create a man according to our own likings and sensibilities, believe in him, and think of that as the kind of belief God requires, or as the kind of belief that has any spiritual benefit.

The real Jesus was, as we’ve seen consistently in John’s Gospel, too much or too “little” for many to accept. Likewise, many believed in Jesus when they believed He was the kind of ruler they wanted. But as Jesus increasingly revealed who He truly was and what He was truly doing, they left; thus proving that it was never Jesus they believed in. Their belief was merely in an idea they’d concocted and projected onto Jesus.

In the same way, the real Jesus is there for us to accept or reject, but not to modify or redefine. We cannot long for a cosmic combination of butler and grandpa (as I did growing up), call that Jesus, trust in that, and believe the blessings the Bible describes for those whose hope is in Jesus applies to them. We cannot take away the supernatural nature of Jesus, still call this invention of ours Jesus, and gain the rewards held out for those whose faith is in Him. And we cannot strip Jesus of His “inconvenient” teaching and commands and believe we’re believing in Jesus.

That’s what Jesus’ brothers had done to this point and it would not do. Therefore,

6 Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. 7 The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil. 8 You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.” 9 After saying this, he remained in Galilee.

Jesus told them, as we considered a few minutes ago, that His time was not yet. But in a fairly scathing rebuke of His brothers, Jesus said it was their time. His main point was that as long as they loved the world, they had nothing to fear from the world. The world is happy to accept atheists (those who do not believe in God at all) and syncretists (those who are glad to mix a bit of God with a lot of the world), for neither atheists and syncretists demand anything from the world and both are glad to accept the world on its terms.

This has always been the case and it will always be the case until Christ returns. If you are willing to play by the rules set by those who do not love God, you will be accepted and even anointed. And if you’ll at least mix enough of their ways of thinking into yours, the world “cannot hate you”. But if you will commit ALL your was to God, if you’ll follow Jesus wherever He leads, then you will need at times to speak of the evils of the world as they’re put before you and the world will hate you for it, even as they hated Jesus for it.

In simplest terms, Grace, in increasing measure, thinking, feeling, believing, and acting in truly and distinctly Christian ways is falling out of favor in our culture. We increasingly look more like Rome. This does not mean that we are to go looking for fights. It does not mean that we are to be angry, fearful people. It does not mean that we are to completely separate ourselves from the world. And it does not mean that we are called to something other than love for the world. In each of these things, consider the way of our Lord.

It does mean, however, that we must “in [our] hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; 16 yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Peter 3:15-16).

And that will mean in hopeful, worshipful, loving, clear, winsome, and bold ways, we must help the world see the world as it truly is. That is, we must teach the whole world to obey all Jesus commanded and help the world understand what the world looks like through God’s eyes. We must help everyone we meet understand that God made the earth and ordered it, all of it, according to His purposes. He alone is life and so He alone gives life. All things belong to Him. Things must be as God made them to be. Things are what God called them. God alone is creator, king, namer and judge.

For these reasons life is not ours to define, give or take. We need to have a high view of being fruitful and multiplying and of caring for the vulnerable. And on the other end of the spectrum, we need to oppose everything that claims or demeans that which belongs to God and has been called good by God. We need to oppose all forms of abortion, favoritism, exploitation, and euthanasia.

For these reasons mankind is not ours to define. We need to have a high view of mankind as divine image bearers and all the dignity and responsibility that affords. We need to have a high view of male and female and the common and unique roles God has assigned to us as such. And we need to have a high view of promoting the purposes for which we were made. And on the other end of the spectrum, we need to oppose the exploitation of anyone, abuse, all forms of sexual immorality (including fornication, adultery, pornography and homosexuality), egalitarianism and transgenderism, and anything that would keep us from being able to work for the physical and spiritual good of the world.

The disbelief of Jesus brothers helps us to see two main things; things we’ve already and will continue to see in John’s gospel. First, the fact that Jesus’ brothers did not believe helps us to see that sin is so thoroughly, spiritually blinding that even when the Son of God is as close to us as He can possibly be, for as long as He can possibly be, in our sin we cannot see Him in the least. Spiritual blindness is like that. And we are all, even the brothers of Jesus, born into that condition. Spiritual sight and the genuine belief that comes from it are gifts from God (gifts God would give to Jesus’ brothers after His resurrection).

And the second main and familiar point is that you cannot be friends with both Jesus and the world that opposes Him. It should not be our goal to be disliked by anyone. But if we are liked by everyone, chances are good that we are not following Jesus very closely.

And that leads to the next point, the perfect obedience of Jesus.

If you were really paying attention earlier, you might already be wondering about Jesus skipping the Feast of Booths. If God commands all of Israel to celebrate it annually, and if Jesus is perfect, then how could He just not go (as He seems to suggest when pressed by His brothers)? In v.10, briefly, John clears that up.

10 But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly but in private.

Even though it sort of sounds like it (in v.8), Jesus wasn’t telling His brothers that He was not going to the Feast. V.10 tells us that He was actually telling them that He wasn’t going to go with them or in the manner they suggested. That is, when Jesus dismissed His brothers and told them “I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come,” He meant that He would not go and present Himself as Messiah as they wanted.

He went, then, in continued perfect obedience to the Father, but He went privately so as to avoid the crowds and their expectations as well as the Jewish leaders and their evil intentions. And that because too in obedience to God.

Grace, once again, in Jesus we have a picture of perfect obedience through every season of blessing and trial, even unto willingly enduring the forsaking of the Father and death on a cross. Let’s look to Him.

In the final few verses of our passage we find another familiar scene; that of a confused and divided crowd, seeking to make sense of this man, Jesus.

11 The Jews were looking for him at the feast, and saying, “Where is he?” 12 And there was much muttering about him among the people. While some said, “He is a good man,” others said, “No, he is leading the people astray.” 13 Yet for fear of the Jews no one spoke openly of him.

Just like today, in Jesus’ time, it was really hard for most people to know what to do with Jesus. The stories about Him were anything but normal. His teaching was different than anything they’d heard before. That He was being talked about throughout all Israel meant people couldn’t just dismiss Him. His claims and demands, however, made it so you couldn’t just tag along comfortably. So what were the crowds and leaders to do with Him?

According to these few verses: (1) Many were looking for Him, (2) Everyone talked privately about Him, (3) Some believed Him to be “a good man”, (4) Others said He was a false teacher, and (5) No one knew exactly what to do with Him as they fearfully waited on the Jewish leaders to make a formal decision about Him.

And so it is today. What do you do with Jesus? Who do you say He is? What authority does He have on your life? Are you seeking Him and why? How tied to the world’s opinion of Him is yours? Do you believe in Him only when it’s convenient or wherever He leads and whatever it costs? Your answers to those questions mean everything.

Grace, in all of this, and in conclusion, see in this passage and hear me say: Our God reigns! The Father had perfectly planned the coming, ministry, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus for the sins of the world. Thirty years into His life and nearly three years into His ministry, Jesus’ own brothers joined many of the Jews in not yet understanding or believing this, however. Nevertheless, Jesus perfectly obeyed His Father without exception, even as the Father perfectly governed His perfect plan to save mankind from our sins.

May our hope be fully in Jesus for His time had come and is coming again. May we patiently say, “Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, come quickly!” and in the meantime, may we eagerly seek to live in faithful obedience to all that Jesus has commanded and proclaim the good news to the entire world.

John 20:1-28 Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. 2 So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 3 So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. 4 Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, 7 and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9 for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples went back to their homes.

11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. 12 And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”—and that he had said these things to her.

19 On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” 20 When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” 22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

24 Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

26 Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Happy Easter, Grace Church! It is the great hope of all mankind that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead! Every promise of God is “yes” in Jesus because of the empty tomb. Truly, the fate of all of humanity literally hinges on our response to the resurrection. For all those reasons, preaching on Easter is one of the most emotionally conflicting experiences of my year, every year. The best term I’ve heard to describe it is “glad gravity”. There is an unparalleled weight—gravity—attached to the responsibility of heralding this message—getting it right and sharing it with an appropriate, God-honoring heart and delivery. And at the exact same time, there is an unparalleled joy—gladness—that comes with the absolute conviction that it is true and the great privilege of being the one to tell you about it. Glad gravity. I hope you all experience that as well. I hope this sermon helps you appreciate both the heaviness and wonder of this day and then launches you out into the world to live in light of it and tell the world this good news. To those ends, we’ll consider the reality, relevance, and right response to the resurrection.

One of the most important aspects of Easter is the fact that it is a historical event. It really happened. The Gospels tell the truth about the facts of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. It is not a metaphor or a parable or a spiritual lesson. Settling on the reality of the resurrection is a key to any right response. Biblically, there are four aspects of the fact of the resurrection that I want to draw your attention to: It was planned eternally, promised consistently, endured willingly, and happened historically.

There are many passages in the Bible that speak to the fact that God’s plan of salvation—including the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus—was established before the world was made. We see this in the promise of salvation in passages like Ephesians 1:4 which says that God “chose us in [Jesus] before the foundation of the world. And in passages like 2 Timothy 1:9, “[God] saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began…”

We also see it in passages that speak directly of God’s plan of resurrection through Jesus from before time. Consider 1 Peter 1:20-21, “[Jesus] was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you 21 who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.” Likewise, Ephesians 3:9-11 says, “[God] created all things, 10 so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. 11 This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The first point for us to see as we consider the reality of the resurrection is that it was not an afterthought of God or one of several options He had at His disposal. The resurrection was God’s plan to save the world from all eternity. We tend to plan most for the most important things in life. The resurrection and all that was accomplished through it is one of the most important events in history and so God planned it before history.

And because the resurrection was a part of God’s eternal plan, it should be no surprise that the Bible contains many promises of the resurrection. There are a number of OT hints and types, but the clearest examples come from Jesus Himself who spoke often of the certainty, goodness, and divine origin of His death and resurrection.

One of the clearest is found in a passage we saw earlier in John, 2:18-22. “So the Jews said to him, ‘What sign do you show us for doing these things?’ 19 Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ 20 The Jews then said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?’ 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”

Likewise, in Mark 8:31 we read that Jesus “began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.”

And not long before His actual resurrection, “As Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside, and on the way he said to them, 18 ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death 19 and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day’” (Matthew 20:17-19).

The reality of the resurrection is such that it was planned eternally and promised constantly. Jesus spent a good deal of time preparing His followers for what was to come because it was going to be the most significant act of love ever performed, but in the most unexpected way.

It was also endured willingly by Jesus. In addition to the passages we just saw, in which Jesus spoke of His crucifixion and resurrection as something He knew was certain and good, there are two passages in particular that speak directly to His willingness to be crucified in order that He might also rise.

The first is Hebrews 12:2. There we read that “for the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, despising the shame”. And the second is Matthew 26:39: “And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.’”

There are others, but these two perfectly capture the universal, biblical teaching that Jesus willingly, even lovingly and gladly, followed the Father’s long-promised plan into His crucifixion and resurrection for the salvation of the world. Praise Him for this, Grace. We do not have a reluctant, co-opted Savior. In Jesus, we have a Savior who perfectly knew what awaited Him physically, and even more significantly, spiritually, in the forsaking of the Father; and yet for the joy set before Him willingly endured for your sake and mine, and for all who would receive Him in faith. Would you receive Him in faith today, the One who conquered death invites you to share in that victory?!

Finally, again, the Christian claim is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a historical fact. The Bible simply leaves no room for a merely symbolic, metaphorical, spiritual, or otherwise ahistorical resurrection. Jesus actually, bodily, suffered, died, and rose from the dead. The Apostle Paul declares that these are not trivial issues or technical, theological matters. He calls them matters of “first importance.” If we get this wrong, we lose everything. In 1 Corinthians 15, he wrote,

3 I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures [That’s our cue to listen up. What does Paul consider a matter of first importance?!], 4 that [Jesus] was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

As a matter of historical record…According to His own words, Jesus’ whole life moved toward His death and resurrection. They were set in motion on Palm Sunday when He entered Jerusalem during Passover week and finally and fully presented Himself as the Christ. They were held at bay until the proper time as Jesus left Jerusalem each evening and went to Bethany, the town where He’d raised Lazarus from the dead. On Thursday night, Maundy Thursday, for the first time, Jesus stayed in Jerusalem because His time had finally come. The Bible is clear that this was part of God’s plan. Therefore, He was not caught off guard by His betrayal at the hands of Judas, His arrest at the conspiratorial hand of the Jewish and Roman leaders, His sham trials, His denial by Peter, or even His torture and crucifixion. These events are as well documented as any events—and far more than most—from the ancient world.

The God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, died on Friday afternoon, was taken down from the cross, and buried that same day in a tomb purchased by Joseph of Arimathea. For fear that Jesus’ disciples might steal Jesus’ body and falsely claim that He rose from the dead, the Jewish leaders convinced Pilate to set a Roman guard to protect the tomb. Jesus remained dead and buried all day on Saturday. And then, on Sunday, the third day, just has He had been planned eternally, promised continually, endured willingly, the resurrection happened historically. Jesus conquered sin, defeated death, and rose from the dead. In His new and everlasting resurrection body, Jesus appeared to hundreds, including the eleven, His broader followers, and even strangers and enemies. This was further proof of the reality of the resurrection.

And make no mistake, the historicity of the resurrection is no technical or trivial matter. Our entire faith rises and falls on it. This fact is beautifully and passionately attested to by the Apostle Paul as he concludes His resurrection thoughts to the Corinthian Christians with this: If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead!

I hope it’s easy to see that if Jesus had not risen from the dead, it would have invalidated much of the Bible’s teachings, including Jesus’ own words. In that sense alone, the relevance of the resurrection ought to be clear. At the same time, however, the resurrection is relevant for many, many more positive reasons as well.

Several years ago, the relevance of the resurrection was the entire subject of my Easter sermon. In it, I listed twelve biblical benefits of the resurrection. You might want to go back and look if you’d like all twelve. This morning, though, I only want to mention four to help you see why the resurrection matters. Apart from these things, it might seem kind of cool, but more like a party trick than a significant part of our salvation. As I hope you’ll see, far from a party trick, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead provides some staggering blessings for everyone who receives it in faith.

Jesus made some fantastic claims about Himself. Among the most shocking was His claim to be the very Son of God (Matthew 27:43; John 10:36). I suppose anyone could make a claim like that, but what could you possibly do to back it up? Well, how about rising from the dead?! Romans 1:4 tells us that Jesus, “was declared to be the Son of God in power…by his resurrection from the dead.” Jesus’ resurrection proved that He was who He said He was. And that’s great news because it means everything else He said and did is worthy of trust and praise.

In 1 Peter 1:3, Peter paints an unbelievably beautiful picture of the new life that God grants His people through the new life of Jesus. It really is a remarkable verse. It reminds us that we are born spiritually dead and that our only hope for spiritual life is to be born again. Peter tells us that this second birth is connected to Jesus’ resurrection. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (1 Peter 1:3). Oh, what grace is ours through the resurrection of Jesus! The second birth we need and the living hope we receive from it comes “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” How’s that for good news?!

More still, the resurrection of Jesus means that all who have faith in Jesus will never be condemned again. Paul writes, “Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died — more than that, who was raised… (Rom. 8:34). Much of the end of Romans 8 describes the contrasts between life in Christ and life out of Christ. In Christ, since God is for us, nothing in the entire universe can successfully stand against us. In Christ, since God gave us His highest treasure—His own Son—we are guaranteed that He will never withhold any lesser treasure. In Christ, since God has already declared us “not guilty”, we know that no lesser charge can hold up. And, in Christ, since Jesus died and rose again to cleanse us of all our sin, nothing and no one can successfully condemn us before God. Do you feel the weight of your sin? Have you experienced brokenness and hardship? The resurrection is the good news that there will never be condemnation for those who are in Christ.

Finally, the resurrection of Jesus is also good news in that it means that Christians will be raised from the dead with Jesus! In 2 Corinthians 4 we read, “[We know] that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence” (4:14). Similarly, Romans 6 says, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (6:5).

