I and the Father Are One, Part 3 B

This is an amazing argument. If I do not the works of My Father, don't believe Me. But if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me and I in the Father. Certainly, if the term gods could be applied to corrupt rulers, it's not a stretch for the uncorruptible Son of God to be called God. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. A number of religious groups believe that Jesus is a God, but not that He's equal with God the Father. You've probably had some people knock on your door and try to convince you that Jesus is something less than the God of the Bible.

Now, when that happens, what should you say to them? Where can you go in God's Word to prove that Jesus is the eternal God of the universe, one with the Father? John MacArthur is answering that question as he continues his look at perhaps Jesus' clearest statement about His divinity. It's all part of our study that's focused on rediscovering the Christ of Scripture.

That's the title of our series here on Grace to You. And now follow along as John begins the lesson. Open your Bible, if you will, to the tenth chapter of John's gospel. This is the final public declaration by the Lord Jesus of His deity. This is also the final invitation in the temple, in the face of the Jewish leaders, before He leaves for three months of isolation across the Jordan with His disciples and those who came to Him there, as noted at the end of the chapter.

As far as John's gospel is concerned, here is John's final record of Christ declaring Himself to be God and calling on people to believe. He is not a noble teacher only. He is not a religious leader only. He's not a highly moral man.

He's not someone with unusual wisdom alone, although all of those things are true. He is God, and anything less than that is blasphemy against Him, against Him. Now, it needs to be stated that the Jews had made a different conclusion. And, of course, their response, as we saw last time, they picked up stones again to stone Him. Temple was always under construction, plenty of stones, and they grabbed their stones for the fourth time that John records in the last few chapters ready to stone Him for claiming to be one with God, in essence, and the work of salvation.

They didn't mistake His claims. They knew He was claiming deity. They knew He was claiming to be equal with God. So, they feel their religious duty to crush out His life at that very moment, where the stones may be still in their hands. But for whatever reason, no stone is thrown, and it has to be the very divine restraint imposed on them by the Son of God Himself, and He causes them to have to think.

And He does a really interesting thing with their own law. Look at verse 34. Let's be rational. Stop the violence.

Let's be rational. Jesus answered them, "'Has it not been written in your law, I said you are gods?' If He called them gods, to whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of Him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, you are blaspheming because I said I am the Son of God?" This is just such an interesting thing. He says, could you just be objective for a minute? Can you just think with Me for a moment?

Can you set aside your fury, the emotion, the hate? Stop and consider the Old Testament. Why are you so inflamed that I am calling Myself God? When in your own Scripture, men are called gods.

Wow. I mean, this shows the mental alacrity of Jesus, which would be unparalleled in any human being who ever lived, to scour in an instant the Old Testament and pluck out an obscure section, not even from the law and the prophets, but the Psalms. Go back to Psalm 82 because that's what He quoted. And Psalm 82 is a judgment by God on the rulers of Israel. Verse 1, God takes His stand in His own congregation.

God shows up in Israel, and He's not happy. He judges in the midst of the rulers. So we're talking about rulers, and by the way, rulers were judges. That's essentially what they did. They were judges.

They adjudicated issues, solved problems. Says to the judges, how long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? You're corrupt. You are partial to the wicked.

Because of your corruption, you have an affinity for the corrupt. Vindicate the weak and fatherless. You're supposed to be their protectors. Do justice to the afflicted and the destitute, the plaintiffs. Rescue the weak and the needy, implied from the oppression. Cover them out of the hand of the wicked.

That's what you're supposed to do. But they do not know, nor do they understand. They walk about in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken. Listen, everything that holds together society is rattling loose because there's no justice. Verse 6, I said, you are gods and all of you are sons of the Most High. What does He mean? He means, look, small g, you are gods because you are the representatives of the one true God. You are God's agents in the world. You are the sons of the Most High.

He has delegated authority to you and you receive His Word. That's what it says over in John 10. If He called them gods, to whom the Word of God came.

They were the ones who were to teach and apply and uphold the Word of God. Nevertheless, you will die like men. And there's some irony and some sarcasm in use of gods. He may be saying, you think you are gods. You think you are more than you really are.

