Synoptic Gospels John 13:31-33

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and then get back to synoptics and, you know, I jokingly say that I hope to finish this before my death, but, you know, which could be this week, obviously, but if I live a normal life span,
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I figure we gotta keep pressing forward here. That's just the way it is,
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I'm afraid, and so we have been studying the synoptic Gospels, but we've come to the place where you sort of have to go, we gotta fit
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John in here somewhere, and so we're looking at John 13 through 17, and then we'll, for that point, go back to synoptics and try to fit in John's material on the betrayals, and I just have to contrast how we've been doing this with my experience elsewhere in years past.
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I guess some folks would say we just go way too slow, but I just remember the high level of frustration that was mine in the
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Southern Baptist Convention years and years ago with the speed with which you had to go through things.
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I mean, you just, wow, you never had time to really consider anything, make application, it was just, well, of course, back then the application was you sit around a group and go, what do you think this verse means?
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Well, what do you think this verse means? Well, I think it means what my Aunt Gertrude thinks it means, and it just sort of, you know, gets a little bit odd at that particular point in time, but I've told a story about when we covered the
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Book of Romans in, what was it, eight weeks? Yeah, all Romans in eight weeks.
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Took us about eight weeks to get through Romans 6, didn't it? Maybe a little more than that, probably a lot more than that now I think about it.
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So, for some folks it's a little slow, but you know, some might say we just need to go more slowly, because we're a little bit slower, but I think at least we have opportunity to make applications.
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So, we've been looking at John Chapter 13. We got rid of Judas last week, basically,
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I guess would be the way to put it. He kept popping up in our discussion here, but now he's gone out and it was night, and therefore when he had gone out,
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Jesus said, Now the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and will glorify him immediately.
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Little children, I am with you a little while longer. You will seek me, and as I said to the Jews, now I also say to you, where I am going you cannot come.
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A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
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By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Simon Peter said to him,
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Lord, where are you going? Jesus answered, Where I go you cannot follow me now, but you will follow later.
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Peter said to him, Lord, why can I not follow you right now? I will lay down my life for you. Jesus answered,
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Will you lay down your life for me? Truly I say to you, a rooster will not crow until you deny me three times.
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And then, of course, we all know the chapter divisions are a later addition.
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They come in the medieval period and then the chapter and verse divisions in the 16th century.
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And so sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. They're certainly convenient for us for outlining the text and memorizing and all that stuff.
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And so on that level, yeah, but I do think we need to consistently remind ourselves that there were no chapter and verse divisions for a long, long, long, long, long time.
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And certainly the original authors did not divide their material up in this way.
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And so as soon as, you know, I think a lot of Christians know
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John 14 .1, Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. But how many know that that came immediately after Jesus says to Peter, You're going to deny me.
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And it's the very next sentence. We may have an entire chapter division there, but there wasn't one originally.
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And conceptually, we can end up with a somewhat less than full understanding of what texts are really saying when we don't see the relationship that they have to the immediate text around it and when we insert rather artificial divisions as we've done at this point.
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So Judas leaves, verse 31, and Jesus begins to speak about the
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Son of Man being glorified. And I said last week, if you want a really in -depth, beautiful study at some point, look at the phrase
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Son of Man. Years ago, there was a group that is still active on some campuses, but has diminished in size.
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They had a little bit of a resurgence for a little while a couple years ago. They're still out there someplace, but back in the day, they were called the
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Way International. The Way International. Remember the Way International? Any young folks ever heard of the
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Way International? Probably some of you sitting around going, Who exactly is young?
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And I was going to point out that certain people should not put their hands up at that point. But anyways, they were founded by a guy named
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Victor Paul Weirwill. And he put out a book called Jesus Christ is
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Not God. At least it was clear where he was coming from. At some level, you can at least appreciate that.