Grace, the good news of the resurrection of Jesus is that death is dead! Jesus’ death defeated death (2 Timothy 1:10). Easter is death’s funeral. Therefore, since He defeated it, it was impossible for death to keep Jesus and those in Him (Acts 2:24). And that means that for Christians it is not death to die. Jesus’ resurrection definitively proved these things. Grace, because of Jesus’ resurrection and all it secured, we too will certainly rise from the dead into new and everlasting life, in the perfect presence and unending blessing of God. For us, physical and spiritual death will never meet!

We’ve seen the reality and relevance of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. To have grasped these things in even the smallest, most child-like manner, is to demand that we ask, “What should we do in response to this spectacular news?!” Since all this is true, what does that mean? What kind of response does this call for? Let’s consider the response of those who first found the empty tomb.

1. Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John ran. Mary ran to tell the others when she discovered that Jesus’ body was gone (1-2). Peter and John ran to see for themselves (3-4). In their excitement and confusion, walking wouldn’t do.
2. John and Peter investigated. Not entirely sure what to make of the fact that Jesus was missing, John went into some detail about the investigation he and Peter undertook. They didn’t know if they should go into the tomb at first. They saw Jesus’ burial cloths lying there and eventually went in to look more carefully. Mary joined them in a bit, but none of them knew quite what was going on “for” according to v.9, ” as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”
3. Mary wept. When Mary got back (apparently, she was not as fast as Peter and John), still taking it all in, she broke out in tears. V.11 says “Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb.” Again, probably overwhelmed with a mixture of fear and hope, Mary couldn’t hold back tears.
4. Not only was Mary sad, she was also confused. While she was at the empty tomb Jesus appeared before her in His glorified body and she didn’t even recognize Him. She mistook Him for the gardener and said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
5. Mary clung to Jesus. Once Jesus enabled her to recognize Him, however, she threw her arms around Him. Filled with joy and wonder, she clung to Him.
6. Mary proclaimed the good news to the rest of the disciples. At Jesus’ command, Mary left Jesus and went back to the others to let them know, “I have seen the Lord”!
7. The disciples were gradually glad. A bit after sending Mary to tell the disciples, Jesus came to them as well. “Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’” As John recounts this interaction, he gives the impression that it took a bit for the disciples to make sense of what they were seeing, but “then” eventually, “the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.”
8. While ten were relatively quickly won over, one, Thomas, who was not there when Jesus first appeared to the disciples, remained skeptical. In the famous line he said, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
9. Eventually, however, Thomas believed. When Jesus finally appeared to him and allowed Thomas to see His scars, “Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’”

The point for us isn’t necessarily to run or investigate or weep or doubt or any of these things. John simply tells us what the disciples did, not necessarily what they should have done. The point, rather, is that the empty tomb necessitates that we do something! Grace, we simply cannot understand it and be indifferent to it or casual about it.

Perhaps you noticed that even though the disciples still didn’t fully grasp its significance (and wouldn’t until the Spirit indwelled them), they understood enough to know that the resurrection necessitated a response beyond the ordinary. This is anything but a normal event and so it requires anything but a normal response. To read the Gospel accounts of their responses is to feel the disciples’ urgency, amazement, confusion, desperation, hope, and awe. Until you’ve felt those things with them, you too are still searching for the true meaning of the resurrection. As we consider our proper response to the resurrection, then, we must pray that God would help us make sure it is in proper proportion to the significance of the resurrection.

How, then, should we respond to the resurrection? That’s the great call of the Christian life. Every one of us are living between resurrections—Jesus’ and ours. Let me close by suggesting five familiar ways we might respond to all of this.

1. Pray. Truly understanding, appreciating, and responding to the resurrection is a gift from God. Pray earnestly and ask God to fill you with a true understanding of what happened and what it means. Ask Him to fill you with appropriate awe and wonder. Ask Him to fill you with the kind of focus and courage only the resurrection can provide. Ask Him to give you the kind of love that He showed to you in sending Jesus to die and rise for you.
2. Read the Bible. The whole Bible, and the NT in particular, is primarily a description of the ways God means us to respond to the Good News, the gospel, of Jesus’ resurrection. It is not up to us to decide how God means us to live in light of the resurrection. It is not up to us to decide the proper response. God has graciously told us all He requires of us. A right response to the resurrection, therefore, means expectantly reading the Bible through that lens. Let me encourage you to commit to prayerfully scouring the Bible, by yourself and with others, for all the ways it describes life in the wake and power of the resurrection; and then with the Spirit’s help, live like that!
3. Praise God. Above all, consider all the Bible says about the reality, relevance, and right response of the resurrection and praise God for it. Worship God. Praise Him in the highest. He deserves all glory and praise, and there are few places that’s seen more clearly than in the resurrection. Praise Him in prayer, music, art, obedience, and in all of your life. As God grants you genuine awe at the empty tomb, turn that back to God in worship.
4. Tell someone. Don’t keep this good news to yourself. Tell someone today and tomorrow and until Jesus returns. More than any athletic victory, academic reward, financial windfall, work promotion, physical healing, or any other good news, share this greatest news, with greatest urgency and joy, with the whole world.
5. Finally, live with focused confidence. The reality and relevance of the resurrection, more than anything else, fixes our eyes on the things that truly matter and fills us with confidence that victory is certain. Because death is dead, we have perfect purpose—to glorify God by making disciples of all nations. And because death is dead, we have perfect confidence—that to live is Christ and to die is gain. This enables us to live in gladness and freedom and love and hope regardless of our circumstances or how others respond.

Before we turn all of this back to God in musical worship, let me remind you of one more thing. None of us rightly understands, appreciates, or responds to the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. None of us ever have or will on this earth. By God’s grace, we will grow in this, but none of us will get fully there in this life. The fact of the matter is this: Easter is a reminder that we are never accepted by God because of what we have done, even as we are never acceptable to God because of what we do. You can’t get your resurrection response dialed in enough earn God’s favor. Instead, the resurrection is an eternal declaration that Jesus did for us what God requires of us. While we were dead in our trespasses and sins, Jesus lived in perfect obedience, died in our place, and then rose from the dead to give us everlasting life. We gain access to that not by our works—the flesh is of no help at all—but by trusting that Jesus alone is sufficient—and His resurrection from the dead declares that in power!

John 6:60-71 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”
66 After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. 67 So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” 70 Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” 71 He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray him.

Happy Palm Sunday. We’re glad you’re here to worship with us at the beginning of Holy Week. Holy Week, as you may know, marks the week between Jesus’ triumphal entrance into Jerusalem (on Palm Sunday) and His resurrection from the dead (on Easter Sunday). The Thursday of that week is known as Maundy Thursday. It’s the night in which Jesus gave the Lord’s Supper to the Church, was betrayed, and arrested. And we call the Friday of that week, Good Friday. That is the day on which Jesus was crucified.

To better understand and celebrate these things, we invite you to come back tonight at 6:00pm for our kid’s Easter program where they’ll tell the story of Easter through drama and music (with snacks after). In addition, please consider coming back on Thursday night for our Maundy Thursday service from 6:30-7:30pm. There, we’ll sing together and consider more carefully the events and significance of Holy Week. And above all, we’d love for you to come to our Easter breakfast (8:45-10:00am) and worship service (10:30) next Sunday.

In one sense, all of life is a celebration of our risen Lord. Every minute of every day is a chance to praise the One who defeated death and purchased forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration to all who will receive Him in faith. In another sense, however, it is good and right to join with the saints of old and the saints around the world today in setting aside a particular time to name, explain, and celebrate the person and events at the heart of our faith.

With all of that, this is not exactly a Palm Sunday sermon. That is, as you can tell, our passage does not deal directly with the events of Palm Sunday. Indirectly, however, it helps prepare us for Palm Sunday. In particular, it helps us make sense of how the crowds could be so enthusiastic about Jesus on Sunday and then so demanding of His crucifixion just a few days later on Friday. And in that, it helps us to avoid their error and instead embrace Jesus for all He is and does and commands and offers.

What I’m trying to say and what I want you to see, is that in a very real way John 6 is a prequel to Holy Week. At the beginning of John 6, like in the beginning of Holy Week, the crowds adored Jesus for seemingly giving them what they wanted (food in John 6 and a conquering king on Palm Sunday). But by the end of John 6, it had become clear that the food Jesus offered wasn’t quite what the crowds expected, even as Good Friday made clear that He wasn’t the kind of Messiah they expected either. And for that reason, the crowds began to turn from Jesus in our passage for this morning, just as they did in Jesus’ last days. In other words, this passage is a Palm Sunday passage in that it helps us make better sense of how Palm Sunday turned into Good Friday.

The main point of this sermon continues to be that Jesus will receive all who come to Him, granting them eternal life. But we must also see that (1) all must come to Him on His terms; only His terms, and all His terms, and (2) that the ability to understand and gladly accept Jesus’ terms is a gift of God. This proved too much for many who had set their minds on a different kind of Provider-Savior-King, but to some it was the words of eternal life.

To make sense of our passage for this morning, and to get out of it all that’s in there, we need to be familiar with all of John’s Gospel up to this point, and with the rest of John 6 especially. In case you’re just joining us or in case your memory isn’t awesome (like mine), I want to quickly bring you up to speed by providing a brief review.

The primary content of John’s Gospel is a bunch of stories about Jesus that most clearly show Him to be who He is—the long-promised Messiah/Christ. And the primary purpose of behind that was to help his readers (including you and me) trust in Jesus as the Messiah/Christ so that we can have everlasting life in Him.

To properly orient us, in the first 18 verses of the Gospel, John penned a kind of theological treatise—a kind of 10,000′ flyover—of the person and ministry of Jesus. In it, he declared Jesus to be the Word of God, the means by which God created all things, and the life and light that overcomes death and darkness. John went on to explain that even though Jesus had eternally existed as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, He had actually come to earth and taken on flesh so that He might dwell among us as an example to us, and then die and rise for us.

From there, from 10,000′ all the way down to the ground, John began to recount the main events of Jesus life and ministry. He started with the fact that God sent someone, John the Baptist, to announce the coming of the Messiah and prepare the way for Him. John wrote several paragraphs (in the middle of chapter 1) on the ministry of John the Baptist. We’re told that he had spent his time fearlessly calling God’s people to repentance, baptizing those who did, and announcing the imminent coming of the Messiah.

The Jewish leaders had already taken notice, sent men to investigate, and were growing in skepticism.

And then, in spectacularly humble fashion, Jesus appeared on the scene. When John the Baptist saw Jesus simply walking by, he immediately declared Him to be the One he’d promised, the One he’d been sent by God to prepare the way for, “the Lamb of God,” and the One who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.

Throughout His early ministry Jesus traveled throughout the entire nation of Israel. His ministry consisted of three main elements. He called a specific group of twelve men to follow Him (the Disciples) and revealed certain things only to them. Second, Jesus taught ever-growing crowds about the kingdom of God, calling them to follow Him as well. And third, Jesus performed many signs and wonders to bless people and validate His claims. In the first five chapters, He turned water into wine, cleared out the Temple of sinful money changers and exploitive businessmen, revealed to people the secrets of their hearts and minds, and healed the sick and dying. He also taught of the need to born again by the power of the Holy Spirit and that it was the love of the Father that sent Jesus into the world to save the world.

Early in His ministry, John recounts, Jesus even went into Samaria—a land of Jews who’d intermarried with pagan people and their gods, and who hated and were hated by the rest of the Jewish people because of that. He went there to proclaim the good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God to all who would receive it in faith.

And all of this happened as Jesus traveled from south to north and north to south over and over again.

During this time some truly believed in Him and followed Him. Some believed they believed, but showed themselves to be unbelieving believers. Some were initially curious, even following Jesus for a time, but were ultimately unconvinced or unwilling to accept all of Jesus’ terms. And some, especially among the Jewish leaders, were outright hostile, even devising plans to silence Jesus because they believed Him to be a blasphemer.

In simplest terms, John 1-5 is the story of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry on earth; one in which He made spectacular claims about being the Christ, performed spectacular signs to back up His claims, and was met by a myriad of responses ranging from whole-hearted devotion to murderous hatred.

Our passage for this morning can only be truly understood in light of all of that, along with the dramatic extension of it in the first 60 verses of chapter 6.

In those verses, John explained to his readers that a large crowd gathered in light of the remarkable things they’d heard from, heard about, and seen in Jesus already. When it became know that Jesus was in their town, they sought Him out to see and hear more. And Jesus didn’t disappoint. He received them and added spectacularly to the growing list of sings and wonders He performed in the power of God. Somewhere around 20,000 men, women, and children showed up. He taught them and then miraculously fed them all abundantly from a few pieces of fish and bread.

Amazed, the crowd sought to make Jesus king “by force.” Before they could, however, He sent His disciples away by boat and slipped away to pray by Himself.

While the amazement of the miraculous feeding was certainly still at a fever pitch in the Disciples, Jesus poured gas on their fire by walking halfway across the Sea of Galilee to meet them in their boat in the midst of a storm!

And with the amazement of the miraculous feeding still at a fever pitch in them, the next morning, noticing that Jesus and His Disciples were gone, many from the rest of the crowd set out to find Him. Once they did, they began questioning Jesus further. And here’s where we really need to lean in to understand our passage for today.

As was often the case, the crowds who had come to Jesus for one thing, got something else entirely. Instead of being flattered by their attention and pandering to them because of it, Jesus began by rebuking them for coming to Him for nothing more than to have Him fulfill the desires of their flesh. Instead, He said, they should have come to Him to be eternally satisfied. And that comes ultimately by eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking His blood (make sure you go back and read/listen to Pastor Mike’s sermon explaining what Jesus meant in last week’s sermon—he did a great job).

If that sounds kind of crazy to you, it did to those to whom Jesus first spoke those words as well. In fact, Jesus taught that sin’s corrupting effect is such that His words will only and always seem crazy to everyone apart from God drawing them into belief. And that’s where we pick up in our text this morning. The crowd that Jesus miraculously fed, enthusiastically sought Him after He left, found Him on the other side of the lake, but then eventually rejected Jesus because His teaching, claims, and terms were too much for them.

Look now to v.60 as we begin to make our way through this passage with all you just heard as the backdrop. Again, having just been told by Jesus that rather than offer unlimited fish and bread, He offered His flesh to eat and blood to drink, having just been told by Jesus that He was greater than Moses, having just been told by Jesus that He came down from heaven, and having just been told by Jesus that He alone offers eternal life and resurrection on the last day, the crowds were understandably a bit dazed and confused.

60 When many of his disciples heard it [therefore], they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”

Truly, that’s a lot to get your head and heart around. It’s what they’d been waiting and praying for, for centuries. But now that it was right in front of them, in an entirely unexpected form and with an entirely unexpected message, they doubted and complained rather that trusted and rejoiced. V.61 makes that plain.

61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this?”

Clearly, the response of the crowds was not one that honored Jesus or the Father. They shouldn’t have taken offense, but they did. They shouldn’t have doubted, but they did. They shouldn’t have complained, but they did. The passage tells us that these were people who had chosen in some sense to follow Jesus (“his disciples”), but also that they were now beginning to have second thoughts.

Jesus’ next reply only further upped the stakes. He basically said, “If you think that’s a big deal, wait until you hear what’s next. If you have a problem believing what you’ve already heard, you’re never going to believe what I’m about to tell you.

“Do you take offense at this [the things I’ve already said]? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?

What did Jesus mean by this question and why is it even harder to believe that He would ascend to where He was before? It means that if the crowds were having a hard time hearing and believing that Jesus came down from heaven (38) in order to offer Himself as food and drink (35), that He was greater than Moses (32), and as the only means by which mankind can be saved (39-40), then the idea of Him accomplishing all of that by dying on a cross, rising from the dead, and then ascending again to the Father’s side, would have seemed 1,000 times more scandalous and preposterous.

Death on a cross was for the lowest of the low, not the promised Messiah, they believed. The Messiah would save by conquering and destroying, not by being conquered and destroyed, they believed. If the very idea of Jesus being from God was too much, they’d never accept that He’d soon return to God after having been handed over to the most humiliating death.

Grace, the only reasonable response to this is to wonder, “Who, then, can be saved?!” Who can believe such things? How do we come to the place where this not only makes sense, but seems so obviously true that we’d bank our entire and eternal lives on it? Jesus’ next words confirmed the fact that this is the right question, in that in them, He answered that question.

