A Pattern of Unbelief
Notes
Transcript
ME
ME
I read a really good quote a few weeks ago…
“Nothing of importance happened today.” -King George III July 4, 1776
Notice the date on the quote, nothing of importance happened today. It didn’t seem to bother him what was happening in his colonies in America. It didn’t seem to make much of a difference to him his colonies in the new world were making their own independent nation. My guess is he didn’t think much of it, he didn’t think anything would become of it. My guess is he thought they would fail on their own and would amount to nothing and he could move in later and pick up all the pieces and start the new world all over again. However, the other side of that you can look and see the people fighting back against him were passionate about their cause, they were passionate about their cause and what they believed in and believed it was something worth fighting and even dying for.
It was clear in that quote that King George was an unbeliever in the cause and had given up hope on what was going on there.
WE
WE
We experience this everyday. Maybe not in the same way, we aren’t trying to form a new nation away from England, but in other ways we can see this in our everyday life. We see people who are passionate about a cause and people who when presented with the same cause just don’t have the same passion and desire, they don’t believe in it. There are two opposing sides of almost every argument, the one of belief and unbelief….
We can see this in people who are passionate about flat earth… and unbelief…
Abortion and life...
And there are strong and opposing views on belief and unbelief on these issues… and we are going to see the same thing in our story today with Jesus.
As we have followed Jesus throughout the Gospel of John he has over and over again proclaimed himself to be God to the people, and up until a few weeks ago we saw that he had continuously told them to keep it to themselves, to not let it out. And we saw a few weeks ago on that triumphant entry he set himself up to prove he was God a scene no one could have denied what he was doing. But he has called people to believe in him and what we have seen over and over is there are some who believe, and some who don’t.
EXPOSITION
EXPOSITION
What we will examine this morning is that pattern of unbelief in Jesus. We will first see what we can call present unbelief…and then look at purposed unbelief and then see examples of what can only be described as practical unbelief. And as we look at these we should allow it to challenge our belief that we do not live in the same way.
We see present unbelief in the first two verses today.
36 While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.” When Jesus had said these things, he departed and hid himself from them.
And isn’t this kind of crazy, we made a big deal a few weeks ago about Jesus coming and how he had made sure they were completely silent about what he was doing and in the moment of the triumphant entry Jesus had set the stage for this to be an amazing display of him as messiah. There would be no doubt, it was in these moments he knew the time was coming for the work the father had sent him to do and he was ready… so this seems to be in complete opposition to that. Why is it in this moment that Jesus has decided to go and hide himself away from them again.
And the answer comes in verse 37…
37 Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him,
Even though they had seen so many signs done by Jesus, the city was still consumed with unbelief. Think of all the things he has done at this point in this Gospel
Turning Water Into Wine (John 2:1-12)
Healing the Nobleman's Son (John 4:46-54)
Healing the Man at the Pool (John 5:1-11)
Feeding of the 5,000 (John 6:1-15)
Walking on Water (John 6:16-21)
Healing a Man Born Blind (John 9:1-12)
Resurrecting Lazarus (John 11)
And these people have seen all of this, and still do not believe… and I know that sounds judgmental, but this is what we see, these guys still aren’t sure about Jesus. Its almost as if they have taken the exact same stance as King George… NBD… nothing to see here… and it harkens back to the days of Moses
2 And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them: “You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land,
3 the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders.
4 But to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.
And what we like to say today when we are talking to non believers or maybe about them is, If I could have lived then and seen everything, or if I could just show people all the things that the disciples saw, there would be no doubt that people would believe, everyone would believe, but what we see in the life of Jesus and the words of Moses, is that seeing is not believing. And I know some of you are pushing back and you think, well if I saw I would believe, and I don’t doubt that at all, but that is not the source of belief, because belief starts in the heart…its something inside our heart that changes and is given over to him… and while we would like to believe it is such an easy thing to see and believe, history tells us that is not exactly true…
So in the face of this unbelief, Jesus removes himself. Remember what he had told them just last week…
35 So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.
36 While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.” When Jesus had said these things, he departed and hid himself from them.
And he tells them they need to believe because he is only going to be there for a short time, and they don’t… so he goes… and this is a sad picture of what really happens when people of unbelief come before Jesus, and still choose to not believe.,. when we are caught in our present unbelief… Jesus removes himself… and when the light walks away it leaves us in darkness… and this should move you… this picture should make you want to share the gospel all the more because you know if people walk away from Jesus they are trapped in the darkness of their sin. And if you are here this morning and you don’t know Jesus as your personal Lord and savior, I pray you are seeing without Jesus you too are left in the darkness of your sin, and it is only through belief in Jesus that you can find the light.
And John wants to show this unbelief a little bit more and he goes on talking about the prophet Isaiah
38 so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: “Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”
So we see John is quoting Isaiah 53:1 here, and The prophet had looked forward to the suffering servant saw the arm of the Lord, or his strength revealed to people and the people still rejected him, and here we are seeing the strength of the Lord revealed to his people and he is being rejected…and the point being made is the people should have seen what was happening and known that he was the Lord, and now they are the ones that are at fault.
39 Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said,
40 “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.”
And I know this is some hard scripture… if you are arminian this scripture hits you a little bit different because you think it messes with your free choice a little bit and you aren’t quite sure what to do with it and if you fancy yourself a Calvinist you read this verse and it doesn’t really trouble you as much because you believe in the elect and you don’t have any problem with God choosing and giving conditions to whoever he wants to do.
Explain the difference? RC Sproul quote…
And we bump up against it and what do we do? I think the best piece of advice is just believe it… don’t try to push back against it or push it away, because we believe in the totality of scripture… and when we try to explain scripture away I think we actually do more damage than good…
So this verse is from Isaiah 6:9-10 and in the context of these verses we know that Isaiah has just heard.. Holy, Holy Holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory. and After seeing this the Isaiah declared his own sinfulness and the Lord placed his grace upon him and removed his sin and sent him to work… and he told him it was his proclaiming which would be what hardened the hearts of the people…
And we need to understand that to be able to understand why John is quoting this here… and what we see is the same is the case… John wanted the people to see it was exactly the teaching and preaching of Jesus that had hardened their hearts. And this is hard to understand, but it is also of note that this hardening of their hearts that allowed for the plans of God to be fulfilled…
I think we all would think Jesus dying for our sins was a good thing, and it was exactly this hardening in the people in our story that caused this to be able to happen.. because their hearts got hardened it made them turn against Jesus and put him to death.
And this sounds eerily familiar to Paul 1 Cor 1:23
23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,
And we move forward to the final words of Isaiah shared by John…
41 Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.
And this is an amazing truth, because John is showing us when he had this amazing vision he saw Jesus in all of his glory…
42 Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue;
43 for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.
And these verses are almost a couple verses of hope… John is showing the power of the gospel in the dark places. He wants us to see that even in the places where there seems to be no belief, in places where there seems to be the hardest to share where it hits the most deaf ears there are still some who believe, and that still harkens back to the words of Paul… and this is almost practical unbelief however, it is the belief that we have talked about Craig Groeschel speaks of Christian Atheism… they were believers, but they feared man… they loved their position more so they couldn’t really share… and this is the same…
YOU
YOU
The question for you this morning is what are you doing with Jesus and his saving power and who he is… are you just claiming to be like King George… and ho hum… though we are claiming to believe in him are you really proclaiming it as great…
WE
WE
Can you imagine what would happen if we all didnt ho hum but really did what those first settlers did and be so all in that we were public and out front with him and for him… how would our churches change… how would the lives of the people around us change?