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

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A reading from John chapter 7, verses 25 through 36.

John 7:25–36

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

But 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 on 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.

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

Yet many 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 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.

Thanks be to God.

Please be seated.

Well, good morning.

My name is Chad Middlebrooks.

I'm one of the other pastors here, and I almost feel like after that testimony of the Lord's work, we just need to pray and uh get on about our business and go do the Lord's work ourselves.

So, uh, but you know, I'm a preacher, so I want to preach this morning.

We're back in John chapter 7 after spending the summer in the Psalms.

John 7 · chapter mention

And those words you just heard read, we could read those and think those sound really good, and we could preach a sermon, but if we don't come before the Lord right now and ask the Spirit to do his work, to take these words that are living and active and apply them to our lives, then what we do in this gathering is pointless.

So let's go before the Lord now and ask his blessing on our time.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, would you go before us now and would you prepare our hearts to receive this spiritual food that our souls so desperately need?

Lord, you've never hidden yourself from your people, and you're not hiding this morning either.

Father, would you give us ears to actually hear and listen and wills to be ready to receive and surrender in obedience to the truth that we're about to hear and see.

Lord, do this for the good of your people.

Lord, we ask this in the name of the one who crushed the serpent head, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Well, in almost every relationship, there comes a time and a point in the relationship when you have to make a choice.

You can humble yourself and you can ask the question that's on your mind or on your heart, or you can just simply assume that you already know the answer.

If you're married in this room, you'll understand exactly what I mean.

You ask your wife, is everything okay?

And she responds, I'm fine.

Every husband in this room knows that fine is not an answer.

Fine is a pop quiz that you didn't study for.

And instead of asking the question, as you should, most men have done what they've always done since the beginning of time.

They've guessed.

We build a whole theory complete with motive and timeline, and we land on a conclusion that's not even in the ballpark.

All because we didn't ask the question.

I think the thing as we think about Jesus here, we can do the exact same thing with him, more than we like to admit.

That we look at our evidence that's in front of us, we run it through our own grid of our assumptions and our past hurts, and we draw a conclusion.

All without actually bringing the question to Jesus.

In our passage, that's exactly what's happening here.

Jesus is teaching publicly in the temple during the day at the Feast of Tabernacles.

And the very people who have front row access to the very Son of God, they walk away confused.

Not because Jesus was unclear in his teaching, but because they had already made their minds up about who the Messiah was supposed to be to them.

And Jesus didn't fit that mold that they had built for him.

In our passage, John makes it very clear that this indeed is the Son of God.

And he does four things that John lays out here.

You see it in your outline.

He defies human assumptions about the Messiah.

He testifies openly about his divine identity and a mission that he came on.

He remains untouchable until his appointed hour, and he continues to confound those who refuse him.

So look back at verse 25 as we begin.

Some of the people in Jerusalem remarked, Is this not the man they are seeking 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.

I think this gives us a window into how the human heart works in relation to Jesus.

Now, these are not the hostile Pharisees that are seeking to kill Jesus.

These are just the ordinary Jerusalem residents there that are watching this drama unfold and they're trying to figure out what's going on here.

But what strikes me is that in fact they did have genuine biblical information and evidence of the Messiah, that he was from Bethlehem, if they went back to the Old Testament scriptures, to Micah chapter 5.

Micah 5 · chapter mention

For 700 years they had these scriptures.

And yet, on the basis of this tradition that they came up with that said that the Messiah would appear miraculously, just out of nowhere.

Nobody would know where he came from.

And so, on that basis, combined with what they knew about Jesus, who was a carpenter's son from Nazareth of all places, they thought this can't be the Messiah.

We know Jesus and where he's from.

And so it settled it for them.

They never once turned to Jesus and asked him a question directly.

They could have said, Rabbi, help us understand where you were born, where you came from.

But they talked to each other instead.

And their conclusion about the Messiah was based purely on assumption rather than on humble inquiry to the one standing before them.

And they remained certain about their assumptions the entire time.

But are we not guilty of often doing the same thing with Jesus?

We construct in our minds this image of who Jesus is, made of our own traditions, our own desires, our own assumptions, rather than going to his word to seeing who he has told us that he is.

See, if our initial reaction to our circumstances and our sufferings and to the word of God that we read, if our reaction is surprise or anger or fear or disappointment, that's okay.

That's part of being human.

But it's what we do next.

That's the test that comes.

Where do we take those disappointments, that suffering, that surprise, that anger?

Do we go to the very face of God through prayer?

To his word, to other brothers and sisters in the faith?

Or do we just make our own assumptions and just keep walking in what seems to make sense to us?