63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

In other words, you can’t do it on your own. In your flesh, you cannot overcome the blinding, deadly effects of sin. It is the Holy Spirit of God alone that gives sight and life.

I absolutely love how simply one commentator explains this, “However much men and women are commanded to believe, and are held accountable for their unbelief, genuine coming to faith is never finally a matter of autonomous human decision” (Carson, PNTC, 302-303).

We must choose to trust in Jesus and if we don’t we will remain in our guilt, but the ability to make that choice, Jesus said repeatedly, is a gift of the Spirit. When the Spirit gives that gift, even the “hard-to-listen-to” things of Jesus become clear and sweet and life! Evidently, Jesus already knew there were many of His “disciples” who had not received this gift, for He said,

64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

In another example of His supernatural ability to know the hearts of all men, Jesus acknowledged the unbelief of many in the crowd (including one of the 12, Judas) and let them know He wasn’t surprised by it.

And here we are again. Jesus offers Himself to all of us. Holy Week is the great reminder of that. But He offers Himself to us on His terms—whole-hearted trust in all He is and says. Is that the kind of faith you have? Is it the kind you’re praying for, for your kids and neighbors, your family and friends? Is this what Holy Week is about for you or is it primarily nostalgic and sentimental?

One of the best ways to tell is by how you respond to the commands of Jesus, the Bible’s descriptions of the character of Jesus, and the trials that come your way. Do you view His commands as optional? Do you pick and choose which ones you’ll obey and when you’ll obey them? Do you focus on the more palatable claims of Jesus? Do you ignore the ones that speak of His holiness, wrath, and imperium? And what happens when things don’t go the way you planned? Is your happiness based on your sense of how things should be and go? Do you ever take “risks” for the sake of the gospel? Is your life primarily focused on maximizing your comfort and safety?

If your answer is increasingly no to these kinds of questions, it is a gift from God and your faith and salvation are genuine. But if you’re stuck in “yes” to many/most of these questions, please soberly consider v.66.

66 After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.

An important thing for us to see here is that just as there are unbelieving believers (people who believe they believe in Jesus, but don’t), there are also discipleless disciples (those who follow Jesus as long as His terms match theirs).

May the fact that different versions of this keep coming up in John’s Gospel be a warning to us. If you are a “disciple” of Jesus only where it nicely and neatly matches up with your own sensibilities, you’re probably a discipleless disciple. That may be jarring to hear, but it is good news in that by realizing it you are now invited to repent of your unbelief and turn to Jesus in genuine faith. Would you do so today?!

You may have heard the famous sermon where the pastor passionately reminds his people, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” The point of that catchy phrase is that although our Savior will die a criminal’s death on Friday, we need not fear, for He will rise from the dead on Sunday and all who longed for His appearing will be raised with Him! That is good news for all who truly believe.

Grace, this part of our passage is the reverse of that. If I had more fire in my logic, to help you truly appreciate the gravity of this passage, I’d bellow out, “It’s (Palm) Sunday, but Friday’s coming!” That is, for all of those who love Jesus only for what He can give (as did the crowds at the feeding of the 5k and during the triumphal entry), the suffering that comes with it will drive you away. If you only believe in Jesus when He calls you to things you’d do on your own, you will not stand the test of the trials that Jesus endured and promised His followers. If you only love the kind of Jesus who brings you the victory you’ve concocted on your own, you will turn away when you find that the “victory” comes through dying.

There were many who turned away because they had not truly received the Spirit’s gift of faith and, therefore, were unwilling and unable to see the greater glory of what Jesus offered than that which they desired in their flesh. But were there any who had received it and would remain? Jesus turned to the Twelve and posed that exact question to them.

67 So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?”

Again, there’s an important distinction we need to make. Not all disciples are disciples. In his first letter (1 John 2:19), John said it this way, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” True disciples are those who remain faithful, not those who are merely willing to follow Jesus on their own terms. True disciples accept all of Jesus and His commands as good and right and binding, and Jesus’ forgiveness for when we fail and His strength to repent.

Though many left and proved themselves to be discipleless disciples, Jesus’ true disciples, spoken for by Peter “68 answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.’”

May God grant all of us the life and sight to see these great, twin truths: (1) Jesus alone has the words of eternal life, and (2) Jesus is the Holy One of God, the promised Messiah who would save the world from our sins. He did for eleven of the twelve. But the chapter concludes by making it clear that one more would walk away though. In the most treacherous, treasonous act of all time, eventually Judas would join the crowd. Jesus knew this and still chose Judas to follow Him (vs.70-71). (We’ll consider that more carefully when we get to chapter 18).

I hope you are easily able to see the fact that this passage is a precursor to Holy Week, and as such it is a Palm Sunday passage. I hope you are humbled by the unbelief of so many as Jesus proverbially moved them from the high of Palm Sunday to the low of Good Friday, in order to reveal the (in)authenticity of their faith; not as a way of cutting them off forever, but as a way of inviting them into the genuine thing and of bringing them to the highest heights of Easter Sunday!

Jesus will receive all who come to Him, granting them eternal life. But all must come to Him on His terms; only His terms, and all His terms, and that the ability to understand and gladly accept Jesus’ terms is a gift of God.

It’s Sunday, but Friday’s coming. And for all who will received a mocked, beaten, crucified, resurrected Messiah, that’s good news because Friday is the only way to Sunday and the everlasting life Jesus purchased for us.

With that, let’s ask God for the race to trust in and obey Jesus where the crowd failed. Let’s eat His flesh and drink His blood; that is, let’s acknowledge that in Him alone is true satisfaction and salvation and let’s do so this morning by taking part in the meal He gave us for just that purpose.

John 6:41-59 So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me—46 not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus 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 you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.

Good morning. We are picking up right where Pastor Dave left off last week in chapter 6 with some hard sayings of Jesus. As he preached last week, there is thinning out process happening in this chapter. At the start of the chapter, there are likely 20,000 people who are fed from the five loaves and a few fish. Everyone is satisfied and amazed, but as things progress, Jesus will turn the screws tighter and tighter. And more people peel off from seeking Jesus. The requirements to follow Jesus are getting tighter. And they work to sort out who is truly willing to come to Jesus on the terms that Jesus lays out.

As we continue our story around Jesus claiming I Am the Bread of Life, we find Israel in the wilderness grumbling. The Jews continue asking Jesus questions about his identity, and his abilities. Each question gets a reply from Jesus along with conditions for coming to Jesus. Jesus offers eternal life, but it must be on his terms. Will we humbly come to Christ in faith? Are we willing to do it no matter the cost?

The outline of our passage is based on the Jews asking questions and then Jesus responding. Notice he doesn’t necessarily answer their direct questions, but he further explains what he means when he says, ‘I am the Bread of Life’. As he invites people to come to him, he gives two conditions for them to come, which are both marked by the word ‘unless’. The first one is in verse 44, no one comes to Jesus, unless, the Father draws him.

The second is in verse 53, ‘unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.’ In other words, unless you do these things you will not receive life. The promise is life eternal, but it must be on the terms that Jesus gives, not our own.

As we work through the terms that Jesus lays down, ask yourself, ‘where do I get hung up on what Jesus demands?’ Is it doctrine? Is it something that our culture thinks is weird? Are there places where I’m just more comfortable with less than what Jesus calls me to?

Father in heaven, we thank you for this day. We thank you for sunshine and the sound of birds. I thank you for the sparkling jewel-like snow you have given us. Thank you for the glimpses of spring and resurrection. Thank you that we can gather around your Holy Word. We thank you that your word is perfect. It accomplishes exactly what you purpose it to do. Thank you for salvation. Thank you that you have revealed specific things about how salvation works and that we see pieces of that in our passage. Please help me to preach your Word clearly and faithfully. May anything that is not true fall to the ground. But in everything that is true and profitable apply to our hearts through your Spirit. May Christ, the true bread of life, the Great I AM be magnified this morning. Amen.

Before we get to our passage, I want to go back to Exodus 16. This will give us a few themes that John pulls forward into his gospel. Listen and see if you notice how John uses them in his account. If you aren’t’ familiar with the story or don’t remember, exodus 16 takes place shortly after God has rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. They make their way into the wilderness and begin traveling. But they people begin to second-guess themselves and wonder if being back in Egypt would be better. ‘At least there was food there, right? We’re gonna die out here’. Kids, I want you to listen for a repeated word in this passage:

So Moses and Aaron said to all the people of Israel, “At evening you shall know that it was the LORD who brought you out of the land of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you shall see the glory of the LORD, because he has heard your grumbling against the LORD. For what are we, that you grumble against us?” 8 And Moses said, “When the LORD gives you in the evening meat to eat and in the morning bread to the full, because the LORD has heard your grumbling that you grumble against him—what are we? Your grumbling is not against us but against the LORD.”

Ex. 16:9 Then Moses said to Aaron, “Say to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, ‘Come near before the LORD, for he has heard your grumbling.’” 10 And as soon as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud. 11 And the LORD said to Moses, 12 “I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel. Say to them, ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. Then you shall know that I am the LORD your God.’”

Now let’s return to John chapter 6. Kids, what word did you hear repeated? This is our starting point for today’s passage:

So the Jews grumbled about him,

We have the Jews, God’s chosen people, grumbling. And why did they grumble? Because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” Did you notice the parallel with exodus?

We have a bunch of Israelites fed in the wilderness, questioning what is going on. Just as the Israelites didn’t fully understand the Manna in the wilderness, the Jews in our story don’t understand. The word Manna means ‘what is it?’. When they encounter the Bread of Life, their response is basically, what is it? As we saw last week, the Jews think they know who Jesus is. They are familiar with their fathers receiving bread in the wilderness. They know that Joseph is Jesus’ father. But Jesus is going to show them that they actually don’t understand. Again we have an I Am statement. This man is claiming he came down from heaven. Who does he think he is?

In John’s gospel the Jews miss the significance of Jesus many times. But it’s not always from sheer ignorance. They know the Old Testament. Look at verse 59, you can see where this discourse takes place. It’s in the synagogue at Capernaum. The Jews understood the Law of Moses. Anyone taking the Lord’s name, I AM, in vain, should be stoned. Is this guy really saying, ‘I AM’? Did we hear that right? This is the same guy who is Joseph’s son. He’s just a normal man like us.

Jesus replies, but he doesn’t directly answer their questions either. He begins, just as the LORD did in Exodus 16 by commanding the people not to grumble. And then he puts out the terms for coming to Jesus:

44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.

No one can come to Jesus. The first part of the condition is that it is an exclusive condition. No one can come to Jesus. A better, more accurate way to say it is, no one is able to come. No one comes, because no one is able to come. This is the result of the curse of Adam. Even if we tried, we cannot come. And worse, we don’t want to come anyway. The Fall has cursed all of our faculties, including our desires.

Romans 8 makes this clear: 7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. 8 Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

Our sinful flesh has no desire to please God. We have no desire to seek God. And we don’t naturally want what God wants. While the problem is obvious that no one is able to come to Jesus on their own, our God is gracious. Despite man’s inability, God provides a way for us to come: The Father must draw us.

This might be a hard saying for some of you. You might hear the idea of the Father drawing people and that sounds hard. And while we do have a responsibility to come, we must begin with what the Bible says. And in our sinfulness, we require God to act first. And in his mercy, he draws us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The great pastor and theologian, John Calvin describes it this way:

‘we ought not wonder if many refuse to embrace the gospel; because no man will ever of himself be able to come to Christ, God must first approach him by his Spirit; and hence it follows that all are not drawn, but that God bestows this grace on those whom he has elected’ (John Calvin. Commentary on John. CCEL)

God is not forcing people who would not want to come. Nor is He overlooking people who would have otherwise come. Listen to the rest of the quote from Calvin:

‘it is not violent, so as to compel men by external force; but still it is a powerful impulse of the Holy Spirit, which makes men willing who formerly were unwilling and reluctant.’ (Calvin’s commentary on John. CCEL)

Here’s another way to say it: The bad news is that no one is able to come. But the good news is that the Triune God has made a way for people to come. Your family history doesn’t matter. You can’t claim the goodness of your parents and you aren’t denied because of a bad family situation. Your knowledge of facts doesn’t matter. Your amount of good deeds won’t gain approval from Jesus, nor will your load of bad deeds disqualify you from coming to Jesus. What matters is that you are willing to come to Jesus in full humility and faith.

Jesus begins with a very exclusive statement that excludes all of us and all of humanity. No one is able to come, apart from the grace of God. That is true. But within this is another, expansive idea. Verse 45 promises that all people will be taught. And that everyone who hears and learns from the Father will come to Jesus. This is a quote from Isaiah 54:13. It’s part of a passage promising the New covenant. It is similar to Jeremiah 31 where the Spirit will write the law on people’s hearts.

The point is that while no one came on their own, the people the Father draws is an inclusive and expansive group. He will draw from all nations. And everyone he draws will come. This is jarring to the Jews and this will continue to develop in John’s gospel.

Then Jesus adds this statement in verse 46 about his credentials. The Jews think they know his background as the son of Joseph. But Jesus is now claiming that he is from the Father. Jesus came to bring life to all who the Father draws. And to reveal the Father to the world.

Now Jesus returns to the original question about bread from heaven.

47 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.

Jesus again claims he is the I AM and then compares two kinds of bread. The Jews are appealing to the wrong kind of bread. The manna brought temporary nourishment. But they had to eat it daily. And it still couldn’t provide eternal life. Everyone in the wilderness died. That bread wasn’t meant to give eternal life. Jesus is offering something greater than manna. He’s offering himself.

In verse 31 they appealed to the wrong father. Now they are staring the true, living bread come from the Father in the face, and they don’t understand. Jesus is not excluding the Jews from salvation. They just don’t want to come to salvation on the terms of Christ. Ask yourself again, am I willing ot come on Jesus’ terms? Do I want life in Christ or am I content with less?

Jesus turns the screws again when he says the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

You can almost hear the air go out of the synagogue. It’s like the party scene in a movie when suddenly the record skips and everyone pauses. Did Jesus just say what I think he said? This leads to the next question.

Any doubt about what Jesus said is now removed. He doubles down on what he just said in v 52.

“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 you.

If Jesus had a chance to back pedal or soften his words, he doesn’t take it. He says different versions of the same thing six times. The main idea is: Feed on my flesh or you have no life.

When we hear eating flesh and drinking blood, that sounds strange. But to a Jew who knew his Old Testament, this is incredibly troubling. Eating flesh was not to be done. In Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, the covenantal curses mention eating of children. And in one of the most horrific episodes in Israel’s history, these curses are realized in 2 Kings 6 and Jeremiah 19. This is hard to deal with, but it’s what scripture says.

It is the same with the blood. After Noah got out of the ark in Genesis 9, God made a covenant with Noah and his family which permitted eating meat, but forbade eating the blood. This is because the life of the creature is in the blood. This idea is repeated in Leviticus 17.

“If any one of the house of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. 11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life. Lev 17:10-11

Again, what Jesus says is hard, especially when it appears to contradict God’s Law. But Jesus has something different in mind. Something more glorious than a weird meal that violates God’s law. But the Jews again miss who Jesus is. Jesus is not merely a man with some cryptic sayings.

So what does this mean? How do we understand Jesus telling the people to feed on his flesh and drink his blood?

Historically some have interpreted Jesus’ words to mean that unless you take the Lord’s Supper you have no life in you. This is a passage that the Roman catholic church bases their view of the Lord’s supper or Communion. Their understanding of the bread and the blood are informed by Jesus’ words here. They believe that the bread and the wine are transformed into Jesus’ body and blood during Communion. This is wrong and it would mean that Jesus is sacrificed continually at Communion. The Bible is clear that it was a one time sacrifice for sins and replaced the need for perpetual sacrifices. But you can see how taking Jesus’ words literally would get someone there.

Now, all of the symbols of the Lord’s Supper are here. Jesus is talking about his body and blood, eating and drinking. The connections are obvious.