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And the kind of argumentation in this book, in essence, was
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Jesus called Son of Man X number of times. He's called Son of God X number of times. He's called
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Son of Man more often than he's called Son of God. And certainly there is truth to the statement that Jesus's favorite designation of himself is
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Son of Man. That means that he's not God. So you just line up the numbers and the whole idea of actually harmonizing these and going,
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Well, but he does use the other term of himself. No, it was just amazingly bad eisegesis and just really bad, bad, bad theology.
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But there are people who think that way. And unfortunately, a lot of American people approach this text, and they do so from a context that it never really had, obviously.
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And we wonder about this phrase Son of Man. What does it mean? Now, my
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Muslim friends like the phrase Son of Man because they Son of Man is a term used in the
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Old Testament, and it just simply means a human. And in fact, I think there's a new translation coming out, which we absolutely positively do not need, and hence is a waste of God's glorious trees.
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Though anymore, it's more a waste of bandwidth than it is much of anything else. But anyway, that translates
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Son of Man as the human one. Well, I suppose, you know,
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Son of God in certain non -biblical contexts could refer to a, you know, one of the sons of the gods and the gods ran around having kids and so on and so forth.
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And in that context, I guess Son of Man could mean simply the human one. But in the biblical context, there are specific meanings.
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Yes, there are some places in the Old Testament where Son of Man just simply means a human being. That's true.
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But clearly, this ain't one of them. Now is the human one glorified?
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Not really. This is the eschatological Son of Man. This is the Son of Man that we see in the book of Daniel, who is presented before the
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Ancient of Days, and he's worshipped, and he's clearly a divine figure. And now that we're getting toward the end, now that the hour has arrived, there is something about what
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Jesus is now entering into that prompts him to say, now is the
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Son of Man glorified. Now, you might say, well, we haven't even had the betrayal yet.
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We haven't had the Lord's prayer, the high priestly prayer of John 17.
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We haven't had the scourging. We haven't had the crucifixion.
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We haven't had him say, it is finished. We haven't had the burial. We haven't had the resurrection.
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Then you still have the ministry amongst the disciples, and then finally the ascension. How can the
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Son of Man be glorified now? And I suggested briefly to you last week that I think the answer to this is to be found in the recognition of the absolute certainty that Judas has gone out, the betrayal is begun.
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There is an absolute certainty in Jesus's mind that the hour has come, and that also shows us that while the specific point of Jesus's giving of his life on the cross is the center of this hour, there are things that lead up to it, and you would never want to interpret the death of Christ without the burial and resurrection.
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You wouldn't want to interpret that outside of ascension to the right hand of power, etc. And so,
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Jesus enters here into this this fulfillment hour, and therefore the
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Son of Man is glorified, and the glorification of the
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Son of Man is the glorification of God. Notice the next, and God is glorified in him. And so, when, in systematic theology, and again, please remember,
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I point this out to you just so that you don't, you don't take it for granted and hence run into problems when you seek to have conversations outside of our context here.
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For many today, systematic theology is sort of a historical study.
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It's what people used to believe, but we've come to realize the Bible is really not clear enough from their perspective to produce a meaningful systematic theology.
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And so, systematic theology, while in seminary, used to be the very center class. It was the class that sort of gave meaning to everything else.
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Now it's moved over to the church history section, and can you believe there were once people who actually believed you could do systematic theology?
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You could actually, you know, and from my perspective, that's not a movement this way, that's a movement this way.
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And I feel, honestly, very deeply for young men who go into most seminaries and experience this kind of teaching to the point where they come out thoroughly convinced that there's really nothing you can know about what the scriptures teach as a whole.
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That the best you can do is say, well, it seems that Paul, at a certain point in his life, believed this, but then later he believed this.
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So you make one author contradictory to himself, and then, of course, there's no harmony of the authors amongst themselves.
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Now, of course, they say, well, what you people do is you just turn it all into vanilla, and you just mix it all together, and Luke can't have his voice, and Matthew can't have his voice, and no, that's not the case.
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We can recognize that John has his emphasis, and Paul has his emphasis, without coming to the conclusion that that means that there is no harmonious truth to be found in scripture.
