God and Moses Testify of Christ

We continue in our study in the Gospel of John 5. John 5, beginning with verse 36. John 5, verse 36. Before we look to the Word of God, let's pray together one last time. Our Heavenly Father, now as we handle Your Word, we ask that You would give us insight, understanding, that You would protect us from distraction.

Remind us once again that we are handling that which You have given to Your people, preserved for them over the ages, that many have given their lives, so that we might possess this, Your truth. May we be thankful as we consider Your Word.

We pray in Christ's name. Amen. Looks to me like pretty much everyone here this evening was probably here this morning, so I will not give much in the way of introduction and bring us back up to speed.

The Testimony of the Works and the Father

I think we're probably aware of where we are and why we're dealing with this particular text. This morning, we looked a little bit at the introduction of the testimony. Jesus is presenting testimony to those who, again, this is still early in the Gospel of John.

Even though we've covered John 10 and 11, we know that in chapter 8, they're going to seek to kill Jesus. In chapter 10, they're going to seek to kill Jesus. In chapter 11, after the resurrection of Lazarus, they're going to get together and talk about how they might destroy Him and all of these things.

But this is still before that, and it's at that first real strong encounter in chapter 5 where they have come to the conclusion that Jesus' statement, my father is working until now and I am working, involves equality with God.

It is a blasphemous claim, a blasphemous statement. And therefore, you have Jesus' response to that. And we saw toward the end of this morning the assertion that Jesus is saying these things so that you might be saved.

The description of John as one to whom they had turned and for a while they had recognized Him as a prophet, a burning and shining lamp. They were willing to rejoice for a while in His light, but then had turned away even from Him.

But the testimony to which Jesus is making reference, this greater testimony than that which He receives from man, is the witness of the works, beginning in verse 36. But the testimony, which I have, is greater than the testimony of John for the works which the Father has given me to accomplish.

The very works that I do testify about me that the Father has sent me. Now, when you consider what is said in these words, we now have the testimony that Jesus accomplishes in the works that He is doing.

And of course, again, this is before the feeding of the 5 ,000. This is before the raising of Lazarus. Though these things would be contemplated as a body of work, which notice, which the Father has given me to accomplish.

So once again, we have the Son in submission to the Father. He's not seeking His own will. He seeks the Father's will. And there is a body of works that the Father has given to the Son that He is to accomplish these things.

And He has begun this. He says the very works that I am doing, that is what's happening right now in His ministry, which they had just seen, sort of a beginning of the grandeur and the greatness of these works and the healing of the man at the pool.

And so that very action, which prompted all this, because it was done on the Sabbath day, Jesus is saying, this is part of the work that the Father has given me to accomplish. And it is Jesus's singular focus to accomplish this.

And the nature of those works, according to this text, the very works I do, testify about me that the Father has sent me. Now, when you think about someone's activities, the works that they accomplish, generally, as you would consider that, you would think, well, those works would testify of the nature of the one accomplishing the works.

But once again, we have the very same concept that we've seen elsewhere in this beautiful chapter. Jesus hears from the Father and speaks. What He sees the Father doing, He does. And now the very works that are given to Him, when He does them, they testify that the Father has sent Him.

The nature of the works are such that, again, they don't set Jesus apart in opposition to the Father as some counter-deity that could distract from the true worship of the Father. The nature of the works are such that not only do they reveal the glory of the Son of God, the Son of Man, but the harmony that exists between those works and the already revealed will of God in His law, in the Old Testament Scriptures, things like that, these testify that the Father has sent Him.

And so when we think about the testimony that is given to Jesus in Scripture, sometimes we think about, well, you know, He raised the dead and He cleansed lepers and He did all sorts of things like this.

But when we think about that, we think about that in the sense of, well, in our modern day, how many atheists will say, well, you know, if God would just show up, He'd perform a miracle in front of me, then I would believe.

We know that that's not true, but that's the idea is that the works testify of the power or the intrinsic capacity of a particular individual to do something. But that's not what we have here. It is the nature of the works.

