"Jesus is the Christ" (Hitchings) | John 7:25-36

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Please stand for a reading from John chapter seven verses twenty-five to thirty-six.

Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, Is not this the man whom they seek to kill?

And here he is, speaking openly, and they say nothing to him.

Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ?

But we know where this man comes from.

And when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from.

So Jesus proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, You know me, and you know where I come from.

But I have not come of my own accord.

He who sent me is true, and him ye do not know.

I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.

So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.

Yet many of the people believed in him.

They said, When the Christ appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?

The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about them.

And the chief priests and Pharisees sent officers to arrest him.

Jesus then said, I will be with you a little longer, and then I am going to him who sent me.

You will seek me and you will not find me.

Where I am, you cannot come.

The Jews said to one another, Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him?

Does he intend to go to the dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?

What does he mean by saying, You will seek me and you will not find me?

And where I am, you cannot come.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Well, I'll add my welcome to that of Brian's.

My name is Frank Hitchings.

I'm one of the pastors here on staff, and we do want to extend a warm welcome to you all.

Uh especially, I don't think the returning students are back, or maybe some of them are back, but freshmen uh are here as of yesterday, I think it was.

So if you're here uh being dropped off at school, we're glad you're here and hope you find a church home uh that's warm and welcoming for you here.

Uh before uh we pray, I do want to remind you that every week uh Jennifer Thompson, actually Emmy's mom, who is my assistant and staff writer also, she writes discussion questions and and uh also resources.

We used to call them for further up, further into the text, and we've kind of redone them for the fall.

They're now called Beyond the Pulpit, resources for continued study.

They're on the web every week.

You can use them individually, you can use them as a small group or as a family, and they are excellent.

She spends a lot of time.

I'm actually going to quote her uh one of the one of the things she says as we go through the passage this morning.

So I want to encourage you to take advantage of that as you see fit.

Now let's pray and then we'll jump into our text.

Lord, you're the one who told us that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Your word tells us that it is living and active, that it's sharper than any double-edged sword, that it penetrates our hearts, it judges the thoughts and attitudes of our hearts.

And your word also clearly tells us that you use it, Lord, to grow us in grace and to deepen us in faith and repentance that we might live for your glory.

And we ask that you would use your word that way this day.

We pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, it happened 60 years ago.

It's still known today as music's biggest conspiracy theory.

Bigger than the conspiracy theory that says Elvis is alive.

Entire websites are devoted to exploring it.

Videos, numerous YouTube videos describe it.

There's even a movie about it.

It's known simply by this three-word phrase.

Paul is dead.

How many of y'all remember that?

You're showing your age, yeah.

Yeah, Paul is dead.

I remember it too.

Let me explain it.

Back in 1966, Paul McCartney, for our younger listeners, uh, one of the four band members of the Beatles, he was alleged in 1966 to have died in a fiery car crash in England.

And then this is the conspiracy goes like this.

The remaining band members, along with their management team, hid the truth of his death from Beatles fans to save us from our grief.

It's even said that MI5, and MI5 is like the English version, the British version of our FBI, the MI5 group was allegedly involved in this too.

And they secretly held a look-alike, sound-alike contest and quickly hired a man named Billy Shears to pose as if he's Paul McCartney.

Once the theory was out there, fans were no longer looking for the truth.

They were looking for confirmation and they saw it everywhere.

Over the next few years, rumors, like years, rumors started surfacing.

They started gaining popularity.

Eventually, reports started coming from American college students.

If you're a college student, don't do this.

They started coming from college students and disc jockeys in the United States scouring the lyrics to the new Beatles songs and the album covers to find clues.

Clues that they said would prove that the band was feeling guilty that they hid this from fans and was leaving these clues in the lyrics and in the album covers.

Now, how many of y'all have ever seen the cover to the Beatles Abbey Road album?

Ah, here we go.

All right.

It's significant how it plays into this conspiracy.

This is a simple photo of the four members of the band walking across a London crosswalk.

But those who scoured it for clues said the cover is actually mimicking a funeral procession.

When I read that this week, I was like, you've got to be kidding me.

So John is in front.

He's the preacher, he's dressed in white.

Ringo is dressed in black, he's the mourner.

