John 7:8-18 (The Rejection and Reception of Christ)

John’s Gospel as a Roadmap to Belief and Life

Many of us are old enough probably to remember life without a smartphone. It was wonderful. You had to pull over and ask for directions whenever you took a wrong turn and the gas station attendant likely knew where to tell you to go, unlike now.

You had to follow road signs, you had to get a map out, and you had to look at it and make sure that you were following it. I remember as a little kid, and we were in the city of New Orleans, and my dad we were in the French Quarter, and my dad handed me the Rand McNally map, and he said he said you get us out of here because he was so frustrated from the traffic and everything else.

We needed maps back then because we didn't have instant data information. Well, I think John has also provided us with a roadmap for how to view his gospel. I think John has given us both a destination and a roadmap so that we can view his gospel rightly and and let's just start with the destination.

The destination is where John ultimately wants us to end up and that is John 20 31 which says this, These things have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God and that by believing in him you would have life in his name.

John wants us when we read his gospel to have life in Jesus's name through belief so that's the destination that he wants us to get to. The question is how do we get to believe? How do we get to life in Jesus's name and John is going to give us a roadmap for his gospel that's going to take us step by step through those points that will get us to his conclusion and that roadmap is John 1 11 through 12.

This is what it says, He came to his own and those who were his own did not receive him but as many as did receive him he gave them the right to become children of God even those who believe in his name.

Now right at the beginning of John's gospel he gives us this roadmap that Jesus is going to come to the people who were considered his own and his own were not going to receive him because they were going to reject him, they were going to crucify him and the ones who were not his own were going to become his own through the cross.

That's how we get to life in his name. Jesus came with a plan and a purpose. He came to be rejected by his own people so that he could be accepted by the people whom God chose in eternity. That is the roadmap for the gospel of John and what we see is John is going to be introducing to us a new kind of believer.

Not a believer who goes to a temple, not a believer who sacrifices animals, not a believer who goes to a priest in order to have their sins mediated between them and God. A believer who goes through Christ and Christ alone in order to find salvation.

A kind of believer that looks like the Samaritan woman at the well. The kind of believer that looks like the thief on the cross to the side of Jesus who says when you come into your kingdom remember me and he says today you will be with me in paradise.

The kind of kingdom that Jew and Greek no more has any meaningful distinction. The kind of kingdom where the low and the downcast and the broken can be a part of Jesus's kingdom. It's not just a kingdom for the high and mighty.

It's for the sinners. A kingdom that will encompass all the nations. That is what John is showing us from the beginning of his book to the end of his book. A kingdom for all kinds of people. All united in one thing, Jesus Christ.

And this is certainly the roadmap that John follows. He came to his own and his own did not receive him. Think about it. He comes to Jerusalem in John chapter 2 and his own did not receive him. Jerusalem is the city of God and they they challenged him in John 2.

They killed him in John 19. He comes to the temple, the place on earth where God's presence was supposed to dwell and yet God himself walks up to the temple and they reject him. They said we'd rather have the old building behind us than God in the flesh.

He came and he talked to the priests, the people who were trained to serve him and they're the ones who murdered him. He came to Nicodemus, the educated scholar of Jerusalem, and he doesn't understand him.

He comes to Galilee, his own hometown, and he has no honor in his hometown because a prophet has no honor in his hometown. He's rejected. John 1, he's rejected. John 2, John 3, John 4, all that we have seen so far, John 1 through 6, Jesus has been rejected by his own people.

Today we're going to be looking at the third time that Jesus enters Jerusalem in John. Now Jesus has entered Jerusalem his whole life. Three times a year. There's three festivals that a Jew was supposed to go up to if you were a faithful Jew.

The Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Passover, and the Feast of the Day of Atonement. Jesus has went up three times a year faithfully to these feasts, but John records three specific Jerusalem trips from John 1 to 7, and every time Jesus is rejected.

John is telling the story of Jesus being rejected by his own people every step of the way. That's the roadmap that he's following. Now today, as we look at John chapter 7, we're going to see 10 different ways that the people rejected Jesus.

