Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.
Greer. I'm Molly Bidevich, and it's a joy to have you with us today. Okay, so no matter what side of the daylight saving time debate we find ourselves on, we all have to at least acknowledge the fact that light is something that we need.
In fact, it's essential for life in so many ways. So Jesus's declaration that He is the light of the world was truly a bold claim. Today, Pastor J.D. shows us how Jesus's light is one that doesn't merely reveal our sin, but ultimately it heals us. Remember, this is brand new, never-before-aired teaching, so you don't want to miss a single program.
If you do, you can always catch up at jdgreer.com. Right now, though, grab your Bible and let's join Pastor J.D. in John chapter 8. Hey, John chapter 8, if you got your Bibles this weekend, John chapter 8. We are looking at the seven I Am claims of Jesus, seven times in the Gospel of John. Where Jesus takes the loftiest name of God in the Old Testament, I Am, or in Hebrew, Yahweh, or in Latin, Jehovah, and then claims it for Himself. And then, this is sort of the theme of the Gospel of John, is that He attaches that name to one of our greatest areas of brokenness or need.
Last week, we looked at the first one of those, I Am the Bread of Life. This week, John chapter 8, verse 12, and Jesus said, I Am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. Light is, of course, essential for our lives, as much as, and perhaps even more than, bread itself.
Being scared of the dark is one of our most primal fears. I'm going to tell you a story that, to my knowledge, I have never told here before. It is a story that many of you will not believe, but I promise you that every single word of it is true.
I worked at a Christian camp for a few summers when I was a teenager, and I'm not even going to tell you the name of that camp, because it is a great camp, and they are so embarrassed by what I am about to tell you. And I will just tell you, this story does not represent who they are now, okay? And look, this story took place more than 30 years ago. George Bush I was president when this story took place.
But this stands as one of the greatest cases of misjudgment that I've ever experienced. This one particular week of high school camp, our theme for the week was American holidays. And each morning at breakfast, the camp director would announce a different holiday theme for that day. And then we would do games and skits in line with that holiday on that day.
It was a lot of fun. And you never knew what the holiday was going to be for the day until they announced it that morning at breakfast. So that week we'd already done Christmas and Thanksgiving and St. Patrick's Day and July 4th, and nobody knew what the last day was going to be. Well, about 2.30 a.m. that morning, camp officials came and got everybody out of bed, and the whole camp, about 500 high school students.
They marched us all to the chapel, which was basically an old wooden indoor amphitheater. So now you got several hundred teenagers roused suddenly out of their sleep, herded into this building with no explanation at all. Nobody knew what was going on. Not even the counseling staff had been let in on this. I happened to know what was going on, not because I was in charge, and that's an important detail, but I was like one of four people who knew what was going on because I'd been working maintenance.
That was my job for the summer. I'd been working maintenance late that evening, and my friend and I had stumbled onto some of the guys who were setting this thing up. So they made us promise not to tell anybody, and on we went. So when we all finally got into this indoor amphitheater, the camp director, who was a very intense man, was just pacing back and forth on the stage, talking nervously into a walkie-talkie. When we had all assembled in there, he announced, he got everybody's attention. He announced that earlier that evening, he had gotten worse, he had gotten word that some prisoners had escaped from a local prison, and then he said that they had discovered an unidentified boat on the camp beaches earlier this evening.
He said, no reason to be alarmed, no reason to be afraid, but given that these escaped prisoners had been serving life sentences, they just wanted to do a sweep of the camp to make sure that everything was copacetic. So we all sat there for about 10 minutes, and you have to get the picture. Middle of the night, and nobody knows what's going on.
It's weird, right? 10, 15 minutes just sitting there, and then suddenly the doors by the front of the stage, kind of the bottom of the amphitheater, the doors burst open, and five guys with ski masks rush in carrying shotguns. One runs up on stage and fires his shotgun, which had blanks in it, of course, fires it at the director. You saw him go down, and then a second ski mask guy aimed his gun at the light fixture in the ceiling, and when he fired, the lights went out, and the whole room went completely dark. I mean pitch black, and then these five guys just unloaded their shotguns at the crowd, each firing four to five 12 gauge blanks into the crowd.
Then after about 45 seconds of this foolishness, somebody flipped back on the lights, and the camp director was just standing there with a big old grin on his face, and he said, April Fools, the holiday theme for today is April Fools. Now you can all go back to your cabins, except he wasn't talking to anybody. I was at the back, and when they flipped those lights back on, you could not see a single head in that entire auditorium.
500 people on the ground under the benches. I kid you not, high school boys had passed out. Some had wet themselves.