In the timeline of John’s Gospel, Jesus has not yet instituted the Lord’s supper. At the same time, John’s original audience would already have Matthew, Mark and Luke. They would have already participated in the Lord’s Supper in a local gathering. So it’s too much to say that John is specifically talking about the Lord’s Supper here, but we miss the rich connection if we ignore it completely too.

So what is the right meaning of Jesus’ words? By feed, Jesus means to believe. Believe all that Jesus is and all that His Word says. Israel was instructed to leave no manna until the morning. Now Jesus is calling for that same kind of eating. We are to believe all that Jesus is, does, and says. These are Jesus’ terms and we either take them and get life, or reject them and perish.

Jesus is also pointing past the Lord’s Supper to the cross. The place where he would take on the covenant curses. The place where his body was destroyed. The place where His blood would be poured out on the altar, just as Leviticus 17 says. Jesus flips everything around at the cross. His blood brings life. And through his death and offering his body and blood, we are nourished. We receive life. We are brought into covenant with God through the Son.

Hebrews 10 connects the flesh and blood to the cross for us: Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh,

We get access into the holy places through Christ’s blood and flesh. Come to Jesus. Come on his terms. Feed on the true flesh and the true blood.

These sayings are hard. Jesus tells us that if we do not come on his terms, we will have no life. But Jesus also gives promises in these passages too: He promises life, the resurrection and that he will abide in us.

Jesus says unless we feed on his flesh and drink his blood we have no life in us. But the opposite is also true. When we come to the Son on his terms, we get life. If we trust Christ and all that he says and commands, we do have life. New life is not merely eternal life someday far in the distance. We have life now, meaning we are alive to the things of God. We view everything in this world with new eyes. Have you experienced this? WE get new priorities. The things you cared about prior to faith in Christ are less appealing. We get new relationships to live life together. Our existing relationships like our spouses or children suddenly carry greater importance. New life brings new angles to see Creation. We can see it as a gift from God instead of some impersonal force.

We also have the promise of eternal life. In the larger passage Jesus promises multiple times that he will raise up his people on the last day. He says so again in verse 54. If we have something even better ahead, what can death do to us? We can work hard now, knowing that it is not wasted in a meaningless life with nothing afterwards. We can look ahead to new glorified bodies dwelling in the presence of Christ the King.

Jesus also promises that he will abide in us and us in him. Abide is one of John’s favorite words. Abide means to remain. Jesus is promising that if we feed on him, he will remain with us and we will remain in him. Jesus will not leave the people whom the Father draws. Remember this truth. Remember that Jesus promises to be with us always. This matters as we turn to look at how to respond to these hard sayings.

Jesus is claiming that he is God come from heaven. He says that no one is able to come unless the Father draws them. Then Jesus claims that the only way to true life is by feeding on his flesh and drinking his blood.

This passage doesn’t tell us exactly how the Jews responded. They were grumbling and quarreling with Jesus, but it doesn’t say how things ended. But this passage, along with the major sweep of John’s gospel shows that many Jews refused to accept the hard sayings of Jesus. They refused to accept the claims that he was making. Even some of his disciples will leave after hearing these things. How will you respond to the terms Jesus gives to receive eternal life?

What will you do when you come across a hard teaching of Jesus that you don’t naturally like? What will you do when Christ’s word calls us to do hard things in his name? What will we do when others hear these hard things and think bad of us? Here’s four ways to respond to these hard sayings:

First, we need the Word of God. We need more than a 5 minute quiet time. We need to be known and shaped by the Word. We need to thoroughly know the entire story of scripture. We need to know God’s law and how to apply it well. As we do, our lives and doctrine becomes more aligned with God’s. We will see more and more who Jesus truly is and his terms will be our terms too.

Second, recognize that following Jesus will cost you. Prepare yourself. It might begin with something simple. Maybe you are following Jesus, but giving your testimony and getting baptized seems too uncomfortable. Coming to Christ means coming on his terms. This is a simple first step out of your comfort zone by obeying Jesus.

It might mean sharing the gospel with someone that might lead to awkwardness or even rejection. There are worse things imaginable.

Third, and related, we need to brace ourselves for hardship. Let’s be honest. We live in a culture that hates God and the things of God. There is almost nowhere in our world that is not stained, let alone dominated, with our secular humanist culture. You can’t watch a children’s show or a football game without seeing the wickedness of our culture on full display. It’s everywhere. Conflict with a Christian worldview is almost unavoidable. It doesn’t mean we go looking for clashes or stirring up controversy. It will find us easily enough. What will you do when a hard saying of Jesus conflicts with what your company wants you to do? Or your family member wants to celebrate things that Jesus condemns?

What if people hear that we love Jesus? What if they hear that we feed on his flesh and eat his blood so to speak? We will be called strange. We will be seen as intolerant, hateful or even cultish. Are you willing to identify more with Jesus than approval from others around you?

Yesterday in masculine mandate we were discussing the cultural and moral pressures in the workplace. We all see the direction things are heading. There will likely come a day where your job will come into conflict with something that Jesus says. Where is your line? Is it pronouns? Is it refusing diversity and inclusion trainings? Work it out before you are forced to discover where your line is. Are you prepared to take a stand for the glory of Christ?

When Jesus had the chance to nuance and soften the blow, he instead doubled down. We should do similar. Maybe there are times when we don’t soften the blow, but lean in. When someone asks ‘Do you believe God made everything in 6 days?’ Yes. I also believe in floods and giants and great man-swallowing fish. And guess what else? I believe a man rose from the grave.

While these scenarios are new for our culture, things are not new for the people of God. The first century church was believed to be cannibals because they ate the body and drank the blood of Jesus. Even the saints in Hebrews 11 faced hard things.

36 Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated— 38 of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

39 And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, 40 since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.

They weren’t all conquerors. They didn’t always make the right decisions. But by God’s grace many of them found courage at the right times.

Finally, pray for courage and faith in the hard sayings. When you come across a hard doctrine, ask God for knowledge and wisdom. When you see hard things in your family, neighborhood, or workplace, come to Jesus in prayer. Ask our Great High Priest for courage. Joshua was commanded to be strong and courageous, but that isn’t something we can work up in our own power.

These things are hard, and we are living in hard times. Jesus told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him. These hard sayings in John 6 are just the same. Will we come to Jesus, fully and only on his terms?

If you will not come to Jesus on his terms-all of his terms-you will not live. But if you do, you will live. You will experience new life now, and eternally. And Jesus will abide with us forever.

But remember one more time that coming to Christ means new life. And Jesus will abide with us now and forever.

Father, we thank you for drawing people to your Son. Thank you for giving us your Spirit. We confess we are unworthy of salvation. We are unable and unwilling to come to Jesus apart from your intervention. May we treasure the grace you have given us. I pray that you would nourish us with true bread and strengthen us for whatever awaits us this week, this year and beyond. Make us a resilient people who are prepared to endure hardship. Grant us courage to speak the name of Jesus in all areas of life. May we be willing to be seen as weird, strange or worse without compromising in our faith. May we see beyond our temporary circumstances to the glories of eternal life. May we not waste our temporary circumstances. I ask that you would bless us as a church. I pray that our strangeness to the world would be a pleasing aroma to you and a beautiful picture to the dying world.

John 6:22-40 On the next day the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone. 23 Other boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. 24 So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum, seeking Jesus.

25 When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” 26 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.” 28 Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” 29 Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 30 So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? 31 Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” 32 Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34 They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. 36 But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. 37 All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

I wonder what the most challenging passage in the Bible is for you? For many it is one of the verses that deal with God’s relationship to suffering or His choice of certain people to be saved. For others it’s one of the passages that speak to the terrors of hell or the wrath of God.

The first passage I remember being really stumped by is Mark 7:24-28. In it, a Gentile woman (I didn’t know what that meant) “came to Jesus and fell down at his feet”…and “begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.” I simply had no categories for Jesus’ reply. “He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’ 28 But she answered him, ‘Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.'” And somehow that convinced Jesus to heal her daughter.

Regardless of what comes to mind when you consider this question, the fact is that there are passages in the Bible that are hard to understand. Even Peter admits that when it comes to Paul’s writing, declaring, “some things in them that are hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:16).

Well, most serious lists of the top five toughest passages in the Bible will probably include John 6:53-54, “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 you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” In fact, it is so difficult that, as we’ll see in a couple weeks, “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?'” Therefore, “After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.”

What in the world was Jesus talking about?! We won’t get to that clause until next week, but knowing that’s coming is necessary if we are going to really make sense of this passage. 22-58 is one big unit and should be covered together. Because there’s so much in it, though, we’ll need to split it up across a couple of weeks. By the time we get to the end of the passage (next week), I hope to help you make sense of it. More than that, even, I hope to help you see that it is really, really good news. Between the two sermons we’ll see (this week) many of those who were miraculously fed by Jesus enthusiastically seeking Jesus, gladly finding Jesus, and then (next week, largely because of the passage I just read) angrily rejecting Jesus.

There are two main points of this difficult passage. The first is that Jesus will be accepted on His terms—all of His terms and only His terms—or none at all. And the second, is that accepting Jesus on His terms—no matter how strange or severe they seem—is the one and only path to eternal life. The main takeaways for us, then, are to find Jesus’ terms and eagerly accept them entirely! Let’s pray that it would be so.

The relationship between Jesus and the Jewish leaders was strained, but consistent. He continually called them out for their hypocrisy and they continually accused Him of various kinds of blasphemy. Steady tension. The relationship between Jesus and the masses, though, was a bit more complicated. In ways and for reasons that are often unclear, the crowds seemed to seamlessly move back and forth between adoration and abhorrence; between praise and persecution. One minute they loved Jesus and the next minute they despised Him. Even in this passage, the crowds would seek Jesus at significant expense one day and then reject Him entirely 24 hours later.

Having just been miraculously fed by Jesus, the people became so enthralled with Jesus that they tried to make Him king (6:15). And although Jesus slipped away before they could do so, the crowd was not yet done with Him. They were still impressed enough by Him that they were determined to track Him down. That’s where v.22 picks up.

22 On the next day the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone. 23 Other boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. 24 So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum, seeking Jesus.

There is about to be a subtle fulfillment of prophecy here. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus told His hearers, “Everyone…who seeks [Me] finds [Me]” (Matthew 7:8). In one sense, that’s awesome. Seek Jesus, people of Grace, and you will find Him. Discouraged moms, seek Jesus and you will find Him. Bored kids, seek Jesus and you will find Him. Abdicating husbands, broken sinners, lonely singles, fearful seniors, uncertain seekers, and angry skeptics, seek Jesus and you will find Him. He wants to be found by you. He will be found by you. And as we see in our passage, hungry, curious crowds, seek Jesus and you will find Him. Indeed, as He promised, the crowd that sought Him, found Him, even as will you and I, if we will truly seek Him.

But in finding Jesus, the crowd helps us to learn another lesson still. The real blessing is not in finding Jesus, but in wanting Jesus once you’ve found Him; or in wanting the Jesus you find. Impressed with what they’d seen and heard, the crowd sought Jesus across a day and a lake. But the irony is that once they found Him, they would quickly rejected Him because He wasn’t what they were really looking for. They had created an idea of Jesus that they liked from a combination of the Scriptures and their own selfish desires, but the real Jesus was different. He didn’t come for the reasons they’d set their hearts on and He didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

We’ll come back to this, and really press in on it next week, but for now, Grace, be careful, then, to seek Jesus for who He really is and what He really offers (which is by far greater), not who you have made Him to be.

What, then, was it that the crowds found when they found Jesus? When the crowd finally came to Jesus, He made four main pronouncements that began to turn them away from Him. Jesus commanded them to seek true satisfaction (1) from Him, (2) through Him, (3), and in Him, and He told them that (4) doing so is a gift from God.

Seek True Satisfaction from Me (25-27)

Fresh off of being miraculously fed by Jesus, an unsuccessful attempt to make Him king, and a fairly decent night-time boat ride, the crowd who sought Jesus finally came to Him and began questioning Him. Look at v.25.

25 When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”

That’s kind of a strange question, since they were with Jesus the night before. Nevertheless, the highly-excited and motivated crowd made their way up to Jesus, asked Him a question, and most likely expected Jesus to be impressed by the fact that they were impressed by Him. They were used to people longing to be popular and to receive the kind of attention they were giving Jesus. They were used to dealing with leaders who could be controlled by their flattery and adulation; by the whims of the masses.

On the contrary, however, Jesus uniquely and completely lived for the pleasure of His Father. In addition, Jesus saw through their unbelieving belief. He knew they were not there for the right reasons and so He began to dissect their false belief. He began to help them to see the true state of their hearts. In simplest terms, Jesus began by telling them both why they were (wrongly) there and why they should have been there.

If questioned, I wonder how a spokesperson from the crowd would have answered the question: Why did you come? What do you want from Jesus? In other words, I wonder how closely the reason the crowds believed themselves to be there matched up with the actual reason they were there. I wonder largely because you and I find ourselves in this position all the time. We often have far more confidence in our own understanding of our hearts and minds—of our thoughts and motives—than we should. Recognizing this, the apostle Paul said, (1 Corinthians 4:4) “I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.” Let us learn from this, Grace. Let’s be humble, read God’s Word, pray often, and ask others to help us see ourselves rightly.

Regardless of what they believed about themselves, they were actually there, Jesus said, simply because He had filled their bellies. “26 Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.’“

This is a subtle, double condemnation. It would have been insufficient for the crowd to simply follow Jesus because of His miraculous signs. Jesus was more than a sign-worker, but at least in acknowledging that, the crowd would be closer to Jesus’ true nature. But Jesus accused the crowd of being even more base still. Their appetite was entirely physical. They were satisfied by mere physical food—fish and bread. Again, then, the crowd had followed Jesus—wrongly—simply because they ate their fill of physical food. And worse still, as we saw at the end of last week, they were content with a king of a merely physical kingdom as well.

Rather than that, the crowds should have followed Jesus because true nourishment, true satisfaction comes from Him alone (not the things—the fish and bread, or physical victory—He could give them). Instead of seeking short-term belly-food, and worldly victory, then, they were meant to seek everlasting soul-food and a heavenly king/dom.

27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.’”

Grace, many, many things promise true satisfaction. It’s hard to drive down the road, listen to the radio or a podcast, pull up a website, or watch any kind of media without encountering some advertisement promising to fulfill your longings (often longings you didn’t even realize you had until you saw the ad). It’s probably hard for most of us to understand what it was like for many in Jesus’ day to not be certain of food or water on a regular basis. The promise of food and water that never ran out (which we seem to have), would have been understandably appealing. Again, however, Jesus was offering something more; much, much more.

Jesus offered food that would never get stale or moldy and that would never run out. He was offering to give them, as confirmed by the Father’s “seal”, food that “endures to eternal life.” He alone could give that food, and He was offering it to them. True satisfaction would come only from Jesus. Do you want to be truly, fully, and eternally satisfied? Jesus, and only Jesus, can give that to you. It comes from Him alone.

This was a mild rebuke of their desires, but it was the beginning, as I mentioned, of Jesus’ dissection of the hearts and motives of the crowds that would soon turn them away almost entirely.

Even if they were still confused, the crowds seemed interested. Jesus’ offer of imperishable, enduring food was genuinely appealing. And Jesus’ command to “work for” it seemed appropriate. Therefore, they asked, “28’What must we do, to be doing the works of God?”

The crowds had worked significantly to make their way to Jesus the day before, to seek Him (possibly through the night), to acquire passage on numerous boats to cross the Sea of Galilee (to where they only assumed Jesus had gone), and then to finally track Him down when they made shore. And all of that work, as we just saw, for merely physical things. Jesus had just corrected that faulty goal. Here He would confront their faulty understanding of the work necessary to achieve the right goal.

29 Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”

I have often wondered why working in our own strength to please God is so often our natural impulse. Why do we almost always assume that we need to work for God’s blessing? Whatever the reason Jesus left no doubt as to the misguided nature of this impulse. As He’d already done on numerous occasions, Jesus clarified for His hearers that salvation and satisfaction belongs to those who believe in Jesus, not those who work hard enough for God.