George is in blue jeans, he's the gravedigger, and Paul is barefoot and he's out of step.

Everybody else is stepping with their left foot first.

Paul's clearly out of step with his right foot first.

He's barefoot, he's holding a cigarette in his right hand, but he's left-handed.

This is clearly a funeral procession.

And there's a white Volkswagen beetle on the cover also.

And the license plate on this beetle is LMF 28IF.

That's the British license plate.

And they're like, well, that just proves it.

LMF stands for Linda McCartney Weeps.

Can you believe it?

28IF was saying that Paul would have been 28 if he were alive.

This thing went crazy.

It got way out of control.

And all the time this was happening for three years, Paul McCartney wasn't silent.

He kept making music, he kept giving interviews, but the rumors continued to grow until in 1969 in the fall, Life magazine put him on the cover with his wife Linda and his two children on their farm in Scotland.

And the whole tagline on the front of Life magazine was Paul is still with us.

And yet, decades later, some people believe, they insist, that he died in 1966.

Isn't that crazy?

Here's the point, because you may be going, what are we going to do with that?

Human unbelief is powerful, it is a strong force.

And spiritually speaking, it's an irrepressible force apart from the work of the Holy Spirit.

Throughout our study in John's gospel, we've seen it over and over again: this tension between human unbelief and a Savior presented.

Once again, we see it in our passage this morning.

Jesus encounters this crowd as he enters Jerusalem and he starts once again to teach in the temple courts.

And we're going to look at it this morning.

If you look in your outline, you'll see we have four points we're going to go through this morning.

The first is this Jesus is the Christ who defies human assumptions about the Messiah.

Look at verses 25 through 27.

Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, Is not this the man whom they seek to kill?

And here he is, speaking openly, and they say nothing to him.

Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ?

But we know where this man comes from.

And when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from.

Now, if you were with us last week, the discussion, you'll notice the discussion leaves the previous topic.

The previous topic was this subject of whether it's okay to heal on the Sabbath.

And now the subject is this question, who is Jesus?

We leave the previous and we go to this question, who is Jesus?

Is he the Messiah or is he not?

That's, friends, that's the most important question any of us will ever wrestle with.

Who is Jesus?

Here he is.

Jesus once again teaching powerfully in the temple courts.

They were amazed and they were saying, He has no formal training.

How can he teach like this?

And the average Jew living in Jerusalem knew all too well that the religious leaders wanted Jesus dead.

But for some reason, they're allowing Jesus to continue to teach.

And they're thinking, why is that?

Could it be that they have now secretly come to the view that this is the Messiah?

But then they're thinking, but we understand when the Christ does come, when the Messiah does come, no one's going to know where he came from.

That's the assumption, that's the commonly held view of the day.

But they were saying, but we know exactly where he came from.

He comes from Nazareth.

Do you remember Nazareth's reputation?

When Philip, early in the Gospels, when Philip goes to his friend Nathaniel and talks about having met Jesus of Nazareth, he's met the Christ, and Nathaniel asks this famous question.

He says, Can anything good come from Nazareth?

That's his reputation.

And these people are saying, we know where he comes from, but we've been taught all our lives, we know for a fact, that when the Messiah comes, we won't know where he comes from.

So they're perplexed.

They're beginning to wonder, could it be that the religious leaders now accept that this is the Christ?

But their logic, John is showing us their logic, is seriously flawed by those assumptions.

They're rejecting Jesus' claims, rejecting them because they know his earthly origins.

They're relying on man-made traditions and man-made assumptions, and because of that, they mistakenly believe that the Messiah's origin would be completely shrouded in mystery.

And that's not the case for Jesus in their minds.

So they're controlled by their unbelief.

They're controlled by their assumptions.

It's as if Jesus had been saying, look honestly.

Consider the works that he's done right before their eyes.

Consider the works he's done throughout the region that they've heard about, the miracles.

But Jesus defies human assumptions.

There's a certain blindness that comes with human assumptions of Jesus.

Here's my Jennifer Thompson quote.

You can tell her I quoted her.

I love this.

She said this human assumptions about Jesus can be remarkably confident and yet profoundly wrong.

She's right.

They can be remarkably confident and profoundly wrong.

They can be remarkably confident in what we think following Jesus should even look like and profoundly wrong.