See, often we create a mold for Jesus and try to fit him into that mold, and when he doesn't fit, we walk away confused.

That choice of how we respond to who Jesus is, it determines what kind of relationship we're going to have with him.

Either one that is confusing and distant and bitter, or one that is intimate, trusting, resting in the Savior.

What kind of image have you constructed of Jesus in your mind?

Ask yourself, what could Jesus do or what could he say that could surprise you?

That would make you say, Well, I didn't expect that from him.

If nothing comes to your mind, then we really have to evaluate whether we swap the real Jesus for one that we have found to be more comfortable, and it goes along with what we should expect of him.

See, the people of Jerusalem, they show us exactly what this looks like played out.

They sincerely thought they had done their homework about the Messiah.

But they were completely wrong.

Not because they hadn't studied about who the Messiah was, but because they had never once go to the very person who had the answers that was standing right in front of them.

Well, next, Jesus testifies openly about his divine identity and his mission in beginning in verse 28.

Jesus proclaimed, he cried out as he taught in the temple, and look at what he says.

You know me, and you know where I come from.

But I have not come on my own accord.

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

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

Now that word proclaimed, that's significant there.

Because it means that Jesus wasn't whispering this, he was shouting it in the temple court.

This was the public, unmistakable declaration of his divine identity.

The Son of God, spoken at the largest festival in Jerusalem in the most public of places.

And he did so at great personal risk to himself.

He already knew that they were actively trying to pursue him and kill him.

Jesus isn't hiding who he is.

In essence, he's saying, I didn't appoint myself.

I was sent.

And the one who sent me is true.

And that Greek word true there means genuine, honest, as opposed to a copy or a fake.

Jesus is saying that the Father is the real Father, in contrast to every counterfeit image that the crowd has built in his place.

That's about as clear of a claim to divine sonship as you can make in the first century Jerusalem.

To claim intimate knowledge with the Father?

To claim to be sent from the Father's presence?

That's the kind of authority that no other prophet or rabbi could claim.

This is the eternal Son sent by the Father, testifying in real time to the very mission that he and the Father had planned from eternity past that he was coming to fulfill.

But note the irony in Jesus' words.

The crowd only knew him on the surface.

They knew where he grew up, they knew about his family, but they remained completely unaware that he actually came from the Father's side.

Jesus is standing there as clear evidence, proclaiming who he is, and they miss it.

They stood there, heard him testify to being the divine Son of God, and instead of falling down on their face and worshiping him, the one who they'd heard about for years, they go back to arguing about his hometown.

Isn't that sobering?

The evidence was not hidden.

Jesus was shouting in the middle of the temple court.

And yet the people still missed it.

Because they weren't actually listening for truth.

They were seeking confirmation about what they had already decided was true.

Let me turn the tables on us for a moment.

Through the sermons that you hear preached Sunday after Sunday, through the power of the Holy Spirit bringing conviction upon your own soul.

And yet we continue to find an excuse to ignore it.

He hasn't made his truth hard to find.

He has plainly told us who he is and why he came.

The question this morning is not whether the evidence is sufficient.

The question to us is whether we're willing to surrender in faith to the one who is true versus stubbornly adhering to our own misguided conclusions.

It's known as the music's biggest conspiracy theory.

Back in the fall of 1969, a rumor swept across college campuses that Paul McCartney, one of the four Beatles, kids, that was a singing group back in the 60s and the 70s, that he had somehow miracle, he had died in a car crash, and they had secretly replaced him with a look-alike.

And fans built a whole argument around various pieces of evidence.

They looked at the cover to Abbey Road and saw that he was the only one that was barefoot on the cover while the other three had shoes on and he was out of step with the other three band members.

So that had to mean something.

And then there was a shirt that he had on that had the letters O P D, and of course, in their minds, that meant officially pronounced dead.

And so after their theory had been developed, they weren't looking for truth.

They were looking for confirmation of the theory and this conspiracy that was surrounding it.

And they saw it everywhere.

But Paul McCartney never stopped speaking during this time.

He did interviews.

He continued to make music.

And when the rumor peaked, Live magazine actually had a picture of Paul McCartney and his family on the cover with a line that said, Paul is still with us.

He said it clearly.

And yet, even decades later, there's still people that think he died in 1966.

That's the scene in the temple here.

Jesus isn't quiet about who he is.

He's cried out saying that I am the Son of God.

But the crowd had already built their theory.

And once a theory like that embeds in the minds of those who believe it, not even direct testimony from the very one that they're talking about can convince them otherwise.

They didn't need Jesus to speak more clearly.

They needed to listen to what he had already spoken to them.

