John 9:13-34 (Share The Gospel Anyway)

The Healing of the Man Born Blind and the Call to New Creation

Over the last two weeks, we've seen the entire drama of redemption play out before our eyes. We've seen Jesus kneeling down into the dirt and crafting through this moment where he makes mud out of his own spit and he wipes that mud on that man's eyes.

We see him reenacting what he did in the garden when he crafted humanity out of the dust. We see him infusing new life into this man's eyes who was born blind and we immediately realize in the passage that we have been born blind too.

Maybe not physically, but we've been born spiritually blind, incapable of seeing the things of God, incapable of seeing the treasures that are found inside of his word, incapable of having a relationship with him if not for the new creation miracle that only Christ can offer.

We've seen that the Lord has healed us too and that all who he delights to awaken will be awakened because Christ has all sufficient power to save those who are his. And we know that for those who are his, his spirit changes everything about us when the spirit of God comes within us.

Last week we talked about, again, how man is awakened and we saw that through this passage, but we also saw how human beings will respond in joy through baptism, just like the blind man in the passage who receives sight and the first thing that he does is he goes to the pool and the waters and you see that there's this correlation between us who receive new sight and the first thing that we really ought to do if we're adults when we're converted is run to the waters of baptism to be washed as a symbol and as a sign of the covenant that God has worked through us.

We saw last week that this man was sent out as a missionary into his community, that he went immediately from the water to his neighbors and his people and his friends and his family and he was sharing the message of the gospel with his family and friends.

And we saw that God does not remove us from the world when he saves us, that he puts us back into the world so that we can share the hope of the gospel with a world that does not yet have hope. We saw how the world responds to us when we do share the gospel and it's not always the way that we would hope for.

We saw how sometimes the world responds to us in confusion and they don't understand what we're talking about. We saw that sometimes they see how changed we are and they're so blown away by that that they sort of distance themselves from us because they don't feel like they even know us anymore.

We saw that we don't have to be experts in order to share the gospel because this blind man had only known Jesus for about 30 minutes when he began sharing the truth of the gospel, so I think all of us have known him longer than that.

But we saw that we can't stay there, we need discipleship, we need to grow, we need to share the gospel now with what we know, but we also need to share the gospel knowing that we need to grow, we need to understand more of who Jesus is over a lifetime so that when we die, we ought to know more about Jesus than we do right now.

Next year, we ought to know more about Jesus than we do right now. Every year of our life, we ought to know more about Jesus than we do right now. But kind of the theme that we saw last week that we'll see this week, even with more clarity, is that we must share the gospel anyway.

There's lots of reasons why we would say that we can't share the gospel or we shouldn't share the gospel or we don't wanna share the gospel, I get it. But the theme that we're gonna be looking at today is in spite of all of that, will we share the gospel anyway?

Will we be obedient to what Christ has said? Now, it doesn't take long for this man to drum up some attention and ruckus in his community. He's no longer begging on the side of the road so everybody sees that this man has been changed.

They notice the miracle has happened to his eyes because he's no longer got this sort of film over his eyes where he can't see. He's responding. His pupils are dilating and contracting with the light, like a miracle has happened here.

So that alone would have caused a tremendous amount of consternation maybe in the community. It would have caused people to wonder what was going on. But I think the primary reason why this community is so up in arms is because this man had an encounter with Jesus.

That is the primary reason why pain, persecution, and trouble is gonna come on this man's life because it wasn't just that his eyes were healed. His eyes were healed by Christ. And at that particular time period, Jesus was on the most wanted list in Jerusalem.

You would have, if you were worried about your social status or your score on how well you interact with society, you wouldn't have hung out with Jesus at this time with about four months left in Jesus's life.

The Historical Background of Priestly Inspection and the Ban on Jesus

Now, there's two important historical factors that I wanna cover before we read our text this morning that I think will help us understand what's going on. The first is that this would have been a normal thing that we'll see today when this blind man is taken to the priest.

He's taken out of his community and he's taken to the Pharisees, he's taken to the priest, and that would have been entirely normal because when someone was healed from a disease, when someone was healed from blindness, they would have been taken to the priest and the priest would have inspected them according to the liturgical law and the priest would have said those glorious words that that blind man had been waiting his entire life to hear.