Five of them are implicit ironies, and five of them are in explicit realities. And then when we've looked at that, we're going to see only one way that we can be accepted by Jesus Christ. Ten ways are examples of the millions of ways we can reject him.

Only one way is the way that we can be accepted by Christ. So let's read John 7, 8 through 18, and then we will pray. Jesus said to his brothers, And having said these things to him, he stayed in Galilee.

But when his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he himself also went up, not publicly, but as if in secret. So the Jews were seeking him at the feast and were saying, where is he? There was much grumbling among the crowds concerning him.

Some were saying he's a good man. Others were saying, no, on the contrary, he leads people astray. Yet no one was speaking openly of him for fear of the Jews. But when it was in the midst of the feast, Jesus went up to the temple and began to teach.

And the Jews were then astonished, saying, how has this man become learned, having never been educated? So Jesus answered them and said, my teaching is not mine, but his who sent me. If anyone is willing to do his will, he will know that of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak for myself, he who speaks from himself seeks his own glory.

But he was seeking the glory of the one who sent him. He is true and there is no unrighteousness in him. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Lord, I pray today that we would see all of the myriad ways that your son was rejected.

Lord, I pray that we would see those things so that we would see the danger it is in deviating from the one way and the one path to being accepted by God, which is through Jesus Christ alone. Lord, I pray that we would see these things with sobriety.

I pray that we would see them and we would call out to you for mercy. And Lord, I pray that we would see them and we would in humility say, Lord, help me to seek you rightly. For all of us that are here, Lord, we know that we cannot lose what you have gained.

We can't lose our salvation. But Lord, we can go astray. We can walk in sin. Lord, I pray that we would see these ways of rejection as sober reminders that we don't want to live in rejection against you.

We want to live as people who received you and who live in you and who live to the glory of God. Lord, if there's anyone here today who does not know you, I pray that that they would clearly understand that there is multiple ways to reject you.

There's multiple ways to reject Christ, but there's only one destination if that is what your heart desires to do, and that is hell. And Lord, I pray that that they would hear that and that they would repent from that and that they would turn to you, Jesus.

We ask that in Christ's name. Amen. There's five layers of irony in this passage. Five layers of irony that showcases that Jesus is going to be rejected. And the reason that I want us to explore these ironies is because they're true.

John himself is writing Holy Scripture. When John is writing, he is writing truth from the eternal mind and heart of God, imputed to time bound human personality, written skillfully by human mind and hand and presented in ways that magnify God through human language.

It is Scripture itself is a miracle. That God takes his thoughts and puts them on the minds and hearts of of weak and small creatures like us, like John. So we share these deep truths from this passage because we don't want to run too quickly past them.

John is a masterful writer and he uses similes and metaphors and contrast and comparison and we want to slow down and we want to see them. So that we can understand the truth of them, so that we can revel in what God has given us.

The gift that God has given us, which is Holy Scripture. To run through passages like this too quickly is akin to a man on his lunch break thinking that he can see everything that there is to see in the Louvre.

I think that's the French pronunciation for all of us English people. It's the Louvre. Running through it, trying to see all of the different artwork, all of the different things that could be seen. That's crazy.

You can't see all of that in a lunch break. How much more can we, if we run too fast through the Scriptures, not see all of the beautiful truths that are in there? And that's why I refuse to go fast through these things because I want us to see the beauty that's in the text.

The second reason I showcase these five instances of irony is because John uses irony in a very specific way. John uses irony like Bob Dylan in his song, The Times They Are Changing. Now, I'll be honest with you.

I don't know anything about Bob Dylan except that particular phrase. I don't even know what the song sounds like. I just know that phrase. But John uses irony in that way. He uses irony to show that times are changing because Jesus and John and his apostles stand at the crossroads of two different eras of time.

The Old Testament era, the temples, the priests, the sacrifices are coming to an end. They're coming to a close. And in 70 AD, when Rome's armies come in and burn Jerusalem to the ground, there is no more temple.