God saves and satisfies sinners only through the “work” of believing in Jesus. This too, as we’re about to see, was not what the crowd had come to get from Jesus. They came to Him asking what they needed to do to honor God, and Jesus turned it around from their works to their trust in His. And the result of Jesus being increasingly clear on who He was and what He offered was a growing wedge between expectation and reality, and consequently between the crowd’s former approval and increasing disproval.

The third aspect of Jesus’ teaching that continued to unsettle the crowd away concerned further clarification of what God really wanted from His people. If they were to accept Jesus’ teaching that honoring God was not about what they needed to do, but who Jesus was and what He would do, they were going to need some proof. Therefore, they asked, “30Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform?

What sign do you do?! What work do you perform?! How is that even a question?! There were there because Jesus had miraculously fed them and 19,000 of their closest friends less than 24 hours earlier. It sounds like a strange question at first (and it really is), but their follow-up question (and Jesus’ reply to it) helps us make better sense of their mindset.

“31 Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

It seems that they had made a connection between the food Jesus had given them and the manna God had given their ancestors. The idea is that they were wondering if Jesus was greater than Moses, since His claims certainly were. Moses gave the Israelites food to eat in supernatural ways, but he didn’t make the claims about himself or his food that Jesus did. It’s as if they were saying to Jesus, “That was great, Jesus, but we’ve seen this kind of thing before. You’re going to have to do better than that if you want us to believe the claims you’re making.”

Jesus’ reply suggests that He took their statement to mean something like that. And sure enough, Jesus didn’t back down, for He was/is greater than Moses.

32 Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

The Jews of Jesus’ day consistently revered Moses to the point that he seemed to functionally overshadow God for them. Jesus corrected this error in explaining that the manna they ate was not from Moses from God. More fundamentally and more spectacularly, though, Jesus corrected an even greater error. Jesus, not Moses, manna, or fishes and loaves, is the true bread from God; the source of all true nourishment! True salvation and satisfaction are not only from Him and through Him, they are IN Him. They ARE Him! What an awesome claim. What an awesome reality.

Grace, let’s be a people who cry out continually and together for God to help us stop looking elsewhere for the things that are found only in Jesus. How much time, energy, money, and mental bandwidth to we waste day after day looking in the wrong places for the wrong things, when the right things are all found in Jesus alone?! (Romans 7:24-25) Who will deliver [us] from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Predictably, however, the crowd still didn’t get it. In language strikingly similar to the woman at the well, “34 They said to him, ‘Sir, give us this bread always.'” Just as the woman couldn’t imagine anything more than some special kind of physical water, these people couldn’t imagine anything more than some special kind of physical bread. If our own hearts weren’t so fickle, it’d be staggering how secular the very people of God had become.

Leaving no doubt, and casting aside any remaining subtlety, “35 Jesus said to them [plainly], ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.'” As we’ve seen over and over, Jesus declared Himself to be the true sustenance, salvation, and satisfaction of every soul. This means that it is never physical food that truly satisfies your belly, it is Jesus doing so through the food. And more importantly, it means that it is never a person or experience or purchase that satisfies your soul. At best, those things merely point to the soul-satisfaction found only in Jesus.

Grace, it’s important for us to see that more than simply addressing the question of His inquisitors and correcting their errors, Jesus was revealing His truest nature. This is the first of seven “I am” statements made by Jesus in John’s Gospel.

1. “I am the bread of life” (6:35).
2. “I am the light of the world” (8:12).
3. “I am the door of the sheep” (10:7).
4. “I am the good shepherd” (10:11).
5. “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25).
6. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (14:6).
7. “I am the true vine” (15:1).

Perhaps most significantly of all, in John 8:58 Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”

It is in this Jesus that all our souls’ desire are satisfied and all are sins are forgiven.

In light of all we’ve seen and heard from Jesus, in light of all the ways He taught and corrected and taught and corrected, and in light of the several signs and wonders, we have to come back to the question of how those who walked among Him, the very children of the Promise, could miss all of this so thoroughly. Or, conversely, we’re right to wonder why some—like the disciples—really did believe.

In the final passage for this morning (36-40), and in conclusion, Jesus offered another piece to that puzzle. The gist of His answer is that seeking and finding satisfaction from, through, and in Him is a gift from God.

36 But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. 37 All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

Jesus will become even clearer in v.44 (“no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”), but the underpinning of that claim is found in the verses we just read (36-40). In them Jesus reiterated the problem; namely that even though the crowds saw and heard supernatural things from Him, they did not believe. But as I said, in them Jesus also started to unpack the reason: all, but only, those given to Jesus by the Father will come to Jesus. All but only those given to Jesus by the Father will understand His teaching, appreciate His miracles, believe in His name, and follow His commands…forever. For none given to Jesus by the Father will miss Jesus or forsake Jesus. None will be lost. All will be raised. And all according to the sovereign, gracious will of God.

As I mentioned last week. There is mystery here, but there is also clarity.

Jesus taught the crowds that salvation and satisfaction were from Him, through Him, and ultimately in Him alone. Those three things really put a wedge between Him and the worldly kingdom and worldly satisfaction-driven crowds. And yet, the real dividing line is found in the next few verses, in Jesus’ command for all His followers to eat His flesh and drink His blood.

Jesus was different and more than anyone expected. His claims and charges were different and more than anyone expected. As we saw in this passage (and have seen in several prior passages) Jesus will be accepted on His terms—all of His terms and only His terms—or none at all. And we’ve also seen (today and previously) that accepting Jesus on His terms—no matter how strange or severe they seem—is the one and only path to eternal life. The crowds ebbed and flowed in their desire to see and hear these things from Jesus.

Consequently, in a foreshadowing of the shocking change between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, the very crowd who’d sought to make Jesus king the day before, would reject Him today. The same enthusiasm that sought Jesus yesterday would turn to distancing themselves from Him today. There were a number of reasons for this (which will become clearer next week), but the heart of them all was that seeking and finding satisfaction from, through, and (ultimately) in Jesus is a gift from God. Let’s ask Him for that gift now—to remain in us and be given through us to all who will receive it. Amen.

John 6:16-21 When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, 17 got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. 18 The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. 19 When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were frightened. 20 But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” 21 Then they were glad to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going.

You may remember that John’s Gospel is often spoken of as consisting of two main parts: the Book of Signs (1-12) and the Book of Glory (13-20). I imagine the reason for the naming of the first part is becoming increasingly clear. While it is generally agreed that there are seven primary signs—turning water into wine (2:1–11), cleansing the Temple (2:12–17), healing the official’s son (4:46–54), healing the paralytic (5:1–15), feeding the five thousand (6:1–15), healing the blind man (9), and raising Lazarus from the dead (11)—there are a number of other “lesser” signs spread throughout the Gospel as well. One of those (“lesser” signs) is found in our passage for this morning. Almost immediately after feeding the five thousand, Jesus (miraculously) took a long walk on the surface of the Sea of Galilee. Even after what they just witnessed (the feeding of the five thousand), the disciples were still “frightened” by this new manifestation of the glory of Jesus.

To help us get the most out of this passage, I’ve divided my sermon into two main sections. In the first, we’ll take a look at the text itself. And in the second section, we’ll consider four staggering biblical-theological themes embedded in these six short verses. The main thrust of the text is that the glory of Jesus is greater than you can ever imagine. And the main takeaway for us is the need to learn to love all of who Jesus is and live entirely in light of it. Let’s pray

After feeding the 5,000, John 6:15 ends with John letting his readers know that “Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” John doesn’t mention any kind of conversation with the disciples before withdrawing. He kind of makes it seem like Jesus just slid away and left the disciples wondering what to do. If we didn’t know any better, v.16 kind of seems like they waited around for a while for Jesus to return, but “When evening came” and Jesus still wasn’t back,” his disciples went down to the sea, 17 got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum.”

But, John’s account is not all we have to go on. Matthew and Mark’s Gospels both speak of this as well. And Matthew’s (14:22-24) adds an important detail.

22 Immediately [after feeding the 5,000] [Jesus] made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray.

In other words, far from slipping away silently, Jesus gave clear instructions to the disciples. And far from accidentally missing the appointed departure time, Matthew tells us that sending the disciples off ahead of Him was an intentional act by Jesus to give Himself more time to pray and to perform another miracle (this time for the disciples alone).

Jesus sent the disciples ahead of Him in the boat, indicating that He would catch up with them at a later time. Night came, and darkness with it. “It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them” (17b). We have to imagine that the disciples were used to this by now. It was fairly common for Jesus to operate on a timeline not entirely understood by the disciples. We’re meant to imagine that they just continued to do what Jesus commanded them until Jesus said otherwise—a great lesson and example for us as well. We may want to know more of God’s will than He means us to have; and so we simply continue to obey.

Consistent with that pattern, the disciples simply continued making their way across the sea. As they did, however, v.18 tells us that “The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing.” It seems that this continued on for some distance and some time. According to v.19, the disciples rowed through darkness and wind for “about three or four miles.” The Sea of Galilee is around eight miles wide, which mean that the disciples would have been almost exactly in the middle of the lake. Again, Matthew adds a detail that John left out. Not only were they in the middle of the lake, but it was also the darkest hour of the night (somewhere around 3am).

It was at then that “they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat.” From their reaction (which we’ll consider in just a minute), we can tell that this was not at all what they were expecting. Jesus commanded them to get in the boat, head across the sea ahead of Him, and to wait for Him to catch up later. It’s not obvious how the disciples would have understood that (would He walk around the lake, catch another boat, something else?), but it is obvious that this wasn’t it. In all seriousness, who would have expected that? How could anyone have expected that. And so, as we can easily imagine, “they were frightened” (19).

It’s interesting to me that the disciples were not at all afraid (in any Gospel account) of being on rough water, in a windstorm, in the dark, in the middle of the night, but they were afraid when they saw Jesus. Matthew and Mark explain that when they first saw Him, they assumed He was a ghost, but it seems that was only because they had no category for a person walking on water. In other words, their fear was more tied to this fuller revelation of who Jesus was than anything else.

It’s really hard not to think of the famous line about Aslan here. “Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr. Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

In other words, Jesus’ glory is of such a kind that genuine awe and wonder, even a kind of fear, are part of an appropriate response to meeting Him. Having been given no small glimpse of that glory, the disciples were right to tremble. And yet, as is always the case for those who trust in Him, Jesus “said to them, ‘It is I; do not be afraid’” (v.20).

There are, perhaps, no sweeter words that anyone can hear, Grace. In the midst of our doubt and difficulty, in the midst of our pain and persecution, in the midst of our suffering and sadness, in the midst of our fear and failure, there is nothing more healing and helping than to hear our Savior say, ‘It is I; do not be afraid’ “I am with you; it will be OK.” “I am here; nothing can harm you.” “I love you; you are accepted.”

Certainly, filled with relief at that revelation, John tells us (in v.21) “they were glad to take him into the boat.” Again, it was dark and windy. It was the middle of the night. They were on a boat in obedience to Jesus, but they had to be wondering when He would—even longing for Him to—rejoin them. And here He was; with them again. Everything was going to be OK.

John’s concluding clause is interesting. Read in the most straightforward way, it sounds like Jesus performed yet another miracle. It says, “and immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going.” Again, on the surface, it sounds like as soon as Jesus stepped in the boat, it teleported to the other side of the lake. While that’s possible, it’s unlikely. None of the other Gospel accounts mention anything like that. More than likely, all John meant was that nothing else of significance happened between the time Jesus joined the disciples and when they reached Bethsaida.

As we’ve seen over and over in John, Jesus continually revealed more and more of His glory. Consequently, each time He did so the crowds (and even the disciples) were more and more confused and amazed. What are we to do we do with this guy?! He’s like no one we’ve ever encountered and yet every time it seems like we’ve found the limit of His wonder, He reveals yet another layer of glory. It’s like there’s no end to the fact that He’s different and more than we’ve realized.

Before we move on to the second part of the sermon, let me suggest a few areas of application in light of this newest miraculous encounter with Jesus.

1. Be careful of believing you have Jesus all figured out. It will be our highest pleasure to spend all eternity exploring the infinite glories of Jesus. Don’t allow yourself to fall into the same trap that those who encountered Jesus in John’s Gospel fell into—the trap of thinking they had Jesus pegged. We have the Word and the Spirit, so we certainly don’t need to pretend we know nothing, but we must also humbly acknowledge how easy it is for us to remake God in our image, as His first followers often did.
   
   
2. The best way to be careful is to read and study and pray God’s Word consistently. The primary place Jesus reveals Himself to the Church today—including you and me—is in His Word. We have the OT promises of Jesus which reveal a great deal about Him. Additionally, of course, we have the NT revelation of Jesus in the Gospels. And we have 23 more NT books interpreting and explaining the nature and significance of Jesus’ person, life, death, and resurrection. If you want to really know Jesus—all He means us to know about Him—you have to be a person of the Bible.
   
   
3. Where you find descriptions and teaching of Jesus that don’t fit with your prevailing understanding, change your understanding, not Jesus. Grace, we need to be eager to come across passages like this one and allow them to expand and correct our understanding of the power and glory of Jesus. We simply cannot hold on to lies. Tragically, I’ve encountered way too many people (as I’m sure many of you have as well) who, when confronted with the Jesus of the Bible, say things like “I’m just too old to change” or “That’s not the Jesus I believe in” or “Science has helped us to see that’s just not possible” or “My Jesus is much more accepting and loving than that” or “We can’t take everything the Bible says about Jesus seriously, that’s childish.” If there is a Jesus worth trusting in (and there is!), then He is the Jesus of the Bible, not our own concoction.
   
   
4. Worship Jesus! Even though we will never exhaustively (or fully) know the glories of Jesus, that does not mean we cannot or should not praise Him for the ones we do know. Though we cannot fully know Jesus, we can truly know Him and one awesome aspect of the gospel is that when we faithfully offer praise to God in light of the truth we do know, God is pleased with our worship.
   
   
5. Obey Jesus. Our lives will begin to take on the fullness God created us for (John 10:10) when we see Jesus’ commands like we’d see the instructions on a treasure map. When we believe the treasure to be sufficiently valuable, no instruction will be burdensome. Traveling 500 miles on foot will be a joyful trial if we truly treasure the treasure. Selling all we have to finance our treasure hunt will be joyful if we truly treasure the treasure. Let’s learn from this passage that even when Jesus’ commands seem particularly odd or difficult, they are nevertheless the straightest path to the greatest joy.
   
   
6. Walk in peace. The heart of the good news of Jesus Christ is that He is always with those who trust in Him. Unlike when He was on earth and He truly would come and go from the presence of His followers, He is now with us always even to the very end of the age. He never leaves and certainly never forsakes His people. And for that reason, His words that were situationally true for the disciples, are now universally true for all who call on His name, ” It is I; do not be afraid.” Grace, hear this, believe this, and then walk in the peace that surpasses understanding.

All of that, then, leads us to the second part of the sermon.

All too briefly, I’d like to close by pointing out four spectacular biblical themes embedded in this already spectacular passage: darkness/light, water, the fear of the Lord, and human choice.

In the very beginning of John’s Gospel we read, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (1:4-5). The theme of light and darkness continues on throughout the Gospel. Even more significantly, though, it continues throughout the entire Bible. In the very first words of the Bible we read, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep…And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:1-4). Unsurprisingly, among the very last words in the Bible are, “And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5).

The main point is that God made physical light and darkness to help us understand spiritual light and darkness; to understand spiritual battle between good and evil that has been raging since the Garden and will continue to rage until the new and final Garden. Indeed, there are few themes more prominent in the Bible than that of light/darkness.

This shows up in our passage for this morning in the simple fact that Jesus’ absence is the essence of darkness. The scene happened at night as a way of helping us see the true significance of the disciples being without Jesus. Where Jesus is absent, darkness is present, even as where Jesus is present, there is light. Every other understanding of light/darkness finds its origin here. That is why my favorite description of heaven is that of a place without shadows, for in heaven we are always in the full presence of Christ, such that the true light of Christ completely encompasses everything, always.

The second key biblical-theological theme we see in this passage is that of water. Water plays a spectacularly important role in the Bible. Like light, the creation of water is found within the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible (Genesis 1:6-10). We quickly find out that water is necessary, by God’s design, for life to begin and thrive. But God’s Word helps us to see that this physical reality, once again, is meant to point to a much greater spiritual reality. By the sixth chapter of the Bible the spiritual significance of water is already upon us.

