009 - That's An Easy Question

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there something here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.

Welcome to More Than Ink. Hey, a lot of people will say that Jesus himself never claimed to be the Son of God. Oh, but he did. Like after he raised from the dead? It really only takes a little reading in your Bible, but early on, in John 5. Like in John 5 today? John 5 today. Well, let's see what he said in John 5 on More Than Ink. Well, hi, welcome this morning. I'm Jim.

And I'm Dorothy. And this is More Than Ink. We should probably tell people what that means, more than ink, because they might have just discovered us.

Okay. Well, More Than Ink, the whole idea is that we are looking at the Word of God, which we have in the form of the Bible written as ink on the page. But when we, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, come to read it, it comes off the page and becomes living to us. So it's more than just the application of ink to paper. Ink on a page. It's not just words. There's something more going on here. More than ink.

It's more than ink, yeah. So that's why we come together and hope that you're with us in terms of not just understanding the Word, but learning how to understand the Word. And so that's why we've decided to move this thing forward by going through the book of John. Well, and it's not the definitive study of the book of John. We're not looking at absolutely every detail.

It's not exhaustive. It's not the final word on John. It's more John's gospel as a laboratory for learning how to begin to explore the Word.

Yeah, a laboratory for how to explore the Word. And of course, like I said early on, you know, give me half a reason to go back through John and I'll do it. And we should. And every time we do, it's a little bit different, a little bit fresh. It's an amazing thing.

And I find there's great value. This will sound kind of odd, going fast through it. I mean, like what we're doing right now is we're doing a chapter a week. Big picture.

And that's really fast. And if there's parts of what we're reading from week to week that you go, wait a second, we've got to slow down and talk about this. Well, yeah, that's fine.

But we're not going to do that here. But we will do the overview, what I call exploration. It's like exploring through the jungle and just seeing what's here.

And if it causes you to go back to certain sections and want to look at it again, then all the better. So we're looking at the skyline. I think we talked about a few weeks ago how we took this trip to Israel that was a geographical history tour. And the first thing we did when we got off the bus was look at the skyline to see where are we? And what can we see from here where we've been before?

And how does that help us orient ourselves in the big picture of the country? So that's kind of the the approach that we're applying to the Gospel of John. Right, right. So we hope you're with us. Last week, we left off with the woman at the well in John 4.

And fascinating discussion occupies almost the entire chapter of John 4. There's one small second to the end, we hope we saw that where Jesus heals an official son. At a distance.

At a distance. He wasn't even there. At the moment, you know, and he asked, so what time did my son get better? And they did the calculation. It was exactly when Jesus said your son's fine. So I hope you saw that. So we're going into John 5 again, a new and, and remember the purpose that John's writing this entire gospel for is so that we might know who he is. So remember, back in John, if you go forward in John 20, the end of John 20, he says, these are written so that you'll believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and, and, and that by believing that that point who he is and that by leaving, by believing, you may have life in his name. So that's his purpose. And then coming into John five, that is still his purpose, which is who is Jesus and what do the events in his life point to in terms of who he is and what does he say as a result of those events in his life?

Okay. And remember that at the beginning of the Gospel of John in his introduction in verse 18 of chapter one, he says, no man has seen God at any time, but the only begotten God who's in the bosom of the Father, he has explained him. And that word explained means he has declared him thoroughly and completely. If we want to know God, we look at the Son who came in the flesh. And so that's going to come very clearly into focus in John five and the conversation that follows this healing of the man at the pool of Bethesda. So John is wasting no time getting to kind of supporting his case for why in the opening of the book, he says what he says about Jesus.

He says, look, I'm just going to jump right in here. A lot of people have this false notion that people claim that Jesus was something more than he was just because of the resurrection. You know, you have to wait until the death and resurrection of Jesus. But here very early, I mean through the entire theme of John's take on Jesus's life and all the events in his life. No, that is like the theme all the way through it. And the death and resurrection just caps that off in a large measure.

Well and he pulls no punches here in this conversation. And so one of the study skills that we're going to talk about a little bit today is how to observe exactly what Jesus says about himself. And so one of the ways we can do that in a real practical way is to list or chart those statements.