But you will die like men and fall like any one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth for it is you who possess the nations. Well, if those corrupt judges could be called gods, if He called them gods, God Himself in Scripture called them gods, to whom the Word of God came. Do you say of Him whom the Father set apart and sent into the world, you are blaspheming because I said I am the Son of God? You see the analogy. Make a comparison, He says. If I do not the works of My Father, don't believe Me. But if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me and I in the Father. This is an amazing argument. He goes right into the Old Testament to make His case.

Certainly, if the term gods could be applied to corrupt rulers, it's not a stretch for the uncorruptible, perfect, sinless, righteous Son of God to be called God. Think what you're doing before you start throwing stones. Think what you're doing. A footnote. In this encounter, Jesus makes an amazing statement that basically the translators have put in parenthesis in verse 35. It's so unique that it shows up here. He says to whom the Word of God came, and by the way, the Scripture cannot be broken.

There's a couple of things going on here. The Word of God and the Scripture are parallel. Did you see that? They're synonyms. The Word of God and Scripture are synonyms. Therefore, Scripture is the Word of God. Therefore, the Word of God is Scripture. The Holy Spirit here inspires John to write the words of our Lord Jesus accurately, and the Lord Jesus equates the Word of God with the Scripture, the Scripture with the Word of God. Now, that one phrase has massive, massive importance. While in the discussion, it's merely a footnote, a kind of digression.

It is a treasure that needs to be lifted out. What does He mean, Scripture cannot be broken? The word for broken is not a word like broken in English. The word is luo in the Greek, a very, very familiar Greek word to all Greek students because it's the model of verbs that are conjugated so everybody knows about luo.

Luo means dismissed, dissolved, removed, released, annihilated, eliminated. So what is our Lord saying? Scripture cannot be changed. Scripture cannot be loosed, released, removed, dismissed, nullified. This passage is Christ's view of Scripture, that it is a seamless chain and not one link can be pulled out, not one.

The passage itself in Psalm 82 has no connection to His deity, but He uses that word God's there to make a point from the lesser to the greater, as very often rabbis did and He did. But He stops in the middle of that and makes this powerful, overarching statement that Scripture cannot be broken. While He's very busy proving that His claim to deity is valid by His works, He doesn't try to prove this statement.

Scripture cannot be broken, period. Why doesn't He prove it? Because they don't question that. They understand that. It's a chain.

All the links have to be in place. Scripture is the final word. They knew it. You can't tamper with Scripture. You can't tamper with Scripture. In fact, He makes His whole argument on one word in one obscure verse in a psalm. You can't touch a word.

You can't loosen up a word and pull it out. That's because all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, 2 Timothy. That's because no Scripture comes by any private interpretation, but holy men were moved by the Spirit of God to write, 2 Peter 1. You can't have a more elevated view of Scripture than Jesus has. So whenever we get into discussions about the authority, the inerrancy, the accuracy, the inspiration of Scripture, I like to start with, what did Jesus think of Scripture? Because I want to have His view.

And if you don't have His view, I'm sticking with Him. And our Lord, in a discussion about the most serious claim He could ever make, turns His argument on one word, on just one word. This was His view of Scripture.

Let me show you another illustration. Go back to Matthew 22, Matthew 22, verse 23, the Sadducees who say there's no resurrection. Why did they say that? Because they believed that the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, the first five books in the Old Testament, were authored by God, and all the rest of the Old Testament was human commentary on the first five books. So they believed in the first five books as the inspired Word of God.

And since Moses didn't write about resurrection in the first five books, they don't believe in resurrection. They were very, very narrow, hard-line, fastidious preservers of all the stuff in the Levitical system that was part of the Mosaic section. Saw themselves as the preservers of the true religion rejected. All oral tradition, all written tradition, all rabbinical tradition, all of it, they rejected every bit of it. They were the hard-nosed, hard-line fundamentalists. Some people think they denied the resurrection because they were like theological liberals.

