Ministry in the Temple Shadows

14-- the emphasis of this statement is that Jesus did not go up to Jerusalem at the same time as His brothers. During the festival this was the right time for teaching (other rabbis did the same) but it would not foster privacy. Jesus is following the Father’s agenda obediently.

If jesus would have came with His brothers, could that have caused an early triumphal entry?

15 — “The Jews” is this context were the religious leaders and possibly the crowds. They were astounded that Jesus, having no formal training in one of the great rabbinical schools of the day, yet had such a command of the Scriptures.

16 — Jesus responded, telling His listeners that His teaching is not something He had invented, nor from a long chain of human tradition, but it was sourced in God the Father. The prophets of the OT would have insisted there message is from God, i.e. “Thus says the LORD.” But Jesus claimed something more because of His unqualified obedience and because He does everything that the Father does. He does not say, “Thus says the LORD;” but “I tell you the truth” (“Truly, Truly’).

17 — Debate will not discern whether Jesus’ teaching is from God.

A seeker must be fundamentally willing to do God’s will (requiring a faith commitment). only then will he know that Jesus does not speak on His own but the Word of God.

18 — a contrast is set forth, confirming Jesus as a man of truth and why the religious leaders cannot assess Him correctly …their motivations are different. Jesus is as trustworthy as His motive are pure and unmixed. The signs Jesus has performed authenticate His Person. Jesus is not pragmatic, but rejects this in favor of the Father’s agenda.

19 — a common area for both Jesus and the Jews is that both recognize God’s will is reveled in the Law Ps. 40:8

Psalm 40:8 NASB95

I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your Law is within my heart.”

But Jesus makes an observation here (Greek form: a rhetorical statement).

Jesus: “This is why you do not recognize where my teaching is from.” Jesus will mention examples from the Law. The first example is that some within the crowd are seeking to murder Jesus, breaking God’s Law.

20 — the crowd reacts, suggesting Jesus is paranoid, maybe suffering from delusions of grandeur. Others have accused Him being actively in league with the prince of demons. The crowds do not know that the religious authorities seek His life.

21 — Jesus emphasizes the one point He has made. The healing of the paralytic in John 5. Their astonishment is not one that leads to praise; rather, it is that someone would tell another to carry his mat on the Sabbath, openly flaunting accepted norms.

22 — Yet they perform circumcision on the eighth day, even if it falls on the Sabbath. the roots of this rite start with the patriarchs, over 400 years before Moses recorded the Law, taking precedence over the Law.

23 — circumcision is not a healing; formally “breaking” the Sabbath, so the Law of Moses in respect to circumcision may not be broken, even through doing this repeatedly. But Jesus’ “one deed” to make an entire man well has called forth deep resentment and anger. One irony is that Jesus’ activity here is the fulfillment of God’s redemptive purposes set forth in the Old Covenant.

24 — Jesus says, “Stop (cease) judging; make a righteous judgment.” Matthew 7:1

Matthew 7:1 NASB95

“Do not judge so that you will not be judged.

in its context, forbids judgmentalism, not moral discernment. Here ,verse 24 demands moral and theological discernment within the context of obedient faith, while scathingly censuring self-righteous legalism and offering no sanction for censorious heresy-hunting.

2. Who is Jesus?, vs. 25-36.

25-26 — The people at large are uncertain about Jesus because He speaks boldly in public and the religious leaders are silent. They wonder, “Have the leaders determined that Jesus is the Christ?”

27 — they dismiss this outright because of their understanding of who Jesus is . There are three tests of messiahship in their thinking. Because they are convinced that they know where Jesus is from that He fails the first test. They believed that Messiah would be born of flesh and blood, yet be unknown until He appeared to effect Israel’s redemption. But they are not as informed of Jesus’ true origin as they think they are.

28-29 — the context of Jesus’ response suggests He might have overheard this discussion and He admits there is a certain soundness to their judgment but it exposes their ignorance. God really is the One who has sent Him!

Point: If they do not recognize who Jesus is, it must be because they do not really understand the Law, evidencing that they do not really know the God who gave the Law. If they had, they would not have rejected His Son, the One who does know Him, and knows Him uniquely; by recognizing who Jesus really is, they demonstrate that they know God.

30-31 — this did not go over well with some of the crowd. Though some sought to seize Him, they could not because “His hour had not yet come.” but there were also many who believed in Him. This illustrates the division that takes place as the revelation of God in Jesus Christ confronts humanity.

The second criterion was Messiah was to perform signs -- and Jesus performed many! But faith based upon signs is not strongly encouraged, yet is better than nothing in this situation. Let us note here that their is no suggestion of those who believed had a deeper understanding of the significance of the signs (miracles) Jesus performed.

32 — things a beginning to get out of hand for the Sanhedrin, so they send out an arrest warrant for Jesus. While the temple guards are preparing to seize Jesus, we see Jesus speak on a new topic.

33-34 — It is possible Jesus may have heard about the warrant; in this context He speaks of His imminent departure. There is really about less than six months before the cross, burial and resurrection, then another forty days after resurrection before His ascension where Jesus “goes to Him who sent Me.” This is the return to the glory He had with the Father.

Others could not find Him; Other could not join Him. In this is an implied threat to many who are hearing His voice , but rejecting His words: ” You will seek and you will not find . . . and you will die in your sins.” How very tragic!

35-36 — here is a demonstration of how spiritually dull many of the people are - His words are misunderstood by the Jews.