Just have a piece of paper handy. And every time Jesus says, but I say, or the Son is, or says something very specific about his relationship with the Father, write that down in a few words that capture it. And then you can kind of move away from the text and just meditate on those things. And that will often deepen the picture and deepen our understanding of what he has said. Yeah, it also sharpens your observations skills if you know you're doing that up front.

So we're going to do that today some as well. So here's the question that I posited myself is if Jesus knows he has a very short time in public ministry, it turned out to be about three years, what do you do to provoke the issue about who he is? I mean, what do you do to provoke the issue? Because you want people to have a very clear understanding of who he is. In fact, he said a couple chapters back that understanding who he is is going to mean the difference between condemnation and coming to the kingdom of heaven.

So he wants to make sure he gets this point across really clearly who he is. So what does he do? Does he have giant rallies and stadiums?

No, although there were some pretty large events and we'll see some of those. But I mean, what do you do? And today is one of a series of a number of these things that is calculated on Jesus' behalf to be like who he really is.

But you wouldn't know that right up front. So what's the event today that he does? Okay, so we're, John 5 opens with this healing of the man laying there for 38 years at the pool of Bethesda. And John gives us a lot of detail. John is selective in his gospel about which miracles he highlights. And so this is an interesting one because he gives us some interesting details about this guy. He says he had been laying here for 38 years and Jesus knew that, picked him out of the crowd, maybe even stepped over some other people because there would have been people laying around this pool waiting for this mythical event, the bubbling up of the water.

And then just asks him this question. So let me just read the actual event. The event is a very small portion of, I mean it's only six verses in the entirety of John 5 and it just causes a ruckus.

A lot of conversation afterwards. So I'm going to pick it up in verse 2 of John 5. Now there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool in Aramaic called Bethesda which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids, like blind and lame and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for 38 years. And when Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, do you want to be healed? Do you want to be healed? I always laugh when I read that.

Well, of course I do. Verse 7, So the sick man answered him, sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water stirred up and while I'm going another steps down before me. Jesus said to him, get up, take your bed, take up your bed and walk. And at once the man was healed and he took up his bed and walked. I'm going to stop the narrative there. Oh, you're not going to go on to the last half of it.

Well, I will in a second. But I mean, you would think this is Jesus's calculated event to bring attention to who he is. Well, you know, miracle does do that. But the detail is not the miracle itself. It's what day of the week he did it on.

That was calculated. So it says in the next very breath, now that day was the Sabbath. It was the Sabbath.

It's a bad deal. So if you know anything about Jewish law, you don't do anything on the Sabbath, you know. So I just pick up a little bit in verse 10. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, it's the Sabbath and it's not lawful for you to take up your bed. But he answered them, well, the man who healed me, that man said to me, take up your bed and walk. And then they asked him, I would ask him, I mean, they healed you, but they didn't ask him that.

So then they asked him, well, who's the man who said to you, take up your bed and walk. And now the man who had been healed, didn't know who it was for Jesus had withdrawn as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward though, Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, see, you're well sin no more that nothing worse may happen to you. And then the man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus because he healed someone? No, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But interestingly enough on the Sabbath issue, Jesus answered them in verse 17, my father is working until now and I am working.

Okay. So that was the second thing that made them angry is that he was by that statement, making himself equal with God, claiming to be doing the same things God is doing as God would do them. And that's blasphemous unless it's true.

Yeah. And if you don't know much about the Sabbath issues, when you dig deep into them in the Old Testament, it was God's way of promoting trust in God. Because in an agrarian culture, you know, seven days a week, man, you go out there and you water and you prune and you pick the bugs off your crops. And if you leave that off for one day, one day, a farmer will say, man, it'll just go out of control and everything's bad. But God said, no, I'll tell you what, I'm going to give you a day off. I'm going to give you a day off and don't do that on one day during the week. Don't sweat about your crops, which are going to feed your family.

Don't sweat about that. But I want you to understand that I'll take care of these things on that day off. So it's very much an issue of trusting God for the wellbeing of your family. And because God's going to take over for you on that day, you can kind of put your feet up.

