John 2 and the Identity of Jesus in John's Gospel

We'll pray for Paul and then we'll crack on.

Lord, we thank you. I'm just super aware that Paul

and Grace have poured out a lot and served us in many ways.

And we just honour, honour that. And we're so grateful for their

presence within the community. And we, we've just been thinking

about freedom and how so much of our lack of freedom is because

we don't really know the love God has for us.

And so I just blessed us this morning, the good news to really

receive fresh revelation of how deeply you love us through what

Paul brings today. Amen.

Thanks. Yeah, I think I will.

I was going to say, everyone come come forward, but I'll come

Grand. Thanks Lizzie for my third cup

of coffee wherever she's gone during lockdown.

We did. We did like one of these Airbnb

remote tours. Did anyone do those things?

No, because people couldn't. You couldn't do tourism stuff,

right? So that's everyone was doing

this kind of remote experiences. Then some of them were really

good. So we did a few.

One of them was with a Colombian coffee grower in her small

holding in Colombia. And she had this goat that a

little baby goat kept jumping up and eating the coffee cherries.

And the goat was getting more and more wired during the

session, you know, and she was talking about the coffee, but

she told us that the legendary story of the origin of coffee.

Have you you heard this one? You've heard it.

Yeah. The story is that there's an

Ethiopian goat herder and his goats are eating like coffee

cherries and are getting really wired and they're jumping around

and he thinks, wow, this might be interesting.

You know, I guess being a goat herder out in the Ethiopian

hills, you don't have a, you don't have a lot to think about,

you know, other than seeing what the goats are doing.

So if you see goats eating cherries, you know, you're going

to try some. So he did and then got the

caffeine hit and thought, wow, this is really good.

But you know, being a good Christian Ethiopian goat herder,

he took some of the coffee cherries to the local monastery

and showed them to the Abbot who tried a bit and said, oh, no,

this is this is of the devil, this is satanic and sent him

away and threw the coffee cherries into the fire.

And then, you know, went away. But of course, the coffee

cherries in the fire then began to roast.

The beans began to roast. And the monks came down for

their nighttime prayers and they could smell this lovely aroma

coming from the fire. So they collected, they

collected the, the, the roasted beans out of the fire, ground

them up, made them into a drink and then found that they were,

they were able to stay up all night and pray because they're

supposed to stay up all night and pray, right.

And the Abbott wanted his monks to, you know, keep the kind of

nightly pray vigil. And when the, when the Abbott

woke up in the morning and came and found all of his monks had

managed to stay awake and pray, none of them had fallen asleep.

And it was because they had drunk coffee.

He changed his mind and he said, oh, no, I got it wrong.

This was not of the devil. This has actually come from

Christ. And so he blessed it.

And therefore coffee is a consecrated drink officially in

the church due to this story. So there we go.

If it was in the Anglican Church, it would be a flagon of

beer or something, you know. But anyway, in here in Hope in

Hope Chapel, we drink coffee while we preach to honour the

Holy tradition of the church, Glory, John's Gospel.

So if you've got books, Bible books, I, you know, I'm not a,

I'm not a big PowerPoint person. Bill always has these very well

put together PowerPoints and things.

I don't have any of that, but I, but I do have references you can

look at in the Bible. And last time when I, we started

the, the John's Gospel series, one of the things I wanted to

avoid, partly because there's just no time is, is just kind of

being in a situation where we're going chapter by chapter.

We'll never finish it. So I'm jumping around and trying

to look at the overall themes in John's Gospel rather than trying

to work like ABC through it. So there's lots of lots of

angles, lots of places we can go.

But we looked at the prologue and if you haven't listened to

that one, I can't remember a couple of months ago, you can

get it on the podcast where we were going into what is John's

Gospel, the 1st chapter. How is it setting us up for the

whole gospel? So today I want to jump around

with a couple of points, but in particular I want to think about

as a starting thought to frame the message this morning when it

says in John one verse, one in the beginning was the word and

the word was with God. The word was God.

So the word word in the Greek is Logos.

And I want to start with a putting a question out there.

Why the logos? Why does it talk about the logos

being made flesh and dwelling among us?

Why? Why is this the focus in the

first verse of John? And what is it that the gospel

is doing when it's revealing to us who God actually is?

