Who is Jesus to you?

Introduction

At the end of the passage last time, we saw that the Jewish religious leaders wanted to kill Jesus. And the reason they wanted to kill him was because Jesus was calling himself the divine Son of God, calling God his Father. Now, in the OT, God being the Father is not a completely foreign idea - even Israel in a corporate sense considered God as Father and Israel was the Son of God. However, no one ever in the history of Israel had called God the Father in an individual sense. In a sense, Jesus was saying something completely radical, as he called God ‘his own [personal] Father’ (John 5:18), speaking of a unique Father-Son relationship that He possessed that was different to every other Israelite and even Israel as a nation. So Jesus was indeed ‘making himself equal with God’, because while the Israelites wanted to maintain that distinction between a holy, infinite God, with finite, fallen human beings, Jesus was removing that distinction, and saying he was the very personal Son of God, just as divine, and therefore, equal with God. So in a sense, when the Jews wanted to kill Jesus, they had pretty reasonable justification in doing so, because this was a man claiming to be God himself, and this was complete blasphemy. However, this is only justified if Jesus was a mere man.

The truth of the matter is that Jesus was not a mere man. And one of the recurrent themes in this passage, especially in the 2nd half, is that there are all these witnesses to this truth about Jesus, and yet the Jews fail to realise this truth, they fail to see Jesus for who he really is, and therefore they fail to receive Jesus.

If we look at John 5:32-35, John the Baptist was a witness to Jesus. John was not the light, but Jesus was the true light, and John was just the lamp that showed and pointed to the true light of Jesus Christ.

If we look at John 5:36, the very works of Jesus - his signs/miracles, testimony, sermons, and his crucifixion/resurrection/exaltation - witness to himself.

If we look at John 5:37, the divine Father Himself bore witness to his Son.

If we look at John 5:39, Jesus says the Scriptures, the OT bear witness about Jesus.

If we look at John 5:46, the very writings of Moses are written about Jesus.

So despite the plethora of ways that people, signs, writings, and even God the Father himself witness to Jesus and who He is, people fail to realise who Jesus is and they fail to believe him. And this is something we really need to look into more carefully, because even if people tell us about Jesus, even if we read the Bible, and even if we see miracles, we see it is possible to not believe. And just as this was true 2000 years ago, it is still true today.

So what are some of the reasons that we may have this spiritual blindness and deafness? What are some of the reasons that we don’t see Jesus for who he really is and therefore fail to believe Him?

Maybe also add to this sermon the concept of witnessing. One of the big themes of John’s gospel is witnessing, and part of it is John witnessing to Christ that He is the Son of God, and that we may believe it through the witness of Jesus - this witnessing theme really comes to the fore in this passage in John’s gospel. So in a sense, Jesus is ‘on trial’. But at the same time, we the readers are on trial, as if we do not believe we are condemned (3:18). So as we hear this message of John, do we believe what it says? We are on trial as we listen to the message of John. If we believe, we are not condemned; if we do not believe, we are condemned already.

The love of self blinds us

One of the reasons we become spiritually blind, fail to see who Jesus really is, and fail to believe him, is because we have this profound self-centredness about us. Read John 5:44 “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” Jesus is saying, ‘how can you believe in who I am and the things I say, when all you are seeking is to glorify yourself, rather than God’s glory?’ All they were interested in was elevating and glorifying themselves, by seeking the praise and approval of others, rather than the praise and approval of God. In the days of Jesus, the Rabbis were very respected and esteemed teachers in Jewish society, and by being experts in the Old Testament and teaching it, they gained a lot of fame, and they were able to show off how smart they were. They even dressed in a way that everyone would recognise they are Rabbis. They were given high places in society and were in positions of power and prominence. And it is in this very self-centredness that John shows us blinds us to see the true identity of Jesus.