It's a wonderful blessing from God. And, uh, but when you, when you hear it that way, you realize that on that, on that Sabbath day, although the people aren't working, God is. God is still working. He's still at work. He's still protecting your crops. He's still bringing all them. He's doing that. And he asked him on occasions of not, not just a weekly but yearly and you know, many years to take whole years off.

So it was really a trust kind of issue. So when you say, if you ask any Jew, you know, who gets to work on the Sabbath, they'll say, well, nobody does, but God does. But God does.

So when Jesus says, my father's working until now and I am working, he's basically saying he's God because he's God's the only one who's allowed to work on the Sabbath. Well, and the thing we probably should remember from the story is that this didn't happen very far from the temple. So it's a natural thing for this guy to, when he can walk, he probably had to pass through the temple area in order to get home from where he was. Right. This pool of Bethesda is very near the north side entrance to the Temple Mount.

Very near. So that's where he would have been laying. And that's probably the side they brought in all the sheep from and the other stuff on the north side.

So there's no doubt he ran across temple officials on his way home. Right. People were coming and going there.

Just no question. Yeah. In fact, to this day, if you ever go to Israel, you can actually go and visit where this site is. It's an archeological site and they actually found, like this passage says, they found the five colonnades.

You know, it has the five roof colony. They found that. So it's there. It's there.

You can go check it out. And when you're there, you can see how close it is to the Temple Mount area. We really need to press on to the things that Jesus said, to the conversation that was provoked by this.

That's just the action. Oh my gosh, because the rest of the chapter is concerned with the conversation where Jesus makes these astonishing statements about himself when they question him about what he has said. You know, he starts saying things like, well, my father's still working. I'm doing what my father does.

My father shows me everything he's doing. This is the list you're supposed to be making. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know that we're going to take the time to read the rest of the chapter. We'll pick some pieces.

But you know, I just made a very short list a couple days ago as I was thinking about talking about this. So he says, my father's working until now and I'm still working. What the father does, the son does. He does what he sees the father doing. The father shows the son everything that he himself is doing. He says the father, just like the father raises the dead, he gives the son life to give to whomever he wishes. All judgment is given to the son. Everyone who honors the son honors the father. And if you don't honor the son, you don't honor the father.

I mean, these are statements that would have, any one of these statements would have caused people to pick up rocks. Yeah. Because he was saying, I am doing the things my father is doing just like he would do them.

Right. And he's not just saying I'm like God, the father. He says, you know, almost saying directly, I can claim total identification with the father.

Yes. And if you look down to verse 26, he says, just as the father has life in himself, and no good Jew would dispute that, even so, he gave to the son also to have life in himself. So he's saying, just as God is a source of life and a life giver, so am I.

Right. Just as God the father raises the dead, so do I. Yeah. And that's, again, if he's not the son of God, if he's not equal with God, this is outright blasphemy. And of course the Pharisees looked at Jesus as just some kind of wild Nazarene hooligan. And so they did not really want to think carefully about who he might be.

Nicodemus is an exception, we found in chapter three, but these guys just are not prone to want to do that. So when Jesus is this bold here, their first response is going to be, this guy's blasphemous. Right. He's claiming to be equal with God.

You can't do this. You can't be claiming to be equal with God. So this equality with God thing, very clearly stated in verse 17, you know, Father's Word in verse 18, that's why John tells us that's why Jesus was seeking to kill him. He was even calling God his own father, making himself equal with God.

Okay. So if he's not, that's grotesquely blasphemous. And so this is what, now in the rest of this chapter then, you know, you listed a bunch of these things. John's gonna make his case for why Jesus does have unusual authority, not just a great teacher, but equal with God kind of authority.

And that'll be the next section he talks about. And then after that, he moves into this area about, you know, according to who, who's your witness? Who are the witnesses? Who's gonna stand up for you and say that's what it is? What's the evidence? Yeah, what's the evidence? And so, as we said before, make a list, go through that next section that starts in verse 19 and goes to 29 and make a list about what exactly did Jesus claim about himself in relation to who God is, you know.

And then you can make that list and you can kick back from your chair and just look at that and go, wow. So next time you find yourself in a conversation with somebody who says, well, Jesus never claimed to be God. You can go, you know, let's read John 5 together and you tell me that he claimed to be God. Right, right. Because, you know, he had begun talking about judgment based on believing in who he is back in chapter three. Right.