There is no more sacrifices. There is no more Old Testament Judaism. All that's left is Jesus and his church. There's two eras that are happening. One is coming to a close and one is rising. And that is the era of Christ.

So John uses his irony to showcase that they're living between the tension of these two eras. One is dying. One is rising. I'll show you what I mean. John 1, 11 through 12, I think is probably the first statement of irony.

Jesus came to his own, but his own did not receive him. That's ironic because his own are the people of Israel, the chosen people of God, the people who have inherited the promises of God, the people who were looking forward to a Messiah, and they're the ones who did not receive him.

That's ironic. And those who did receive him were the Gentiles and the Samaritans and the people in the down and out, the people who didn't understand God, the people who never knew God. Those are the people who are going to accept God because a new era of redemption has dawned in Jesus Christ.

When John uses this sort of irony, he's saying that one era is coming to a close. One era is rising. Another example would be Nicodemus and the woman, John 3 and John 4. Nicodemus is the quintessential Old Testament man.

He's in the upper echelons of Jewish society. He's honored old man. He's morally righteous man. He's a high and mighty religious leader. He studied the Torah. He teaches the people of Israel. He knows what the sacrifices are.

He serves in the temple. He is a quintessential Old Testament man, and he doesn't get it. And yet you have, when you turn the page over to the woman at the well, a young woman, a dishonored woman, a sinner who is sexually immoral and bound in her shame, living in perpetual guilt, a Samaritan, which means that she was one of the hated class of people from the Jews, so much so that the Samaritans invented their own religion as a spinoff to Judaism because the Jews hated them that much.

They wouldn't let them participate. They wouldn't let them go to their temple. They wouldn't let them worship. They even had their own version of the Old Testament because the Jews hated them so much that they had to differentiate themselves from them.

That's who salvation is coming to, to the people that the Jews blocked and barred for centuries. The temple doors were closed to the Samaritans. The temple doors were closed to the Gentiles. And yet here we have a salvation that's no longer going to come through temples, priests, and Sanhedrins or anything like that.

It's going to come to the nations through Christ and Christ alone. There's irony all over the page. Now, we should expect nothing different when we get to the ironies that are found in John 7. And there's 10.

The first, or there's five. The first are that Jesus still went up to the feast. And what we'll see is in that irony where he will showcase even his rejection from that. Now, in verse 8, it says, Jesus says to his brothers, go up to the feast yourself.

I do not go up to the feast because my time has not yet fully come. But yet as we turn the page, we see that Jesus actually did go to the feast. So it seems like Jesus may have just lied to his brothers.

He's saying, you go to the feast. I'm not going to go up to the feast. And then he does go up to the feast, which makes it seem like he is just told an untruth. That's ironic. But what I want us to understand about what Jesus is saying is that he didn't tell an untruth and he didn't tell a lie because if he did, we have no hope in our salvation.

Jesus qualified the statement. Jesus said, my time is not yet here. Your time is always opportune. Go up to the feast yourselves, for I do not go up to the feast because my time has not yet fully come.

Jesus is saying, I'm not going to go up to the feast when you tell me to because you were telling me to go according to worldly time. I'm not going to go until God himself has told me it's time for me to go.

Because everything that Jesus does in his entire life is according to the plan and the will of God. There's not a single moment in Jesus's life where he does anything that the father has not told him to do.

When God tells him to go, he goes. When God tells him to stay, he stays. When God tells him to speak, he speaks. Jesus lives his entire life in submission to God. And a little side point here is if Jesus lived his entire life in submission to God as God himself, how much more, how much more ought we live our life in submission to God?

Now we'll see later how Jesus empowers us to do that. But this doctrine is so well developed that Jesus lives every moment of his life in submission to God. It's beautiful, and I want to show you some examples of it.

For instance, John 434, Jesus says, my food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Jesus is saying that when I do work, it's God's work. It's not my work. John 519, truly, truly, I say to you, the son can do nothing of himself unless it is something he sees the father doing.

