Father and Son, Unity and Testimony

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If you'll turn with me, please, in your Bibles once again to John 5, the
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Gospel of John 5. And before we look to God's Word together, let us pray that He will bless our time together.
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Our gracious Heavenly Father, once again, we come into Your presence. We come with Your Word at hand, but we know that You have chosen to give to Your people
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Your Word and Your Spirit. And so, Lord, we would ask that Your Spirit would be with us during this time, that He would guide and direct, that He would protect us from distraction, that He would help us to focus upon Your truth, and that He would bring that Word to bear upon our souls, that He would convict us of sin, that He would encourage us in our walk and in our service to Christ.
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All to Your honor and glory, we pray in Christ's name, amen. For those of you visiting with us, we have been engaged in a study for quite some time now on a very unusual path.
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And I will, of course, take full responsibility for the unusualness of this particular study, specifically in the sense that I am working upon a project, a doctoral project on the subject of a papyrus called
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P45, Papyrus 45. And so, what we are doing in our time together is we are looking at what that particular papyrus contains.
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Now, the problem is it is a fragmentary papyrus, and therefore, what we are doing is, as long as it contains a chapter in the
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New Testament, and it covers Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, only portions thereof, we will cover that chapter.
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And so, we already did John chapters 10 and 11. I then cheated rather boldly in recognizing that it contains just a few words in John 4 and a few words in John 5.
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But hey, let's cover John 4 and 5 while we're at it. I made up the rules, I can do as I wish. And so, we are getting toward the end, believe it or not, of our looking at P45 in the
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Gospel of John. And I have decided that once we finish this, we will move to what it contains in the
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Book of Acts. I, again, don't have any rules in this. I'm making them up as I go along. So, we may do a few chapters in Acts, and then we can step out and do maybe the
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Markan material, then go back to Acts, and then go back and do Matthew. And the Matthew, Mark, Luke stuff, there's not a whole lot of overlap.
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And so, that's how we're doing things, I can guarantee you. As far as I know, this has never been done before.
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So, I'm not sure if that means it's good or bad, but at least it's not something that everybody's doing.
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And so, we have been looking at John chapter 5, and we have been digging into some very deep material.
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We saw that especially the material beginning in verse 18 gives us some of the most in -depth discussion of the relationship of the father and the son as to their persons, their purposes, their relationship as far as the son is incarnate.
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He is the sent one. The father is the sender. And so, what does this mean as to their relationship?
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And the distinctions between the father and the son are very important to recognize, because there are, unfortunately, many people who deny the distinction between the father and the son.
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They will actually teach an error that teaches that the son is the fleshly aspect of Jesus, and the father is the divine aspect of Jesus.
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So, Jesus is actually two persons, the father and the son. If you were here for the opening this morning, before Sunday school, we read through the section in the
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London Baptist Confession of Faith that addresses the truth of what Scripture teaches concerning the nature of the son, one person with two complete natures.
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And so, the distinction between father and son, very important to understand.
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And yet, we've also seen incredibly high things said about this son of God.
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He identifies himself as well as the son of man. And he has taught us that all judgment, for example, will be handed over to him, that he will be the one who calls the dead forth out of their graves, and he will be the one who renders judgment.
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He is the one who can give life. He has been given to have life within himself and to give life to others.
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And so, we are to honor the son, even as we honor the father. All of this has been given to us in John chapter five, and it has provided us with a real balance in understanding more about our
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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And so, we finished off looking at the resurrection in verse 29, that an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come forth.
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Those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.
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And we talked about the difference between something that is descriptive and something that is prescriptive.
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That is, if you come to the Bible with a mindset of legalism, in the sense that you feel that you can somehow do things to gain something from God, then you're gonna look at texts like this, and you're gonna go, ah, you see, if you do good deeds, the result will be that you will get a resurrection of life.
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And if you do evil deeds, a resurrection of judgment. Well, since we've all done evil deeds, that does raise the issue of how do you balance these things.
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But many people have the idea that when you encounter these types of texts in scripture, they are prescriptively giving you a description of what you must do, a prescription.
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Over against descriptively, we're looking at the Bible descriptively and recognizing that those who receive a resurrection of life, yes, they are marked as those who did good deeds.
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Those, the resurrection of evil, marked as those who committed evil deeds. Since, obviously, we have all committed evil deeds, there must be something more involved in the determination of one's final place of abode.