Peter helps us to see the importance of water in the connection between Noah’s physical deliverance and the greater spiritual deliverance God promises in Jesus. Thus, in 1 Peter 3:20-21 we read, “in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. 21 Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ…”.

Likewise, just a few chapters earlier in John (4:10-14), we read of the significance of water in Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water…14 whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty forever. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Again, quickly, the main thing for us to focus in on is the fact that God made physical water to teach vital spiritual truths. Water is necessary for physical life to begin and thrive. But that is primarily a metaphor for its necessity for spiritual birth and sustenance. We see this in our passage in the simple fact that Jesus brought a type of deliverance (from darkness, storm, and lingering disbelief) to the disciples “through water”.

To have any idea at all of the holy nature of God is to fear the LORD. Few have understood this better than Jonathan Edwards. And fewer still have captured it as well as he did in his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

In one such example, we read, “The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”

To know the LORD is to fear the LORD. That is why God praised Abraham for willingly offering his son as a sacrifice by saying, ” now I know that you fear God” (Genesis 22:12). That is why Jethro instructed Moses to “look for able men from all the people, men who fear God” (Exodus 18:21) when he needed men to help govern the Israelites. That is why David regularly described his enemies and God’s enemies as those who “do not fear God” (Psalm 55:19). That is why Solomon, in all his wisdom, acknowledged that the fundamental difference between the righteous and wicked is the fear of God, “a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they fear before him. 13 But it will not be well with the wicked, neither will he prolong his days like a shadow, because he does not fear before God” (Ecclesiastes 8:12-13). And this is why some of the final words ever spoken on the old earth will be “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water” ( Revelation 14:7).

As I noted earlier, there is no mention of the disciples being afraid of being in a storm on the water at night (granted, several of them were seasoned fishermen). Their fear was tied to seeing Jesus on the water. Grace, may we never forget that He is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, even as He is the one who will come back to judge and make war (Revelation 19:11), and the One whose “eyes are like a flame of fire” (19:12), and who will be “clothed in a robe dipped in blood” (19:13), and from whose “mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty” (19:15).

Grace Church, settle now on the fact that any true understanding of Jesus includes a holy reverence. If your understanding of Jesus is entirely tame and containable, you’re not really thinking of Jesus. Indeed, if any of us remains in our sin and rebellion against God, Jesus will be the instrument of our eternal destruction.

But let us also settle on the fact now that Jesus came that all who fear God might never need to fear God. Jesus’ command is one that echoes throughout the Bible. Fear God so you need not fear Him! To trust in Jesus, to come to Him in the light, and to drink of His living waters, is to hear the words He spoke to His disciples in this passage, “It is I; do not be afraid.”

All of that, then, leads to the final theme—the reality and significance of our choices. The simple fact is that God created all mankind with the ability to make real choices. He also made us responsible for the choices we make.

We see this in most dramatic fashion when Adam and Eve chose to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree and the consequences of doing so—death!

Consistently, throughout the rest of the Bible, people make choices and God holds them accountable for them.

To the Israelites, Joshua said, “Joshua 24:15 choose this day whom you will serve” and they did. They chose the LORD and He blessed them.

On the other hand, Isaiah prophesied that God would “destine [His people] to the sword, and all of you shall bow down to the slaughter…” and He would do so “because, when I called, you did not answer; when I spoke, you did not listen, but you did what was evil in my eyes and chose what I did not delight in” (Isaiah 65:12).

And most importantly of all, when the Philippian jailer witnessed the power of God and wondered, “What must I do to be saved?” the simple and immediate answer the disciples gave him was, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved…” (Acts 16:30-31). Salvation comes to those who chose to believe in Jesus.

All of this is captured in our passage in the simple phrase, “21 Then they were glad to take him into the boat”. John’s Gospel is filled with accounts of those who were not “glad to take Jesus into their boat,” even as was the case in all of our hearts at one time and is still the case for many in the world around us.

There is some mystery in how our choices and responsibility works out in light of certain aspects of God’s sovereignty and providence, but there is no mystery in the fact that they do.

And so I leave you with this: Jesus is greater than you ever have or will imagine. We’re given yet another glimpse of that in this passage. One of the main reasons for this kind of revelation, in this kind of passage is to help us choose to believe in and follow Jesus. And the main reason for that is because it is the means by which God has determined to unite us with the saving, reconciling, death-defeating, fellowship-restoring work of Jesus on the cross. We don’t gain God’s favor by making enough right choices, but by choosing to trust in the One person who did. Choose, then, right now, to believe in Jesus, to gladly “take Him into your boat” and find the fullness of life and eternal life you were made for. Amen.

John 6:1-15 After this Jesus went away to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias. 2 And a large crowd was following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing on the sick. 3 Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples. 4 Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand. 5 Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” 6 He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. 7 Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.” 8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?” 10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number. 11 Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. 12 And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.” 13 So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten. 14 When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!”

15 Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

If you wanted to prove to the world that you were in fact the Son of God, the long-promised Messiah, what exactly would you do? More particularly, assuming that performing miracles was at least part of your answer, what kind of miracles would you perform? When you think of the kind of miracle that would leave absolutely no doubt as to your divine nature, what’s the best you’ve got?

As we’ve seen, miracles were indeed a part of the testimony Jesus provided concerning His true nature. The interesting thing for me is how low-key Jesus’ miracles were. Jesus never did anything too far out of the ordinary. For instance, He didn’t fly from place-to-place Superman-style. Likewise, He didn’t summon a pillar of fire to continually descend on Him or cause trees to do summersaults every time He walked by them. When He healed, people just got better. Water simply became wine without a sound track or lightning bolts. The Bible never fully explains the thought process behind that approach. We’re gradually given smaller pieces of the answer, but never a thorough and explicit explanation.

With that in mind, we’ve come to one of Jesus’ more famous miracles—the feeding of the 5000. And it’s no exception to Jesus’ low-key approach to miracle-working. When He did so the earth didn’t split open and erupt food. Nothing rained down from the sky. There was no angel Door Dash. Instead, as far as we can tell, He did so by simply causing a few baskets containing a few fish and pieces of bread to never be empty. There’s no mention in any of the four Gospel accounts of the crowd being amazed by whatever multiplication means Jesus used, only in that they were all fed.

Through all of this we see word of Jesus spreading further and further, crowds growing larger and larger, Jesus’ ministry being more and more divided between public and private, Jesus’ revelation of Himself becoming clearer and clearer, and the reaction of the masses as more and more dramatic. The main point of all of this is that Jesus is the Christ but His time of fully fulfilling His role as the Christ had not yet come. It was drawing nearer and nearer, but there was more work to be done first. Our main takeaway is to fight to believe and remember that trusting Jesus is the only path to everlasting life and joy. Let’s pray.

I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ll mention it again as we continue to see it play out in John’s Gospel: throughout the entire three years of Jesus’ ministry, He was consciously and masterfully overseeing a balancing act. Jesus came to serve as an example for all mankind before dying for the sins of mankind. What’s more, the more Jesus accomplishing the first (serving as an example), the He ushered in the second (dying for the sins). In other words, as Jesus increasingly revealed Himself for who He was (by teaching and performing miracles), He made it increasingly likely that He would be crucified. The balancing act that I’m referring to, then, was of accomplishing all that the Father had given Him while not stirring up the Jews or Romans so much that they would crucify Him prematurely. In John’s Gospel, we’re witnessing an ongoing interplay between what Jesus says and does and the reaction He gets. And Jesus was orchestrating both perfectly. That is, in part, why Jesus went from north to south and back again so many times.

John 5 came to a close with Jesus in Jerusalem (for an unnamed feast) and locked in a trial of sorts with the Jews and Jewish leaders. The trial arose because Jesus miraculously healed a man on the Sabbath. This led to accusations by certain Jews and Jewish leaders that insodoing Jesus had broken the Sabbath and encouraged another man to do so too.

While that certainly would have (and did) caused a stir, there’s a bit more that happened in between the end of chapter five and the beginning of six that explains the “large crowd” of v.2.

Interestingly, the miracle we’re about to consider, the feeding of the five thousand, is the only one recorded in all four Gospels. Helpfully, that means we have more background information than usual to fill in John’s account. While it’s not obvious in John, 6:1 likely takes place at least six months after 5:47 (we know this because of the change in feasts). 6:1 also takes place back up in the far north again (near the Sea of Galilee). More importantly still, is the fact that in between the end of five and the beginning of six, Jesus had sent the disciples out “throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction (Matthew 9:35; also Mark 6:7 and Luke 9:1-2). For months demons had been cast out, sicknesses had been healed, and the good news had been proclaimed throughout all Israel. With those additional details, vs.1-2 makes a lot more sense.

1 After this Jesus went away to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias. 2 And a large crowd was following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing on the sick.

The “large crowd,” as we’ll soon see was around 5,000 men, but it also included an undisclosed number of women and children. It is estimated that there were upwards of 20,000 in total. That’s a lot of people! Tragically, however, they were not there because they’d come to believe in Jesus, but because “they saw the signs He was doing.” And that’s part of what made the balancing act more and more precarious. Because they still didn’t really understand who Jesus was, they didn’t really believe in Him. And because they didn’t really believe in Him, they were not humbly surrendered to Him. And because they were not humbly surrendered to Him, they were a fickle and oscillating bunch. Balancing all of that was growing increasingly challenging, but our Lord was more than up to the task, perfectly orchestrating all things to the praise of the glory of God and the salvation of the world.

Word was spreading and crowds were growing as Jesus moved toward the cross.

Another interesting aspect of the balance Jesus was working to achieve concerned the interplay between His public ministry to the masses and His private ministry to the disciples. With the growing crowds Jesus would preach, teach, and perform signs. In private Jesus would explain, test, and commission. In our passage for this morning, we get glimpses of both. The bulk of the text and sermon are focused on Jesus’ public ministry. Before we get there, however, I’d like to say a few words about His special ministry to His disciples.

Privately, Jesus “withdrew” from the crowds with His disciples. While there’s no explicit mention of why Jesus initially withdrew or what He did while withdrawn, given what we just saw, it’s not hard to imagine. Jesus and His disciples had been separated for some time, each engaged in remarkable ministry. On top of that, they’d likely just heard of John the Baptist’s beheading. It’s possible that this is the first time they’d gotten together in a while and wanted to process all of that together. Nevertheless, the text simply says (in v.3), “Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples.”

Additionally, even within His ministry to the crowds, Jesus engaged the disciples personally. There were continually two tracks of ministry running for Jesus. Much of what He did and said with the crowds was meant to help the disciples understand so they could best lead the Church after Jesus’ ascended to the Father.

Therefore, in the midst of another public, marvelous work, we find an exchange between Jesus and Philip where Jesus sought to minister to Philip personally (in v.4-8). That is, as the crowds pressed in and Jesus anticipated the public ministry that was about to begin, He took a moment to help Philip understand a bit more about His power and overcome a bit more of his functional atheism.

4 Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand. 5 Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” 6 He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. 7 Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.” 8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?”

Even after all he’d already witnessed in Jesus, it seems not to have occurred to Philip that Jesus wasn’t bound by the way the usual limitations of men. Knowing this, Jesus “tested” him in order to help him. Jesus asked Philip what Philip recommended concerning the feeding of the 20k+ people moving towards them. Knowing what He was planning, Jesus was giving Philip the proper framework to interpret the imminent miracle. This is what all good leaders and mentors do. As they seek to train up others good leaders and mentors don’t just impart skills, they also help their followers interpret the world in which those skills will be used.

Philip and Andrew most certainly knew the right answers, but they lacked the ability to see how they applied to their current situation. The disciples usually had to purchase their food so Philip simply projected that out to the crowd and realized there was no conceivable way they’d have enough money. Andrew was equally practical. He surveyed the people to see if they’d brought enough for themselves, but alas, they were as far short of food as they were money to purchase it.

As we’ll see more and more as Jesus’ time drew near, Jesus private ministry to His disciples would become increasingly important to overcome this kind of remaining unbelief. They were to be the ones who started taking the gospel to the ends of the earth and Jesus was doing everything necessary to make sure they were prepared.

On a practical level, this is part of how we understand the relationship between our corporate worship services, DGs and discipleship tracks. In the corporate worship, we’re meant to gather together around the reading, praying, singing, and preaching of God’s Word. It’s meant to be the time of most careful proclamation. In DGs, we’re meant to press further into the Word together. They still have pastoral leadership, but are meant to be more interactive. DGs are a great place to get your questions answered concerning the sermon and its application to your life, for instance. And our discipleship tracks are meant to be more personal still—typically one-on-one. That’s where the most specific questions can be asked and prayer requests shared. That’s where we’re often best able to not only impart truths about following Jesus, but also stories and life.

All of that, then, leads us to the main passage and central thrust of the text, the actual miracle of feeding 20k people with no food or money. In that we see the miracle, the sufficiency, the leftovers, and the result.

Concerning the miracle, in his usual, understated prose, John simply wrote, “10 Jesus said, ‘Have the people sit down’ [in groups of ‘about 50 each’ according to Luke]. Now there was much grass in the place [a statement that strongly confirms John as an eyewitness]. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number. 11 Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted.”

If you’ve been to a potluck at Grace or talked to the Dahls, you know that coordinating food for 200 people can be a significant endeavor. We’re mostly guessing how many will show up and how much they’ll eat. It can take a long time to get everyone through the line and then it’s typically a challenge to make sure there’s someplace for everyone to sit. It’s not unusual, despite our best efforts, for the food to run out before everyone gets enough to eat.

The miracle, once again, was in feeding an unimaginable number of people without any preparation or earthly resources. We’re only told three things about it: (1) Jesus had the disciples have everyone sit down in the grass, (2) Jesus gave thanks for the few pieces of bread and fish they had, and (3) There was enough to go around. There’s no real mention of how everything was distributed, how long it took, how the fish and bread multiplied, or any of the other details we think so carefully about when we feed people. Even though details are scares, we cannot miss the staggering reality of what just happened. This was a miracle!

Jesus was not bound by the limits of ordinary men because Jesus was not an ordinary man. He was and is the Christ, the Son of God. Trust Him, Grace Church. Trust Him with all you have. Believe on His Name that you might have fullness of life, now and forever!

The second thing to see from this passage is that not only did everyone get something to eat, but everyone was able to eat “as much as they wanted,” to the point every single person was able to eat “their fill”. Again, in contrast with our ordinary experience, instead of trying to stretch out the limited quantities when more people show up than we planned for, so that everyone gets a little something, but no one gets enough, Jesus made sure that everyone ate until they were fully satisfied.

Grace Church, hear me say that (1) Jesus has no shortage of anything, ever and (2) He is pleased to satisfy us entirely. This miracle shows both of these profound truths as clearly as possible. Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth. All that has been made was made by the word of His power. He summoned all the fish and grain (for bread) into existence with a word and He can add to that at any moment without any effort. Likewise, Jesus is infinitely glorious and offers all of Himself to all who will receive Him. He withholds none of His glory from any His people. That means that He means us not to live (now or eternally in heaven), with anything less than peace that surpasses understanding, life to the full, all joy, and complete satisfaction.

Neither of those things mean that we will be healthy or wealthy on earth. Those are not first promises of physical fulfillment (though those too will be ours in the new heavens and earth). They are, however, promises of a greater, fuller spiritual fulfillment that is able to count every trial joy, rejoice in suffering for the sake of the Name, count all that the world offers as loss, and consider death gain.

Eat until you are full, Grace, not of the world for it can never truly satisfy, but of Jesus who offers Himself freely. The masses ate bread and fish until they were full to give us a picture of the abundant life Jesus won and offers to everyone who will receive Him.

Third, more than simply enough, though, there were even leftovers.

12 And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.” 13 So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten

Much has been made about the meaning of the leftovers. Some suggest that the twelve baskets represented God’s blessing for the twelve tribes of Israel. Those who argue for this interpretation, also typically believe the seven baskets of leftovers from the later feeding of the four thousand represents God’s blessing for the gentiles. Others believe the leftovers were simply provision for each of the twelve disciples for the next day or two.

