John: The Judge
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Exegetical Point: Jesus has authority to do what he is doing because he is working for God the Father. The Son is the agent of the Father and thus the Judge & life giver.
Homiletic Point:
Intro
Intro
Who was at church last week and can tell me about what Jesus did?
healed the disabled man
The Jewish authorities didn’t like this, you know why?
Because Jesus did it on the Sabbath! And made the man carry his sleeping mat.
Waaaaay back in the past, the Jews had been very bad at obeying God and resting on the Sabbaths. God had made good rules for the people to help them rest and rely on God.
But they ignored God, and they did what they wanted instead of listening to him.
So, there was consequences for the Jewish people, so they were very sorry for the way they had disobeyed God. They didn’t want to consequences again, so they tried to follow the rules really hard.
God had told them not to work on the sabbath, so they became very strict about following the rules. In fact, they invented rules to go on top of God’s rules!
God said you can’t work on the Sabbath, but the Jews made up rules that said you can’t even carry your sleeping bag on the Sabbath! Imagine that! If you went camping you wouldn’t be allowed to move your swag!
When God made the rule about not working on the sabbath, he made it to help people rest in God and rely on Him, not to make it super strict and have lots of tiny rules to follow. God wanted their hearts to rest in their savior.
Last week in the story Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath, and he told the man to take his swag with him.
When the Jewish leaders found this man walking with his swag, they became very upset with Jesus.
They thought that Jesus was dishonoring God by healing on the Sabbath and by telling the man to take his sleeping mat with him. They had confused the rules they had invented themselves, with God’s rules.
But, in our passage this week, Jesus tells the Jewish leaders that He knows what God wants, and in fact Jesus tells them that He will Judge everybody. Jesus will be the one who says who has done what God wants, and who deserves consequences for being an enemy of God.
This makes the Jewish leaders reaaaaaaaaaallllly mad! They get so mad that they try to kill Jesus. They think that they know better than Jesus, but Jesus knows better than them, because Jesus is the Son of God. He knows what God wants him to do!
If you want to follow along for the rest of the message, there will be 5 big points. See if you can catch them all!
You see everyone, this passage flows on from the healing in the start of chapter 5. Chapter 5 is one big unit, but there is so much in it that we need to break it down into more manageable units to get into the meat of this wonderful passage. It’s so dense!
In essence, the Jewish leaders have brought 2 charges against Jesus, which we’ll see in a moment are: Sabbath breaking & Blasphemy. And the bulk of this passage is Jesus defense: I’m doing God’s work, and I have the authority to do it.
This is fantastic, because often when people challenge Jesus he side-steps their questions to get to their heart, here, John records for us the almost direct response to the challenge by showing that God the Father and Jesus the Son of God are connected so integrally that Jesus has every right to do what he has been doing, and then some!
This defense is broken down into 5 main ideas. 5 ways Jesus is inseparably connected to the Father.
The Father Works, Jesus Works
The Father Works, Jesus Works
SO lets get stuck in to v16 which sets the scene:
So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”
So initially they’re persecuting because of the activities on the Sabbath, so Jesus responds basically saying: “You think I’m disobeying God? Nope, I’m following God my Father’s example.”
God never takes a break from his “work” upholding the universe and redeeming His people! Now, in the beginning God had done his creative work in the 6 days of creation, and then on the 7th he rested from his creative work. He made that day holy. He set a pattern for God’s people to follow.
But,
God did not stop being God on that 7th day! He didn’t stop maintaining the universe. He didn’t give up caring for His world or enacting his sovereign plans. In that sense God never stops working.
SO here, Jesus is essentially saying, “If you consider healing and carrying your sleeping bag to be “work”, then God himself has never rested from “work”. In that definition, God has always been at work! And Now I’m doing the same work as my Dad.”
This really stirs the pot! How do they react?
For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
This was enough to push them to try and execute Jesus. They thought this kind of talk was so bad, and so wicked that they had to take him out.
Interestingly, later on Jesus will make a reference to the way that the Jewish people are trying to kill him and they say “you’re crazy, no one is trying to kill you!”
Yet here they are, trying to kill Jesus because they understood the implications of what he was saying. By claiming to be the Son of God, by claiming this divine parentage, he was claiming a divine status.
There are only two ways to receive this kind of message - either it is a) true, and thus they would have to accept Jesus words and authority, or b) it is false and he is uttering shameful blasphemy and ought to be put to death.
The Jewish leaders are choosing B. They want to take him out because of this perceived blasphemy and sabbath breaking.