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And we know from scripture that that has to do with one's relationship to God in and through Jesus Christ.
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And so having announced his own centrality in the actual judgment, and again,
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I just make it known to those of you who have read the Bible pretty much your entire life, you're accustomed to it, it is so easy for us to miss these tremendous texts.
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We know how the book ends. We know what the final revelation concerning Jesus Christ is, but can you imagine the weight of these words as they were being enunciated?
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Before, there is a Philippians 2 to read. If you didn't have Philippians 2 to read, if you didn't have
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Colossians 1, if you didn't have Hebrews 1, if you didn't, well, you'd have John 1. If you got to John chapter 5, you've already read
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John 1, I suppose. So, but if you didn't have those others to help provide that level of context, these words would strike us as making amazing claims.
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And as I've said, so often we become unsettled when challenged about our faith because we only look to a small number of texts to establish an overarching teaching when the reality is that that overarching teaching is found in the very fabric of the entire story of Christ, or the very fabric, for example, of what
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Paul teaches. When you listen to everything in the Pauline epistles, you can get a balanced understanding of what
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Paul is saying. I'm so tired today, I'll be honest with you, of the amount of anti -gospel scholarship amongst
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Christians today, of anti -Pauline scholarship, and of course, that's all picked up by the people that I get to deal with regularly, my
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Muslim friends, or my Mormon friends, or wherever else it might be. They just, oh, they love liberals, and they love quoting from those folks to try to make their case.
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And the reality is when you just allow the scriptures to speak, when you just extend some level of faith in the inspired nature of scripture, the consistency of what it teaches is right there.
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It's not a simplistic thing. I'm not saying it's real easy to just make everything fit together, but if you're willing to hear, if you're willing to listen, that harmony and that consistency will be found.
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And so with that, we notice what was said by the
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Lord Jesus in verse 30. We will pick up our focus in verse 30 with another phrase that, again, if you weren't with us when we covered the earlier portions of this chapter, you may find my treatment of this somewhat brief, and it's because we've already dealt with sort of the foundational platform here, but I will reiterate some portion of it.
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Jesus says, I can do nothing on my own initiative. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me.
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Now, again, this type of text has been used to attempt to, in essence, say that Jesus denies his own deity or denies his own equality with the
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Father, because how can you be equal to the Father when he says, I can do nothing on my own initiative? How can anyone who makes that statement truly be considered
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God in human flesh or anything else? Well, again, one must look at all of Scripture says, and one must listen to words like this in the flow of the narrative in which they are found.
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Jesus has just been talking, once again, for the preceding verses, about how he is going to render judgment.
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He is going to raise the dead. The Son of Man is the one who is going to judge the living and the dead and the resurrection, and these are all things that the
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Jews believed were God's prerogatives. So, as we've seen already in John chapter five, the emphasis is upon showing the distinction between the
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Father and the Son, and yet the unity that is there, so you do not have a separate deity off doing his own thing, distracting in worship.
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I'm gonna get my followers who are gonna worship me, and the Father's gonna have his followers who are gonna worship him. No, no, no, no, no. You do not have that kind of literal polytheism being taught in Scripture.
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The balance always is the one being of God, yet there are three distinct persons revealed to us that share that one being.
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How, then, are we to understand that? And we have, even in this one verse,
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I think a beautiful fusion of those two truths, maintaining both truths and allowing us to see how we are to maintain those truths in our own thinking.
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And so, when Jesus says, I can do nothing on my own initiative, once again, it's that same phrase that we saw earlier, of myself, when it says my own initiative, that's literally from myself, the idea being in isolation from, separate from doing the will of the
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Father. And this makes sense. This is the Son who has been sent.
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He is fulfilling the will of the Father in all things. The idea that the
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Son could do something of himself in isolation from the will of the
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Father would open up the possibility of the very disruption of the
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Godhead itself. Remember how this started? Jesus said, my Father is working until now, and I am working.
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And the Jews understood what he was saying. He was calling God his own Father, making himself equal to God. They understood the ramifications of these statements, and now
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Jesus is explaining what the ramification of those statements actually is.