When you actually stand back and you look at what Jesus did, we as Westerners tend to chop up Jesus's miracles into little individual expressions of divine power, rather than stepping back and seeing the character of all of these works together and understanding that they point to the accomplishment of God's will in this world.

They are consistent with what God has done in the past. There is a consistency that brings about a testimony. It is a testimony about Jesus. It says, testify about me. But what? That the Father has sent me.

Not that I've come and that I am setting up some type of system to exalt me at the expense of the Father or anything like that at all. It really is John's intention in chapter 5 to make sure to keep bringing us back to a recognition of the unity that exists between the Father and the Son.

And yet, even in that phrase, testify about me that the Father has sent me. Is there not in those very words a clear distinction between the Father and the Son? Do we not see that the one who is sent is not the one who did the sending?

You might say, well, that's obvious. I know, but if you feel that's obvious, it's probably because you haven't spent much time talking to any oneness Pentecostals recently. There are a number of them out there and all sorts of other odd variant views that deny the distinction of the Father and the Son.

And so we have the witness of John. Remember, Jesus said if he alone testified, his witness would not be valid. But then we have the witness of John. We have the witness of the works. And then we have the witness of the Father in verses 37 and 38.

And the Father who sent me, he has testified of me. The works testify of me. John's testified of me. The Father has testified of me. You have neither heard his voice at any time nor seen his form. You do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe him whom he sent.

Now, if Jesus was just trying to, in some way, shape, or form, cajole or to sort of, as we do things today, get people to do things by complimenting them or sort of tricking them, this is not how to do it.

This is a very straightforward approach. He says that the Father who they claim is their God, and the Father who sent me, he has testified of me. Now, they claim to know God very well. They worshipped him.

They were worshippers of God. And yet Jesus says, you have neither heard his voice at any time nor seen his form. Well, I suppose you could take that in the context that even the Jews recognized that the voice of prophecy had ceased in Israel hundreds of years before this time.

That's why they were so intent upon looking for the coming of the Messiah, is God had stopped speaking. There were no prophets left in the sense of the scriptural prophets that had lived amongst the people of Israel.

And so, I suppose you could say, well, yeah, God had not appeared in any fashion in speaking from heaven or anything like that. I suppose I could just be referring to that. But I think it's also important that we tie this together with the statement that we have seen in times past in John 1, verse 18.

Because in the prologue of this gospel, John tells us that no one has seen God at any time. The unique God, the one who is in the bosom of the Father, he has explained him, he has revealed him, he has made him known.

And this is part of the very lens through which John the Apostle wants his book to be read, to be understood. And so it immediately brings to mind that statement. No one has seen God, that is, the Father, at any time.

But we know who he is because of the faithful, perfect revelation of him by the Son. And we can at that point, I think, very profitably consider what the Son must be in his own person, the grandeur of his being, the exaltedness of his being, that he might be able to reveal the Father in that way.

If he is merely a prophet, there is a massive limitation upon what he could reveal to us of God. But that's not what John wants us to know. We know that this Logos has eternally been in the very presence of the Father, and therefore he can reveal him perfectly.

You have neither heard his voice at any time nor seen his form, but it's understood the Son has because he has been sent forth by the Father. And then you have, and this is, here you sort of have the beginning of a certain thread.

You see a little bit of it in Jesus' discussion.

With Nicodemus, but here is the first time the thread really is seen clearly. You do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe him whom he has sent. And that theme is going to come up again in the next chapter, in chapter six, chapter seven, and it's really gonna become a predominant theme in chapter eight, where he's gonna say, why can't you hear what I'm saying to you?

Because you do not belong to God. He who belongs to God hears the words of God. The reason you cannot hear, you don't belong to God. The very thing that they assumed because of their genetics, Jesus says cannot be assumed because of genetics.

You do not have his word abiding in you. These are people who would have had major portions of the Old Testament text committed to memory. They would have been able to quote things for you very, very quickly, but that's not the same thing as having his word abiding in you.