You can empathize with those leaders. They’re set in their ways and beliefs. They think they know how the world works and what God is like, and what He expects from them. In order to receive the truth they would have to have major surgery done to their worldview. Even these people who have grown up listening to God’s word, and who are trying to please God, have misunderstandings and faulty doctrine. They needed to be humbled and hear from God. They needed to be reborn by the Spirit so the could accept truth from God, but they were stubborn, to the point of trying to kill God’s annointed Son.
You and I brothers and sisters run the risk of becoming these Jewish leaders, so close to the God’s kingdom, yet so far away. We must be humbled, we must be brought low to have God’s truth shape our worldview. We need to have our faulty preconceptions undone.
It hurts!
It’s hard to see so much of what you thought was true to fall in a heap.
It’s hard to admit you were wrong.
It’s what each true believer must do before they can really receive what God has said through his Son.
That Son of God has come at the behest of God the father. God the Son was at work among those Jews doing exactly what God the Father wanted him to do. They work in unison so that we can say the God the Father has worked, when God the Son works.
This leads us to the next point which is that not only is Jesus the Son, working like his father is working, but the Father Shows the Son what to do, and he does it!
The Father Shows, the Son Does
The Father Shows, the Son Does
Jesus pushes his point that he is acting on God’s behalf in his response to the Jewish leader’s astonishment:
Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.
Jesus is definitively saying that His authority to act on the Sabbath is directly from God: “God the Father wanted me, His Son, to heal that man on the Sabbath, and to tell him to take his sleeping mat with him. I never act without my Father’s instruction.”
They are deeply connected, so that everything the Son does or doesn’t do is based on what the Father has shown him. there is a 1 to 1 correlation between Jesus action and the revelation from the Father.
I’ve worked for many hears in civil construction, and following the plans is the key part of the contractors job. But sometimes there will be unexpected issues that come up, there’s an unexpected pipe there, the soil isn’t as good quality as we though it was, there’s ruck under the soil so we can’t dig trenches, etc. So we end up with variations. What we put on the plan is not always what is built.
Not so when it comes to Jesus and the Father. There is no variation between what the father has laid out, and what the Son does. One to one!
The Father and the Son, these two persons of the God head are in beautiful loving union. All good fathers love their sons and treasure them, and this is only a shadow of the truest Father-Son relationship that exists in the Godhead!
This love is and integral part of this redemptive work that Jesus is doing. Lets look:
For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed.
Jesus has an intimate knowledge of what God the Father is doing. And if you thought that this healing of a disabled man was a great work, what till you see what the Father has in store next!
One of those amazing works is...
The Father Judges through the Son
The Father Judges through the Son
Jesus lays out two of the “greater works” that are to come.
Jesus will give Resurrection Life
Jesus will Judge the World
We’re going to come back to that work of resurrection in a moment, so just put a pin in that for a bit. We’ll read what Jesus says about these “greater works” and focus on the judgement:
For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son,
So this is one of those concepts that we all innately know: God will Judge us.
Even the most rebellious, wicked person you can think of, when they are in a bind, fearing for their life, they will call out to God and repent their sins. They recognize that they deserve punishment, they will promise to give themselves to God and live righteously if only God would have mercy and save them from their awful predicament.
We know it innately in our hearts that God will Judge the world. Yet as we sin a little, and then a little more, and then more and more and more and we are not smitten by lightening from heaven, we start to think we can get away with it. We start to think God doesn’t care, or that he’s not watching, or that we even have a “right” to sin this way.
But is is all self deception. God is patient with you, not wishing that any of his people will perish. The delay of his wrathful judgment is so that you may come to repentance and have your sin washed away!
Because, believe you me friends, the day is coming when God will Judge the world in Righteousness!
God is Judge, and he will Judge!
But in our passage today, the startling revelation is that God will not only Judge, but he will Judge through Jesus. Jesus, God the Son, will be the agent of God’s judgement. He will be the one who does the judging for God.
You might have a view in your mind of the great judgement with a grumpy God the father judging the masses, and then joyful Jesus interrupting to sway his opinion on Christians. This is not how it works!
The father and Son are not opposed to each other in judging the world, they are working as one, and Jesus, the god-man is the face of God’s judgement.
We need to face Jesus himself on Judgment Day, he is the one who will pronounce our fate!
Jesus here a little further down in v27 explains why the SOn of God is judge:
And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.
Simple enough right? The Son of God has the authority to judge because he is the Son of Man. Self explanatory?