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And so, when he says, I can do nothing on my own initiative, having just said he has life in himself, he's going to judge, honor the
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Son, even as they honor the Father, is not some statement that says, I'm just a creature that is representing
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God. That's not his statement. The point is the perfect unity that exists between the
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Father and the Son, and therefore the Son is not going to disrupt the unity of the Godhead in going off and doing his own thing, and that's what's brought out later on.
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Notice, as I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just because I do not seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me.
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So this judgment, and really, when you think about what's being said, I can do nothing on my own initiative, the context here, very fairly read, is judgment in the verse before, judgment in this verse, it's focused upon that specifically.
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But the point there is, the judgment is going to be absolutely harmonious as to its outcome because the
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Son is not seeking his own will, but the will of him who sent him, and he says, as I hear,
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I judge. Now, what's important there is what Jesus hears, he hears from the
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Father. More than once, we've already heard Jesus saying, we're going to see him saying it again in the
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Gospel of John, that what he hears from the Father, he speaks. And so the revelation that the
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Son gives to us, we can trust it. It's not like so much of what we have today, where you have religious leaders, and they have their own thoughts, and they have their own ideas, and you are left having to pick through what this person says and that person says, and this person contradicts that person, and you've got popular gurus and people today in our world, and if you go back, you can just use
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YouTube and find them contradicting themselves. You know, they used to have one emphasis, now they've got another emphasis, and now they may come from the same sort of Eastern religious background, but then they develop their own perspectives, and so they contradict one another, and you're left going, who is to really know?
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But when it comes to what Jesus is saying, he says, as I hear, I judge.
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And so there is going to be perfect harmony, even in his judgment of all of mankind, with what he has heard in the very presence of the
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Father. So you have unified, perfectly consistent activity of the
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Father and the Son. The Son does not seek his own will, but the will of him who sent me.
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Now, of course, there have been controversies in regards to statements like this, even over the past couple of years, as to the relationship of the
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Father and the Son. I would say, especially in light of what we have very clearly laid out for us in Philippians chapter 2,
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I direct you to a review of that particular text. But in Philippians chapter 2, the
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Son voluntarily makes himself of no reputation.
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And so the submission that you see of the Son's will to the
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Father's will is a submission of love, it is not a submission of force.
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And in Philippians chapter 2, as we've mentioned before, the forms of the language that are used there is that Jesus does this himself.
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He makes himself of no reputation. It's not like the Father strips him of his power and authority, forcefully taking it away from him.
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This is a voluntary submission, a laying down out of love, both for the
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Father, for the plan that Father, Son, and Spirit have decreed from eternity.
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Past and amazingly, love for the elect themselves.
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And this going back into eternity itself. But the point here is, the
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Son is seeking to do the will of him who sent him. Now I stop once again.
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When we think about the true foundation of our relationship to God, one of the sad, sad things when you hear what
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I would call sub -biblical man -tradition -laden versions of the faith that place the onus of salvation upon the creature and the creature's power that works in cooperation with God, rather than recognizing the truth that God is the one who saves,
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God's power is behind it all, God's purpose is being accomplished. One of the sad things is that it always in its final analysis either results in an uncertainty about one's relationship with God or it results in this gross perversity of those who believe that all you have to do is tip your hat toward God, you got your ticket punched, and after that you don't ever have to think about Christ and it's just simply a matter of, well, you can become a super disciple if you want, but hey, you're on your way, don't worry about it.
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This kind of, we don't need to worry about repentance, we don't need to worry about holiness, perversity that is just such an ugly thing that unfortunately is extremely pervasive in our day, at least in the
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United States. What I mean by that is if you don't see that God and the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit, the perfection of the decree of God, the perfection of the work of the
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Son, the powerful ability of the Holy Spirit of God to accomplish what the triune
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God wishes to accomplish, if that's not a part of your theology, then you're stuck with those two pits to fall into, in essence.
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And you either have the person who is always wondering, you know, am I still in relationship to God?
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Have I done enough? You know, I sinned over there in this matter and I keep struggling with this sin over there and, you know,
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I just don't know if I'm going to be able to make it. Or you have the people just forget about all that stuff and say,
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I've got my ticket punched, I'm on my way to heaven, I don't have to worry about anything else. And I would suggest that both of those ditches to fall into would be avoided if we just allowed ourselves to consider for a second how important it is to our salvation that the
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Son does not seek His own will, but the will of Him who sent Him. I mean, honestly, think about it.