For whatever the father does, these things the son also does in like manner. So Jesus not only does the work of God, he does the actions of God. Everything he does is what the father has told him to do.

John 530, he talks about the will. He says, I do nothing of my own initiative. As I hear, I judge and my judgment is just because I don't seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me. He's saying every decision that I make is bound up in the will of God.

He talks about this when he talks about his teaching in John 716, Jesus answered them and said, my teaching is not my own, but he who sent me. Jesus saying that every word that comes out of his mouth in teaching is not his words is from the father.

Jesus is saying that his words, every word that he speaks is that way in John 8, 26 through 28. He says, I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, but he who sent me is true and the things which I heard from him, these things I speak to the world.

They did not realize that he had been speaking to them about the father. So Jesus said, when you lift up the son of man, then you will know that I am he and I do nothing of my own initiative. But I speak these things as the father has taught me.

His words are God's words. His thoughts are God's thoughts. His actions are God's actions in John. In John 12, 49, his, he says that his commands are from God. For I did not speak of my own initiative, but the father himself who sent me has given me a commandment as to what to say and to what to speak.

The very last word we'll see is what ties them all together in John 14, 31, so that the world may know that I love the father. I do exactly what the father has commanded me. What a verse. Jesus submitted his entire life to God so that the world would know that he loved his father.

What a verse for us who've been ransomed and redeemed by Jesus who live our lives to showcase the love of God to the world. How do we showcase the love of God to the world? By humble, joyful, obedience to God, not to get anything from God, not to be saved, but because we're saved, we showcase the love of God to the world by obedience.

Jesus saying, I only do the father's work. I only do the father's actions. I only do the father's will. I only say what the father tells me to teach. I only say the words God tells me to say. I only command the things God tells me to command, and I only do what the father tells me to do, which means that his life is bound up in the authority of God.

Who can question Jesus if these eight things are true of him? So when John 7 occurs and Jesus looks at his brothers and says that he cannot go because it is not his time, he is saying to his brothers, I cannot go because God has not yet told me to go, and I would rather obey God than you.

That's what he's saying. Now that showcases his obedience and submission to God, but it also showcases the rejection. His brothers go up without him. Jesus has just told them, and he's told them multiple times before this, that he only obeys the father.

So when his brother said, you should go up to Jerusalem now, and he says no, and they go up without him, they are implicitly rejecting him because they're choosing the world's time as opposed to Jesus's time.

They could have waited with Jesus, but they didn't. They left him and he went up later. It's an implicit rejection, even right here from the brothers. They're rejecting Christ's time and his ways and his thoughts.

Now that's the first irony that we see. The second irony is the way that Jesus went up into the city. Verse 10 and 11 says, but when the brothers had gone up to the feast, then he himself also went up, but not publicly, but as if in secret.

So the Jews were seeking him at the feast and were saying, where is he? Now, what I love about this passage is that Jesus went up privately when his brothers told him to go up publicly. Jesus goes up privately when the Pharisees are seeking him publicly.

Jesus is doing the ironic because he's showcasing the rejection. His brothers wanted him to go up in John 7, 4. They said, for no one does anything in secret when he himself seeks to be known publicly.

If you do these things, then show yourself to the world. His brothers wanted him to go up ostentatiously. His brothers wanted him to go up making a spectacle of himself. His brothers wanted to go up wooing the crowds and making a scene and causing people to fall in love with him because of his works and to gain a following and to draw a crowd and to gain power and prestige so that why he could charge the palace of Herod, overthrow Herod, overthrow the Romans, put Israel back on track and be king sitting on the throne of David.

That was the plan of Jesus's brother. That was the plan of the crowds, and Jesus wanted nothing at all to do with it because that plan was not from God. That plan was a nationalistic, idolatrous plan written by people who were sad that their country wasn't great anymore.

It had nothing to do with what God had told Christ to do. He was coming to start a whole new kingdom. Jesus rejected that offer because had he done that, it's likely he would have died. They were looking to kill him, the text says.