Both of those things are certainly true and so we should celebrate them even though John doesn’t make it clear which one (or both, or something else entirely) that Jesus specifically intended. John’s point in writing what he did was, once again, to help his readers to see that Jesus really was the Christ, that we might believe in Him and have life. May that be the result today and until Jesus returns.

Finally, we see the response of the people. They gained clarity in who Jesus was, but also confusion as to what that meant. Having witnessed and partaken in Jesus’ miracle, “they said, ‘This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!’” This was another reference to the Prophet promised by Moses in Deuteronomy (18:15-18). The Jews wondered allowed whether John the Baptist was “the Prophet” back in John 1. But while they asked John if he was the Prophet, they knew for certain that Jesus was, and they were right!

But what should they do now that the Prophet had arrived? That’s a good question for sure, but not one they answered well. Instead of simply listening to and following Jesus as they should have, they sought to “take Him by force to make Him king.” They sought to use Jesus as a tool to accomplish their own purposes. They sought to make Him into a weapon to fight their battles.

If ever there was an example of Jesus’ teaching that man does not live by bread alone, it’s this. Their bellies were full of bread, but their souls were empty of faith and life.

Knowing this, because He knows the hearts of all men, Jesus slipped away. He would not be used for the purposes of men. He was there to do the will of the Father and until the time appointed by the Father, no man could lift a finger against Jesus—whether to do Him harm or make Him king.

Grace, it is right for us to join the crowd in acknowledging Jesus as the Prophet. We must also join them in recognizing Jesus as King. But we must break from them in seeking to manipulate Jesus’ power and authority to accomplish our own purposes. We cannot do so. Jesus cannot be manipulated.

Equally important for us to recognize, though, is that even if we could, it would always, always, always, be to a lesser purpose than that of Jesus. The last thing in the world you should want, if you really understand Jesus, is for Him to do your will. He is full of all goodness, knowledge, wisdom, and power. We are finite, fickle, and fallen. He is continually working all things for greatest glory and good. We are often driven by selfish, silly desires. Why in the world would you or I want to get in the way of or override Jesus’ perfect plan? Once again, let us learn from the mistakes of the crowds and turn to Jesus in humble, surrendered, faith. And let us fight to believe and remember that trusting Jesus is the only path to everlasting life and joy.

The Lord’s Supper, to which we now turn, was given to us, in part, for exactly that purpose.

John 5:30-47 “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. 31 If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true. 32 There is another who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true. 33 You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. 34 Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved. 35 He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. 36 But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me. 37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, 38 and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. 39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. 41 I do not receive glory from people. 42 But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44 How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

I want you to imagine yourself on trial for something extremely significant—you’re innocent, but the charges are as serious as they come. If found guilty, you’d likely get decades in prison…or worse. Now imagine that the verdict will depend entirely on your witnesses; the quality and believability of those willing to testify on your behalf. Who would you want to speak for you? Of everyone in the entire world, who do you think would be the most helpful person to call? The pope? The president? A supreme court justice? In some ways that’s what we’re dealing with in this passage.

There’s a type of trial going on in John 5 and we’re meant to notice the several stages of it. In the first stage Jesus “committed the crime” of miraculously healing a paralyzed man. In the second stage Jesus was “brought to trial”. He was accused by the Jews of breaking the Sabbath (by healing on it), of encouraging someone else to break it (by commanding the man He’d healed to carry his bed away), and of claiming to be equal with God. In the third stage (which we considered in last Sunday’s sermon), Jesus took the stand Himself. He explained that the Jews misjudged His words and actions because they misjudged His nature. As a means of clearing up the misconceptions, Jesus listed eleven aspects of who He was/is that gave rise and legitimacy to what He said and did. Now, as we come to the close of the chapter, we enter the fourth stage. In this stage Jesus clarified Himself and called witnesses on His behalf.

Again, then, first, Jesus reiterated His main claim—that He did and said only what and everything that the Father gave Him to do and say. And second, Jesus offered four different witnesses to back up His claim: (1) John the Baptist, (2) Jesus’ miraculous works, (3) God the Father, and (4) The Scriptures (especially those written by Moses). And yet, despite the impeccable credentials and consistent testimony of Jesus’ witnesses, the Jews still refused to believe because: (1) They lacked genuine knowledge of the Scriptures, (2) They lacked the love of God, (3) They were hypocrites, and (4) They loved their own glory.

The main point of all of this is that while Jesus is fully trustworthy—with the most credible witnesses attesting to it—the Jews still would not believe because of the hardness of their hearts. The main takeaways for us are to ask God to make us humble as we come to the Word of God and eager to believe and obey all we find therein. Let’s pray that we’d see and respond to the text as God means us to.

Jesus makes many claims about Himself and His work throughout John 5. In some ways, they are all summed up in v.30, “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.” When agreeing to become incarnate, Jesus agreed to depend entirely on the will of the Father and the power of the Spirit. The main implication of that in the context of John 5 is that everything Jesus said and did—everything that made the Jews so angry and accusative—was the exact will of God. Jesus was completely surrendered to the will of God in a way no other man had been or has been since. Jesus’ main point, then, was that to accuse Him of acting wrongly, was to accuse God the Father of acting wrongly; a preposterous claim, of course.

The problem, once again, was that the Jews had recreated much of what God had said of Himself and called them to according to their own wisdom and desires—twisting and adding on over and over again to the point that the true version was no longer recognizable to them. (It’s kind of like those celebrities who, futilely chasing youth, have had so many cosmetic procedures that they no longer look like themselves.) Therefore, when Jesus came, perfectly imaging God and obeying His commands, instead of repenting and worshiping, they persecuted and reviled.

Part of Jesus’ mission on earth was to perfectly reveal and model the true nature of God and His will. And insodoing, Jesus aimed to correct and atone for the centuries of disfigurement and rebellion. Both for the sake of His accusers then and for us today, Jesus continued to stack up more and more evidence to prove that He really was of God. In this latest round, Jesus added four impeccable witnesses; any one of which would have been entirely sufficient, but all four together provided the strongest evidence ever presented.

Before we come to the witnesses, let me ask you two questions. First, if you are still not sure of whether to trust in Jesus or to trust entirely in Jesus, who would need to testify and what would they need to say for you to believe? Who would be the perfect witness in your eyes? Who would need to attest to the authenticity of Jesus’ claims for you to truly surrender to Him? And second, how are you guarding against falling into the same deadly pit the Jews had fallen into—the pit of adding to or taking away from the life God has called you to? How are you intentionally seeking to live an authentic Christian life instead of a man-made counterfeit version? These are two critical questions we all need to settle on if we are to gain all we are meant to from this passage.

To be sure, Jesus’ claim was significant. It is the biggest thing anyone has ever claimed about themselves. Fully aware of this, Jesus declared, “31 If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true.” That did not mean, of course, that Jesus’ words were insufficient all by themselves. It did mean, however, that by law and nature, the Jews would not have accepted Jesus’ testimony if He had no witnesses. And, more significantly still, it meant that embedded in Jesus’ very claim was the fact that He had witnesses to back up His claim. In other words, Jesus was saying in effect, “I know that there’s no way you will accept my claims apart from the testimony of others and you shouldn’t because part of my claim to have witnesses (eternal, divine, inspired, miraculous, unprecedented witnesses).” Jesus’ claim was significant indeed. But His witnesses were no less significant. And with that, let’s meet the first witness.

32 There is another who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true.

With those words, Jesus was referring to John the Baptist. He was the first prophet in 400 years and the greatest man who ever lived (Matthew 11:9-11). That’s not a bad start to your witness list. Indeed, for a time, the Jews agreed.

When John first came on the scene, he really did inspire many. He “was a burning and shining lamp,” that caused many to “rejoice for a while in his light” (35). He broke God’s centuries-long silence and promised the imminent coming of the long-expected Messiah. The Jews even sought him out to hear his message (33) and respond to it in repentance and baptism. But when he finally announced the arrival of the Messiah in the person of Jesus, everything changed.

John 1:29-34 The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.” 32 And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. 33 I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ 34 And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

The Jews should have believed him because “he [bore] witness to the truth” (33), but they didn’t. They turned on him to the point that he was eventually beheaded for his testimony (Mark 6:14-29).

The first witness was John the Baptist. And he was a good witness, promised and sent by God (Isaiah 40; Malachi 3). Among men, he was the best witness. But he was merely a man which is why Jesus declared, “34 Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved.” More and greater witnesses were up next.

The second witness Jesus called was His own marvelous, miraculous works.

36 But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me.

Two weeks ago we considered the miracles of Jesus recorded in John’s Gospel. To this point in John’s Gospel, Jesus turned water into excellent wine (2:1-11), He supernaturally read minds and knew hearts (2:25), He miraculously healing an official’s son, saving him from death, by merely saying that it would be so, without touching or even seeing the boy, from a day’s journey away (4:46-54), and He caused man who was paralyzed for 38 years to immediately stand up and walk (5:1-17). In the coming chapters we’ll see that Jesus miraculously fed 5000 people from five loaves of bread and two fish (6:1-15), walked on water (6:16-21), healed a man who was born blind (9:1-41), raised another man from the dead! (11:38-44), foretold Peter’s denial of Him (13:36-38), and rose from the dead Himself (20:1-10)!!!! On top of all that, you probably remember, John wrote, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which were not written in this book” (20:30).

No one could do those things apart from the power of God. More even than the greatest man who ever lived, Jesus’ miraculous works testify to the truthfulness of His claim to do nothing outside of the will of God.

Where do we go from there? What greater witnesses might Jesus call than these first two? Truly, the only thing that can top the first two witnesses called by Jesus is the third: God the Father.

37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me…

While John’s Gospel records neither, Matthew, Mark, and Luke each record two explicit, audible declarations from God concerning the legitimacy and divinity of Jesus, the very Son of God.

When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist “immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; 17 and behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased'” (Matthew 3:16-17; see also Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22). John doesn’t record these words, but speaks of the event in the passage I just read (1:29-34).

In similar fashion, in Matthew 17:1-5 (along with Mark 9:7 and Luke 9:35) we read of the transfiguration, “And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. 2 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light…and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.'”

Grace, do not miss the profound reality that at both the beginning and end of His ministry, God audibly spoke on Jesus’ behalf, testifying to the facts that Jesus was His Son and that Jesus’ words and actions were pleasing to Him. How’s that for a credible witness and a powerful testimony?!

If someone charged you with stealing from the president of the United States, who would be able to provide a more compelling argument on your behalf than the president of the United States? Imagine being on trial. The charges are leveled. Things are looking rough for you. The prosecution is zealous and the circumstantial evidence against you is significant. And then, the president himself walks in, and under oath testifies that it was definitely not you who stole from him. What person in their right mind would still believe you to be guilty? Case closed, right?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to Jesus. He was charged with blaspheming God, but God testified that He was pleased with Jesus; more than once!

After that, what possible need might there be for a fourth witness? The issue was whether or not the things Jesus said and did were the will of God. God himself testified that they were. What more could be said that would add to that? The answer is the Scriptures.

The Scriptures themselves are nothing more or less than the Words of God. In that sense, to say that the Scriptures testify on Jesus’ behalf is simply another way of saying that God the Father testifies on Jesus’ behalf. But while John’s point in v.37 was that the Father audibly spoke for Jesus, his point here is that God has done so for millennia! From the very first pages of the Scriptures God testified about the coming, work, and message of Jesus.

39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me… 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.

Genesis 3:15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

Genesis 49:10; Numbers 24:17-19; Deuteronomy 18:15-18

In addition, Job 33:23-28; 1 Samuel 2:10; 2 Samuel 7:12-13; Psalm 2:7-9, 22:16-18, 16:10

Micah 5:2 But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.

Isaiah 7:14, 40:3, 53:1-12

Zechariah 9:9-10 Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he…

Zechariah 12:10; Malachi 3:1-2 and 4:5-6

The Scriptures, the very words of the Father, the very words the Jews studied so diligently, the very words they believed gave them life and condemned Jesus, actually testified for Jesus, over and over again, over century upon century (39). And yet, instead of finding the life they promised in Jesus, the Jews misread them and refuse to come to Him (40).

John the Baptist testified on Jesus’ behalf, Jesus’ miraculous works gave testimony to the fact that He was from God, God Himself testified for Jesus while He was on earth, and the Scriptures too, over thousands of years, authenticate Jesus’ claim to do nothing other than the will of God.

Grace, whatever doubts you may have, consider the testimony of these witnesses. There are no greater witnesses and there is no greater testimony to the fact that Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior of the world. Learn from the mistakes of the Jews and the heart behind their rejection of Jesus, that you might turn to Him in faith. It is to that which we will now, very briefly, turn.

In spite of the impeccable testimony of the witnesses, the Jews still refused to believe Jesus and, therefore, receive, the salvation of God in Jesus. To help them understand themselves and to help us look for hints (or large doses) of these things in us, Jesus named four specific reasons why those accusing Jesus refused to accept Jesus.

First, they misread their Bibles. While they understood themselves to be experts in the Law and fervent keepers of it, they were anything but.

37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, 38 and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. 39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

45 Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

Again, Grace, may this stir in us humility of the highest order. Humility recognizes the ease with which our hearts wander into pride and selfishness, with which our minds settle too early or late on what God has said, and with which our actions take on a form of obedience but miss the spirit. Learn humility from the tragedy of the Jews.

And then respond in reading your Bible more and more consistently, digging into it thoughtfully, studiously, meditatively, and prayerfully; reading it with the help of good resources, reading it with other godly people, and reading it in light of history. Genuine knowledge of the Scriptures doesn’t come from reading your Bible alone a few times a year, half-engaging sermons and Bible studies, and being unaware of how the Church has understood it for centuries.

To truly and fully trust in and follow Jesus, we need to understand how He is revealed in God’s Word. Failure to do so always ends up like the Jews in some form of misbelief, unbelief, or unbelieving belief.

The second characteristic of the Jews that kept them from receiving the testimony of Jesus was the lack of the love of God within them.

42 But I know that you do not have the love of God within you.

We love others, and we only love others, when the love of God is in us (1 John 4:19). If there is a message the world needs to hear today it’s this. Love is not something we can define or conjure ourselves. Love is not love. God is love and so all love comes from Him. There is no such thing as atheistic or self-generated love. The Jews missed this and so they missed the truthfulness of the testimony of Jesus and His witnesses, and therefore, they missed on the love and salvation of God found only in Jesus. May we not make the same mistake.

Third, the Jews had given themselves over to perpetual hypocrisy and so missed the genuine thing in Jesus. One such example was in how they applied the commands of God when it suited them but didn’t when it didn’t.

43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him.

Often, they would believe the testimony of one on their inner circle without witnesses. Here, in the case of Jesus, however, they would not budge in spite of a plethora of witnesses. More than a dozen times Jesus is explicitly recorded as condemning the Jews as hypocrites, for reasons just like this. No one is perfect, but hypocrisy and imperfection are not the same. We’re hypocrites when we say or act as if we’re perfect, not when we admit we aren’t. Admitting we aren’t is the beginning of trusting in Jesus and finding life in Him.

Finally, in spite of the overwhelming evidence for the fact that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, the Jews refused to believe because they were consumed with the love of their own glory instead of God’s. Like so many often do, they claimed to care about the glory of God, but it was only the means by which they sought to be glorified themselves.

41 I do not receive glory from people… 44 How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

The universal truth is that everyone is seeking glory. That desire and impulse are hardwired into us by God. The only question is where we look for it. Will we look for it in the one place it is truly found (in God Himself) or in the countless other places that promise it but can never deliver? Will we seek the eternal, all-consuming, all-satisfying glory of the God of glory or in the counterfeit versions in and around us?

The Jews missed that that the Messiah they claimed to long for was standing in front of them because they didn’t understand the Scriptures, they lacked the love of God, they were filled with hypocrisy, and they loved their own glory. Again, may we consider these things and make war against them wherever they are found in us.