And in this instance, notice the demonstration of this. For you do not believe him whom he has sent. That is, literally, it's you are not believing in him. He is right there before them, but you are not believing.

Now, this idea of unbelief in the face of Jesus accomplishing signs and works that have been given to him by the Father to do. These people can see this man healed, and what's the only thing that they want to do?

They want to accuse. This action of God goes outside of their very narrow boundaries so this just can't be God. This can't be God. Our traditions say that God wouldn't act this way, and therefore. But Jesus says their unbelief in the one whom he has sent in light of the evidence that is being given, and much more evidence is going to be given, means that his word is not abiding in them.

They may pay lip service, but the one who has God's word abiding in them will believe the things that God is doing. They may claim to be right with God, but by their actions and their unbelief, they are demonstrating that they are not.

Now, they certainly would have been offended by this statement, and I think that's what's behind the witness of Scripture that is introduced beginning in verse 39. Now, there is a translational issue in verse 39.

A lot of your translations will have a note here, maybe a footnote, a marginal note, something along those lines. Some will say, you search the Scriptures, describing the fact that, well, the Jewish leaders searched the Scriptures.

They certainly were individuals who were regularly involved in the examination and teaching of the Old Testament Scriptures, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim, the law, the prophets, and the writings.

And so, it could be understood as,.

You search the Scriptures.

You are doing so because you think that in them you have eternal life. It is these that testify about me. But, in the Greek language, at this particular point, in the plural, the descriptive, which is what we just translated as, you are searching the Scriptures, and the imperative, you search the Scriptures, are the same form.

And so, you can only tell by context, obviously when it's being spoken. If I were to say to someone,.

You search the Scriptures,.

Then you would understand that I was issuing a command. It's in the imperative. But, we can't hear the inflection of the voice, and so you have to look at the context. And so, you will have some translations that will understand it as, you are searching the Scriptures.

And then others will say, search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life. But, it is these that testify about me. Now, it doesn't really massively change the meaning in any way, but you may note that if in a Bible study, one person has one translation, another has another, you'll see the difference there.

It's not a difference in the underlying manuscripts. This is a, all the manuscripts saying the same thing. It's just that you cannot, in this particular context, necessarily differentiate between the descriptive and the imperative forms.

And so, we are told that you think that in them, you have eternal life. Now, be careful, because you might hear that and go, oh yes, we find eternal life in the Scriptures. They were right about that.

Be careful.

As exalted as the Scriptures are, they're not God. The Scriptures aren't the source of life. God's the source of life, and He's given us the Scriptures so we might know for certainty what He has done.

But, you've got to be careful that you don't get to that point where you begin to exalt the Scriptures to a point where they start taking on some sort of a form of almost deification to themselves. They are God-speaking, and their authority comes from the nature of God.

That's what makes them what they are. And it almost seems that what Jesus is saying, you think that in them you have eternal life, but since you're not hearing what they're saying, you're actually not handling them aright and seeing what their true purpose is.

It is these that testify about me, and we don't have time this evening to even begin to consider the tremendous number of passages where, well, just think before you say anything about Luke 24, the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, the centrality of the Scriptures, and the repeated emphasis on Jesus' part.

Moses, the Law, the Prophets, they all testify about me, and then you hear the early church preaching, and what are they doing? They're just beating that drum, starting with Moses, and through the Prophets, and you hear Peter repeating this, and it's just, it is clearly one of the strongest elements of that early proclamation of the Church is the consistency of the Old Testament testimony to Jesus, to his Messiahship, to the fact that he was to suffer, all of those things like that.

And so you have a lot of testifying going on in John 5. You've had the works, you've had the Father, you've had John, and now the Scriptures themselves, which they think give to them eternal life, these Scriptures, it is these that testify about me.

Now, the fulfillment passages are going to become much more clear, obviously, when? After the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. But they are testifying about Jesus, and Jesus' commentary in verse 40 is, you are unwilling to come to me so that you may have life.

The very thing that you think is giving you life, the Scriptures, testify that you need to believe in me, but you are unwilling to come to me so that you may have life. Now, is this only about certain people?