No, they denied the resurrection because they were hyper-fundamentalists who accepted only the first five books of the Old Testament. So they want to stump Jesus about the resurrection, so they tell Him this crazy sort of story about seven brothers. And there was a law in the Old Testament that if a man died, his brother, if he was unmarried, would take up his wife and care for her. This was what brothers did. So in the case of this hypothetical situation, seven brothers, the first marries and dies, no children. The second marries and dies, the third marries and dies, all the way down to the seventh. I would say, frankly, folks, the last four guys were stupid because everybody in front of them has died. And there's one common denominator here.

It's the same lady in the kitchen. But anyway, that's not the point. They all die, and so they think this is so ridiculous because if there's a resurrection, whose wife will she be? Jesus said, you're mistaken. You don't understand the Scriptures. There He goes back to the Scriptures again. Nor the power of God, for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

No marriage in heaven. But regarding the resurrection, let's get back off of your stupid story. Let's get back to the resurrection. Regarding the resurrection, verse 31, have you not read what was spoken to you by God? Let me take you back to the Old Testament.

Jesus goes right back to the Old Testament. Have you not read what was spoken to you by God? And He quotes Exodus 3, 6, where God says, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

What's that about? When God said that in Exodus 3, Abraham was dead, Isaac was dead, Jacob was dead. If there's no resurrection, God should have said, I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

But when He says, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it is to say that they are alive. And the whole argument turns not only on a word, but on a tense, present tense. What was Jesus' view of Scripture? You can't loosen a word. You can't touch a tense. So that's Jesus' view of Scripture.

It cannot be broken. Now you can go back to John 10. So, why don't you just go to the Scripture, think objectively, put down those stones, think objectively, that when someone comes from God and speaks for God, there's a sense in which they could be called gods with a small g because of that representation. If that's true of corrupt men, how much more is that true of the perfect sinless incarnate God Himself? And I'm not asking for something that can't be validated. Verse 37, if I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me.

Make an objective judgment. But if I do them, though you do not believe Me, My claims, believe the works so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me and I in the Father, that we are one. That's what He said in verse 30. How does Jesus prove that He is God? By His works. And this is a final call. Believe, believe, believe the works, believe the works so you may know and understand.

The only way to eternal life is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, to believe He is God in human flesh. This is a final gracious invitation. You can call Me a blasphemer because of My words, but you can't possibly call Me a blasphemer if you look at My works. They all came from the Father to honor the Father. And the notion that I do what I do by the power of hell is merely a revelation of the corruption of your own heart. One last gracious invitation. We come to verse 39. Here's the first response. Consequences, consequences, final scene of the five scenes.

Consequences. They were seeking again to seize Him and He eluded their grasp. At this point, I told you it didn't matter what He said, didn't matter what appeals He made, didn't matter how merciful or gracious or kind. They were fixed in their unbelief, and they would scream for His blood all the way until they saw the Romans nail Him to a cross. They had the same response that they had back in verse 31. This time, they tried to seize Him again for the same reason, to stone Him to death and He disappeared. They wanted to haul Him off and stone Him. They'd do the same thing to the apostle Paul or try to do it in Acts 21 in the same place in the same temple. But it wasn't possible.

Why? Because His hour had not come. He says that in chapter 7.

He says it in chapter 8. They weren't going to get their hands on Him for three months until God's timing was perfect in the final Passover. So the first consequence, the rejecters are confirmed again in their damning unbelief.

But then there's a delightful ending. There are not only rejecters, there are receivers of the truth. Verse 40, He went away. He went away for three months. Where did He go? He went beyond the Jordan to the place where John was first baptizing.

Where's that? A place called Bethany in chapter 1, verse 28, house of the poor, is what it means. Sometimes called Bethabara. This is different than the Bethany which was adjacent to Jerusalem where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived.

Different Bethany. That was where John began his ministry. So where John began his ministry is where Jesus ended his.

So He went back there and He was staying there until chapter 11 when He comes back near the Passover time to enter Jerusalem to die. Verse 41, many came to Him and were saying while John performed no sign. Why didn't John do miracles? He wasn't an apostle. Signs and wonders belonged to the apostles.

He performed no sign. Yet everything John said about this man was true. Now there's a mandate for a preacher.