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In your conversations with fellow believers on the subject of the
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Gospel, when it comes up, you know, I get to have some of these conversations because I sometimes feel like I live in an airport in an airplane, okay?
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Not so much this year though, that's going to be changing here come May. I'm going to be spending, you know,
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I don't know, 25, 30 ,000 miles flying in the air over a couple of weeks and to get on those crazy things, you generally sit around a lot.
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And especially when you have a flight delay, it's almost like everyone starts becoming friendly to one another because we're all suffering together, you know?
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We're all eating the same lousy food and sitting in the same lousy airport waiting rooms.
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And so we start suffering together and you start talking. And on a trip
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I had recently, I forget now which one it was, I was in the exit row, thankfully.
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Rank has its privileges. And I was in the exit row and the guy was in the middle seat next to me.
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And I forget how we got started, but we discovered that we're both believers and so we start having this conversation.
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And you've had the same type of conversation as well. And you start getting into, you know, talking about the faith and it's not long before you find out whether you're talking to someone who has been challenged regularly from the pulpit of their fellowship to think deeply about what the real core foundation of their relationship with God is.
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And I would suggest one of the worst things that churches today do to people is they will introduce them to a form of the gospel.
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They will introduce them to some truths about the gospel. But then out of a lack of confidence that the spirit of God will keep the sheep of God, they switch into some type of,
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I don't want to offend you, entertainment mode that then deprives them of being regularly reminded of the very foundations upon which they are to build the relationship with God that will bring them through all the difficulties of their life.
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Now, we've already pointed out over and over again, the foundation of our relationship with God is not found in our accomplishments.
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Anything that we do, any progress that you make in the Christian life is due to the work of the spirit of God within you and the spirit of God is working within you because of prior realities.
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And one of those prior realities is the perfect union of the father and the son laid out here because I do not seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me.
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Can the son ever fail to do the will of the father?
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Can the son ever fail to do the will of the father? Now, on one level, when we think about that, what we have here is
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Jesus's statement that his focus is doing the will of him who sent him.
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That's Jesus's focus. I think one of the reasons that may not be the focus of too much preaching in many churches today is because that's not about us, is it?
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Everybody wants to hear about me, me, me, us, us, us. But you see, we understand that the
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Bible presents the gospel as being focused upon what God has done to glorify himself through the salvation of an undeserving people.
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But so much of what is preached, not so much of what's found in the New Testament, but so much of what is preached is focused upon us, us, us.
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I played a video, oh, I played a video on the dividing line this week from this young guy from a very, very, very popular church in California.
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And he was just going on and on and on about how
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God thinks you are just fantastic. I mean, he just thinks about you in a positive way all the time.
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You are, he's just wrapped up in you. And I just want to go, what
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Bible are you reading? We're to be wrapped up in him.
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And yes, the condescension of the father and the son and the spirit and even having anything to do with us.
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And yes, God's love toward us is a fantastic thing. But if you don't balance that with an understanding of God's absolute perfection in and of himself, you're gonna end up worshiping a mirror image of you rather than the transcendent
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God of scripture. And hence, you're not gonna be changed by worshiping a mirror image of yourself.
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But you will be changed when you recognize that God is God and you are not. And that this kind of truth that we see here is foundational to why
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I can wake up each morning not in terror of the wrath of God. And it's not about me.
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It's about the fact that I know the son will always do what is pleasing to the father.
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The son is capable of doing what the father has sent him to do. And so in the next chapter, when
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Jesus says, it's the father's will that I lose none of them that have been given to me, but I raise them up all in the last day, that's what he's going to do.
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It's astounding to me how many people I encounter today who actually preach that yes, the son wants to do what the father wants to do and the father wants to do things, but you know, we all have disappointments in life.
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And even the father, the son and the spirit experience disappointment.
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I look at something like this. I go, so you mean the father, you mean the son might fail to actually bring forth the resurrection, might fail at the judgment, there might be some unjust verdicts given.
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You know, exactly where does this failure come in? I'm not even talking about the heretical teachings that are to be found amongst quote unquote evangelicals today.
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Such as the open theistic teaching that directly teaches that Jesus could have literally destroyed the
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Godhead by doing something different than what the father desired him to do.
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That's taught by people. God could have ceased being God. That could have happened.
