Witnesses to the Son of God - John 5:30-47 (05.03.2026)

Morning. How are we doing? All right. Well, we are going to be in John 5.

So if you haven't turned to John 5 in your Bibles, go ahead and do that.

If you don't have a Bible, that's okay. We are going to have it on the screen.

And you should also have gotten an insert in your bulletin with the passage.

And I'm going to pray for us one more time as you're finding your way to John 5.

Father, we give you thanks for this morning and for your word and for your son, Jesus Christ.

And we just need help this morning to see him as we should.

Lord, I pray that you would open eyes, help us to see the evidence that's being laid before us.

And Lord, I pray that you would remove the barriers in our hearts to belief

and that we would leave here today with a clearer picture of your son.

It's in his name we pray. Amen.

So, my good friend, Ben Whittinghill, is a pastor up in Vermont.

He and his wife, this past summer, got a chance to go to France for,

I think it was their 15-year anniversary.

And he sent me a picture while they were in France.

He sent me a good number of pictures while they were in France,

but he sent me this picture from inside a hotel room, or actually a bed and breakfast room.

And so, they were in the French countryside. And this picture,

You know, it's from inside his room, looking out over these rolling hills and a vineyard.

And there's, I mean, this beautiful French countryside, wildflowers everywhere,

some really old looking, beautiful buildings on one of the hills.

And imagine if I had replied to his text and said, wow, that's an incredible window.

Look at the panes in that window. Look at the paint on the windowsill.

Look at the trim work around that window.

He would have laughed at me, right? He would have said, no, you completely missed it.

What I wanted you to see was the view through the window and you missed it.

Well, this passage that we're studying this morning, that same thing happens

to the religious leaders, to the Pharisees and the scribes.

They have the scriptures, the window through which we are to see the son of God, and they missed...

They obsessed over the window itself and they missed the view to which it pointed.

And we're going to learn some things from this passage in the ways in which

we do the very same thing.

So that we can avoid that colossal mistake.

So let me just remind us of some of the context of where we are in this passage.

So at the beginning of John chapter 5, Jesus heals a man who's been paralyzed

John 5 · chapter mention

for 38 years, hasn't walked for 38 years.

He heals him in a very public place, in a very public way on the Sabbath,

and it draws the ire of the religious leaders.

And so that kind of begins the confrontation. He's healed on the Sabbath.

But then he raises it up to another level by claiming equality with the Father.

And so that was what we talked about last week in verses 19 or 16 through 29.

And so we're halfway through this response of Jesus to these religious leaders.

And so that first half of the response was him explaining his equality,

his status as equal with the Father, as God.

And he knows that these are massive claims.

And so what he's going to do in our passage today is he's going to say,

look, I don't expect you just to take my word for it. I bring to you evidence.

And he's going to lay out what that evidence is, those witnesses.

And then at the end of the passage, verses 41 through 47, he's going to explain

why they still can't see it.

Even though the evidence is abundantly clear, he's going to explain why they

still just cannot see it.

So that's the way that this passage is laid out. That's the way the sermon is laid out.

So the first thing that we need to see is that the father testifies to the son.

So verse, look at verse 30 and 31.

He says, I can do nothing on my own as I hear, I judge and my judgment is just

because I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me.

If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true.

In the Old Testament, a claim had to be established with two to three witnesses.

In other words, you know, a person couldn't just make a truth claim that no

one else was in agreement with unless there were witnesses.

And so that was judicial law in the Old Testament. And so Jesus is submitting

himself to this principle of multiple witnesses.

He's saying, I'll show you my witnesses. I'm not the only one testifying about

myself, about my identity.

And so the father has ensured that there's a multitude of witnesses.

So you don't have to just take my word for it.

That's what he's saying. And we understand this because when we apply for a

job, we have to provide references. We go through the interview process and

they ask you, what's your greatest weakness?

And you say, I just care about my work too much, right?

Or I just pour too much of myself into my work.

And then they reach out to your references and they get the truth, right?

We need references because our own testimony about ourselves is not sufficient.

Well, Jesus is doing that here. He's saying, look, I have references and the

Father is the one who has provided those. Look at verse 32.

This is where the witnesses come from. There is another, and he's talking about

his father, who bears witness about me, and I know that the testimony that he bears about me is true.