You're clean. In the evening, you can go to the temple. You can walk through the gates and you can go into the court of the men. This man would have never seen the temple. He would have never seen the Torah.

He would have never seen any of this stuff. And he would have been taken to the high priest, or not to the high priest, he would have been taken to the priest and they would have pronounced him clean.

Everything that this man wanted to hear was about to happen in his life. And yet, this was not a joyful day for this man. This should have been a joyful day for this man, but it wasn't, and the reason that it wasn't is because of the second historical factor that I want us to understand in this passage.

You see, at this time, it was almost illegal, and I think we could even go as far as to say that it was illegal to associate with Jesus. There's a historian named Raymond Brown who says that around this time, a public ban had been issued on the worship of Jesus.

This text is gonna show us evidence of that. And when we do some research on what a public ban meant in the first century of Israel, there were three types of bans that they had issued to people, and they were based on different severities of action.

So there was what's called the Nesapha, that's the first layer, the first level ban. That's for minor infractions. That's for things like, you know, maybe you jaywalked in Jerusalem. I mean, I don't know, I mean, it's not a big deal.

Maybe you get a verbal warning, maybe you get a slap on the wrist, but this was not a major punishment nor a major violation. This was the Nesapha ban. But then there was the Nijui. I think I'm pronouncing that right.

It sounds smart if I didn't. This was a stronger sort of ban. This was a more severe punishment. And the Jewish Talmud, which is like a book of the rabbis and their thoughts and their commentaries and their sayings and stuff like this, it actually outlines 21 different kinds of behaviors that could get you banned in the Nijui ban, which is the medium level ban.

Essentially what would happen is, let's say one example, if you speak poorly about a rabbi, whether he's living or dead, then you could have this sort of ban put on your life. This would have carried with it a 30-day ban from the synagogue.

Now, this is not just 30 days ban from going to church. This is 30 days ban from social activities, 30 days ban from seeing your children and picking them up at school. This was 30 days ban from having fellowship meals.

This was 30 days ban from worshiping God in the synagogue. All of their social life was bound up in the synagogue, so to ban someone for 30 days was a significant punishment. Again, there was 21 different kind of categories of sins that the Jews would put a ban on someone during this time period.

The final one was called the harem. Now, that's a fun word, harem. The harem was for two reasons. If there was no repentance in 30 days from the former ban, then you would get a permanent indefinite ban.

The second reason you would get this ban is if you committed a depraved sin, a sin that was so egregious in the sight of Israel that you would have immediately skipped everything, passed, didn't collect your $200, go straight to that.

Now, again, this is a permanent ban. And not just that, no one was permitted to teach you the Bible if you were under this ban. No one was permitted to do work for you or receive work from you. No one was allowed to speak to you in public.

You were not allowed to benefit from any social engagement of any kind. No one could give you any benefit whatsoever of any sort except to save your life if it were in harm's way. Essentially, the only thing another person could do for you is keep you alive so that you could prolong your suffering.

Pretty intense. Now, we don't know what kind of ban the Pharisees are going to pronounce on this blind man here in this text. It's not the first one. That would have been almost insignificant. John wouldn't have mentioned it.

Could be the second, it could be the third. I'm inclined to see that the trajectory of persecution that's happening in Israel, the hatred for Jesus that's been bubbling under the surface, I'm inclined to say that when they kicked this man out of the synagogue, as we will see today, it was a permanent ban, and it was a permanent ban for loving Jesus.

Either way, whether it was 30 days or whether it was a lifetime, what we see in this passage is that following Jesus is costly. Not just for him, it's costly for us as well. Maybe we're not gonna be threatened with being banned from a synagogue today, but there's other things that will affect your and my life because we love the name of Jesus Christ.

So what I want us to do today is I want us to look at John 9, verses 13 through 34, and I want us to see what happens in the life of this man as he continues to proclaim the gospel, even though it's gonna cost him everything.

So if you will turn with me there to John 9, 13 through 14. So we examine our text this morning. Begins this way. They brought to the Pharisees the man who was formerly blind. Now it was a Sabbath on the day when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes.

Then the Pharisees were asking him again how he received his sight. And he said to them, he applied clay to my eyes and I washed and I see. Therefore, some of the Pharisees were saying, this man is not from God because he does not keep the Sabbath.