You could hear people audibly weeping. Like I said, it was one of the worst cases of misjudgment I've ever experienced. That camp got sued out of its gourd. Again, it's a great camp now, okay, in case you're trying to figure out where that was, and look up my bio, and that was 30 years ago, and you know what?
The rules were different in the 80s and 90s. Can I get a witness on that? But still, y'all, still when I talk to people who currently work at that camp, I'll say, did you ever hear about, and they'll say, you were there for that disaster. The most awful part of the whole experience was the darkness. The middle of the night, the pitch black darkness when they supposedly shot the lights out. Darkness is just always synonymous with chaos and confusion.
It's one of our most primal fears. There were two things, two things that I needed growing up to feel safe at night. The first was the soft glow of a night light somewhere, somewhere, and the second was for that closet door to be shut.
I don't know what it was about that closet, but it just seemed like the pit of darkness, and I just knew there were demons in that dark hole staring out at me. Veronica, my wife and I prefer our room to be dark now, so no night lights, but we still want that closet door shut, okay? We associate light, we associate light not just with safety, but with honesty and integrity.
When some financial wrongdoing is uncovered, we always say it is being brought to light. We know that light brings beauty. Every kid in fifth grade science class learns now that in all the beauty that we see around us, all the colors, they're really the result of reflected light. Color is literally light. And of course, we now know, now we know that light is literally essential for life. Without light, major parts of our food chain would be disrupted and life as we know it on earth would cease to exist.
One more thing I think is especially interesting. We now know that light is somehow fundamental to existence itself. Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity, which by the way, is so complex that only Albert Einstein, myself, and a handful of other physicists really understand it, okay?
But it was all premised, it was all premised on the constancy of light. His famous formula, you've seen this, E equals MC squared. E stands for energy, M stands for mass, and C stands for constant, which is the speed of light, 186,282.2 miles per second, because that speed never changes. Energy and mass are variable, he said. They're variable and speed and time are relative, but light never changes.
It is constant. It's literally what undergirds existence. All that to say, it is hard to imagine a more audacious claim for Jesus to make about himself than I am the light of the world. I'm the color. I'm the life. I'm the constant that holds it all together. I'm the safety.
I am the beauty. Well, just as with Jesus' claim to be the bread of life, in order to understand all that Jesus is really saying here, you got to look at what's happening around this statement, how John sets it up. So first, let's consider the setting that Jesus was in. If your Bible is open there to John 8, I want you to go back a few verses in John 7 to John 7, 37, and I want you to see that John tells us, important detail, that this claim occurred on the last night of the Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast of Tabernacles was a seven-day feast, sometimes referred to as the Feast of Booths.
The word in Hebrew is sukkot, right? Feast of Booths or tents. There were three primary rituals that were associated with this feast. The first ritual was everybody in Israel came to Jerusalem and they lived in little tents or booths or tabernacles.
Those words all mean the same thing. They did that for a week to commemorate that long season during the Exodus when they lived in tents as God led them out of Egypt to the promised land. Think of it like a Jewish Woodstock without all the drugs and immorality. Second ritual was every night. Every night they pour water out on the ground to remind themselves of how God provided water for them in the desert when Moses struck the rock and it gushed water. The third ritual was they lit this enormous candelabra, had a bunch of huge lamps on all the stems. This giant candelabra was right there at the front of the temple and it was so big that when it was lit, light flooded the city. The temple orchestra would play, the people would dance before the Lord. Think of that like one of those gigantic bonfires at Texas A&M or the Burning Man Festival.
Just I'm not sure those people are dancing to the Lord by the way, but here they were. They lit this gigantic lamp to commemorate how God led Israel through the wilderness by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. The pillar of light was God's presence with him. It lit their way in the darkness.
It split the Red Sea in two and it shielded them from the pursuing Egyptians. And then when God gave them the law at Mount Sinai, that same cloud of light covered the mountain in thunder and flame. And when Israel built the tabernacle to house the ark of the covenant, that cloud hovered over the ark wherever it was. It was always there following the ark.
Years later when Solomon built the actual temple, that same cloud of light and fire descended from heaven and settled onto the Holy of Holies. We'll return to our teaching in just a moment, but I wanted to take a quick break here to sing the praises of a very special group of people, our gospel partners. This team gives so generously and faithfully to Summit Life each and every month.
It's not an exaggeration to say that they are the financial fuel behind everything we do, including broadcasting this program every day. We call them gospel partners because that's exactly what they do. They are actually partnering with us to help make the gospel known around the globe. This month we are sending each of our faithful givers a brand new Bible study working through the seven I am's that we just began studying here on the program. You know, this ministry couldn't exist without our gospel partners, and it's always a privilege to say thank you with our specially curated featured resource each month. To give a one-time gift or to join with us as a monthly gospel partner, call us right away.