I had a friend in university who was extremely intelligent. He is the smartest person I know. He topped VCE in his year, got a perfect VCE score, he got into every university course he applied to. Even in university, he excelled at everything, and got nearly perfect scores for everything. And he wasn’t just good academically, but he was also a social butterfly with a lot of friends, he was a good son and brother to his siblings, he came from a wealthy family, he had excellent leadership skills and was part of a lot of extra-curricular activities, and to top it off he was a really good singer so he was part of a singing group that even appeared on Australia’s Got Talent. And he’s now a specialist doctor, a gastroenterologist, is married, and has two kids. The only thing is he is not a believer, and he is an atheist. And I was having a conversation with this friend one day, and I think we got onto the topic of religion. And he made one really interesting comment that has really stuck with me even until this day. He said ‘Dan, I think humans are fundamentally selfish.’ He even considered our acts of charity, generosity, selflessness, an expression of our selfish natures. And he was quite resigned, content, and just very accepting of this, and for him, this fundamental selfishness of humans, was just an unchanging reality of life that we can’t escape from.

And in a sense, I think he is absolutely correct. In his brilliance and wonderful intelligence, I think he made an observation that is absolutely correct, about what really drives human beings. It’s really easy to identify overtly selfish behaviour, like stealing, but I think without Christ, even in our purported selflessness and altruism, in reality even that is really is an act of selfishness and self-preservation. People may have different motives to be generous and altruistic. But aren’t many of those motives fundamentally about ourselves? Through helping others, we find a sense of satisfaction, self-worth, meaning in our lives, happiness. Humans are fundamentally inward looking, into ourselves, into our own worries/concerns/matters/identity, rather than outward looking looking towards others.

And it is this very selfishness, this inward orientation of our desires and attention, that blinds us to see and believe Christ. If we are so inward looking and self-obsessed, it is impossible to see anything outside ourselves; it is impossible to see God. That’s why in the passage we read today, we see that when these Jewish religious leaders read the Old Testament, they ended up loving their own opinions about the word of God, and seeking glory and praise about their opinions, rather than loving the very word of God itself. Their self-love kept them from loving God which we see in John 5:42 “But I know that you do not have the love of God within you.”

We miss the point of the Scriptures

And what does this lead to? We completely miss the point of the Scriptures. When we are stuck in our selfishness, when we are so inward looking that we become spiritually blind, we can completely miss the point of the Bible. Even if we read the Bible we can completely miss the message the Bible is telling us.

These Rabbis and Jewish religious leaders were experts in the Bible. They knew the Old Testament inside out. They memorised the Scriptures, they studied it intensely, passionately, even obsessively. And despite this almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the Scriptures, they still rejected Jesus. Why? Because they completely missed the main point of the Old Testament, which is to point to Jesus Christ. See John 5:39 “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” and see John 5:46 “For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.” They didn’t realise that the whole point of the Scriptures was to talk about and point to Jesus Christ. And what did they believe instead? In their self-centred approach to Scripture, they turned Scripture into a superstition. It was no longer God, Jesus Christ, who gave salvation through the Scriptures; they believed that there was some superstitious power and salvation that could be found in the very words of Scripture. There was this almost disconnect from God and the Words of God, and the object of their faith was no longer God but the very letters in this book instead. And without God, it just became a human religious system; it was no longer about God, but all about the myself and my own righteousness in an attempt to extract praise, glory, righteousness, salvation for myself. It’s almost as if the Scriptures became about themselves, a ‘me-centred book’, rather than about Christ. No wonder they rejected Jesus, because when they read and studied the Scriptures, they could not possibly fathom that it was about Jesus.

So again, we see this pattern of self-centredness causing spiritual blindness. And one consequence of this is that in our blindness of Jesus and what the Scriptures really mean, we seek other foolish things. Read John 5:43 “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.” After the time of Jesus, there were many people to pretend and claimed to be the Messiah - it’s recorded that there were at least 63 people who claimed to be prophets or messiahs. But what these had in common is that they all came in their own name. They weren’t pointing to God, but they were pointing to themselves - again this same them of self-centredness. And ironically, rather than following Jesus who pointed to another, people flocked and followed these false prophets and messiahs. These false prophets and messiahs gained popularity because what they offered and what they claimed, fed into the desires of these people - they offered easy victory, political power, and material power. Ultimately, in their self-centredness, they fed into the self-centredness of others - they were kind of speaking the same language with the same goals. So rather than following Jesus Christ, who was the truth and the real person who the scriptures were talking about, people followed other things and people, and the things or people they followed ended up just being things that aligned with the desires of their own heart.