Had he went up like that, they would have arrested him and they would have murdered him seven months before he was supposed to die. Jesus does not do anything unless the timing is right with God, and Jesus safeguarded his own life so that he would die exactly at the Passover seven months later, so he didn't go when they told him to go, but it also showcases his rejection.

His brothers wanted him to go down or go up to Jerusalem in order to advance his ministry like we talked about last week. The Pharisees wanted him to go up publicly so that they could cut down his ministry, and Jesus, in humble opposition to them both, rejects that offer and goes up privately, but that is where the irony even thickens, and that's where we get to our third point.

Jesus not only goes up to Jerusalem privately, he goes up to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a mountain city that was conquered by David. It was a city that was in control of the Jebusites, but out of all the history that we could talk about, the capital of Israel, the capital of Judea, out of all that history, what I think is more important to the story is the irony of what Jerusalem means.

Jerusalem is a Hebrew word. It's two Hebrew words, jeru and shalom. It means the pillar of peace. So the city of Jerusalem is the pillar of peace on earth. It's the foundation of peace on earth, goodwill towards man.

It's the city where God was going to dwell and bring his peace to the nations, and it's the city of peace that wants to kill Jesus. It's the city of peace that wants to go to war against the Son of God.

Jerusalem was supposed to be a night to the Gentile world and a cornerstone of faithfulness, and yet it's Jerusalem that wants to murder him. It's Jerusalem that's fraught with war and violence and death.

It is Jerusalem who is going to kill God's one and only son. That's ironic. The irony thickens again when we know that where he's going, why he's going, he's going up to the Feast of Tabernacles. He's going up to the city privately.

He's going up to the city that's supposed to be peaceful, and he's going up to the city that's supposed to be joyful. The Feast of Tabernacles was the most joyful time of the Jewish year. It's the time when the Jews actually were praising God and celebrating and dancing and raising their hands, and praises were breaking out all over the city because they were remembering what God himself had done in the Exodus.

God had brought them out of the Exodus with a mighty hand, and he had put them at Mount Sinai, and he had given them his commands, and he had said, I will be your God, and you will be my people, and I will live with you in your midst.

The greatest gift that God ever gave to Israel and the greatest gift that God ever gave to you and I is his presence. And I'm saying it as in him and his presence, not presence as in under the tree. A lot of people treat God like that, like a vending machine.

That's not what I mean. The greatest gift he could ever give you is himself. So these people are supposed to be happy. They're supposed to be joyful. They're supposed to be excited about the presence of God.

And here God himself comes into their presence, just like what happened at Mount Sinai. They're camped around God in the flesh, and they're angry. They're not joyful. John says there was much grumbling among the crowds concerning him.

On the feast where there was supposed to be joy, there was grumbling just like the Old Testament Israelites. But unlike them, when they saw the presence of God, they fell down and at least were afraid.

Here, these Jews were standing up with the audacity to grumble. The God who the feast represents was here, and they were grumbling about him. It's even deeper than that because Jesus is the true temple.

The Feast of Tabernacles is about the tabernacle that God made, the tabernacle, the tent of meeting where his presence came down and dwelled in that little tent, temple in the book of Exodus. John 1 .14 says the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory.

The glory is of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. That word dwelt right there is a word called skene in the Greek, and that word skene in the Greek means tabernacled. It's not the word for dwelt normally.

So you could read this text and you could see it as the word Jesus became flesh, and he was tabernacling among his people at the Feast of Tabernacles. This is true. Jesus was tabernacling among them during the festival of the tabernacles, and they rejected him and they grumbled about him because they were so blind in their unbelief.

They couldn't see. It's certainly ironic. The final irony that I would show you is. Not only do they go up to the city, he goes up to the city privately. He goes up to the city that wants to kill him, even though it's the city of peace.

He goes up to the city angry, even though it was the city that was supposed to be filled with joy. The last one is that he goes up to the city secretly. Because the people were afraid. The verse says in verse 13 and 14, yet no one was speaking openly of him for fear of the Jews, but when it was now in the midst of the feast, Jesus went up to the temple and began to teach.