So, he's going to present three witnesses.

All three witnesses originate from the Father, and those three witnesses are

John the Baptist, the works that he does, and the Bible, the scriptures.

So, we're going to walk through those one at a time. So first,

first witness, John the Baptist, verse 33 through 35.

You sent to John and he has borne witness to the truth.

Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so

that you may be saved. He was a burning and shining lamp.

And you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light.

So early on in John the Baptist's ministry, these religious leaders, they sent to John.

John was a big deal. We've talked about that earlier on in this gospel.

And just about everyone in the region went out to hear him preach.

And so he's causing quite a stir.

He's drawing massive crowds. People's lives are being impacted greatly by his preaching.

And so the religious leaders, they sent to him to ask him who he was.

And he always had the same message.

It was, I'm not the one.

I'm here to prepare the way for one who's coming after me, who is greater than me.

That was his message all the time. And then at the end of his ministry,

you'll remember, he said, behold, pointing at Jesus, a public.

Proclamation, behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

There he is. He's the one I've been preparing the way for. He's the one you've been waiting for.

And then again, he says, he must increase and I must decrease.

So consistently, John the Baptist has been bearing witness to Jesus.

His entire life in ministry pointing to Jesus.

And that's Jesus's first witness. It's a human witness.

And God still uses human witnesses today. Maybe you know someone like that.

Maybe there was someone in your life or currently there's someone in your life

that was a bright light, a bright and shining lamp, like Jesus calls John the Baptist.

Someone who when you looked at their life, you felt more confident about the existence of God.

When you looked at their life, you couldn't help but believe the truth of the gospel.

Only the gospel could transform a life like that.

And so God still uses human witnesses to speak to us today, to point us to his son.

And that's his first witness, John the Baptist. And he says,

I don't know why you don't believe him.

What would make you doubt his testimony about me? So then his second witness is his works.

So in addition to John the Baptist, who gives verbal and prophetic witness to Jesus's Messiahship,

God also gives to Jesus, the Father gives to Jesus these works that he is to

perform, the miracles that prove who he is, that testify to the truth of who he is. Look at verse 36.

But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John for the works that

the Father has given me to accomplish.

The very works that I am doing bear witness about me that the Father has sent me.

So first of all, look at the magnitude of his miracles.

Who else could heal a person from 20 miles away?

You know the story, he says the word and this official's son is healed 20 miles away.

Who else could speak to a paralyzed man?

Doesn't even touch him. He just tells him, get up, pick up your bed and walk.

And a man who hasn't walked for 38 years is completely restored to strength in a moment.

Who else could do that? Who else could turn gallons and gallons and gallons

of water into wine without ever going near them.

Only Jesus, only the Son of God, only someone who is equal with God could do such a thing.

That's the magnitude of his miracles. Think about the quantity of his miracles.

Everywhere he goes, he is performing miracles.

And John's gospel, it doesn't get into this a whole lot, but the other gospels

tell us that even by this point, even by the time this confrontation is happening,

everywhere he goes, crowds are coming to him and he's healing multitudes of people in a single day.

He may heal thousands of people in a single day. He's casting demons out of people.

So the quantity of his miracles points to his divinity.

And then look at the character of his miracles, at what his miracles accomplish.

His miracles are works of love and compassion.

They improve the lives. They They radically transform the lives of those that

are the recipients of his miracles.

And so his miracles are pointers. They point beyond themselves,

as we talked about several times in this gospel, to his divinity.

So his first two witnesses are John the Baptist, this human witness who came,

who was clearly a prophet, who declared very, very publicly who Jesus was.

And then his miracles, his works themselves are pointing to his authenticity.

But he has one more witness.

And it is his greatest witness of all. Verse 37 through 40.

And the father who sent me has himself born witness about me,

his voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen,

and you do not have his word abiding in you.

For you do not believe the one whom he has sent.

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life.

And it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

So Jesus is saying that the scriptures are the father's special and unique witness about him.

And then he goes on to say that these religious leaders do not have the word

of God abiding in them, which is a very interesting rebuke considering the fact

that these were serious students of scripture.

They had massive chunks of what we call the Old Testament committed to memory.

And yet he says, you do not have the word of God abiding in you.

If the Bible is Jesus's key witness, and if they had chunks of it,

massive portions of it committed to memory, if they were serious students of

the word, how did this happen?