The number is 866-335-5220, or you can visit us online at jdgrier.com. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD. And so to commemorate that part of the exodus, every night of the festival, you had this third ritual. They lit this giant candelabra.
Every night they did it except on the last night because everybody on that night was packing up to go home the next morning. Scholars say this last night of defeat was always eerie because you had this big, cold, dark, dead lampstand in front of the temple since they hadn't taken it down yet. And they said it served almost as an unintentional reminder that the actual cloud of God's glory had not been seen in the Jewish temple for centuries. You say, well, where had it gone?
Great question. Let me tell you that story real quick. Ezekiel chapter 10. The prophet Ezekiel proclaims that because Israel has sinned and sinned and sinned and turned from God so many times that if they did not turn back to God immediately, God's presence and glory would depart from them permanently. Israel didn't listen to Ezekiel tragically. So Ezekiel says, chapter 10, you can read it later. Ezekiel says that he saw God's glory, his cloud of glory, lift up from its place in the temple, move toward the door of the temple. It stopped at the temple threshold and hesitated for a moment, almost as if overcome with sadness at what it was about to do.
Think of it like a spouse being driven out of a home who stops at the threshold and looks back as if to say, I don't want to leave. And then the glory cloud of God's presence went out, Ezekiel says, to the east gate of Jerusalem. And then Ezekiel saw it move up the Mount of Olives and then disappear into the sky forever. From that point onward, the glory was gone.
The Israelites even had a term for it, ikabod, which literally means in Hebrew, no glory, no glory kabod, the glory is gone. And so every year in Israel, on the last night of the feast, when that candelabra was extinguished, a quiet despair, they say, was felt in Israel because they wondered when will the actual light of God's glory return to us. And now, on the last night of the feast, Jesus stands in the temple in front of that giant dark candelabra and he says, I am the light of the world.
God's presence, his protection, his beauty, his glory is back. And he's standing at the mouth of the temple. So with that backdrop, let's consider first the presumption of his claim.
And then secondly, let's consider the promise slash problem of that claim. Number one, the presumption of his claim, I mentioned this last week, but there is a convenient myth among modern people that the true Jesus, the real Jesus, the one who actually wandered around Jerusalem, was likely just an itinerant moral teacher, a good moral teacher, maybe ahead of his time, a societal revolutionary, if you will, maybe even a messenger with a special connection to the divine, similar to the Buddha, to Abraham, to Muhammad, and to other great lights in our history. But he didn't think of himself as God. No, that claim, that claim to divinity, they like to say, that was a kind of legend imposed on Jesus later. And some Christian cults today, like the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses, will say that Jesus never really claimed to be God, but that's not true.
Jesus's claim to be God was central to his teaching in the book of John. It is the core of what he is saying in moments like this one, and not just by using the name I am, which is significant in itself, but in all the imagery behind it. He was saying, I am the voice. I was the voice speaking in the burning bush. I was the cloud of God's presence that led you through the wilderness. I was the glory that dwelled in the Holy of Holies.
All those manifestations that Moses and your forefathers called God, that was me. They knew exactly what he was saying, by the way. Verse 20 says, look in your Bible, John 8 20, that they tried to arrest him when he said that.
They weren't trying to arrest him because he was claiming to be an unusually insightful teacher, but because he was claiming to be God's presence. In fact, just a few minutes later in the same discussion, the Pharisees are going to confront Jesus by telling him, they're going to say, you shouldn't be claiming all this authority for yourself. Jesus responds to them, verse 56, your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day.
He saw my day and was glad. So the Jews said to him, you are not yet 50 years old. You're talking, we're talking about seeing Abraham and him seeing you and being happy about you coming around. Jesus said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. Not before Abraham was, I was, but before Abraham was, I am. So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.
Why were they picking up stones? Not because he was using bad grammar, but because in saying before Abraham was, I am, he was claiming to be God. They knew exactly what he was saying. The other variation of this myth is that these kinds of bold claims by Jesus to deity only occur in the Gospel of John. And John presents Jesus differently than other Gospel writers.
The reasoning goes like this. In the earlier Gospels, the earliest written Gospels, Mark, Matthew, Luke, that's where we find Jesus the hippie moral revolutionary. And only John, some will say, puts in all the big God stuff and that's written years and years later. But that is not true either.