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And I submit to you the primary reason these people teach that is to maintain a rabidly unbiblical concept of man's utter autonomy.
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Which by the way, when you think about man's utter autonomy has become the very religion, the very religion of the cultural leftists in our day.
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If you can sit there and be a grandfather and all of a sudden decide that you're a grandmother, you think you're autonomous.
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And we're seeing the resultant chaos in our society today. Part of the foundation of why you can trust that Jesus Christ will accomplish within you what he has said he will accomplish in those who believe in him is that he is not seeking his own will, but the will of him who sent him.
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That means there is perfect harmony between the father and the son. And then you keep readings of the
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Gospel of John, you get to chapters 14, 15, and 16. And who do the father and son send and by whom do they dwell within believers, but the
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Holy Spirit of God. And so here you have an element of the perfect harmony that lays the foundation for you to be able to have confidence that God will accomplish what he will accomplish in your life.
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Now, Jesus has made some absolutely amazing statements.
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And you can understand how someone might say, who do you think you are?
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What evidence do you give? So in verse 31, we see
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Jesus saying, if I testify about myself, and you could probably, if you wanted to interpret that, if I alone, because he's gonna talk about others.
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If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true.
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There is another who testifies of me and I know that the testimony which he gives about me is true.
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Now, once again, there have been those. I know
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I'm an absolute treasure trove of different ways that people have twisted the scripture. Comes with the territory, comes with the job,
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I'm afraid. And sometimes I would imagine you sit there going, I didn't know, I didn't need to know.
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About all the different ways that people have messed this up in times past. But then again, you run into someone who does it and maybe you'll be better prepared.
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When it says my testimony is not true, there'd be people say, see? How could
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God say something like that? But what he is referring to, obviously, in my opinion, there are some who might disagree, but in my opinion, it's fairly obvious.
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When he says, if I alone testify about myself, my testimony is not true. We know that in the court of law, you needed more than one witness to verify the truthfulness of a statement.
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And so he's not saying I am a liar or what I say is not true in of itself. What he's saying is there is more to the testimony of myself than just my words.
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And he's going to introduce what that is here in the next few verses. But the point is, when it says true, we think of categories of true and false rather than true as valid or invalid, legally speaking.
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And so we know that in the context of dealing with the Jewish people, testimony, the giving of testimony in a matter required multiple witnesses for the verification, the establishment of the truthfulness of a particular statement.
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And so he says there is another who testifies of me and I know the testimony which he gives about me is true.
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Now, given that the very next verse is about John, some would say that he's talking about John's testimony to him, but there would be others that would say, no, because he goes on to say that the testimony which
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I receive is not from man. So he mentions John and he mentions
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John's testimony to him, but the ultimate testimony is going to be found in his works, in his words, and in the father himself.
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So there's going to be a multitude of testimony that is given. And since the words that he's spoken, he's heard from the father.
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Since the works that he's doing have been given to him by the father, then ultimately the final source of testimony concerning the son is of course the one who sent him.
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And that means God's testimony is final and complete and has taken a multitude of avenues to provide that testimony to the people.
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And so you have the statement, you have sent to John and he has testified to the truth.
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Now, I'm not gonna spend any of our only brief few moments left together to expand too much upon this.
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There is, if you're interested in looking into the commentaries, a lot of interesting discussion of the relationship of the gospel writer
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John to John the Baptist and to the reality that as we see in Acts chapter 19, years after John's martyrdom, there were still those who viewed themselves as followers of John the
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Baptist. And there was an interesting dynamic and relationship that you see there in Acts chapter 19.
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And there seems to be a real concern on John's part to make sure that those who had been exposed to the baptism and preaching of John came to understand this is the one of whom
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John testified. So there was a real concern that that forerunner, his message would not turn into something that was an end unto itself, but would be seen even by those who had heard it to be fulfilled only in Jesus Christ.
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So from their perspective, it'd be such a tragedy for someone to be left as merely a follower of the forerunner rather than finding the fulfillment in Christ.
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There seems to be a real concern on John's part, which if John is written as late as some would say that it was, is an interesting testimony to how long
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John the Baptist's ministry had impact literally all across the
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Mediterranean basin. You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth, but the testimony which
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I receive is not from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved.
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Now this is as far as we're gonna get today, but it's gonna take a few minutes for us to consider what is said here.