That's the question that we should be asking ourselves as we read this,

as we read this rebuke that Jesus is giving them? How does this happen?

And the answer is that they have missed the forest for the trees.

He says it very plainly in verse 39, you think that the scriptures contain eternal

life, that they themselves contain life and can give you eternal life,

but it's they that bear witness about me.

They're meant to point you to me so that you will come to me,

he says, and I will give you life.

The scriptures, just like the first two witnesses, John the Baptist and Jesus'

works, are meant to point beyond themselves to Christ.

They are not an end in and of themselves.

They are the window to look through. So Jesus is saying,

don't come to the window and admire and get lost in the window and miss the

view through which you're supposed to look and see the glory on the other side.

That's what the Pharisees and the Sadducees, religious leaders did all the time.

They could not see through the glass.

This is incredibly relevant for us today. We can fall into the same error.

And I'm not just talking about people in general. I'm talking about Christians.

We can fall into the same error today. We can slip back into this at any time.

How do we recognize it? What causes it? Let's try to understand this so that

we can avoid it as much as possible.

One way that we slip into this is that we read the scriptures for intellectual stimulation.

So many people read the Bible because it is a fascinating book, right?

It has fascinating stories. Its literary structure is fascinating.

And secular people will tell you that.

People who've studied the scriptures that are not believers in Jesus will tell

you, this is a fascinating book.

It is arguably the most fascinating book on the planet.

And so you can come to this thing and read it all day long for the wrong reason

come to it because it is interesting.

That's not a bad thing, but that should not be your purpose in coming to the

scriptures just because it's interesting, because it's intellectually stimulating.

We can easily fall into this, but you can study the Bible for intellectual stimulation

and never encounter Christ.

As many religion professors in our universities today would tell you,

as these Pharisees and Sadducees and religious rulers would tell you.

Here's another way that we can err in this.

We can come to the Bible for the insights that it can provide for our lives only.

Now, and don't mishear me. There is wonderful wisdom to be gained in this book.

God's wisdom for our lives.

But if we come to the Bible and our primary focus is, what are some good tidbits?

What are some good keys, some cheat codes for life that I can glean from this

book? and that's our primary purpose in coming to the Word, we can miss the forest for the trees.

We can look at this book as though it were simply a book about us to make our lives better.

And it's actually not about us.

This is a book about Jesus Christ. And so we don't come to the Bible merely

or primarily to glean wisdom for life.

As much as that is a benefit of reading the word, we come to the scriptures

to see Christ, to learn who he is and to encounter him through the pages of scripture.

So we learn we can study the Bible with an obsession for learning new insights

or keys for living a successful and moral life, but never encounter Christ.

So how do we approach the scriptures correctly?

Because the last thing I want to do is sound as though I am diminishing the

value or the importance of the word of God. That's not at all what I want to

communicate this morning.

The word of God is just that. the word of God. It is God-breathed.

It is inerrant. It is infallible. It is authoritative.

We go to God's word to learn everything that we need for life and godliness.

We go to God's word to know God.

And so how do we approach the scriptures correctly? Well, we need to remember just that.

And that will guard us from coming to it for intellectual stimulation.

We need to remember what it is. It is a living word. It is living and active

and sharper than any two-edged sword that pierces to the division of joints

and marrow and soul and spirit.

It discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart. This book is powerful

because it is God's word. It is a supernatural book.

And when we come to it, he is speaking to us.

So that's the first thing we need to do. We need to remember what it is we're reading.

It's not just a book, but it is the very word of God.

And secondly, we need to come to this book to see and encounter Jesus Christ.

That's the purpose of this living and powerful and active sword of the Spirit, this mighty Word.

It's so that we could see and encounter the person of Jesus Christ.

It's so that we could know God. And how do we know God?

But through the revelation of God, who is the second person of the Godhead,

Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

And he is all through the pages of this book from Genesis to Revelation.

The entire thing is about him.

There's a story in Luke's gospel. After Jesus has been crucified and risen from

the grave, Jesus appears to two disciples and he has a Bible study with them.

I wish so badly I could have been a fly on the wall.

And it says in Luke 24, 27, "...and beginning with Moses and all the prophets,

he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.".

Jesus shows his disciples, guys, this entire thing is about me.