Is this, can we limit this just to the Jews of Jesus' day? Well, certainly contextually, he is addressing Jewish religious leaders who, because of their traditions, even though they have divine truth in the Scriptures, are unwilling to listen to the scriptural testimony of Jesus.

I think if you want to have a discussion of man's will and God's will and how they relate to one another and the depravity of man, things like that,.

Yeah, wait for the next chapter.

John 6 is going to go into a lengthy discussion of that, and you've got other places in Scripture that go into that as well. In this particular situation, you have individuals who claim to be followers of the one true God, but they are unwilling to come to the one who is testified by the Scriptures so that you may have life.

Now, here again, here comes another thread that is going to become very prominent in the next chapter, and that is the idea of coming to Christ to have life. And when there is a more explicit context upon which to comment on, which is what you end up with in the synagogue Capernaum in John chapter 6, you have men who have come to Jesus.

They've rowed their boats across the lake. They've come seeking Jesus. But they will walk away by the end of his conversation with them because they are unwilling, and Jesus will explain why they're unwilling.

They haven't been given by the Father to the Son. You are unwilling to come to me so that you may have life. They think they have life, but they're unwilling to come to the one who is actually the source of life.

He says, I do not receive glory from men. That is, he's not looking for their glorification. He's not looking for John's. He is not looking for human testimony that would result in his glorification. But I know you, that you do not have the love of God in yourselves.

Now, this is pretty straightforward. This is tearing the veil aside, you might say, and exposing the very heart of religious hypocrisy. Because what had motivated them in the first place to begin persecuting him here in John chapter 5?

He's breaking the Sabbath. He's violating God's law. We know, because we are the leaders of Israel, that's not something that a true follower of God would do. We know these things. But Jesus says, I know you, that you do not have the love of God in yourselves.

Now, Jesus does not say, it has been revealed to me in a prophetic way that you all are hypocrites. Jesus says, I know you.

I know you.

Here, I think you clearly have Jesus operating in a divine capacity as the one who searches hearts. And he says, I know you, that you do not have the love of God in yourselves. Now, it's hard not to see a parallel between what is said here, you do not have the love of God in yourselves, and the statement that is found above in regards to his word abiding in you.

You don't have the word abiding in you. You don't believe in him who he has sent. And you do not have the love of God in yourselves. There is almost no more difficult people to reach than those who think they know the truth and think they are loved by God because they confuse their traditions and their self-satisfying religiosity with the actual truth of God.

And I would say there are many, many, many people in our day that would fit into that category, or at least are in danger of fitting into that category. The religiously self-assured are some of the hardest people to exhort in the ways of God and to really see them, examine themselves, examine their traditions.

How many people have you spoken to? Well, you know, I was raised believing this, I was raised believing that,.

And they are just satisfied with it.

They are satisfied. And you watch their lives, they have no concern for the things of the kingdom, they have no concern for Christ or their living a holy life or anything else, but they are satisfied with their religiosity.

Jesus says, I know you do not have the love of God in yourselves. I have come in my Father's name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. Now, what's interesting is the history of that time period after Christ demonstrates this to be true.

There were a number of false messiahs who arose in that time period between the resurrection of Jesus and the eventual destruction of Jerusalem in A .D. 70, so that next just under 40 years. There were numerous false messiahs during that time period that drew away many people.

They came in their own name and they received a great deal of support even from the religious leaders. But they did not believe in Jesus' claim, and Jesus' own words are, how can you believe when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?

What does that tell us? It tells us something about the nature of true faith. There are those today who teach the idea that any faith, any faith at all, saves. They simply reject the idea that we can find anything in the New Testament upon which we could build a doctrine of false faith.

Now, you might go, how in the world can you do that in light of James 2? I mean, the whole thing is about false faith. James 2 .14, it just lays out there, can that kind of faith, the faith that has no works to demonstrate its reality, can that faith save?

And the answer is no. They answer, yes. And they turn James upside down and use mirrors and smoke machines and everything else to come up with some way of getting around James 2. It is an astounding thing to watch as people do that.

