You Cannot Have One Without the Other

Big Idea: When you reject Jesus by not receiving His word, you reject the Father whose word will judge your unbelief.

John 12:44-50

Intro

Some things complement each other so perfectly that you can't have one without the other. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich without jelly isn't a sandwich—it's just a choking hazard. A pen without paper, a lock without a key, a bow without an arrow, a fish without water—all would be useless or dead without their counterpart. Some things are so essential that they simply can't exist alone. That's what Jesus is teaching in our text this morning. You cannot have the Father without Jesus, and you cannot have Jesus without his word. Jesus continues to explore the reasons for his rejection, revealing some of the implications.

You Cannot Have the Father and Not Jesus

Jesus returns to address the crowds in what will become his last public sermon. It carries the same theme the narrator John surfaced last week. Here, however, Jesus puts a slightly more positive spin on the theme of rejection as a sober call to repent and accept that He is the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus crying out is an impassioned plea of a preacher who longs to see His own people, the ones he came to save, accept him as the Christ.

Before reminding the crowds of His mission, he draws a close, intimate link between His ministry and the one who sent Him. Going back to Jesus' sermon in John 5, Jesus identifies the one who sent Him with His Father. Prior even to that, John teaches us that "God so loved the world, that he gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish." (Jn. 3:16). Here Jesus draws that out by explaining that one need not choose between belief in Jesus or belief in God, since He and His Father are one. So if you believe in Jesus, you believe in God, and vice versa. You can't have one without the other.

Jesus is not suggesting that there are no distinctions between them, but that their close, unique relationship is such that Jesus embodies, or better, Jesus incarnates God. So that to see Jesus is to see God. What does Jesus mean by this? In what sense has someone seen the one who sent him (Father) if they have seen Jesus? And what of us, who have not 'seen' Jesus in the flesh, what kind of eyes are needed to see God?

Throughout Israel's history, many men were authorized to speak on God's behalf—these were the prophets. While rejecting their message meant rejecting the Lord, they never claimed to be God incarnate. Jesus, however, came as a mediator in a unique way: He was both the Son of God and born of a woman, fully divine and fully human. This wasn't a mixing or creation of a new being, but rather two distinct natures in one person. Jesus isn't a lesser deity or one of three gods; instead, God is a trinity—one God in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Consequently, when people see and hear the Son, they're also seeing and hearing the Father. This means rejecting Jesus is equivalent to rejecting the Father—you simply can't have one without the other.

Now, this means Jesus is the perfect image of God. The Imago Dei is a set of qualities that reflect God's likeness. The confession teaches that the image of God is seen in shared attributes of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. It also includes our capacity for a relationship with God and the call to order our lives and steward God's world according to His word. Jesus teaches us that He is the archetype of Adam, who was merely a prototype of what was to come. Adam failed to reach his full potential by disobeying God's word, thereby losing his relational connection with God and marring those attributes of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. Sin blinded man, making him ignorant of God's ways of righteousness and separating him from God through uncleanness. But Christ, the perfect image of God in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, restores the image of God in mankind through His work of redemption.

To see Christ, is to see the image of God restored in man. It is to see the full potential glory God had destined for Adam to reach, and which all those who believe in Him will even now, begin to be restored to. This is the mission Jesus came into the world to complete. He is the light that shines in the dark, both noetically and ethically. He exposes us to the ways of God by enlightening our minds with the knowledge of God, and by setting an example of how we ought to walk.

Jesus issues a stirring last call to the crowds, who are both hostile and indecisive on the question of who He is. These crowds all claim to worship God. But the startling truth is you can’t have God without having His Son. If you want to see God, you must look to the Son. You cannot have one without the other. So those hostile to the Son are in fact hostile to God, and those indecisive about Jesus are shown to be indecisive about God. As I have noted throughout our consideration of the Gospel of John, Jesus provokes a response. You cannot be ambivalent about who He is, and what He came to do. You must decide, is Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, or is he not? Only those who believe in Him, trusting that he is the Christ the Son of God, can see the one who sent Him, only they are qualified to have eternal life.

But it is equally true that you cannot have Jesus without His word. Person and word are inseparable, since as we have just learned, His word has its origin in the father. So, although Christ came to save and not judge sinners, that does not mean those who reject Him will not be judged. But it is the Father who will do the judging based on those who reject the Word he sent to save the world. Let us now consider vv. 47-50.

You Cannot Have Jesus and not His Word.

Seeing God is not merely the result of contemplation, but of ethics. We achieve that beatific vision by becoming like God through the obedience of faith. As Jesus teaches, “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Mt. 5:8). The apostle John fleshes this out in his first epistle.

1 John 3:2–10—2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. 3 And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. 4 Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. 5 You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. 6 No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. 7 Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. 8 Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. 9 No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God. 10 By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.

You become like what you love, and you love what you pay attention to, and what you pay most attention to you worship. So, through worship, you become like God by gazing on Christ. But this may be confusing for us Americans who have reduced worship to what happens for an hour on Sunday morning. All of life is worship, including your way of being in the world, which we often call ethics. Put simply, your actions show your heart. By what you do, you show who you are. Or, you are what you do. And that scares us, as it should.

Jesus maintains that His purpose for coming was to save the world, and for that reason he has not come (this time) to judge those who reject him (as savior). But that does not mean they will escape judgement, for by rejecting His word they have rejected him, since He is inseparable from His word. It is the father who gave Him the words to speak, and they come marked by His authority, having been authenticated by signs. Jesus did not come with a message He made up, but one he was given—”what to say and what to speak” (12:49). Here we see the gulf between hearing and doing.

James 1:22–25—22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25 But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.