They can mislead us.

Some of you may have heard the story of Harry Houdini, the great musician, not magician, nah magician, not musician.

The great uh locksmith.

Houdini was known as a great escape artist, and and he got in trouble once when he was doing a stunt when he was on a European tour.

He was doing a stunt in a Scottish jail.

He found himself really locked in, you might say, by his own thinking.

He had been searched and shackled.

And the old jailer in this town put him in the cell and closed the door, the the big, it's not like the bars door.

This is like a big door, big, thick wooden door.

Closed the door, walked away.

And Houdini quickly, even though he had been searched, quickly got out of the shackles and set about getting out of the lock, the cell door lock.

And he tried and he tried, despite all his efforts, the lock wouldn't open.

And finally, exhausted and desperate, he leaned on the door and the door swung open and he fell into the hallway.

The jailer never locked the door.

He made the assumption that the jailer locked the door.

He missed the obvious.

John is saying here that their assumptions, the Jews' assumptions too, they miss the obvious.

He's healing blind people.

He's raising Lazarus from the dead.

They're missing the obvious.

Maybe our assumptions get in the way of our faith also.

If I put my faith in Christ, if I commit to follow him, my life should be very different than it feels like it is.

I shouldn't have the troubles I have, right?

Shouldn't have the troubles in my career.

I shouldn't have the relational struggles I've got with my supposed friends.

I shouldn't have the relational struggles with my parents or in my marriage or with my children.

I shouldn't have, if I'm going to trust Christ, I shouldn't have financial struggles that just seem to never go away.

I shouldn't have health struggles that seem like they're one after the other.

If God really is good, if he really does love me, my life should be different.

I shouldn't have to suffer, but where do those assumptions come from?

They don't come out of the scriptures.

When Jesus is talking to his disciples about the hardships of living, living out their faith in a fallen world, he says this.

He said, I've told you these things.

After he goes through the list, he said, I've told you these things, so that in me you might have peace.

In this world you will have trouble.

But take heart.

I've overcome the world.

Jesus is the Christ who defies all the human assumptions about who the Messiah is and what following him will look like.

But secondly, he also testifies openly to his identity and mission.

Look at verse 28 and 29.

So he proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, you know me, and you know where I come from, but I have not come on my own accord, or of my own accord.

He who sent me is true, and him you do not know.

I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.

He's doing he's doing two things here.

He's really condemning them for their ignorance.

He's publicly proclaiming, he said, you know, even though you may know my human background, you don't know me, and you don't know the father who sent me.

Now these are devout Jews.

He's saying you don't know the Father, and he's asserting at the same time his authority, his divine authority.

He's claiming absolute knowledge of the Father because he comes from the Father.

In a historical sense, yeah, they can locate his origin, his ancestral lineage, but in a spiritual sense, they have no idea who he is and where he comes from.

And the language, it seems a little cryptic to us when he says he refers to the Father as the one who sent me and the one from whom he comes.

But it was crystal clear to his listeners.

They knew exactly what he was claiming.

His intent was to make it crystal clear.

He was pointing out their blindness, their lack of understanding.

He was pointing out their unbelief.

I read a sermon this week from Martin Lloyd Jones on this passage, and he talks in his sermon at one point about the four really serious consequences of unbelief.

And here they are.

He said this: he said, unbelief, it leads to ignorance of God.

The religious leaders, they didn't truly know God.

They had a superficial knowledge of him and an outward knowledge of him, but they lacked an inward spiritual knowledge of him.

They didn't know God.

Secondly, he says, unbelief, it leads to ignorance of one's own condition, as sinners in need of a savior.

Unbelief, you can't see that.

And thirdly, he says unbelief leads to ignorance of God's plan of salvation in Christ.

The Pharisees didn't understand why Jesus came.

Here he's coming to offer himself as a sacrifice for sin, fulfilling all the Old Testament, all the Old Testament laws.

But they didn't think they needed it.

And lastly, unbelief leads to ignorance of even being outside the kingdom of God.

They thought they were inside the kingdom of God.

They're the protectors of the kingdom of God.

And they didn't realize that they were outside the kingdom and they could never enter on their own.