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But, again, when we look at systematic theology, when we have a high enough view of scripture to do systematic theology, then we have to recognize that what we have here, you know, we talk about the glorification of God.
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How does God glorify himself? And we'll talk about how God is glorified when we live in such a way that we seek his glory, and we seek to be obedient to his word, and all those things, but most of the time we speak about this with ourselves in the middle of the conversation.
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And that's understandable, because we want to understand what God's will for us is. Okay, that's fine.
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But the problem is, if that's as far as the conversation goes, I don't think we really have the proper foundation to come up with a meaningful answer to the question.
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What we need to realize is that all of creation, from beginning to end, is really focused right here.
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It's focused in what God is doing in redeeming a particular people unto himself by means of a particular action, and that is through the incarnation.
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That's broad. I mean, that's absolutely necessary for everything else to have meaning. But then, because of the incarnation, then the ministry of Christ, and because the ministry of Christ, then the cross of Christ as the center point of history.
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Everything points to it or back to it. The center point of history where the divine son of man, who is the
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God -man, gives his life. He restrains.
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There is a tremendous restraint in the power of God that is demonstrated in the cross.
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I mean, can you imagine puny sinful man who is dependent for his very existence upon the continued extension of God's power, crucifies the incarnate one.
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What kind of humility, what kind of restraint is required?
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I mean, Jesus sort of hints at this. When on the way to the cross, he says, if I ask my father, he could give me a whole, you know, legions of angels.
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And we know a single angel went through the camp of, I recall it was the
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Assyrians, and destroyed 180 ,000. So, if you got legions of angels, you're talking about global destruction.
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And yet, Jesus says, while that's clearly a possibility, that's not going to happen.
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Because this is the very purpose, literally, of creation itself. And so, this glorification that Jesus speaks of, isn't it odd that it occurs that the first things
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Jesus says when the traitor leaves is about the glorification of God? From the world's perspective, that doesn't make a lick of sense.
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It doesn't. I mean, itinerant peasant, 12 followers, one is about to betray him into the hands of the
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Romans, and he's going to suffer a brutal and ignominious death that is going to be so offensive that many people will call it foolishness for the next couple thousand years.
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I mean, from the world's perspective, that's what you're talking about. And yet, the first things
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Jesus is talking about is how God is glorified. God has been glorified in his life, he's going to be glorified in his death, and this is going to happen immediately, and will glorify him immediately.
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God will also glorify him in himself, not just externally, in the sense that God has given honor to certain people for what they have done in the past, but there is something about the glorification that Jesus experiences that transcends that.
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God will also glorify him in himself, and will glorify him immediately. Again, these are only words that make sense when we have already read
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John up to this point. We've read that the Word was in the beginning with God, and is to his nature
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God, and the Word became flesh, and we understand that there. If we don't have that understanding, if we just jump in here and try to go, hmm,
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I wonder what this text by itself means? It would be difficult, but when we have the context, then it makes perfect sense.
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And it's in the context of that glorification then that Jesus begins to make sure the disciples understand that their relationship with him is about to change radically.
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That he is going to be going away. Now, he had mentioned that to the Jews, John chapter 8, remember? I'm going, you cannot come.
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What's he going to do, kill himself? Remember, that's not all that long ago. But now, he needs to make sure the disciples understand what this means, and even though he explains this, you can be told about what's coming, but until you experience it very frequently, it just remains theoretical in your mind.
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I certainly learned that when I was a hospital chaplain. Some of you remember years and years ago, when
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I would go straight from the morning service to the hospital, and we had the loss support group that I did, which was some of the hardest work
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I've ever done. And, you know,
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I'd go into the critical care unit, and I would talk to families, and there'd be people there with loved ones who had been sick for many, many years.
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And they'd tell me, you know, we know what's coming, and we're ready.
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We're ready. We're prepared. And I often thought to myself, and a couple times felt it appropriate to say, you can never really be fully prepared.