This is this is a big question for me all the time.

How does the Scripture reveal who God is to me?

Not just about how to live life or what we should do or how we

approach different questions or different issues.

All of that's fine. But the heart of the matter is

who is God? What is he like?

How do we know, and why does that matter?

So I think I maybe mentioned this before, but I don't

remember, and maybe you weren't here and maybe you don't

remember, but John's Gospel historically has been understood

as the the last gospel to be written, maybe even the last

book of the New Testament to be written.

It's certainly the book with, we would say it has the most

developed theology in it in the New Testament in the sense that

it's it's the most arguably, I think it's true.

This is the most theologically dense book in the New Testament.

Another reason why trying to go through line by line is going to

take us forever. But one of the data points we

have about the Gospel comes from Clement of Alexandria, who was

kind of third generation after John the Apostle and early

church father. And he said we basically have

got the major facts about Jesus life that is set down in

Matthew, Mark and Luke. They tell us the key points, you

know, the summary of of Jesus life and ministry on earth.

All of that's there. And what he says is that John

towards the end of his life was urged by his own disciples to

write a gospel. So you can kind of imagine John

at this point is in Ephesus. He's kind of the, the kind of

grand spiritual grandfather figure at the, of the church in

Ephesus and has been ministering there for many decades.

Mary, the mother of Jesus had been there with him as well.

So they, they ended up there and you can go and see the, the

memorials and graves, traditional sites, you know, in,

in and around the ethicist area as well.

If you, if you ever go and pay a visit, it's, it's cool, it's

good fun. But John had all of these

disciples, you know, in the church there and they said to

him, John, you really need to write some stuff down or at

least tell us so that we can write it down.

We need your teaching to be put out because we we're not seeing

all of the insights that you have in the gospel writings that

we have available. So they urged him and so he he

he did last time I talked a bit about how I like the idea that

the the Book of Revelation, when it talks about the small scroll,

it says the Angel says to John, you, you must write again that

the small scroll he has to write again is the Gospel of John.

So what he's getting in the revelation on Pat Moss in sort

of psychedelic apocalyptic form, he then is trying to put into a

narrative form in the Gospel of John.

But actually the message is the same.

But the the revelatory stuff happens on Patmos and then he's

kind of trying to get it into intelligible words, you know, in

in the Gospel. So, but Clement says that John

recognised that the facts had been put down in the other

gospels and that he sought to compose what Clement, Clement

called a spiritual gospel in in the Greek Pinephomaticus

Evangelion, a spiritual gospel. So he said the facts, we see

them in the others, but the the spiritual essence.

And I think that the point of what Clement's trying to say is

that the Gospel of John is highly symbolic.

Sometimes John will move things around.

So you've got Jesus cleansing the temple at the beginning of

his ministry in John's Gospel. In the other three gospels, the

cleansing of the temple happens at the end.

And so Clement's angle is, well, John moves, he'll he'll pull one

thing out, change the chronological order because he's

making a point. There's a symbolic point that

that is very carefully curated in the Gospel Origin of

Alexandria, another key church. Father also commented on the

differences between John's Gospel and the other Gospels.

And if you ever get into the apologetics space, lots of

people argue about this. You know, why?

Why do the gospels have things in a different order?

Why are the stories being told in a seeming contradictory,

contradictory fashion sometimes? And Origin says, well, because

they contradict, they're not saying they're not kind of

taking liberties. John especially is taking

liberties with the order of things because he expects you to

have an idea of the the narrative from the other

gospels. But he's now trying to make a

point by reorganising some of this stuff to give us a

spiritual revelation about who Jesus is and, and what John is

carrying as an evangelist and as an apostle.

So Origin says in all these people trying to harmonise and

make everything fit together, this is a waste of time because

it doesn't fit together. I think that's, it's interesting

to see someone, I think Origin was the 3rd century, someone so

early on making very astute observations around these

things. We think about these apologetics

arguments about the agreement of the Bible, how it all matches up

as being a very modern thing. But they already dealt with this

like 1800 years ago. And he was like, stop trying to

do that. It's not how it works.

It's not how the Scripture works.

There are spiritual truths that are being communicated in in the

scripture. This is the important stuff.

Actually the the historical facts, you know that is it 1

Angel or two at the tomb, you know, all these kind of things.