Unbelief is caused by spiritual deadness in the heart, and they didn't realize it.

They thought they were alive and they weren't.

They needed their hearts renewed in Christ.

He stands ready to do that.

For them, he's ready to do that for us.

Jesus is the Christ who defies human assumptions about the Messiah.

He testifies openly to his identity and mission.

Thirdly, he remains untouchable until his hour.

Look at verse 30 through 32.

So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him because his hour had not yet come.

Yet many of the people believed in him.

They said, When the Christ appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?

The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about him, and the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to arrest him.

I love verse 30.

I love verse 30.

There's so much comfort in it.

Here the Jews are, they're arguing with Jesus.

He responds clearly, stating his identity and his mission, and their response is to try to arrest him, to try to seize him.

And it seems like in verse 30 it's like a spontaneous effort.

Verse 32 is like a more planned effort.

They're going to send the temple guards, but here in verse 30, it's a spontaneous effort.

And we're not told what happened, but we are told why they were not successful.

You know, in other passages, like they were going to stone Jesus in another passage, and he just walks through the crowd and leaves.

We're not told what happened here.

But we are told why it happened.

His claims required a serious response, either accepting him or rejecting him.

And the division of the people.

We see the crowd, he says, many in the crowd did believe, but others didn't.

And here's what happened.

He says, it wasn't his time yet.

His time had not yet come.

Even though they rejected his claims and sought to arrest him, they're not able to do so because of the sovereign providence of God.

And you say, well, what do I mean by that?

Well, let me give you the two aspects of that.

The sovereign providence of God.

God has supreme power to rule over all things.

That's sovereignty.

But he actively uses that power in holiness, in perfect wisdom, as our catechism says, to powerfully preserve and govern every creature in every action.

That's providence.

That's why he wasn't arrested.

Because God's sovereignty alone will dictate the time of Christ's arrest, the time of his passion.

It shows us here that there really are limits.

To human hostility, and God is the one who sets those limits.

Yes, the arrest will happen.

Yes, there'll be a mock trial.

Yes, there'll be a crucifixion, but it won't be today because it's not his time.

God in his sovereign providence, in his care, says it's not his time.

There's abundant comfort for that, for us in that, in the providence of God, the sovereignty of God.

I was thinking this week, if you're taking notes, Psalm 139 is a great psalm.

Verse 16 in Psalm 139 says this all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

I love that.

All the days that God has ordained for me to be on this earth were written before one of them came to be.

It's true for Jesus, it's true for the psalmists, and it's true for you and me.

The writer of Proverbs says this in Proverbs 19, 21.

He says, People make many plans, but only the Lord's purpose stands.

It's true for Jesus, it's true for us.

Our sovereign and loving God has numbered all of our days.

We need not live in fear of anything.

He powerfully preserves and governs every creature and every action.

As John said in John chapter 3, he loves us so much that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life.

John 3 · chapter mention

That's the best news ever.

We need to move on.

I wish I could spend more time on that.

There's so much comfort in the sovereign providence of God for our lives.

The section ends with once again, verse 32, the Pharisees hear the crowd muttering these things about him.

Things like, when the Christ appears, will he do more miraculous signs than this man has done?

So they decide to send officers to arrest him, and once again they fail because it wasn't in God's plan for that to happen then.

He remains untouchable until his appointed hour.

And lastly, fourthly, he continues to confound those who refuse him.

Look at verse 33 through the end.

Then Jesus said, I will be with you a little longer, and then I'm going to him who sent me.

You will seek me and you will not find me.

Where I am you cannot come.

The Jews said to one another, Where does man Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him?

Does he intend to go to the dispersion among the Greeks Greeks and teach the Greeks?

What does he mean by saying, Will you will seek me and you will not find me?

And where I am you cannot come.

I love these verses at the end.

Jesus is announcing, he said, I'm going to be with you a little longer, and then I'm going to leave.

I'll return to the Father, and when that happens, you'll seek me, but you won't find me, because you cannot come to where I am.

And his opponents, once again, we've seen it all through the gospel so far.

Once again, the opponents, they totally misunderstand what he's saying, and they demonstrate their spiritual blindness by saying, where is he going that he thinks we can't find him?

Is he going to go to the dispersion and preach to the Greeks?