The chapter closes without any formal verdict. We have to wait thirteen more chapters to come to that. When we get to chapter eighteen, though, we’ll see two unmistakable things. First, we’ll see that even as Jesus’ witnesses continued to testify on His behalf, the animosity toward Jesus and the false charges against Jesus only grew. And second, we’ll see that all of this was according to the eternal plan of God and the willing submission of Jesus, for the salvation of the world. Jesus came to bear witness to the plan of the Father, to perfectly obey the Father, and then to suffer, die, and rise from the dead for the glory of the Father and the everlasting good of mankind.

Are you with me, Grace Church? Jesus came as the innocent Son of God and Son of Man in order to endure these false charges, die at the hands of these lawless men, and to atone for the sins of you and me and all who will receive Him. The sham trial that began in the beginning of John and continued throughout the entire ministry of Jesus was the very reason Jesus came to earth. It was the means by which He would rescue us from our rebellion against God and reconcile us to God.

And so, let us grieve over the mistreatment of Jesus, let us experience holy anger at the injustice perpetrated against Him, let us marvel at the hardness of the hearts of those accusing Jesus, and then let us remember that is us. It was our sin that caused those things. Then, let’s turn to Jesus in humble faith, thanksgiving, worship, and obedience. He was falsely condemned so we wouldn’t need to be rightly condemned. He was wrongly sentenced to death so that we might be graciously justified to eternal life.

15 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. 16 And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. 17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”

18 This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

19 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel. 21 For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will. 22 For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, 23 that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.

25 “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. 26 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. 27 And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. 28 Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice 29 and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.

Have you ever gotten someone entirely wrong? What I mean is, have you ever completely misjudged someone? I think that’s the basic plotline of every single romantic comedy ever. Some cute girl who is having a bad day bumps into a cute guy and finds him entirely repulsive. Then, through a few twists of fate and a comedy of errors, she discovers that he’s actually the prince of some country in Europe and surprisingly charming and likable after all. The very man she misread as obnoxious turns out to be her prince charming.

That’s a silly example, but I imagine that all of us have some sort of bad misread. Maybe your version goes the other way. Maybe you initially judged someone to be kind and decent, only to find out that they were anything but. It seems to me that most of the most terrible tragedies on both the personal level and the world stage fall into that category.

Well, the greatest misread in the history of mankind is very well encapsulated in our passage for this morning.

The backdrop of this passage is growing hatred of Jesus among the Jews. The religious leaders believed they were justified in their hatred because of the things Jesus said and did. The real reason they hated what He said and did, though, was because they were way, way, way off on who He was. Recognizing this, Jesus named eleven aspects of His nature that gave rise and legitimacy to His words and actions.

The main point of this passage is that if we get Jesus wrong, we get everything else wrong too. Getting Jesus right is the beginning of living in this world as we were made to do. And my main prayers, therefore, are that we would consider Jesus’ own words concerning Himself, allow them to further refine and refine our understanding of Jesus, and then truly live in every way in light of them. Let’s pray that God might make it so.

In their own minds, the Jews were right to persecute Jesus, and even to seek to put Him to death, for two main reasons. First, they believed He was violating the Sabbath. And second, they believed He was wrongly making Himself equal with God. We see this in vs.16-18.

Interestingly, as we saw last week, the main accusation the Jews made against Jesus was more about inciting the man He’d healed to break the Sabbath. In other places in the Gospels Jesus is accused of breaking the Sabbath by healing (Luke 14:1-5), so we can probably assume there’s some of that here as well.

16 And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing things these [healing a man and telling him to pick up his bed and walk away] on the Sabbath.

Second, again as we saw last week, more significantly still, the Jews were right that Jesus’ claims were essentially claims to be equal with God. Claiming to have the same right to work on the Sabbath as God and being over the Sabbath are claims that should definitely raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with God’s Word.

17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”

18 This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

The key for us to recognize here is that embedded in these accusations was two simple assumptions: (1) No mere man ought to claim these things about himself, and (2) Jesus was merely a man. It should be easy for us to agree with the Jews that insofar as they were right in their assumptions, anger was appropriate and Jesus ought to have been stopped.

Everything hinges, then, on whether they were right in their assumptions. The first seems plain enough, doesn’t it? No mere man (or woman) should claim the things Jesus claimed. The very first commandment is that “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). God is God alone. Making yourself equal to God is entirely out of bounds for every mere man.

In a similar way, it is clear that God requires His people to honor the Sabbath. In Exodus 20:8-11 we find the wordiest of the Ten Commandments, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

All men must honor the Sabbath according to God’s clear decree. And in a not-very-subtle way, Jesus was claiming authority over the Sabbath—something that you and I ought never to do as mere men and women.

But that brings us back to the second assumption—that Jesus was merely a man like us. If that’s true, then the response of the Jews and Jewish leaders was mostly right. But is it true? Was Jesus merely a man as they suspected? That leads us to the second and main part of this sermon.

Again, the Jews believed they hated Jesus because the things He said and did were not appropriate for who He was. It was because the Jews didn’t accept Jesus’ claims about His nature that His words and actions seemed blasphemous. And it was for that reason that Jesus gave one of the clearest explanations of Himself found anywhere in the Bible. In the fifteen verses of our passage, Jesus explicitly named eleven attributes that are anything but mere humanity. It’s as if Jesus said in loudest and clearest terms, “Fix your understanding of who I am and that will fix your response to the things I say and do.” What, then, did Jesus claim about Himself?

1. Lord of the Sabbath (16-17). I’ll come back to this in just a bit, but Jesus claimed to be able to work on the Sabbath just as God did in creation.
   
   16 And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. 17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”
   
   Jesus claimed to be Lord of the Sabbath, and that is a claim that sets Him apart from every mere man.
   
   
2. The Son of God (17-18) and Son of Man (27). This too I’ll come back to in a few moments, but the key is to see that Jesus was not claiming to be “a son of God,” but “the Son of God”. That is, Jesus wasn’t claiming God as “our Father,” but “My Father”. Likewise, Jesus was not claiming to be “a son of man,” but “the Son of Man.”
   
   17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”
   
   18 This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
   
   27 And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.
   
   There is a way in which Jesus is the Son of God and Son of Man that is entirely different from every mere man.
   
   
3. Equal with God (17-18). The claims Jesus made might be somewhat subtle to modern day readers. I wonder how many of us would read what Jesus said and did in chapter 5 and conclude that in those things Jesus was claiming to be equal with God as the Jews did. The Jews picked up on that simply by hearing ten simple words from Jesus, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” The words that Jesus spoke in response to their charge gave an incredible amount of additional evidence to the conclusion of the Jews. Jesus was claiming to be equal with God, and not just a mere man!
   
   
4. Entirely obedient to the Father (19). In v.19 Jesus claims to have perfect insight into the will of God and perfect conformity to it. No mere man would have that or be able to do that.
   
   19 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
   
   God is kind to reveal to us all He requires of us (in the Bible), but that is a long ways from revealing to us “all the he himself is doing”. Likewise, it is good for us to grow in obedience to God, but that is a long ways from doing everything God does. Jesus had both because He is no mere man.
   
   
5. Entirely loved by the Father (20). V.20 elaborates on and grounds the claim Jesus just made in v.19. He has perfect insight into the Father’s will because the Father reveals all that He is doing to Jesus. And the Father does so because of His perfect love for Jesus.
   
   20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. There is a kind of love God has for the entire world (John 3:16) and there is a particular kind of love God has for those who trust and obey Him. But the kind of love the Father has for Jesus, His only Son, is greater still, as it is an eternal love; a love without beginning or end.
   
   That is a kind of love that finite, mere men can never experience, but Jesus is anything but a finite, mere man.
   
   
6. All-powerful (20). As we saw last week, John records many varieties of miracles from Jesus—from healing the sick to knowing the hearts and minds of all men to feeding vast crowds with a few pieces of bread and fish, to raising people from the dead, to rising from the dead Himself. Mere men can’t do any of these things, but v.20 adds something even more remarkable.
   
   20 … And greater works than these will he [the Father] show him [Jesus], so that you may marvel.
   
   The Father shows Jesus all He does and Jesus joins the Father in all of it. Jesus is no mere man. He, along with the Father is all-powerful.
   
   
7. Physical, spiritual, and eternal life-giver (21, 24, 25, 28-29). As an example of the Jesus seeing and doing all that the Father does with all power, Jesus gives life even as the Father does. What’s more remarkable still is that there are three kinds of life-giving mentioned in these few verses. Jesus gives physical life as is evidenced by His healing of the official’s son who was near death. That’s at least part of what v.21 was referring to and not a thing that mere men can do.
   
   21 For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will. More than that, though, Jesus gives spiritual life to all who believe. That is, in Him is forgiveness of sins and new life in the Spirit. That’s not something mere men can give, but it’s what Jesus’ claimed for Himself in vs.24-25. 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.
   
   25 “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.
   
   What’s more, not only are physical and spiritual life Jesus’ to give, so too is eternal, resurrection life.
   
   28 Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice 29 and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.
   
   In the day of final judgment Jesus will call forth every man, woman, and child to give an account of their lives. To all who have done evil and refused to accept the salvation offered in Jesus, Jesus will grant everlasting death. But to those who do good in through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, given by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, Jesus will grant everlasting resurrection life into the new heavens and earth. Who but God alone can do such marvelous works?
   
   
8. Self-existent (26). V.26 gives the basis for the life-giving power of Jesus.
   
   26 For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.
   
   Every mere man has contingent, derivative life. God alone has life in Himself. He has eternally granted this to His Son as well. Again, it is for that reason, it is because this is who Jesus is, that He is able to join the Father in giving physical, spiritual, and eternal, resurrection life. Be amazed, Grace Church. Stand in awe!
   
   
9. Judge (22, 24, 27). The beginning of the gospel is that God is the Creator-King and Righteous-Judge of all that has been made. While God has called leaders, judges, kings, prophets, elders, Christians, and even secular authorities to take part in certain aspects of creating, ruling, and judging righteously, the Jews were right that no mere man is those things. But they were tragically wrong in thinking that Jesus was merely a man.
   
   22 For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son… 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment…27 And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.
   
   Jesus did not come into the world to condemn the world (for it was already condemned), but He did come into the world and will return to the world to pronounce judgment on what is. This is not the work of a mere man.
   
   
10. Worthy of all honor (23). In another twist of irony, the Jews believed they were honoring God by persecuting Jesus. In reality, however, Jesus stated plainly that men will honor both or they honor neither. To honor the Father is to honor the Son, even as honoring the Son is honoring the Father.
    
    22 For the Father … has given all judgment to the Son,23 that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.
    
    This is the same great tragedy that fills the world today. Mankind has futilely devised countless ways of seeking God and attempting to honor God apart from Jesus Christ. This is in one way or another at the core of every false religion. But Jesus left no doubt that He was not merely a good moral teacher or an important prophet or an exceptionally faithful son of Abraham. If He were merely any of those things, the ire of the Jews would have been mostly appropriate. But Jesus shares glory with the one who will not give His glory to another (Isaiah 48:11). And that is because Jesus is no mere man. He is the Son of God and worthy of all honor!
    
    
11. Sent by God (24). Perhaps the best way to sum all of this up is found in v.24. Jesus was standing before and talking to the Jews who increasingly despised Him, in perfect obedience to the Father’s will, having been sent for that very purpose by the Father.
    
    24 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life…
    
    In this final clarifying claim made by Jesus, I hope you’re seeing that if it weren’t so tragic, it’d almost be comical how wrong the Jews were on almost every single point of contention. Whatever else they might have gotten right or wrong, the second most important thing they missed was that in their zeal to shut down any opposition to the one true God they were actually opposing the one true God. Jesus was there because He’d been sent by God. To be angry with the claims and works of Jesus, therefore, was to be angry with God.
    
    That was the second most significant mistake they made—missing that Jesus was sent from God. The first, once again, was in missing that Jesus wasn’t merely sent by God, He was/is God.
    

Because Jesus is these things, we can see that the second assumption of the Jews—that Jesus was a mere man—was the problem. While their concerns were entirely valid for mere men, Jesus was no mere man. He was (and eternally is!), as we just saw, far, far more than that. This means that the response of the Jews to the things Jesus said and did was way off too. In light of these things, we need to briefly reconsider what Jesus said and did regarding the Sabbath and His relationship to God—the two main charges against Him.

Concerning the Sabbath, the simple command that God intended His people to follow, in honor of the rhythm of creation, in submission to their finitude, and as a sign of trust in God, was to refrain from the normal work done on normal days. Keeping the Sabbath day holy was less about an amount of work and more about setting a day aside to particularly honor God by worshiping Him and doing good together. For a myriad of reasons, some likely well-intentioned and some not so much, the Jewish leaders over time had added many particular requirements to Sabbath keeping, such as not carrying anything (like a bed roll) from one location to another. Therefore, rather than celebrate and praise God with the man who’d been healed, when the Jews saw him, they said to him (in v.10), “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.”

The greatest tragedy in creating their own Sabbath system was that some of their man-made requirements were in direct opposition to the meaning and purpose of the Sabbath, as evidenced here. What Jesus did was in complete fulfillment of the Father’s requirements, but the Jews not only missed it, they were incensed by it. That just shows how far they were from the truth. Instead of rightly filling them with awe and wonder, Jesus’ miracles and teaching made them violently angry. At best adding to God’s commands puts unnecessary burdens on us. More often they prevent us from actually being able to obey what God did say. And worst of all, man-made additions to the Law make us angry when we are around someone who does obey God.

In other words, because the Jews misunderstood who Jesus was, they missed the reality that He was right and they were wrong concerning what it meant to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. And because of that, they were angry and contemptuous when they should have been filled with gladness and worship.

The second reason for their anger was that they believed Jesus wrongly claimed divine authority. But as the eleven claims Jesus made point out, Jesus was (and is) equal with God. He did (and does) have divine authority. The Jews acknowledged that while God rested from His creative work on the seventh day, they also acknowledged that He worked no less in sustaining and providentially ruling over His creation on that day. In that way, Sabbath for man was different from God. God never rests because God never gets tired. Thus, when Jesus declared, ““My Father is working until now, and I am working,” He went a step further from simply explaining that His actions were entirely keeping with the Sabbath for any man. In those few, simple words Jesus claimed the same right and necessity to work on the Sabbath as God. And this was entirely appropriate because He was (and is) God.

In addition, Jesus claimed to be the Son of God and the Son of Man. The unique way in which He described God as His Father was in reference to the fact that He is the second person of the Trinity. And the unique way He claimed to be the Son of Man was in reference to the messianic passage in Daniel 7:13-14, “I [Daniel] saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. 14 And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”

That these things might be true seems never to have occurred to the Jews and so they were persecuted Him and plotted His murder all the more. But Grace, these things are true of Jesus. He is no mere man. And because of that, it changes everything.

The question confronting you and I right now is the exact same question that confronted the Jews after hearing Jesus words in our passage: Was Jesus telling the truth about Himself? Is that really who He was/is? In other words, who do you say Jesus is?

If He was an imposter as the Jews believed, we should treat Him as they did—with contempt, as a menace to society. Actually, if they were right, and He was nothing more than an imposter, we should have nothing to do with Him at all. They had to deal with Him since He walked and taught among them, but we don’t. If they were right, Jesus is dead and His body rotted away a long time ago. Get out of here, throw off the shackles put on you by Christian morality and the false claims of Jesus and His followers. Enjoy your life on your terms. Eat, drink, and be as happy as you can be in whatever makes you happy.

But if Jesus was telling the truth and the Jewish leaders were wrong, that changes everything. If Jesus really was and is the Lord of the Sabbath (16, 18), the Son of God (17) and the Son of Man (27), equal with God (17-18), entirely obedient to the Father (19), entirely loved by the Father (20), all-powerful (20), eternal life-giver (21, 24), judge of the whole world (22, 24, 28-29), worthy of all honor (23), sent by God (24), dead-raiser (25), and self-existent (26), then you are right to be here and right to worship Him with all our being. And we are right to keep working our way through John’s Gospel in order that we might find out what Jesus calls us to. And we are right to give ourselves entirely to living entirely in light of all of Jesus’ teaching. And we are right to make this good news known to the very ends of the earth.