The whole book is about me.

It all points to me. It's all so that you would believe me.

It's all so that you would trust in me.

So what's that mean for us? Well,

it means that if when we read the story of David and Goliath,

We think that that is primarily a story about how we can face our giants in

this life. We're missing it.

The story of David and Goliath is a story about the better David,

our better king who went out onto the battlefield alone with no sword and conquered

our greatest enemy, sin and death.

And his victory became our victory. Thank you.

If when we read the story of the prophet Jonah, we think that the point of the

story is that we need to go where God tells us to go the first time.

We're missing it. When we read

the story of Jonah, we're supposed to see that Jesus is a better Jonah.

Just like Jonah willingly had himself

thrown into the turbulent seas so

that the storm would not take the

lives of everyone on board the Jesus is a better

Jonah who threw himself into the storm to save us from sure destruction and

went into the heart of the sea and three days later was raised back to life

in order to preach so that we could be saved from the wrath of God.

The Bible is about Jesus.

And that means that when we open the Bible, the point, the whole point is that

we would encounter Him, that we would see Him,

that we would marvel at Him, as we talked about last week.

Seeing His glory, we would be transformed into that same image from one degree to the next.

And so the point, the warning for us, friends, is that even now,

even as followers of Jesus, believers in Jesus, it's possible to have a Bible study.

It's possible to open the pages any morning that we do.

And I hope you're doing that every single morning, but it's possible to do that

and miss the forest for the trees.

Possible to come to his word and think that in it, it has life,

but stop short of coming all the way to Jesus that he might give us life every single time.

So Jesus has presented his witnesses. The evidence is clear.

The father has given him these three witnesses, John the Baptist,

the works that he's performing, the scriptures themselves.

And the evidence is clear. So why don't they believe?

And in this final section, Jesus stops presenting the evidence and he starts

diagnosing the human heart. That's what this last section is.

In these final verses, he's going to present three things that will keep anyone

from seeing the clear evidence and coming to him that they might have life.

So let's read verses 41 through 47 together.

I do not receive glory from people, but I know that you do not have the love of God within you.

I have come in my father's name and you do not receive me. If another comes

in his own name, you'll receive him.

How can you believe when you receive glory from one another and do not seek

the glory that comes from the only God?

Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses

you, Moses, on whom you've set your hope.

For if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.

But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

So the invitation from Jesus is clear.

And in every passage in John, we've been seeing the invitation is to anyone

who would come, let them come, come to Jesus and you can have your sins forgiven.

The Lord will, if you put your trust in Jesus Christ, your sins will be forgiven.

You'll receive new life in him.

You'll be adopted by the father. The invitation is wide open.

It's wide open and yet these students of the scripture are missing it.

Missing it. And he says there's a heart problem.

That's what he's doing here in this last section. There's a heart problem that

you have, he's saying, that is keeping you from seeing.

And it's great for us to look at this as well.

Let this be a mirror for us to see ourselves in the ways that these things might

hinder our faith as well.

First one is this, verse 42. do, they don't love God.

You don't have the love of the Father in you. They don't love God.

They love the wrong things. And I think what he's going to talk about next is

part of the specific thing that they love, but they don't have the love of God in them.

And if you'll think back to earlier in John, we talked about how unbelief is

not merely intellectual.

It's actually a moral thing because John says the light shined in the darkness

and people loved the darkness rather than the light.

It was a moral thing. Unbelief is a refusal to see and love the truth.

We love darkness rather than light.

And that's what Jesus is saying here. You don't You don't have the love of the father in you.

And if you think about your own sin, honestly, you think about it.

If you're honest with yourself, you see this still in your flesh.

A love for what's wicked.

Is the condition of the human heart apart from God's gracious transforming of it.

We love darkness rather than light. And that's also that if you've ever read in Romans chapter one,

kind of the second half of Romans chapter one, Paul lays out the human condition,

what's happened in the world, and it's a worship problem.

We suppress the truth by our unrighteousness. We shove it down.

We say, I don't want to see what's real.

I'd rather live in my ignorance.

And we can look out at the world and say, yeah, we see that.

Do you see it in your own life?

See that in your own life, a tendency to love things in the wrong order,

to love things more than you should.

And other things that you should love, you don't love enough.

That's their first problem. And it's a problem for us.