Are we listening to God speaking to our hearts?

Next we see that Jesus is the Christ who remains untouchable until his appointed hour.

Here's where I think this passage takes a turn that ought to bring us a tremendous amount of comfort as believers this morning.

Verse 31 says that many in the crowd believed.

And they said, Where is when the Christ appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?

They just watched him perform all these signs, and then in verse 32, it tells us how the leaders responded to that.

That they hear the crowd muttering about Jesus, and they send officers to arrest him.

Now that word, Greek word muttering there, is the same word that John uses back in chapter 6, when Jesus says, I am the bread of life, and they begin to grumble, and many of them turned away and stopped following him at that point.

But it's also the same word used back in the Old Testament when the Red Sea split and they come walking across on dry ground, the Israelites, and they get into the wilderness and they begin to grumble against Moses.

God's work clearly put on display.

And yet the same response when they see something incredible before their eyes, they argue and grumble.

The work of God is clear, yet the response is the same.

But notice verse 30 tells us that no one laid a hand on Jesus.

Not because Jesus was hiding, not because he had people protecting him.

John tells us the reason directly.

His hour had not yet come.

Now we need to understand what that means because that little phrase is loaded with theological meaning and richness for us as believers.

God's sovereignty means that he has ordained whatever comes to pass.

Even now to the smallest detail of our lives.

His providence is his sovereignty worked out in time.

He upholds and he governs every event and creation, even in a world that is marred by sin, yet without ever being the author of sin.

Nothing happens by accident.

Nothing happens outside of God's decree, and yet God accomplishes his purposes, even through the free and sinful choices of wicked men.

The men in the temple courts, they were hostile.

They were genuinely sinful.

And yet they couldn't lay a finger on Jesus.

Because the Father had an appointed hour, and not even hell itself could touch Jesus.

It's the same reality we had to call to worship in Daniel this morning.

Kids, remember the story of Daniel.

He's thrown into the lion's den, and what does he say the very next morning after the king had put him in into the lion's den?

He said, My God sent an angel and shut the lion's mouths, and they have not harmed me.

Brothers and sisters, do you know what this means for us this morning as believers in Christ?

It means that the same God who governed every second of his son's life is the same God that is governing every second of your life and my life.

Psalm 139, David writes to God and he says, Your eyes saw my unformed substance.

In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me.

Your days are not random.

The trials, the suffering, the doubts, the fears of your life.

They don't fall outside the boundaries that God has appointed out of deep love and provision for his beloved children.

And that doesn't mean that life is not going to hurt because we live in a fallen world.

And it also doesn't mean that the Lord delights in your pain.

What it means is we have a loving Father who has numbered our days before we've ever lived them.

If you're in Christ this morning, here's what should settle your soul amidst whatever you're walking through.

That none of our assumptions, our wrong assumptions that we make about God, none of our resistance to surrender some part of our life before the Lord, none of that can thwart God's plans.

Think about Joseph sold into slavery by his own brothers.

And at the end of it all, those who betrayed him, he could look to them and say, Yes, you meant it for evil, but God intended it for good.

God wove it sovereignly into a plan to save an entire nation on his timetable, not on his brothers.

God's parade of providence is often invisible for us to see in the moment.

But later, looking back, believers across the centuries can all say the same thing.

What felt like senseless chaos and confusion was the sovereign hand of God positioning, protecting, and preparing us for what he was going to unfold next.

And here's the anchor of it all that Jesus went to the cross at just the right time.

Paul says in Romans 5, while we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

And he ascended at the appointed time.

And he will come again at the appointed time that the Father has set.

Which is why Luke tells us in Acts 1, it's not for you or me to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed in his own authority.

The same sovereign God who kept at bay the angry hands that wanted to get onto Jesus in that courtyard is the same sovereign God who sent him to the cross to lay down his life for sinners.

And is the same God who is ruling over every circumstance of your life and mine this morning.

Let that be of comfort to you this week.

When things come out of the blue, when things you don't know are coming around the corner.

And the devastation that happens.

Know that there's a sovereign and loving God who is over those circumstances.

And that he's intentional in everything that he does.

Finally, we learn that Jesus is the Christ who continues to confound those who refuse him.

Beginning in verse 33, look at what Jesus says.

He says, I will be with you a little while 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.

You can imagine how confused the Jews were then.

And of course they respond and say, Where does this man intend to go that we won't find him?

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

What does he mean when he says, You will seek me and you will not find me?

And where I am, you cannot come.

Here's what we have to understand that in throughout John's gospel, Jesus is very clear about what's coming that he's going to depart, he's going to be glorified and ascend to the Father, and he will come back again.