Do we make the Scriptures a ‘me-centred book’? When we read the Bible don’t we often approach it with the mindset of: what can I learn from it today? How can I improve my life? Can I find passages to make me feel better? What does the Bible say to make me wiser? What does the Bible say to help my marriage? What does the bible say to help my anxiety? But although God is deeply interested and desires to help you with your issues and problems, the Bible is first and fore-most a Christ-centred book, not a ‘me-centred book’. The Bible first and foremost is talking about Christ, and when it talks about you and me, it talks about you and me always in relationship with Christ. The Bible doesn’t tell you how to solve your anxiety; the Bible tells you how wonderful, powerful, loving, and in control Christ is, and therefore why we shouldn’t be anxious because of who Christ is. And when we don’t get this right, when we miss the fact that the Bible is a Christ-centred book, we completely miss the point of the Scriptures and we no longer seek Christ but we seek other things, other foolish self-centred things. We will seek other things in our lives, and the Bible just becomes an accessory on the side, which we misinterpret and misuse to fuel our self-centred desires.

Who is Jesus to you?

So then who is Jesus really? If we read the Scriptures for what they really mean, what does the Scriptures say about Christ?

In this passage, we read about Christ, never in isolation, but always in relationship and unity with God the Father. There is this perfect inseparable unity between the Father and the Son, and we get an insight into how this relationship works.

John 5:19 and John 5:30 - Jesus loves the Father so much that He only does what the Father does and what the Father wants (see also John 14:31 “but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here.”)

John 5:20 - and if we read this verse, we see that the Father loves the Son so shows the Son all that he does.

So just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so the Son also gives life (John 5:21); the Son judges according to the will of the Father (John 5:22 & John 5:30); as the Father has life in himself, the Son also has life inhimself (John 5:26).

That means there is this amazing perfect inseparable unity between the two so that whatever the Son does, it reveals what the Father does and wills. And this also means that we honor Jesus just like we honor God the Father, and whoever does not honor the Son, does not honor the Father. This is why Jesus in John 15:23 says “Whoever hates me hates my Father also.” This is also why it says that whoever sees Jesus has also seen the Father (John 14:9).

So here we get this glimpse into this rich wonderful dynamic of the Trinity - our God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -> One God, but in 3 persons. And as they are one, there is this perfect love and unity within the Trinity, and a key characteristic we see in the Trinity is other-person centredness. There is no hint of self-centredness in the Trinity: each member of the Trinity is wholly, wilfully, devoted to the other, in glorifying, loving, the other. In this passage we see the Father is God who sends and commands, while the Son is God who is sent, and is obedient. And it is all rooted in mutual love for one another.

And because God’s love is a love of complete other-person centredness, God’s love is creative -> the overflow of this complete other-person centred love was the creative force behind God’s act of creation, so that He may share this love within not only the Trinity, but that it might overflow into His creature. And He created us in His image, so we are to also be completely other-person centred. But with sin entering humanity, we went from being outward looking and loving and other-person centred, to inward looking, selfish, and only loving the self. And it is this that blinds us to the true meaning of the Scriptures, and makes us miss the point of the Scriptures. It is only when God opens our spiritual eyes, opens our eyes to what true love is by seeing the nature of love contained in the Trinity, that we can see Christ in the Scriptures and the true meaning of the Scriptures.

Ultimately, it is a correct doctrine of God, a correct understanding of the Trinity, that helps us overcome our self-centredness and spiritual blindness.

Conclusion

This is important because what is at stake is eternal life and judgement (John 5:24, John 5:28-29, John 5:45-47).

Sources

PNTC

Bible Speaks Today (Milne)

Preaching the Word (Hughes)