What I find so fascinating about this passage is that the people were afraid, but they weren't afraid of God. They were afraid of man. You go back to the Old Testament time when God's presence came down among his people, their faces hit the earth because his holiness was so good that it terrified them.

Moses had to be hidden in the face of a rock so that he could experience the presence of God. Isaiah says, woe is me. I'm a man of unclean lips when the holiness of God interacts with Isaiah. The demons in hell believe and they even shudder at the presence of God.

And here you have God's people. He came to his own and his own are rejecting him in the most audacious way because when Christ walks into their presence, they don't even bow. And they're afraid, but not of God.

They're afraid of man. They're afraid of puny and pathetic Sadducees and Pharisees who are going to kick them out of the tabernacle or going to kick them out of the synagogue. When you get kicked out of the synagogue, you get kicked out of social life in Israel.

You have no friends. You have no social life. You're kind of alone. When you get kicked out of the temple, you have no religious life. Think about it. God's presence dwells in the temple. So if you're not allowed to go there, you're not allowed to know God.

So they're afraid of these puny worms of a man who are telling them that they're going to get kicked out of the synagogue and kicked out of the temple if they worship Jesus. So they're afraid. But yet the God who made all of them is right there.

The God who deserves all worship is right there. And they instead cave to the fear of man instead of the fear of God. And that is a sort of rejection that ought to grip our hearts. How often do we do the exact same thing?

We cave to the fear of man instead of the fear of God. We cave to someone else's opinion instead of God's opinion. We cave when our family member says, don't do that. Don't do this. Don't go to church.

We cave when the world says, don't do this. Don't do that. We are caving type of people because we don't know who God is. If we knew who God was, we would say, you know what? I love you, but I'm not going to follow you.

I'm going to follow God. And that's exactly what Jesus did in the middle of the feast. He stood up in courage and he began to teach. Jesus obeyed God instead of man. He went privately instead of publicly.

He went to the city of peace that was going to kill him. He went to the festival that was supposed to be joyful. And yet everybody was angry. And he went up to the place that was fearing man instead of fearing God.

Irony is all over this passage and it showcases that time is changing. This era of old Testament history is coming to an end. And Jesus is going to in one moment, all of the pain, all of the power, all of the, all of the wickedness is going to come down upon Jesus's head in the ultimate act of rejection.

And he is going to break upon the world, the kingdom of God. All this irony is fueling it through the gospel of John. We'll see it develop over the next three years as we go through the gospel of John.

It's interesting how we're in John 7 and all of this is already happening. So just buckle up. It's going to be a ride. We're also going to look at five instances of explicit rejection. We just saw implicit ways that they rejected him.

We saw ironic ways that they rejected him. Now let's look at five explicit ways that they rejected him. It says in verse three of John 7, therefore his brother said to him, leave here and go into Judea so that your disciples may also see your works, which you were doing.

For no one does anything in secret when he himself seeks to be known publicly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world for not even his brothers were believing in him. At the core of all rejection of God is unbelief.

At the foundation of every act of rejection against God is an unbelieving heart. And an unbelieving heart is the default mode of the human condition because what response could they give but unbelief?

John 6, 44, which we've already learned, says no one comes to Christ unless God himself drags them to Jesus. That means human effort alone is not enough. You're not righteous enough. You're not good enough.

You're not pure enough in order to come to Jesus without God's help. So if unbelief is the foundation of everything, how could we do anything else? Even Jesus' own brothers don't believe. They had every reason to believe in Jesus.

They had every reason to support him. He was their flesh and blood brother. Their family reputation was on the line. And yet even flesh and blood was not enough for them to understand who Jesus was. Unless God drags a person out of their unbelief and out of their sin, they will not be saved because they will not believe in Jesus.

We see it from his brothers. We see it all across the gospel. Unbelief is at the foundation of rejecting God. People reject Christ because they cannot believe. The same is true for all of us today. Unless God opens up our eyes, we will not see Jesus for who he truly is.