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The testimony which I receive is not from man. He's gonna go back to talking about John. He was the lamp that was burning and was shining and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light.
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And so there very clearly, John was very well known amongst the Jews and there was the call for repentance and his personal character was clearly seen and that's what ended up in his losing his head was because he was willing to rebuke powerful people about their sinful actions and all those things were true.
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But Jesus says the testimony which I receive is not from man. So he's pointing us forward to a greater testimony that will be there.
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He's not discounting John's testimony. He was a great man, but he has a divine testimony.
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But then we have this little phrase. And a lot of people would be tempted to just hop over it, move on, maybe not say much about it.
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I can't do that. I can't do that because I know that this is a kind of phrase that is gonna be utilized over and over again by some people who would seek to make an argument against where we stand on an emphasis upon God's freedom in the matter of salvation.
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Why do I say that? But I say these things that you may be saved. You see,
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I've had more than one person say to me, if Jesus was a Calvinist like you think he was, there's a little bit of an anachronism there obviously, but you know what
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I refer to. You've heard people talk about how when you get over to John chapter six, I even put it in the potter's freedom.
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Jesus preaches Calvinism, okay? That's an anachronistic, but you understand what it's saying. And this is what they will say.
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If Jesus was a Calvinist, he never could have said these words. Can you say these words as a Calvinist? But I say these things that you may be saved.
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May be saved? In the next chapter, don't you understand, don't you teach that the father draws men to the son and you emphasize that that term that's used there is the same term that when
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Peter dragged the fish up onto the shore, that's the same verb that's used there. And so you emphasize the power of the father in drawing men to the son, and you emphasize all that stuff.
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But if you had just started one chapter earlier, then you wouldn't have all those misunderstandings, you see, that's what
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I'm told. Because Jesus said these things, you may be saved. So he just throws it out there, and he's talking to the
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Jews, and you go back to verse 18, they were seeking to kill him, but he just throws it out there, and it's just this big possibility, it's peanut butter grace, you just throw it all out there, and I say these things that you may be saved, and it's not really a matter of whether the father gives the people to the son or anything like that, we're just gonna throw it all out there, and I say these things because there is a possibility that someone might be saved by hearing what
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I'm saying, that's what is stated, that's what is said in this context.
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Is that what is going on? Is that what
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Jesus says? But I say these things so that you may be saved.
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Well, let's keep a few things in mind. Once again, it's very easy to isolate texts and try to build huge things out of this, and this is a subclause, it's an aside because he's gonna go on to talk about John, so it's not like he expands upon it, it's always interesting to me how many people wanna try to build entire theologies on subclauses when you have entire chapters talking about certain subjects they wanna try to avoid.
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So you have the doctrine of justification laid out in Romans 3 and Romans 4 and Romans 5, but Roman Catholics will run over to one statement of Jesus, wisdom is justified by our children, and you build an entire theology of justification out of a passing statement while just sort of pushing chapters 3, 4, and 5 of Romans off to the side.
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You start after a while to recognize that kind of activity on people's parts.
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And it is quite evident that when you walk into John chapter 6, you start in the 20s, and the same topic just keeps going all the way through to the 60s, verses 20 through 60, you got about 40 verses there on one topic, one argument, yeah, you can build a lot on that.
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Be careful what you build on passing statements in subclauses at the end of sentences that are not even picked up and explained.
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It would seem that you need to keep that in mind, but it's given to us by the
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Holy Spirit of God, so what do we do with it? Was Jesus saying that I'm saying these things so that you don't have to believe in the doctrine of election?
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That's how people take it, isn't it? I mean, it's good to put it into its final form, because that's what they're saying.
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What they want to suggest to you is, but I say these things so that you may be saved, which means salvation really isn't something that the
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Father has determined, and it is not really an elect people of God, and he's not going to join a particular people to Christ in his death, and the elect is really just an amorphous group that we get in and out of by our own activities and just totally change the whole character of biblical revelation, all on the basis of half of a sentence.
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Now, a couple things to keep in mind. I say these things that you may be saved.
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God gives divine revelation, and some of that revelation he uses to draw his elect into himself, and some of that revelation he uses to condemn men in their sin.
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The very gracious words of Jesus in the next chapter are going to result in what?