It’s not enough just to listen to what Jesus says, to accept Jesus as the Christ, you must put what he says to practice. You must keep His word*.* But what is this word that we must keep and if we don’t, we will be judged by on the last day? Well, it’s the same word that gives you life, is the same word that when rejected will condemn you on the last day. And that message, which we call the gospel opens the eyes of the blind, and blinds those hardened by sin. It calls dead men to life, and leaves others in a tomb of their own making. In the Apostle Paul terms it is an aroma of life to those who are being saved, and an aroma of death to those who are perishing. That gospel message of hope springs eternal, to those who have by the Spirit been born again. For they believe that Jesus is the Son of God, sent by His father to be the light of the world. They believe that he is the Christ, the savior of the world.

But when that message of hope is incredible, when no amount of evidence will persuade, and you reject the Word made flesh, who came and dwelt among them, and they beheld His glory, then the same message condemns. For on the last day, the scales will fall from every eye, and they will look on him who they pierced with mourning, as they see what they refused to see before, when they hear what they stopped up their ears from hearing. That Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Then they will bow before Him, not willingly, but because of His glory, and they will weep and wail for they loved the glory that comes from men while they rejected the Lord of glory. Then they will own him as king and confess that He is Lord, and then His words will come back to them, they will be barbs in their sides, and hooks in their flesh, to drag them down to eternal perdition. And they will ring out in torment for all eternity, as they see and hear the truth, but it will be too late—for he will say depart from me, I never knew you.

And there we see that this message of the gospel makes demands of you, and some respond by faith, and some doubt and turn away. That demand is nothing short of life itself. It says, I will save you if you come and die with me. I will bring you into the light, but first you must walk with me through death. The demands of the gospel are faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these for John is love, faith is the door, and Hope is the medicine that enables you to endure love’s demand—lay your life down and die. Love compelled the Father to send His only Son, His well-beloved Son, to die for ruined sinners, lost in the dark. Love compelled the Son to give his glorious place at the Father’s side, for the glory of the cross, bloodied and gasping, he loved with every last breath those he came to save. And love must compel you to keep His word until the end, because you love not your life even unto death. (Rev. 12:11).

The simplest way to keep His word—don’t lose faith. Simple, not easy. For your faith is exactly the thing that will be tested, not only when you first saw, and believed, but even more so when you are called to continue to see and believe even when you pass through the waters, and through the flames, and desperately when you ride on the heights of the earth. Don’t lose faith when he calls you to lose your life, don’t lose faith when the world hates you and says all kinds of evil against you falsely. Don’t lose faith when those in the church try to convince that you can have Jesus without having to keep His word. Don’t lose faith when they tell you it’s unnecessary for you to lose your life, for God wants you to have your best life now. Those who do not keep the words of Jesus, reject Him. And those who reject Jesus cannot have the Father, but will instead face the just judgment of His word on the last day.

You cannot have one without the other. Only those who by faith believe that the Father sent the Son to be the light of the world, those who receive Jesus by keeping His word, will receive the crown of eternal life. A promise backed by the Father Himself. Do you believe it? Will you receive it? If you will not, then you are condemned already—God have mercy on your soul. But if you have, then let us pray as we prepare to come this morning to be reminded again of the love of the sending father, and His light-giving, mission-fulfilling Son, as we participate in His death, through His Spirit and faith. Let’s pray.

O Father, you have shown us we cannot have you without your Son, and we cannot have your Son with receiving and keeping His word, so cause us by your Spirit to embrace by faith the word of Christ, holding fast our confession of faith. And assure us that in Him, we have access with great boldness to your throne of grace, for we come in Him, made holy by His death, and learning by your Spirit to lose our lives, so that we may only be found in Him. It’s in Christ we pray, prepare us now to come to His table by faith. Amen.

Lord’s Supper Meditation

There were many obstacles that prevented the crowds from accepting Christ, but none that survive the scrutiny of Jesus (or John), and yet they persist to today. Some of those same obstacles prevent the people of God today from receiving the gifts of God. Hardness of heart, the fear of men, and the often untrustworthy nature of our senses. Jesus, claimed earlier in His ministry, probably too many of these crowds, that he was the bread that came down from heaven to give life to the world. But the crowds grumbled amongst themselves because they reasoned, “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?’” (Jn. 6:42). But just because their senses deceived them, Jesus doesn’t give them a break, he doesn’t make it easier for them to accept Him, instead he says,

John 6:48–58 (ESV) — 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.”

It is for this reason the confession teaches us that “There is, in every sacrament, a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified: whence it comes to pass, that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.” (WCF. 27.2). So when I say this is the body of Christ, I don’t mean that I have turned this ordinary bread into His body, but that there is a sacramental union between the sign, bread, and the thing signified, Christ’s body broken for you. And when you receive these visible words by faith, trusting not in the sign itself, but in the thing signified, you really do feed on His life-giving flesh, you really do drink His blood of the New covenant. The life is found not corporally in these elements of bread and wine, but spiritually in Christ—whose body was broken for you, and whose blood was shed to cleanse you from sin. If you would receive Christ, you must receive all of Christ, the whole Christ, by keeping His word, even these visible words.

If you, like the crowds who scoffed at Christ when he called them to eat His flesh and drink His blood, and continued persistently to reject Him, even while claiming to have God as their father, for you if you were to eat in such a state, these visible words would judge you on the last day. For you would not eat and drink to health, but to the damning of your soul. So think carefully you who would profane these holy gifts, only such as come and receive Christ by faith, may eat and drink their health. Only those who accept that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God can have eternal life, so come and welcome to Jesus Christ.