And yet over and over, every single time, they miss it.

They don't lack information.

They lack surrender.

J.C.

Riley commenting on this very chapter, he calls it obstinate blindness.

And he said that men's memories are often sadly dependent on their wills.

It's not a lack of evidence problem, it's a will problem.

And Jesus says as much even when he's dialoguing with the Pharisees a couple of chapters later.

When the Pharisees claim to be seen clearly, and Jesus tells them, he says, if you were blind, you would have no guilt.

But now that you say we see, your guilt remains.

Their problem was not that the light was too dim and they didn't see the truth.

Their problem was that they were blinded and they loved the darkness.

In 1944, a Japanese intelligence officer named Hiru Inodo was sent to a small island in the Philippines with one order.

Never surrender, no matter what you hear, until the superior officer comes in person to relieve you.

The war ended the following year, but Inodo kept fighting.

For twenty-nine years he kept fighting.

Leaflets were dropped in the jungle that said that Japan had surrendered and the war was over, but he thought they were fake.

His own brother later flew over with a loudspeaker, told him to come out of the jungle that the war was over.

He thought it was a trick.

And Odo wasn't short on evidence.

What he lacked was a will to let any of that evidence change his mind.

Because he had already decided what kind of proof that he would accept, and none of that actually showed up qualified in his mind.

Now, before we get too comfortable pointing our fingers at the first century Jews, let's be honest of ourselves.

How many of us may be born and raised in the church, heard the gospel week after week, sermon after sermon, and yet we find a way to get out of surrendering to it?

How many of us know what it's required of us this week as followers of Christ, that we are to forgive those who harm us and who do wrong against us?

That we're to repent when we sin and turn from our sin and walk in new obedience.

And yet we still make justifications and wonder if there's another way to get off the hook and live the way we want to.

Like the crowd, we come to God's word often and we find alternatives.

I don't think that's what his word means.

That's not exactly what sexual purity or generosity or humility looks like.

Instead of simply receiving it as truth and letting that truth transform our lives and surrender in obedience to Christ.

It's not a lack of information, it's a lack of wisdom in applying the truth because we don't ask.

This is where I think we can be most confounded of all, though, is that we can often mistake familiarity with Christ for surrender to Christ.

We can know the doctrine, we can know our theology backwards and forwards, and yet we miss the very person who's at the center of it all.

And like the Jerusalem crowd, we can be very sincere and yet be sincerely wrong.

Where are you refusing to surrender a part of your life this morning?

Because you're scared of what it's going to mean if you let go.

Your resistance is only going to steal away your peace and your joy and the flourishing that Jesus is inviting you into this morning.

Back to Inodo in the jungle for 29 years.

He refused to surrender because he was confounded by any other form of authority outside of what he expected.

1974, there was a hiker that found him in the jungle and encouraged him to come out, and yet he said he still would not come out.

Said he would only stand down for the one person that gave him that order 29 years earlier.

So they found Major Tanaguchi, who was an old man by this point.

They flew him into the jungle.

And the moment that Onada heard it from that voice, 29 years of resistance, he laid down his gun and surrendered and began to weep.

That's what surrender looks like.

It is total, it is immediate.

The moment that you realize that truth stops being something that we evaluate and it's something that we follow and we surrender to.

That's what Jesus is calling us to this morning.

And amid even this hard truth of what it looks like this week to surrender those areas that we've been holding so tight to, hear the glorious truth of the gospel.

Jesus later says in John's Gospel, he says, You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Isn't that what we desire?

True freedom in Christ is always and only found on the other side of surrender.

Jesus is exactly who he said he was on that day in the temple courtyard.

And he's going to defy every mold and box that we try to fit him in.

And even this morning, he is still mercifully and patiently confounding those who would rather assume than come to him and ask, who would rather reject him and resist him than surrender.

But he is becking for you to come and surrender.

And that patience will run out at some point.

So don't walk out of here still guessing about who Jesus is.

Ask him.

Open his word.

Surrender what you have been holding back.

And let the glorious truth of the gospel be what you experience this day.

That the truth will set you free.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, thank you that you have testified openly about who you are, even at great cost to yourself.

Lord, forgive us for the areas that we're still gripping so tightly, refusing to surrender to your good and sovereign hand.

And Lord, would you remind us that our resistance cannot stop your purposes, it can only still our peace and our joy.

So, Lord, would you teach us to let go and to trust the Father who's already numbered our days?

Lord, set us free with the truth that we've heard this morning, and let it move from our minds into our wills and out into our hands and our feet that we might do your kingdom work, proclaiming the glorious good news to the lost.

In the matchless name of Christ we pray.

Amen.