We don't do miracles. This John performs no signs. But hopefully everything this John says about Jesus Christ is true.

That's what ministry is. And it was true in John's case. John was dead.

John had his head cut off. But they remembered. It might have been that there was a community of people there. That's where he started his ministry. And I'm sure there were people who attached to him and were still there and remembered well the several years that John carried on his ministry. And I think John showed from the Old Testament how Jesus was the Messiah. John was an Old Testament preacher pointing to the fulfillment in Christ.

We don't know the whole story of John's ministry, but it lasted for several years. And they come and they say, everything John said about the man was true. They've heard John, and they've seen Christ, and they've seen what Christ has done.

These are the people who saw the miracles and believed they were from God. And John's ministry comes to fruition long after he was dead, long after John was dead. There was the echo of what he said about Jesus. That was proven true through the works of Christ. Nice to know that even before downloading sermons, a minister's messages can be remembered. And as a result, many believed in Him there. Many believed in Him there. And to as many as received Him, He gave the right to be called the sons of God, even to those who believed on His name. That's it.

That's the final exposure publicly. Jesus stayed out there with His disciples and with the gathering believers until it was time to go back to Jerusalem to die. The compelling question here is obvious. Do you believe? Do you believe the works of Jesus is supernatural?

That's not debatable. If they're supernatural, they had to come from heaven or hell. Do you believe that Jesus was an agent of Satan? If you don't, then He had to be God. And if He is God, then you must believe that He is who He claimed to be.

It is blasphemy to deny Him, to reject Him. And it cuts you off forever from eternal life. If you believe, you receive salvation.

Eternal life, forgiveness of sins, a place in God's family, the gift of the Holy Spirit, promise of heavenly glory, everlasting bliss, joy. It starts with believing in Jesus as the Son of God. That's the gospel. That's the Christian message. And it comes from Scripture, and Scripture always tells the truth.

Well, I think it's a combination of both. Based on our study of John 9 and 10, we have tried to clear out the fog for people when they think about Christ. There are people who have sentimental views of Christ. There are people who have, I guess, you could say greeting card, hallmark views of Christ. They see Him as a baby in a manger. They see cards about the resurrection. But they don't have a theology of Christ.

They don't have a biblical Christology. So in these past three weeks, we have been looking in detail at the person of Jesus Christ as revealed through His miracles and through His teaching. And the whole point of this is to make Christ clear. The Christ of Scripture is none other than the living God of eternity.

That is the point. And if you have just discovered that, you've made the greatest discovery in your life, and if you sort of were confused about that and you've got now a tighter grip on the reality of Christ, you have the most necessary truth there is, because it's your faith in Christ and confessing Him as Lord that is the way of salvation. There's no salvation apart from Christ, and that means believing in Christ but believing in the Christ who is Christ and not a false Christ.

So we've tried to make that clear for the sake of salvation and for the sake of the honor of Christ who is worthy of all praise as the living God. So rediscovering the Christ of Scripture is at the heart of the Christian message and gospel. It's available in an eight-CD album exclusively from Grace To You. Shipping is free on U.S. orders, so if you want the CDs, you can get them from us or you can download all eight messages free of charge from GTY.org. And it's true that the more you know Christ, the more you will love Him, experience victory over sin, and know supernatural joy. So to pick up this in-depth study of our Lord's character and grace, again it's titled Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture.

Get in touch today. You can order this series on eight CDs, and to do that, call us toll-free, 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, GTY.org. And keep in mind, the CD album for Rediscovering the Christ of Scripture comes with a lot of material that we don't have time to air.

Again, to order this study, call 800-55-GRACE or go online to GTY.org. And while you're online, remember you can download the entire series free of charge. All eight messages are available on MP3. You can also read the sermons in transcript format. It's a great resource for pastors, Sunday school teachers, any student of Scripture.

Again, you can download this study or read the transcripts free of charge at GTY.org. And thanks for remembering that we are listener-supported. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. A reminder that you can watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, or check your local listings for Channel and Times, and then be here next week when John begins a series on why you can pray to God with boldness. It's titled Don't Be Afraid to Ask. That study starts Monday with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.