But others were saying, how can a man who is a sinner perform such signs? And there was a division among them. So they said to the blind man again, what do you say about him since he has opened your eyes?

And he said, he is a prophet. And then the Jews did not believe it of him that he had said that he is a prophet or that he had been born blind and received sight until they called the parents of the very one who had received his sight and questioned them saying, is this your son who you said was born blind?

Then how does he see? His parents answered them and said, we know that this is our son and that he was born blind. But how he now sees, we do not know. Or who opened his eyes, we do not know. Ask him, he is of age and he will speak for himself.

For his parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews. For the Jews had already agreed that if anyone confessed him to be Christ, he would be put out of the synagogue. For this reason, his parents said, he is of age, ask him.

So a second time they called the man who was born blind and said to him, give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner. And he answered, whether he is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know that though I was blind, now I see.

So they said to him, what did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered them, I've told you already and you didn't listen. Why do you wanna hear it again? Do you wanna become his disciples too, do you?

They reviled him and said, you are his disciple. But we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he is from. The man answered and said, well, here is an amazing thing.

That you do not know where he is from and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not hear sinners, but if anyone is God fearing and does his will, he hears him. Since the beginning of time, it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind.

If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. They answered him, you were born entirely in your sins and you are teaching us. So they put him out of the synagogue. They enacted the ban that we were just talking about.

Let's pray. Lord, through this passage, we see a man who grows in courage. We see a man who grows in conviction. We see a man who knows almost nothing about you and then at the end, it seems like he's speaking with a sort of power and authority and conviction that we're not even sure entirely, or I'm sure he's not sure entirely where it came from.

Lord, we see a man who is challenged, who is questioned, and who continually proclaims the gospel, even if the consequences are severe. Lord, I pray that today as we look at the testimony of this man, that we would adopt the posture of this man and no matter what happens to us, whether good or bad, whether wonderful things or wicked things, that Lord, we would proclaim the gospel in Jesus' name.

Amen. Amen. Today, we're gonna follow along the story of this man as he interacts with several different people. We're gonna see how the pressure intensifies in his life and how he is forced to make a decision on whether he will proclaim Christ or whether he will be silent.

And then what we will do in the end, or what we will do throughout this message, we will see six different challenges that you and I will likely face in our life that will cause us to face the same questions.

Will we have enough courage to follow Christ? Will we have enough conviction to proclaim him even when the world is not in agreement with us or offering consequences to us? Will we be like the blind man?

We'll look at six challenges. We'll examine them one by one. The first that this man faced and that we will also face is that the people that will oppose you are often the religious people. Religious people will be the ones who oppose you, but you and I must share the gospel anyway.

Religious Opposition and Man-Made Legalism

Verse 13, 14, and verse 16 says this. They brought to the Pharisees the man who was formerly blind. Now, it was a Sabbath on the day when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes, and then down to verse 16.

Therefore, some of the Pharisees were saying, this man is not from God because he does not keep the Sabbath. Now, this is not the first time that the Jews have accused Jesus of a Sabbath violation. This is the third time that it's happened, and it began in John chapter five.

If you remember, Jesus goes into the city of Jerusalem. He sees a man who had been in a state of sickness for 38 years lying on the ground before the pool of water, and there was this urban mythology where if you just saw the water stirred up and you ran to the waters, then you could be healed, but he was paralytic, so he couldn't get up and run.

So for 38 years, this man had been in a state of sickness and brokenness. Jesus walks into the city and sees him, and he says, pick up your mat and walk, and the man is immediately healed, but the Pharisees hated Jesus because of this because he healed a man who was born with this, or he healed a man who has been sick for 38 years.

They said, you can't do that on the Sabbath. Jesus challenges them, and he says, which one of you won't go out into the field and rescue your sheep when it falls into a crack of the earth? And yet, you're telling me that I can't heal a human being on the Sabbath.

That's what Jesus was talking about, but they hated him in John five, and they looked for every reason to kill him. John seven, when Jesus comes back into the city of Jerusalem, they accuse him of being a Sabbath breaker and having a demon.

So now they've intensified their persecution against him, even calling him a child of hell, and it says from that moment on, they're looking for opportunities to kill him. John eight, they pick up stones to kill him.