For a couple reasons. First, John was not written that much later than the other Gospels. True, it was most likely the last Gospel written, but it was still within the first generation of Christian followers. The second, and more importantly, the other Gospel writers most certainly put forward Jesus divinity. They do it a little more subtly because as Jesus himself said, he preferred to let people discover that he was God through the works that he did rather than just through outright claims. Anybody could just claim to be God. Jesus wanted to demonstrate it and let people arrive at that conclusion on their own.
But it's in there. For example, in Matthew and Mark, Jesus says, tear down this temple and I'll raise it up in three days. Matthew and Mark both know that in saying that, Jesus was talking about himself. For the Jews, the temple was the place where God dwelled. Jesus said, I am the new temple. That's a pretty strong claim to divinity.
Or how about this one? In all three of the other Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus forgave sins. And when the Pharisees objected saying, you can't say that, only God can forgive sins, Jesus does not dispute their reasoning. Instead, Jesus backs up his claim to be able to forgive sins by making a lame man walk.
And then he says, hey, if I got the power to make a lame man walk, which we all know only God could do, maybe you should also believe me when I say I can forgive sins. Matthew and Luke both record five different times, mostly toward the end of Jesus' life, when the disciples worshiped Jesus, something Jews believe was reserved for God only. So yes, the other Gospel writers put forward Jesus' deity.
They develop it differently than John does, but it's there. And that's not to mention, by the way, Paul's letters to the church, which predate the Gospels, they're all crystal clear about Jesus' deity. So all that means is that the idea that Jesus was one of history's great lights, who had perhaps a special connection to deity like many others, that idea, though popular among college professors, is just not true.
Ironically, one of the greatest assessments of this in modern times comes from U2's bottom U2's Bono. He said this in an interview with his biographer, Micah Asayas. The secular response to the Christ story always goes like this. He was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting fellow. He had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ says, no, I'm not saying I'm a teacher.
Don't call me a teacher. I'm not saying I'm a prophet. I'm saying I'm God incarnate. And people say, no, no, no, no, please just be a prophet, a prophet we can take.
I mean, you're a bit eccentric, but we've had John the Baptist eating locust and wild honey. We can handle a central prophet, but not God, not the Messiah, because you know, we're going to have to crucify you if you say that. And he goes, no, no, no, I actually am the Messiah.
At this point everybody starts staring at their shoes and says, oh my God, he's going to keep saying this. So what you're left with is either Christ was who he said he was, God incarnate, the Messiah, or a complete nutcase. I mean, we're talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson.
I'm not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have had its fate changed and turned upside down by a nutcase, well, for me, that's a bit farfetched. Not bad Bono, right? It seems like he might've finally found what he's looking for. Am I right?
Okay. Jesus claimed to be light. Y'all, he claimed to be the very radiance of God's glory. So that's the presumption of this claim.
Don't miss it. So see, now we turn to number two, the promise slash problem of that claim. As I explained, Jesus not only claims to be the great I am in the gospel of John, he attaches that name to our greatest areas of brokenness and need.
So what is the need? What are the deeds met by this claim? How does Jesus as the light of the world benefit me personally and you? What does it mean for Jesus to be our light?
Not just in the big moments, but in the everyday. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. Now, Pastor JD, as we dig deep into the character of who Jesus is during this new teaching series, can you explain why it is significant that Jesus uses the phrase I am in these seven statements? Molly, this is one of the most profound things that Jesus does in the gospel of John, because when he says I am, he's not just using a statement like an auxiliary verb like we use.
What he's saying is he's invoking the name of God from the Old Testament. It's interesting how each of these he's applying into the places of one of our greatest needs. You know, I'm the bread of life speaks to just our spiritual hunger.
I'm the way. That's the need that we have for direction. The reason that's so important is because he's showing us that the answers that we're looking for are not found in religion.
They're not found in education. The happiness you're seeking in life is found right here, right now through a present relationship with Jesus. And so, you know, to that end, to help you really get your mind around this, we've got an excellent resource for you this month. It's a seven-part Bible study of these I am statements.
I honestly can't think of anything better for you to spend time diving into. It's available in both print and digital versions. I'd love for you to take a look and reserve your copy at JDware.com.
Thank you, JD. We'd love to send you a copy of this brand new featured resource called I am seven weeks in the Gospel of John. When you give $45 or more today, we'll send you a copy as our way of saying thanks for your generous support. You can also request the study when you make your first donation as a gospel partner. If you've been growing through this program, join this special family today. Give us a call at 866-335-5220. That number again is 866-335-5220.
Or you can give and request the book online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch inviting you to join us again next time for the conclusion of today's teaching here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