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I mean, you can make preparation, but don't fool yourself. This is going to be a difficult thing, no matter how long you've seen it coming.
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It's still going to be a very difficult thing. And I remember one particular situation in the
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CCU, where I had had that conversation with someone, and then when the death did occur,
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I think the person, if I recall correctly, it's been wow, two decades now.
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Goodness. This person, I think, came to the loss support group a few weeks later, maybe a few months later.
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I don't remember what the context was, but and I just remember them saying, you know, you tried to tell me.
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I had myself fooled. I thought that I'd been seeing this coming for so long, no problem.
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And I was wrong. You just can't, you can see it coming, but until you experience it.
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And I think that happened with the disciples. Jesus had given them warning, but what he was saying was going to happen in his life was so dissonant, so out of context with what they expected of the
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Messiah, that they were conflicted. They were torn, they were pulled both directions. And as a result, you you know,
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I can't help but speculate and think, and I don't think there's anything wrong as long as we don't turn it into some kind of a thing where we draw conclusions and then build dogma on it, but we often think of that the silent hours that the scriptures tell us almost nothing about between the crucifixion and the resurrection.
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You know, that whole day, what was it like to be one of the disciples? You know, we have the advantage of hindsight, and we can look back at, you know, the fact that they've recorded all this for us, and we can see
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Jesus trying to prepare them and everything else, and yet, you know, even with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, even with the teaching from scripture, there is still this amazement when the revelation is finally made, and clearly the disciples are not sitting in the locked upper room going, well, it's coming quick.
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Can you see that, Peter? Yeah, look at that. Well, of course, they've got a sundial or something, I don't know. But, you know, the old, whatever the version of Timex was back then,
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I guess, but just a little while longer, and you know, I just get the feeling they're sitting there, I don't get the feeling they're sitting there singing hymns, you know, coming, saying, well, we need to write some songs about the resurrection, you know.
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They are, they're hiding, they're in fear, they don't understand, and the reason we know that's the case is because when
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Jesus does appear to them, what does he say? He upbraided them for their unbelief. Why didn't you believe what the prophetic scriptures had testified of me from the beginning, and, you know, going through them, and Luke chapter 24, etc.
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So, you know, what was it like? Were they sitting there going, man,
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I've wasted three years of my life, and now the Romans are after me, and the Jews too, and even if I go back to Galilee, everybody up there knows who
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I am. I mean, Peter's going, man, even in the dark they knew who I was. You know, the servant girl was going, he was with him, he was with him, and of course, he's sitting there thinking about how he had had so much bravado, which we have, you know, recorded for us right here.
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I would die for you. Yeah, I think it'd be long, Peter, before you're going to deny even knowing me.
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So, that whole time period, it makes you wonder how you could have walked with Jesus and heard
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Jesus teaching, but for us, I think we need to realize that Peter is going to require heavenly visions to break out of his traditions in Acts chapter 10.
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Remember the sheet, you know, do not call, what I've called clean, unclean, three times, and if that's with the
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Holy Spirit after three years of teaching, then you can understand what it's like here before the coming of the
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Spirit in the the way he's going to come post -resurrection, post -Pentecost, and without the discussion that they're going to get post -resurrection about the fulfillment of all these scriptural prophecies in Christ and so on and so forth.
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So, it was a difficult time, no two ways about it, and you just wonder how they handled all of that, but the scriptures don't go into much detail on that.
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They give us clues, but they don't try to psychoanalyze the disciples, and they don't go, well, you know,
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Thaddeus handled this better than the other
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Jude, and, you know, John was somewhat more spiritual than the others, and Peter just kept to himself, and we don't have that kind of listing of the disciples and how they handled these things, though I'm sure they probably did handle them in different ways, because they weren't all clones of one another.
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But the conversation does turn, after the announcement of the glorification of the Son of Man, to the fact that Jesus is going away, and what this is going to mean to them, that certainly is the context that takes us into John chapter 14.
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And so, when Jesus announces he's leaving, he then gives a new commandment.