But I keep pausing at verse 24 when he says, truly I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. Right. That is a, that is an astonishing statement. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's life and death itself.

It's not just kind of an iffy thing. It's life and death. Well, and then, you know, he really ramps it up when he talks about honoring, you know, did the Jews honor the father? Absolutely. That was part of the religion, had to honor the father. And now Jesus inserts himself into that picture and says, well, you know, you have to honor me as well. And that's 23, you know, all judgments given, given to the son that all may honor the son just as they honor the father. Oh my gosh. And just if you missed that point, Jesus says, whoever does not honor the son does not honor the father who sent him.

What? So Jesus ramps it up right here. It's not that he's sort of like God and he has all the attributes of God, you know, and he copies who God is. It's basically if you, if your life is intent on honoring who God the father is, you need to honor me as well. And he says, and you clearly, now this is much later in the chapter, you don't even have the love of God in yourselves. That's down in verse 42.

Yeah. I've come in my father's name and you don't receive me. You don't love God because if you loved God, you would be seeking the truth. I am the truth. And these are the witnesses that testify to the truth of who I am and what I'm doing. So we kind of got ahead of ourselves here. We need to double back and touch on the witnesses. Yeah. Well, in fact, let's do the witnesses because that's the last section.

I mean, it goes from 30 until the end of the chapters. And Pharisees would always preach or teach in public when they would do that. And they would always have to reference somebody else. They'd say, well, according to the great rabbi Gamaliel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And they all, it was like name dropping. So they would say, I can say these things because this is what these guys say. So that's kind of the witnesses kind of thing.

So it's their way of saying, I'm not saying this just on my own accord. There are these other witnesses that support what I'm saying. And the more witnesses you can pull into your case, that was Phariseeism in terms of teaching. That's, that's what you did.

The Talmud is very much like, that's a collection of those kind of wise things by the rabbis that came later. But you always had to name drop. You always had to have these witnesses. We still do that. We do. No, no, we really, really do. I mean, we quote different, you know, TV evangelists or something like that.

Or famous Bible teachers. Yeah, say, well, this is what he says. Well, I get that.

So, so that's the next thing. That's the next question in their mind, which is why Jesus goes there automatically after he makes these bold claims about being honored, just like the Father. I mean, in verse 30, he says, I can do nothing on my own. You know, as I hear, I judge and my judgment is just because I seek not my own will, but the will of Him who sent me. So, you know, he's saying, we're identical here. And if I alone bear witness, this is just saying, I'm not just, if I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true.

That's according to Jewish law. You have to have other witnesses, the strength of two witnesses. But he says, there's another who bears witness about me. And he, he drops, he basically drops John's name. Okay, so the first one, not John who wrote the gospel, but John the Baptist, who we've already talked about a little bit as the forerunner, the one who went ahead and said, now repent because the Kingdom of God is coming.

Get ready to do life another way. Because once the King comes, you're going to recognize him. Yeah. And, and the, it's interesting, but even though John the Baptist is kind of controversial, the Pharisees in a way sort of accepted the fact that he had some kind of God connection sort of. Well, he was clearly a prophet in the Old Testament pattern.

Right. You know, he proclaimed this message of a need for repentance. He lived in the wilderness. He, you know, wore camel's hair and ate bugs like Elijah. He looked like a prophet. He was recognized as a prophet. Even later when Jesus challenges the Pharisees in an interesting exchange, you know, he gives them the choice of either poo pooing who John the Baptist was, did he come from God or not? And they weren't willing to say, well, he didn't come from God.

They wouldn't go that far. So, so clearly, so Jesus starts here saying, well, there was, let's talk about one way. There's a human. How about John the Baptist? He pointed to me and said, there's the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. And then you get to 36, he says, but that testimony that I have is greater than that of John.

Right. What's the next testimony? Well, he says, my father bears witness of me. My father has given witness of me. Well, when did he do that? Father endorses Jesus?

Well, you know, probably the most obvious ways was the voice of God speaking at his baptism who, you know, Jesus wasn't the only one who heard that. John the Baptist heard it and many others heard it, even though they may not have identified exactly what was going on. They heard. Right. Right. They heard something. Right.