Now here in John nine, we've got this third Sabbath controversy where they say Jesus has done something good that God would have done. He's done it on the Sabbath, and now they hate him and think that he's a lawbreaker.

And just for a little bit of background on this, if you weren't here a couple weeks ago, Jesus is the author of new creation. He came to do the works of God. The first creation was seven days, and then God stopped working on the seventh day, and he rested.

Jesus is now working and doing the works of God again. The works of God have started again. He's not breaking the Sabbath. He's starting a new creation. That's the point that Jesus is making. They miss it.

They totally miss it. The Pharisees discounted the living God because the living God did not agree with their rules and their traditions that weren't even in the Bible. These categories of Sabbath observances were not biblical.

They were added later as a part of their man-made religion. There's many examples that we could share about man-made religion. A couple have happened to the church recently where we see additions that are treated like biblical canon, even though when you get down to the nitty gritty, they're not, and religious people, when you don't observe these sort of man-made rules, will come after you and will say, all men are evil against you.

Most recently with the COVID -19 lockdowns. I know this is a sensitive topic, but I've seen this play out in the church, and it's hard. For the churches that say, the Bible says that we're supposed to gather, there will be many Christians who look at you and say, you're trying to kill someone.

You're trying to hurt someone. Why are you not obeying Romans 13? Doesn't Romans 13 tell us that we're supposed to honor the government? My question is, what if the government told you not to believe?

If the government told you not to believe, would you obey that? What if you were under a government like China where it said that you can only have a certain amount of kids, and then if you got pregnant after that, you'd have to abort them, would you obey that?

What if the government says eventually that churches can no longer gather at all, will we obey that? You see, I think the proper understanding of Romans 13, and this is why I think this has been brought into a sort of man-made tradition, is that the proper understanding of Romans 13 is we do obey the government until the government tells us to disobey God.

And when the government tells us to disobey God, we no longer obey the government. And in the Bible, it says that we are supposed to gather. We're gathering people. Hebrews 10, 24 says, do not neglect the gathering.

How much more clear could that be? So whether there's a pandemic, or whether there's a war going on, I hope we have the timidity and the courage to say we're gonna gather, and we're gonna worship our God.

Because God's law in this case is higher than the law of man, but I will tell you that if you take that posture, there will be a long line of people who are ready to criticize you, and a lot of them will be religious people.

A lot of them will be Christians. A lot of them will be pastors. But I think it's more loving to obey God than man. It's more loving to show the world that Christ matters so much to us that we're willing to deal with whatever consequences they can give us.

I mean, think about the example that we're showing the world. If the world looks at us, and at a moment's notice we fall over and say, ah, well, Christ doesn't matter that much to us. We'll just meet on Zoom.

What are we saying about our love for Jesus in that moment? But if we stand strong in who Christ has told us to be, no matter what happens, we're saying to the world that that's how much he means to us.

I think that's a better message. I think that's a more loving message. That's one example. I grew up in the South. This is another example of legalism, and how man-made rules can be elevated up to the point of biblical canon.

There's a lot of faithful churches down South, and there's also a lot of legalistic churches down South as well. I'm sure it's the same everywhere. But there was a church less than a mile away from my home where if you were a woman, and you wore a dress that came up even an inch above your ankle, then you and your father were both entirely in sin, just like this blind man.

Totally vulnerable to be cast out of the church, shunned by members. This is true. And it's that sort of man-made religion that I think's offensive to God. Now let's ask the question, all right? Is it right for a woman in today's society or in any society to dress in such a way as not to lead her brothers to stumble?

Yes. That's good. Is it also right to raise up men to view women as their sisters in Christ and not as objects? Yes. Those are true. But when we get out the ruler and we start measuring things and codifying things and making issues that you're not even a Christian if you wear a skirt that goes up to your calf, for goodness sakes, then what we have is not a discipleship issue at that point.

Discipleship can teach all of us to love one another and sacrifice with one another, care for one another, serve one another. This is not a discipleship issue. This is a legalism issue where you start making arbitrary rules.

And if you violate them, then you're not a Christian. This is exactly what the Pharisees were doing. And this is why religious people will often be the ones who will come after you if you obey Christ.

Because when you obey Christ, you're obeying this gracious Lord who has fulfilled all of the Old Testament promises. He's fulfilled all of the commands. And you don't have to earn your way to God anymore through obedience, through rigid obedience.