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Now, this is the same kind of language that certainly comes up over and over again in First John, and is it really a new commandment?
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I mean, in the Old Covenant, you had, you know, love your neighbor as yourself. It's one of Jesus's favorite quotations from the
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Holiness Code. Is this a new commandment? What's new about verse 34?
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I think the phrase, even as I have loved you, I think what we have, I think the newness of this commandment is not that there hasn't been a command before to love, but there will never be a greater example of what that means than what is about to be given.
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I think that's where the newness comes in. A new commandment
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I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
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By this, all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. So, we have to, if you think about it, and you go, all right, the betrayer is left,
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Jesus knows there is now, I mean, literally, the clock is ticking.
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I mean, that would be, I think, sort of a colloquial way to express what is going on here now.
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The clock is ticking. It's only going to take a certain amount of time for Judas to walk a certain distance, and a certain number of people to be gathered, and to walk back, and so on and so forth.
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So, Jesus knows when this is going to take place.
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And you have this intensive, chapters 14, 15, and 16, and 17, you have this intensive period with the disciples on this last night.
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And if you know that's what's coming, then what you're going to say at this time is incredibly important.
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You're not going to waste your time talking about local politics or the weather.
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If you know the clock is ticking, what you're going to say during that time is going to be extremely important.
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And so, as soon as the announcement of the glorification of the
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Son of Man comes, what's the next thing? Love one another. Have love for one another.
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And this has echoed down through the centuries.
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Certainly, when God's people, especially, are under persecution, the care that they have for one another, the tenderheartedness they have toward one another in those situations has been a testimony to all men who the true disciples of Christ are.
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Now, don't get me wrong, Lucifer does everything he can to counterfeit the real thing.
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And every cult and ism that I know of talks about love of one another.
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I remember back in the mid -80s,
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Sun Yung Moon was real big here in the United States. A couple of people
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I talked to back then, I'd like to talk to now that he's gone, asked him what their thoughts and feelings are now, but they were very active here.
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I was actually involved, I don't know if I ever told the story, I was actually involved in getting a church member from a local church here back from the
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Moonies. Church put me on a plane, sent me up to Berserkly and I met with a student at Golden Gate who was from the church.
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And I'll never forget hiding behind this garage with binoculars and watching this house.
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Until we saw the guy, he had snuck a letter out to the church asking for help and he was afraid, he was an immigrant, he didn't know he could just walk away.
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He thought that would get him shot or something. We ended up showing up with the cops and making a demand that he'd be returned.
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I think I flew back on a Friday and Sunday night after I was teaching a class on Mormonism. I walk in and there he was standing at the front of the church with the pastors.
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Interesting experience, but what they would do was something called love bombing and has nothing to do with what's going on in Israel right now.
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If you were a new person to the group, they would just love all over you.
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I mean you're the most important person on the planet, they want to know all about your life. You were just just smothered.
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So much so that you really didn't have any... they did not want to give you time to reflect.
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Rational thought's not a good thing in cults. They just smothered you and got you in as quickly as possible and only once you were in and they managed to sever the ties you had with your normal life outside of that.
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Remove you from where you were to another location, make you completely dependent upon them.
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Then you became a part of the group and now it was your responsibility to then join with them and doing that to other people was the idea.
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And so from the outside you'd look at that and go, wow, they love one another.
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Well because they... how do you know that? Because they loudly profess it and they talk about all the time and they hug each other and they're just ishy -squishy.
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And we have to be careful that we don't interpret biblical terms in modern terminology.
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I mean what the world today calls love very rarely is. Most of the time it's lust.
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Most of the time it's self -fulfillment. Most of the time it's marked by selfishness.
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I mean in the current conversation about the nature of marriage, I cannot think of anything more selfish than to want to love someone who's a mirror image of me.
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It's really narcissism. And then when you think about someone in a situation like that, then forcing a child into that thing, that's child abuse.
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I'm not allowed to say this outside of these walls. Oops. But it is.