But there is plainly false faith in Scripture. Jesus' own parables, when you talk about the parable of the soils, that's literally what it is, not the parable of the sower, it's the parable of the soils.

When you look at that parable, you may recall that there are, when the seed is sown, you have some places just eaten up by the birds and then you have some places where there's growth but there's not fruit.

And of course, some people say, well, they're still Christians, they're just carnal Christians, they're still going to go to heaven. There's no fruit. There's no ground. The soil is not proper. The soil is not right.

And you have Jesus there warning his disciples,.

You're going to see people, and we've seen it, have we not?

I mean, if you haven't been a Christian for a long period of time, okay, but if you have, you've seen people come in and man, they just seem to be so on fire and it's so exciting,.

And where are they today? Where are they today?

Some are back in the world. And I hate to have to tell you this, but the longer you're alive and the longer you're involved in the church, the longer the list you have of people that you can remember like that.

It is a sad reality. How can you believe when you receive glory from one another, and that's certainly what was going on in the experience. We know how they would wear the teflon and stuff and they would demonstrate their holiness by their garb and by blowing the trumpet as they were giving their alms in the treasury, in the temple, and make long pretense of prayers and all these types of things.

You receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God. True saving faith has the proper focus. It's focused upon the God who justifies. And what we learn here is that true saving faith seeks only God's approval.

Now, I know we can start talking about people's conversions. You start thinking about the complexities. Don't you know someone who was converted? When you looked at it at the time, it seemed like maybe they were trying to please their wife, trying to please their husband, trying to please their parents.

There were certain pressures.

Sometimes it's hard to see.

But Jesus' warning is true saving faith, an element of that is its focus upon God alone. You must be seeking the glory that is from the one and only God. That honor, that fame, that glory has to have its origin only in the one true God if you're doing it for the sake of others around you, as was seen in the very nature of the religion that had developed, the cold religion that had developed in the formalism of Judaism of that day.

Isn't that what happens in almost any situation where religion becomes the formal religiosity of the people? Do we not see, even today, has it never struck you? Certainly strikes me. Where do you find the deepest, most, really, the only term I can think of is repulsive forms of secular, anti-Christian, totalitarian thought in Europe today?

Where you just have this utter overthrow and a detestation of the Christian heritage that was once theirs. Where do you find that? Sadly, in nations that were once known as thoroughly Calvinistic. Thoroughly Calvinistic.

Look at the Dutch. Look at some of the Scandinavian countries. And the Scandinavians were a little bit more on the Lutheran side of things, obviously. You know, state churches and things like that. But many places where Reformed theology had grew deep roots today, oh my, oh my.

Once it became, there's almost nothing more ugly than not born in the heart by the Holy Spirit of God, Reformed orthodoxy. Calvinists can excuse a lot of behaviors. And if there is not a changed heart, man, it can be ugly.

Oh, it can be ugly. How can you believe if you do not seek the glory that is from the only God? Do not think, Jesus says, that I will accuse you before the Father. The one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope.

I'm not going to have to be the one that accuses you for your unbelief. The assumption here is, you will be accused before the throne of God and you will have no excuse. And the one who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you've set your hope.

For if you believe Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. This is Luke 24 in John chapter 5. This is the very same message that is emphasized post-resurrection here in conflict with the Jewish leaders in John chapter 5.

That you have such a clarity of revelation in Moses. If you had truly believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. And if you were seeking glory from God, if the love of God dwelled within you, then you would not have impediments to your being able to see that he did this right in the very Scriptures that you claim to honor.

You've got them in little boxes.

Hanging around your head. I mean, what an incredible irony that is. That on the doorposts of your home and in the little boxes on your garments, you have the very words that testify of me, but you don't see it, because you've let something get in the way of that.

We believe Moses, that's why we're seeking to kill you, because we believe Moses. And Jesus now comes full circle.

All the way around.

What started back in verses 17 and 18 now comes around. Oh, you're going to quote Moses as your reason for seeking to kill me, for doing what I did on the Sabbath? If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.