Yes, you obey because you've been accepted by Christ, but you're not a legalist. You don't get your identity from the law. You don't get your identity from your obedience. And people will look at you and they will say, you're not even a Christian.

That happens far more than I would even like to even say. If we truly know Christ, we will long to declare the gospel. And we will understand that people will say all men are evil against us. Most, a lot of times that will come from religious people.

But we will share the gospel anyway because Christ is worth it. That's the first obstacle that we will often face. The second is that the gospel itself will bring division. It will bring division. That is what the gospel does, but we must share the gospel anyway.

The Gospel Brings Division

It says in verse 15 through 16, then the Pharisees also were asking him again how he received his sight. And then he said to them, he applied clay to my eyes and I washed and I see. Therefore, some of the Pharisees were saying, this man's not from God because he does not keep the Sabbath.

But others were saying, how can a man who is a sinner perform such signs? And there was a division among them. That word again means that they were asking him again and again and again and again and again.

They've been questioning him. They put him on the witness stand. They've been challenging him. They've been hurling all kinds of questions at him. And they're divided over this Jesus. Some of them say that this man must be a sinner.

Some of them are curious and they're wondering how can anyone like this heal the eyes of the blind? They're divided. The gospel is being preached and the audience is divided. That is what the gospel does.

When you proclaim it, you'll never become popular if you proclaim the true gospel of Jesus Christ. You will never become, maybe not never, but you won't have your best life now. You won't be healthy, wealthy, successful, and rich.

You'll be faithful. But it will divide. Now there's ways to bring division that are not faithful. I wanna cover a couple of those. The first is that you become the offense instead of the gospel. How often does this happen?

You look at churches like Westboro Baptist. You look at churches that the pastor has made it his mission in life that he is the one who offends. He's the one who brings the hammer. And that sort of offensiveness is totally inappropriate because we're supposed to share the truth of God and love.

Because we love the people that we're speaking to, we're supposed to share the gospel with them out of a heart and out of a concern that we don't want them to be lost. But you can actually become the offense where you say offensive things on purpose, where you say all sorts of things that will just rile people up and you will be provocative for no reason.

That's not the kind of offensiveness that the gospel brings. That's you being an agent of offense and that's wrong. The second way that I've seen the offense of the gospel be perverted in our society is not by becoming the offense, but by muting the offense.

I've seen churches all throughout this country and I bring it up a lot. And I know that it might sound like I'm beating this drum really hard, but the church in America is sick because we've muted the gospel.

We've watered down the only thing that has the power of God to save humanity. We've watered that down and we've given them tropes and anecdotes and stories and self-help and psychology and anthropology and everything else.

And we've not given them Christ. And when you mute the gospel like that, when you water down the gospel like that, you've taken the offense out of that and you've made the offense into something else.

Your ministry mainly. Think about the men and women who listen to those messages every single week and who are convinced that they're a Christian because they listen to those messages or they send $1 ,000 to this ministry or because they made a decision on a podcast or something like that.

They're going to hell, misled and abused by people who tickled their ears with their silver-tongued shenanigans. It's wrong. There is a right way to proclaim the gospel and it's not difficult. Christ is the offense.

He is the wisdom of God. His gospel is the one who brings us to stumble. His gospel is the one who, like a scalpel, cuts at our heart and breaks away the brokenness of us. His gospel, his death, burial, and resurrection for our brokenness and sin is sufficient.

And that gospel will bring offense. And it won't be about us, it will be about him. The Bible, the gospel is God's means of offense. Look at how Jesus shows up to planet Earth in Luke 2, verse 34. He announces that he's gonna bring division to a man named Simeon.

Now, Jesus didn't say it, the Bible says it, but you know what I mean. And Simeon blessed them, that's Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and he said to Mary, his mother, behold, this child is appointed for the fall and the rise of many in Israel, and for a sign to be opposed.

This Jesus came to bring opposition. This Jesus came to bring some up and to tear some down. This Jesus came to bring division to the world, to divide his sheep from the goats and his wheat from the tares.

This Jesus came to bring division. The gospel divides father and mother, he says. If you're not willing to walk away from your father and mother, maybe you're not worthy of me. That's what Jesus says.