And it will hinder our ability to believe, to see the clear evidence and trust as a disordered loves.

We don't love God as we should. We love the wrong things. And then the second

thing, look, he says in verse 44, how can you believe when you receive glory,

from one another? And this is a big thing.

I wish we had more time to unpack this.

This is a sermon in and of itself, but these religious leaders, they live to please man.

And friends, the more I have thought about this this week, the more convicted I have been.

This is a really, this is a seriously deep struggle.

And I don't think it's just for me. I think that, I think if you take the time

to really go deep in your own life, you're going to see this.

We seek our sense of worth in the wrong place.

We want people to like us.

I mean, this is why if I'm running late, I start to feel this incredible sense of anxiety. Why?

I think if you could somehow snap your fingers and erase this compulsion in people,

Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, social media would go out of business in

a day because people would stop posting.

They wouldn't have so much to share, right? If we stopped living for the applause of other people.

Think workaholism would end. I think we work so hard.

We work our fingers to the bone so that we can get the success,

so that we can get the money, so that we can drive the car, so that we can have

the house, so that everybody will look at us and give us applause.

I mean, I'm preaching to myself here. He lived for the approval of man far too much.

I think that it's why we struggle to share our testimony, why we struggle to

share the gospel with people. We're afraid of what people will think.

This runs deep in our hearts.

And it ran so deep in the hearts of these religious leaders that they just simply

could not fathom walking away from what they had.

And that's what it would have meant. Remember back the story of Nicodemus?

This is why he comes to Jesus in the night. He's a Pharisee.

To believe in Jesus would have meant rejection. It would have meant excommunication.

It would have meant starting all over for him and for any of these religious leaders.

So because they were not willing to be despised and rejected by men and instead

to be consumed with the joy and the satisfaction that comes from knowing that

you are accepted by God, they couldn't believe in him.

Even if they entertained the thought, maybe he really just might be the son of God.

I think they shoved it down the next moment.

And then finally, he gives them one more reason they can't believe.

He says, verses 45 through 47, they put their hope in Moses.

We talked about this last week as well, that they believed that the law had

been given so that they would be able to live a life good enough to be accepted by God.

But the law has been given to show us the impossibility of keeping it so that we would despair,

so that we would look outside of ourselves for a righteousness that would make

us acceptable to God, so that we would turn to Jesus Christ.

The law is a schoolmaster.

It's a teacher. It points us to him.

You can't be good enough to be acceptable to God.

You absolutely cannot be.

And they didn't believe Moses. He says, Moses spoke of me. One example, Deuteronomy 18, 15.

Moses said, The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among

you, from your brothers. It is to him you shall listen.

And they knew this scripture. I promise you they knew it, but they just didn't believe it.

Believe it. And they missed that Abraham was justified by faith.

They missed all through the scriptures, the pointers that were,

you cannot be justified by your works.

You have to be justified by faith.

So let this be a mirror to us.

What's hindering you from coming to Christ? and maybe you've never come to Christ before.

Maybe you're realizing even today you've never known him.

And my encouragement to you would be, come to him.

He says, come to me and I will give you life. I'll give you eternal life.

I'll restore you is what that means.

I'll restore your life. I'll reconcile you to God.

Come to him, trust in him, trust that his sacrifice on the cross is sufficient

to cleanse you of your sin and receive him by faith.

And if you have done that, if you're a Christian, come to him again.

Come to him afresh this morning.

Come to him every single time you open the pages of this book.

Don't admire the window panes and miss the view?

Come to Jesus.

Encounter Him. Know Him. See Him. Glory in Him.

He'll give you life. And let's do that again today. Even as we worship here

in just a moment, even as we take communion, let's come to Him.

Let's not just think about Him. Let's come to Him for life. Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, we thank You that You give us life, real life, real satisfaction.

And Lord, this is such a reminder to us that we need new desires,

that we love the wrong things, that we seek our self-worth in the wrong places,

and that we think that we can somehow be good enough to be acceptable to you.

Lord, remind us of what's true.

Just like you told Nicodemus, we must be born again. Just like you told the woman at the well.

You offer living water, and anyone who drinks of it will never be thirsty again.

Lord, help us even now to come and to drink that water and to find satisfaction for our souls.

It's in your name we pray, Lord. Amen.