Saying, this is my beloved son. So they, he says that the father, the father's word has become apparent to you, you know, whether it was, you know, audibly out there or if it was through the word that is in the Old Testament. Right. The word is there. I mean, he says that in 38. He's going to get to that.

Yeah. And you don't have this word abiding in you. There's this word that testifies about who I am and that's God's endorsement of Jesus. But, but you don't believe because you don't have that word abiding in you is what he says. He says, you can search the scriptures thinking that in them you have life, but, but you're missing it because you don't realize that they all pointed to me.

Right. And yet you don't come to me. You don't come to me. So what's the point of knowing the entire Old Testament that points to Jesus if when Jesus shows up, they don't recognize who he is. So in 40, you know, you refuse to come to me that you may have life and yet that's what those, that's what those documents in the Old Testament talked about was the coming of this Messiah. He should have been recognizable to them, but they would not.

They will not. They would not recognize who he was. Well, they were seeking the Messiah that they expected from their own conclusions rather than the one that the scriptures actually spoke of. Yeah, kind of a bent understanding expectation of who he was supposed to be. Yeah.

And you know, you get so accustomed to dealing with things in a traditional thought pattern that you don't ever look at it afresh. And at the end of the Gospel of Luke, if you remember that, that encounter on the road to Emmaus, it says that Jesus, beginning with Moses, explained to them everything in the scriptures, talking about himself. I'm like, oh. Yeah. We need to always read that when we're reading the Old Testament because Jesus himself said, it all points to me. So we can take that into our Old Testament reading and go, you know, is God telling us something here about his plan to save us by sending his son? What does this passage say?

Yeah. And so he closes out this whole chapter, since we're running short on time, by saying, talking about, let's talk about witnesses. You know, in the end, I'm not even going to witness against you, but Moses will. Moses will.

You know, in 45, don't think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you, Moses. And so he comes down to saying, you should have known through what Moses wrote who I was. So Moses himself will stand there and say, look, you know, I served notice to these guys and they wouldn't accept who Jesus was. But from what Moses wrote, they should have.

They should have. Yeah. Yeah. And Moses did say, now the Lord's going to raise up for you a prophet like me from among you. Right. And you know, so, and we come in John 6, we find because of what Jesus was doing and saying that people were saying, is this the prophet that the scriptures speak of?

Is this the one? So even the crowd was making that connection, but the religious leaders were not. And it's, you'll find later it's because of pride.

It's a, it's a competition for the masses. Because they were sure that they had the inside line of what God was intending to do. And this Jesus did not fit their preconceived notions.

So that's where you get to. And so it closes out the whole, the whole chapter. But if you do not believe his writings, Moses is, if you don't believe what Moses said, well, how will you believe my words? And sure enough, they didn't believe his words. So it really, this chapter centers on belief. Do you believe me? Do you believe the witnesses? The witnesses are testifying. They're giving evidence to something, that something is true.

Do you believe the witnesses? Exactly. Exactly. And go back and rethink what you've read from Moses too. I mean, he really serves notice to them. So this all started in this chapter with healing a guy deliberately on the Sabbath and it provoked the issue of the Sabbath. And the only person who works on the Sabbath is God himself.

And Jesus says, you're looking at him. Oh, there's so much more we could say about this. Tons, tons, tons. But take that, make that list.

Yeah, make the list. Read through this chapter slowly and just put in your own words. Oh, he's saying, I'm doing the Father's work.

I, the Father, sent me. Keep all those things in mind. Put them on a list and then sit aside and just think about what that means in terms of who he is and do I believe him? Yeah. So we need to quit. We're out of time again. Next week, we're going to push on and read with us. We're going to go into John 6 next week and it gets even crazier.

Oh my goodness. Chapter 6 is one of the most amazing chapters. Pretty bold. Yeah, very bold. And you think this was bold today. Wait until chapter 6. So we're glad you're with us and I hope you join us next week and explore through the Bible with us and I hope you're learning how to do that on your own as well. So I'm Jim and I'm Dorothy. Glad you were here. We'll see you next week on More Than Ink. More Than Ink is a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City and is solely responsible for its content. To contact us with your questions or comments, just go to our website, morethanink.org.