Jesus here is calling to mind the prophecy of Daniel
“As I looked, “thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his seat. His clothing was as white as snow; the hair of his head was white like wool. His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze. A river of fire was flowing, coming out from before him. Thousands upon thousands attended him; ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. The court was seated, and the books were opened.
“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
When God comes in Judgement, there will be a God-figure who comes to God and is given the authority and power to reign. He is called the Son of Man.
Jesus is claiming to be this God. He is claiming this divine title, and the right to judge the world. He is claiming to be the one who comes to God the Father and rules on his behalf forever and ever and ever.
This indeed is a great work that healing one man at Bethesda!
This simple man who stood before the Jewish leader in Palestine was God himself, with his vast magisterial glory put-off for a time. He had every right to tell people what they could do on the Sabbath because he has dominion over everyone and everything!
Jesus will Judge the World, because he is the Son of Man, Son of God, Messiah.
And because Jesus is God, he must be worshiped and honored as God! Like it was here: “He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him.” Da 7:14.
So it is unsurprising to find in John 5 where Jesus says...
The Father is honored when the Son is honored
The Father is honored when the Son is honored
It says it here, let look from v22:
Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, 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.
The Father wants people to honor the Son! He wants us to look to him as our God, and to honor Him like we honor the Father!
We know there is only one God, and we shall worship him alone. He is the one to whom we give all our devotion and honor and obedience. And here we are shown that the one God is expressed in Father and Son (and HS!) and we should give the same honor to the Son as the Father. And that’s the way the Father wants it!
It is also stated in the negative, you cannot truly honour God the Father unless you honour the Son the same way. This is why all the other monthesistic religions are still so far from GOd, they must come through Jesus! A Muslim or a Jew or a Mormon or the Baha'i cannot come to God unless they come through the Son. God is only honored by those who honor the Son.
But let us now return to the other “great work” that Jesus tells the Jews is coming. The Life giving resurrection from Jesus!
The Father Gives Life, the Son Gives Life
The Father Gives Life, the Son Gives Life
Jesus himself is a the source of Life, just like God the Father. We have already heard in John that the world was created through Jesus, but now we also hear that Jesus can give life!
Lets recap v21:
For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.
We are all under the curse of death. But Jesus has the power to undo that death!
Jesus can give life! He is the one who holds it and passes it to those he wishes. No one can take it by force, or earn it - it is given.
Now Jesus goes on to explain who those are who will receive that life:
“Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.
Hearing and receiving Jesus word is the key!
That’s why we treasure the scriptures and come back to them! For not only do they contain the “quotes” of what Jesus has said, it all points to Jesus. It’s all his word delivered by the inspiration of the HS!
Receive the words to escape judgement and receive life. These things go together.
Escape judgement illustration: Getting into spy stories, there's the classic cold war stories, with Soviet agents who want to defect to the USA. The hope of the defecting agent is not only that they escape judgement in their home country, it is that they would have the abundant life in the new country.
We hope not only for an escape from judgement but an escape to the eternal abundant life on the Lord!
One day soon in our story, Jesus will demonstrate this power of life by Raising Lazarus as a foretaste. Then as we will celebrate next week, he will himself enter death and be raised!
What does this mean for us?
What does this mean for us?
We have two fates before us - one of Life in Jesus the Son, or Judgement by Jesus the Son.
To receive Jesus is to receive Life. To receive His words is to escape judgment.
Jesus warns us of what the future holds:
“Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.
It is not popular these days to make these kind of statements. People are enraged when you tell them that they are sinning, even though they don’t believe in God. Because in their hearts is written the general revelation of God to his creation. they know it to be true, but they cover up the truth.
But willful ignorance does not make this truth go away - that beyond death there is still Judgement to Come.
There will be a great day of Judgement, and a general resurrection.
Jesus will sit in Judgement and divide the people in two:
He will condemn those who have done evil, those who do not honour the Son, they who do not receive Jesus words.
He will give new life to those who accept Jesus word, honour Jesus the son of God and do what is good.
References:
Carson’s Pillar Commentary on John.
Hutcheson’s commentary on John
Hendrickson’s commentary on John
Sermons by Richard D. Philips,
Sproul, R. C., ed. The Reformation Study Bible: English Standard Version. Orlando, FL; Lake Mary, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2005.
Phillips, Richard D. John. Edited by Richard D. Phillips, Philip Graham Ryken, and Daniel M. Doriani. 1st ed. Vol. 1 & 2 of Reformed Expository Commentary. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2014.