But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? How will you believe my words? You claim that in his very words, you find eternal life, but you don't really believe. If you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

Perfect harmony once again, now between what has been given by God under the old covenant, in the old covenant Scriptures, and now what Jesus is teaching in his words now, how will you believe my words if you do not believe his writings?

And of course they would be going, but we do believe, and hence the point is, when you allow your traditions to so encrust the word of God that you no longer have the love of God dwelling within you, your heart is focused upon your own religious self-justification, when you get to that point, you can claim the Scriptures all you want, but you are no longer hearing them.

None of this would make any sense if the Scriptures are not what we believe them to be, supernatural. I mean, to believe in his writings is to believe him. There's nothing here. I mean, you cannot do what so many people in modern academia do and try to shoehorn something in here about the unreliability of Scripture.

You can't even begin to understand what Jesus is saying here when you have the presupposition that, well, we don't really know what Moses wrote. I mean, it was a long time, and there's been a lot of changes and stuff like that.

No, it is a given in Jesus' own self-understanding that God has preserved his Word. And we know exactly, do we not today, exactly what they possessed in that day. We have the Dead Sea Scrolls. I mean, I think I may have mentioned it, but just recently they found that Leviticus, well, they had found Leviticus scroll a long time ago, but they used this X-ray technology on it.

Maybe you saw it. The scroll, you can't unroll it. It would just break into a thousand pieces and that'd be it. So you can't unroll it. What they've done is they've found a way to scan this thing with X-rays and to digitally unroll.

They can differentiate where there's ink and where there isn't ink. And they can literally digitally unroll the scroll now using X-rays and read it. I mean, that's fantastic. That is really, really cool.

And they did that with Leviticus scroll. And this is, again, dated 100 years before Christ.

And it's Leviticus.

No, it's not something different.

It is the Masoretic Text of Leviticus. Just like the Isaiah Scroll was the Masoretic Text from 100 years earlier, well, Leviticus is still Leviticus. And it has been for 2100 years from that point and even earlier.

And so this whole idea of the kind of skepticism that is so rampant, Jesus wasn't skeptical. And I personally believe that empty tomb gives him the final authority on these things. It's so easy for us to get caught up in the attitude of skepticism.

But there's no reason to. If you do not believe his writings, those are his writings.

No, no, no.

All he had were copies of copies. Thank you, Bart Ehrman. When Bart Ehrman's grave is empty, we'll listen. But it's not going to be empty. That's the point. If you do not believe his writings, you still have them.

God has preserved his word. And those words testify of Jesus. And the person who has the love of God in his heart, who belongs to God, is the one who will hear and obey. You see, it's not enough just to read them.

It's not even enough just to memorize them. The saving element of faith is that willingness to believe and to accept. That is not something you can pound into someone's head. That is not something you can force.

That is the work of the Spirit of God. This fifth chapter, amazing materials in it, amazing beauty in what it says, that harmony between the Father and the Son. Don't let anyone drag you there in the future and make you feel uncomfortable.

Realize this is home-court advantage for the Orthodox Christian, as long as you remember what the context is, what the flow of argument is. Hopefully that has been made clear to you in our study through this text.

Prayer and Thanksgiving for God's Preserved Word

Let's pray together. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we are thankful that you have preserved for us your word, that you have given to us the testimony, even of Moses. Lord, we know you're capable of doing this because you have invested your power in the inspiration of those scriptures and then the preservation, and now even in our day, in moving in our hearts and minds to cause us to believe, to hear, by placing your love in our hearts so that we can hear when your word resonates with who you are, and we rejoice in your truth.

We thank you for giving us this clarity of revelation. We thank you for this fifth chapter of John and what it tells us about our Lord and the relationship between the Father and the Son. May we rejoice in the truths we have seen, live in light of them.

May we not twist them in our traditions, but may they be the very life of the Spirit of God in our soul. Now, as we leave this place, we ask for your traveling mercies. Make us to be good servants of Jesus Christ in the coming week, we pray in Christ's name.

Amen.