Their earthly mindset.

In their earthly mindset, they completely miss the spiritual reality of what he's saying, and they completely miss the warning.

Where I'm going, you cannot come.

Going back to the Father, and you think you know the Father, but you cannot go to the Father except through me.

They miss the warning.

It's ironic.

The very God, think about this, the very God they're seeking to defend can only be known through the one whom they're seeking to kill.

Have you ever thought about that?

The very God that they're so intent on seeking to defend can only be known through the one they're seeking to kill.

It's a great picture of what we saw last week.

Chapter 7 is a huge chapter, but last week in verse 17, Jesus said this to them.

He said, If anyone's will is to do God's will, he'll know whether my teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own.

Well, they're convinced that his teaching is not from God.

They're convinced of that.

They're refusing to believe in him, they're refusing to abandon their assumptions about what the Messiah will be like, where he'll be from, what he'll do.

He's supposed to rescue us from the Jews.

What's he doing talking about our sin?

Excuse me, rescue us from the Romans.

What's he doing talking about our sin?

They won't abandon their assumptions.

They won't surrender their vain attempts at self-righteousness to gain the favor of God.

It doesn't work.

But they won't abandon it.

They won't surrender it.

They won't place their trust in Him.

Their confusion illustrates, just continues to illustrate, they're spiritually blind because of their unbelief.

I need to wrap up.

Let maybe do it with this illustration.

How many of y'all remember taking your first swimming lesson when you were little?

Yeah.

I remember my first swimming lesson.

My swim teacher.

I still remember, I don't remember her name, but I remember the house she lived in in Memphis, and my parents would take me over there with my sister who was a year older.

And my sister already knew how to swim, and I didn't.

And my swim teacher kept saying, just, you know, lie on your back and float.

That's the hardest thing in the world.

She's like, I'm not going to let you drown.

You will float.

It's so hard.

I was incapable.

I could not relax.

I was absolutely incapable of just lying back.

I could not trust that I would not sink.

And even when she got under me, under my back and would hold me up where I could float, I could feel her hands when they moved.

And what happens when that, when you when the person moves their hands?

What happens when you don't believe you're going to float?

You kick and you flail and you twist around.

You've got to save yourself.

Surrender and trust was the key.

But I just couldn't do it.

Well, it's similar spiritually here.

It's not the same, but it's similar.

The natural, unregenerate person simply cannot understand spiritual truth.

The Pharisees couldn't understand Christ's words in any other way than just material and earthly.

In what ways, in what areas maybe are you not surrendering and trusting today?

Maybe you could say it this way: in what areas are you still flailing and kicking and twisting instead of surrendering and trusting Jesus and His righteousness and not your own?

Maybe you're here this morning and you don't yet believe in Him.

You haven't surrendered to Him.

You haven't placed your faith in Him.

You're still striving on your own, hoping that if there is a God, He will see that you are a good person.

You're not like those people.

You've been a good person.

That's really what the Pharisees were doing.

Jesus stands ready to give you living faith, to uphold you, to receive you, to love you, to bless you.

Surrender and trust in Him.

Or maybe you've already placed your faith in Jesus long ago, and yet your circumstances are difficult.

Life is hard.

Your faith is being stretched, you're struggling.

He says this to all of us.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I'm gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Surrender and trust.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we rejoice in the gift of your word, Lord, for the time that we had this summer in the Psalms and now the time in John's gospel this fall.

We thank you.

Your word, Lord, it challenges us to really consider who Jesus is and what he's done for sinners like us.

It challenges us to fully accept that we cannot save ourselves.

Indeed, we need your divine intervention in our hearts that we might receive the gift of saving faith, that we might surrender and trust.

And we ask, Lord, that if there are any with us this morning who have not yet come to a saving knowledge of Jesus, that this would be the day that you change their hearts just as you've changed ours.

Lord, we ask that you would press these truths that we've been studying deeper into our hearts.

Lord, that in a sense we might be overwhelmed afresh with all that you've done for us in Christ and through us, through your Spirit and in us each day.

Evoke from our hearts, Lord, worship and thanksgiving that flows not just here on Sunday mornings, but throughout our weeks, in our homes, in our communities, our relationships, and our workplaces.

We pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.