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It's not love. Love is self -sacrificial. And love is long -term.
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And love is a commitment. And believe it or not, even Scottish people can love. And you're going, huh?
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You know, I'm from Scottish stock and we are not the most emotive people on the planet. I mean, you know,
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I've said it before, but it's true. When I travel, especially I go back to Long Island, a lot of Italians there.
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And you go into a church and you preach and then afterwards here come the
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Italian women. And they want to hug you.
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And I'm just sort of like Al Gore, you know. And I try to explain to folks, let me show you a
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Scottish guy with a Scottish hug. That's how we show love for one another, from across the room.
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I mean, that's deep. Oh, man, that's deep, man. Let me tell you. That is, whoa.
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You should be. That's as close to you as that. Stop it. There you go. That's just the way
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Scotsmen are. I mean, anything more than that is just English. So, you know.
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You guys got that from us. I don't know.
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I'm not sure how that worked. So, I'm finally, you know, my son was pointing out to me that in less than one month, less than one month from today,
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I will enter into my sixth decade. See how much white there is down here? Fair amount, fair amount.
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And I think I'm finally getting, you know, once you get into your second half century, one thing
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I can say I really appreciate, I've had many people over my lifetime express love and appreciation for what
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I do and the ministry and all the rest of this stuff. But you know the people I really appreciate and appreciate the most about me is the people who have been steadfast and consistent in their prayer and support.
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They're always there. It's not the gushiness. It's the consistency over time.
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And Jesus is going to say here, loved his disciples to the end, completely.
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It's one thing to use the language. For some folks it's really important. I understand that. But real love lasts because it is a mindset and it's a commitment.
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Love the Lord your God. That doesn't mean that every single day your feelings of God are gushiness.
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That's one of the problems with mysticism from my perspective, is it replaces commitment and consistency over time with the need to constantly be revving up your emotional batteries.
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And there's entire denominations where the essence of quote -unquote worship is revving up the emotional batteries.
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Got to get all emotional on Sunday and then you slowly, and then Wednesday you get a little bump and then on Sunday and it's just this roller coaster of emotion.
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Now God made us as emotional beings but the New Testament teaching is that we are to be of a sound mind.
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Sophronismus, discipline. And that means long term, long term.
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The world can tell the difference between a brief, temporary assertion of emotional attachment.
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And well, you know one of the greatest things I can think of about B .B. Warfield, some of you have never even heard of B .B.
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Warfield. If you haven't, I would highly recommend him to you. Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, one of the great
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Princeton theologians. Back in late 1800s, early 1900s.
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I've seen his grave in the Princeton Cemetery, which is more of a seminary than the seminary is anymore, which is more of a cemetery than the cemetery is.
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But anyways, he wrote some tremendous stuff.
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I've been greatly benefited by Warfield. But if you know his history, you know that at the end of his life, his wife became a complete invalid.
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If I recall correctly, this is just sort of a faint bell in the back of my head, which is getting scary to listen to those things.
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But I think it was actually a thunderstorm or something that started her decline.
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It was very, very interesting. But she became an invalid and Warfield spent the rest of his life caring for her.
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Now, he continued to work, but at a much reduced level because of his long term commitment.
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And we see, we see those, you know, my parents were married over 50 years.
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I was privileged to be at their 50th wedding anniversary. And we see that kind of thing. We go, that's how you see love.
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It's the long term commitment. It's not just the young couple that just constantly pawing each other.
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I mean, anybody can do that. But when that young couple then grows old together, that's the kind of commitment that demonstrates real love.
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And I think that self -sacrificial love that we see within the
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Christian community is a fulfillment of what
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Jesus says here, not the kind of love that our society talks about all the time. Well, we will pick up at that point and can hopefully get into chapter 14.
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Somewhere about where I just was. Let's close the word of prayer.
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Father, we do thank you for your word. And we do ask that you would help us to love one another, not just in word, but in deed as well to pray for one another and to seek to build one another up in our faith and our service to you.