Those are hard words, but that's who Jesus is. 1 Corinthians 1 .23 says, but we preach Christ crucified, and to the Jews, that's a stumbling block, and to the Gentiles, that's foolishness. So for everybody on Earth, this is a offensive gospel.

The Jews stumble, and the Gentiles crumble, and the ones who are elect of God will be raised to life in Christ because of this gospel. The same gospel has the power to raise some, has the power to crush others, and that is a glory to God.

It's not about us. When we preach the gospel and someone hates us for it, we give glory to God. If we preach the gospel and someone loves the message of the gospel, we give glory to God. It's God's gospel for God's mission, for God's purposes, and it will accomplish what God set out for it to accomplish.

The Bible is an offense. It will divide. There will be some who hear. There will be some who won't, and we can't make any assumptions or pretenses on who's gonna hear it and who's not. We really need to just focus on the fact that we need to share the gospel.

The Bible is gonna divide, but we must share it anyway. We must share it out of obedience to the risen Christ because He told us to. We must share it out of love for a dying world because the world around us is sick.

It's confused. It's broken. We have the cure, and it's not up to us how the cure is efficacious or it works in other people. We share it liberally with everyone, and we trust God with the results, but to withhold it is the most unloving thing that we could ever do.

Even though the gospel will divide, we must share it anyway. We must, which leads us to our third point, that the people that we share the gospel with will not give glory to God, but we must share it anyway.

People Who Refuse to Give Glory to God

Verse 24 says, so a second time they called the man who had been born blind and said, give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner. Some people that you share the gospel with will be just like these Pharisees, and look at the irony of what they're saying.

They're saying, give glory to God, as if they're in the position of the ones who are giving glory to God, and they're looking at the sinner and saying, you need to repent and give glory to God, but think about the irony of that.

They're the ones who are calling Jesus a sinner, and they're sitting up in their high and lofty chair saying, you give glory to God, and yet they're not. They're not giving glory to God, and the one who is giving glory to God is this blind man who's known Jesus for 30 minutes.

We will share the gospel of Christ, and some will end up thinking that they're glorifying God, but they're not. Now, I hinted at this just a moment ago, but I wanna hit this point right now. It is tempting for us as Christians to look at the way that people respond to the gospel and to think that that is what gives glory to God or doesn't give glory to God.

I've seen churches that when they grow, when more people show up, when the giving is better, when more baptisms are happening, they think this church is really glorifying God, and the little tiny community church that's preaching the gospel faithfully that has six old people in it who are just preparing for heaven, they're not glorifying God because clearly they don't know what it means to grow a church.

That's wrong. That's wrong. We haven't done anything wrong. We haven't done anything wrong if we've shared the gospel and we're rejected. We haven't. And we haven't done anything inherently right if we share the gospel and in our ignorance, the Lord just decides to use us.

It's his gospel. It's his message. It's his glory. I think this teaches me that if you'll just share it, you're glorifying God. If you'll just tell someone about the hope that you have in Christ, you might Monday morning quarterback yourself to death the next day.

You might say, I wish I would have shared that. I wish I would have shared this. I wish I would have done that. But if you will just share the gospel of Jesus Christ, he will be glorified. And he will use the words that you share and he will use more words that you didn't share and he will use those to bring to life those that he wants to bring to life and convict those that he wants to convict.

It's his gospel. It's for his glory. And when you and I share the gospel, we glorify God. The world may not glorify God, but we can glorify God by sharing it and we must share it anyway. That's the third.

Never Feeling Ready to Share the Gospel

The fourth is that you will never be ready. You will never be ready, but you must share the gospel anyway. Verse 17 and verse 25 says it like this. So they said to the blind man again, what do you say about him since he has opened your eyes?

And he said, he's a prophet. Then in verse 25, which says, he then said, whether he is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know is I was blind and now I see. They were giving this man a barrage of questions trying to exhaust the limits of his knowledge, which was 30 minutes deep.

He didn't have a lot of Christology, which is the theology of Jesus Christ. They asked him a question and he said, I think he's a prophet. And you're like, okay, well, that's a start. Yes, he was the final prophet of Israel, but that's not all he was.

He was not just man. He wasn't just a prophet and the priest and the king of Israel. He was God in the flesh. So he has a very limited understanding at this point. He says truthfully that this man was a prophet, but he doesn't share the entirety of who Christ is.