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John chapter six, you start out with 5 ,000 excited disciples. By the end of John chapter six, you've got 12 confused disciples, one of whom's a devil, okay?
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Bad numbers, okay? Not the church growth movement, the church shrinkage movement. Yes, indeed, we've talked about that before.
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So what happened? The gracious words that Jesus spoke in John chapter six have been used by God to console and encourage
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God's people and to focus people upon the centrality of Christ and bring about salvation, and yet at the same time, repel so many who are not ready to hear about Jesus as the sole source of spiritual life.
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Any person who thinks they have that within themselves is gonna find Jesus' words to be repulsive, something they don't want to accept.
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And so God gives revelation, and we don't know, the book of Acts tells us that there were many priests, many
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Levites who came to express faith in Jesus Christ.
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Were some of them listening to these words? We don't know, we're not told. We know that there were some who were saved, but the reality is, were there some people listening to Jesus right now who were opposed to him, maybe who initially heard him say,
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I am working until now and my father is working, and were offended by that, who were eventually a part of the family of faith when
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God worked within their lives. We don't know, but we do know that God gives revelation, and that revelation is then used by the
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Spirit of God to bring about the redemption of God's people, but those very same words can be used to bring the judgment against those who reject
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Christ's claims. And in fact, if you look at Jesus's ministry, if you look at Paul's ministry, if you look at Peter's ministry, there were many, many, many times when they said beautiful, fantastic things.
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And at the end, it's only a small portion that respond positively.
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The majority either profess a neutrality that is actually a rejection, or there is a strong negative reaction to that revelation.
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But the point is the giving of the revelation is gracious. These things
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I say, I say these things so that you may be saved. We don't know who the elect are.
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God does, Jesus did. We don't know, and so we can proclaim the gospel promiscuously to everyone, and leave it to God.
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Leave it to God. Don't get into one of those mindsets where you start trying to do fruit inspection and start looking around.
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Before I spend much time with you, I need to see if there's any evidence that maybe you've been regenerated or the
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Spirit of God's working in your life. I'm not gonna tell you the whole gospel, and so that's dangerous.
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We are called to proclaim the full counsel of God. We are called to proclaim the gospel to every creature, and we leave the results to God.
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I say these things so that you may be saved. The Son of Man gave revelation to these individuals, some of whom were filled with hatred, but there were others, there were others that God would use these words of grace.
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Maybe not that day. We're not told about what happens at the end. It might be down the road.
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It might be decades down the road, but God uses those things to bring about the salvation of His people.
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When we balance all of what the gospel of John says, what we see, clear teaching in John chapter six, 10, 17, the sheep, all those things, it's very plain.
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And yet, there's nothing to fear from recognizing that God uses us, we desire, we desire the salvation of everyone to whom we witness.
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Do we not? And so when you see texts like this, do not be frightened by them, do not be disrupted by them.
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Jesus says, I say these things that you may be saved. Even in the midst of testifying to Himself, there is in the
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Son of God's lips grace, a recognition of the need for salvation, even on the part of individuals that may not at that time have thought they needed to be saved.
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They needed to know this one to whom they were speaking and who was speaking to them.
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And so this evening, we will continue on. We don't have very far to go. Believe me, it is extremely, extremely tempting to start looking for a fragment of P45 that contains even a letter of chapter six.
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I mean, how can you stop right there? Well, you can't, and we'll probably do so ourselves.
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So we will continue with John chapter five this evening, the Lord giving us opportunity.
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Let's pray together. Our gracious Heavenly Father, once again, we do thank you for the opportunity of hearing the very gracious words of our
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Lord and Savior. We thank you for the opportunity of thinking about the beautiful harmony and consistency that exists between Father, Son, and Spirit that has resulted in our gathering here today, a whole gathering of people from many different backgrounds and perspectives, and yet we are here in a common confession of faith that Jesus Christ is
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Lord. We thank you that you've continued to build your church and that you will continue to do so no matter what man may do.
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Lord, we ask that as we go through this week of service to you, that we will always remember and be thankful for what you have done for us in Jesus Christ, and that as we encounter difficulties, as we encounter trials and tribulations, that we will have that firm foundation that is not a mixture of our works and Christ's works, but the firm, solid foundation of the fact that the
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Son always does what is pleasing to the Father. Help us truly to rejoice and find in this our greatest happiness, for the world can never take it away from us.