3. The Promise of The Spirit to Come, 37-44

These verses have another great Christology claim. The context is the water rite during the Feast of Booths:

The Gospel according to John c. The Promise of the Spirit (7:37–44)

On the seven days of the Feast, a golden flagon was filled with water from the pool of Siloam and was carried in a procession led by the High Priest back to the temple. As the procession approached the watergate on the south side of the inner court three blasts from the šôp̄ār—a trumpet connected with joyful occasions—were sounded. While the pilgrims watched, the priests processed around the altar with the flagon, the temple choir singing the Hallel (Pss. 113–118; cf. Mishnah Sukkah 4:9). When the choir reached Psalm 118, every male pilgrim shook a lûlāḇ (willow and myrtle twigs tied with palm) in his right hand, while his left raised a piece of citrus fruit (a sign of the ingathered harvest), and all cried ‘Give thanks to the LORD!’ three times. The water was offered to God at the time of the morning sacrifice, along with the daily drink-offering (of wine). The wine and the water were poured into their respective silver bowls, and then poured out before the LORD. Moreover, these ceremonies of the Feast of Tabernacles were related in Jewish thought both to the LORD’s provision of water in the desert and to the LORD’s pouring out of the Spirit in the last days. Pouring at the Feast of Tabernacles refers symbolically to the messianic age in which a stream from the sacred rock would flow over the whole earth (cf. J. Jeremias, TDNT, 4. 277f.).

37 -38 — The reference to the Scriptures has associations with Nehemiah 9:15; 19-20:

Nehemiah 9:15 NASB95

“You provided bread from heaven for them for their hunger, You brought forth water from a rock for them for their thirst, And You told them to enter in order to possess The land which You swore to give them.

Nehemiah 9:19–20 NASB95

You, in Your great compassion, Did not forsake them in the wilderness; The pillar of cloud did not leave them by day, To guide them on their way, Nor the pillar of fire by night, to light for them the way in which they were to go. “You gave Your good Spirit to instruct them, Your manna You did not withhold from their mouth, And You gave them water for their thirst.

These references with this text emphasize Jesus is the True Bread from heaven; He alone can provide the real drink, the Spirit who satisfies...

39 — John explicitly confirms here the connection between the water and the Spirit, to come only when Jesus was glorified. These words had meaning to some who heard Him...

40 -44 — but there still was confusion. Note the various views:

(40) — this is the Prophet. Possibly reflecting on Deuteronomy 18 again, these may have been thinking of Moses and God’s provision of water from the rock.

(41a) — this is the Christ — First century Jews thought of the Prophet and the Messiah as two separate individuals.

(41b) — this third group could have been Judean Jews or Jerusalemite Jews. They introduce the third criteria for Messiah, which they do not believe Jesus meets. They do not know of His early years; all they know is that He has ministered in Galilee and gained a following.

To question Jesus is to side with the world.

These various views created division and turmoil.

4. The Unbelief of Jewish Leaders, 45-52.

45 - 46 — The temple officers became disoriented because of the divisions in the crowd and returned to the chief priests and Pharisees. Their struggle is that these officers are Levites, religiously trained, who are felling themselves torn apart at the deepest level of their being by the deeds and words of Jesus causing the division among the people.

The officers did not believe, but the spoke better than they knew.

47-48 — Their sneering question mocks the officers on the grounds that, as Levites who should follow the religious authorities, have compromised their theological integrity by being seduced by a transparent imposter who could never manage to deceive real thinkers (irony by John)

— but one of those is about to step forward.

This is a common theme of the Christian gospel: Not many wise and noble are chosen. God makes it a practice to go after the weak, foolish, ignorant, and despised.

1 Corinthians 1:26–31 NASB95

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

These leaders boasted that they have not been duped; their very boasting is precisely what has duped them.

49 — This is a telling viewpoint of these religious leaders: The common people are ignorant of the Law, and thereby accursed.

50-51 — one of their own, Nicodemus (we have heard of him before) raises a procedural point based on a rabbinical rule, a rule which, incidentally, Roman law also agreed with.

52 — They did not want to be reasonable; the leaders were too worked up to concede the point and too hostile to listen to reason. They make a claim about no prophet coming out of Galilee, yet at the least Elijah, Jonah and Nahum sprang up from that region. They have also by this statement displayed their ignorance of Jesus’ true origin.

He chose to do only what brought glory to God and avoided seeking glory for himself (7:18). The Son of God came to earth to be our Savior, not to become a martyr. The death of a popular leader can become the catalyst for revolution; Jesus did not come for that.

He trusted the Father to guard His safety until His “hour” had come (7:30, 32–33). The Lord didn’t adopt a fatalistic “I die when I die” attitude, but He did entrust His destiny to the Father’s timing.

He stayed at His task until it was complete and then He retreated from danger (7:37–39). The Lord didn’t retreat from the temple because danger mounted. He attended the feast until the closing convocation (see comments on 8:12), at which time He gave His most provocative speech yet in the temple.

The world system hated Jesus and it continues to hate those who follow Him (15:18–19; 17:13–14). More often than not, we can serve Christ and avoid danger; but sometimes, obedience and danger come as a combined package. No amount of planning will separate them. However, when confronted with such circumstances, we need not throw caution to the wind or adopt a cavalier attitude toward risk. Let us instead fervently pray, assess the danger, plan our approach, remain focused on the goal, seek to glorify God in all our actions, trust Him to accomplish His will, complete the task at hand without reluctance, and then retreat to safety when the time is right.

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