Origin was like really, can we, can we grow up?

These are not the important questions.

And I think that there's lots of people, again, as an aside, who

read the Bible and struggle with will hang on.

If this is really a book from God, why is it it seems to say

one thing in one place and another thing in another?

And this really wasn't a big deal for much of the early

church. And it is a big deal for us and

I think partly because we are approaching it in the wrong way.

That's why I say this book is about revealing the nature and

character of God to us. It's not really about trying to

give you a blow by blow historical account of absolutely

everything that happens in a certain order, which isn't to

say that this isn't stuff that happened, but the point, the

point of it is not to educate us about history.

The point of it is to reveal Christ in US and to us.

Now, John himself says that at the end of this book.

He says, I've written these things so that you may believe

and continue to believe and in believing that you may have

life. That's that's why it's written.

It's not written so that you may be educated.

It's written so that you may believe, have life, giving

faith, experiential. You're supposed to feel

something and experience something when you read this.

And the symbols and the references that are there in the

gospel are difficult to engage if you don't know the back story

because there's lots of references.

And so when you read that it might kind of be confusing.

What, why is it putting it that way?

Why is it putting it this way? But I would say just don't worry

about those bits. Read it in a way that is

engaging your heart and is read it.

Read it prayerfully in a way that you're saying, Jesus, how

are you revealing yourself to me in this gospel?

That's how it was written, perhaps more so than any of the

other books of the New Testament, although I think it's

a good way to read the whole of the Bible.

John's Gospel, the tradition of the church historically has been

this is how you read this book. It is a spiritual book.

It's supposed to reveal who Jesus, those are supposed to

reveal who you are in revealing him.

It's supposed to be experienced. It's supposed to be felt.

It's supposed to be something that you have a sense of.

Something more is going on within me than I can grasp with

my natural mind. Something is happening in my

heart, something's happening in my spirit and I need to kind of

just not resist that. I need to relax into that and

allow the Holy Spirit to do the Holy Spirit's work in teaching

me, in forming me right. So just as a longer intro, how

do we look at the book now? There's a couple of things if

you, if you're new to studying John systematically, a couple of

things to look out for that I didn't mention before.

There's lots of numerology in John, symbolic numbers.

We have 7 signs in the book of John.

The signs are called mighty works or signs.

When you read the other gospels you see Jesus doing miracles all

the time. In John's gospel there are 7

curated miracles that are chosen and there are also seven

so-called I am sayings of Jesus. There are actually more I am

sayings, but there are 7 special ones where Jesus says things

like I am the bread of life, I am the true vine, I am the Good

Shepherd. Like over and over again he says

these phrases. And as I say, there are a couple

of others which are not in the list of seven, but they are

other I am sayings. I'm going to say a little bit

more about those in a moment, but you have this, the I am

sayings and the signs also happen in a certain order and

that's there's a purpose to it. So we see for example, in in

John 2, you get Jesus changing the water into wine.

So this is on page 1064 in the Bibles, if you're looking at it,

it says we've got the story on the third day, a wedding took

place in Cana in Galilee. Jesus's mother was there and his

disciples and then they had no more wine.

And his mother said to the servants, do whatever he tells

you. And then he says nearby there

were 6 stone water jars used by the Jews for ceremonial washing.

Jesus said fill them with water and then draw it out and then

they turn into wine. You know the story, right?

And then in verse 11, it said what Jesus did here in Cana of

Galilee was the first of his signs through which he revealed

his glory. So John makes a point of saying

this is the first of the signs, the transforming of the water

into into wine. Now that's not the case in the

other gospels. You get a different order.

John is doing this deliberately. He's saying this is the first

one. And and what does it mean?

Well, it's really, it's really full of symbolism.

You, you notice that it says 6 jars and the jars are for

ceremonial washing, which means it is representative of the

whole Jewish law and the system of the law, the system of

purification that requires water for ceremonial washing.

A little bit like we're, we're more familiar with perhaps with

a Muslim prayer practises, people have to wash before they

pray in a ceremonial way. That's what these jars were used

for. And there are six of them.

And numerologically 6 is a number of incompletion.

So what you have is 6 jars and there's no wine.

So you've got ceremonial water, but there's no wine, which means

there's no life because wine is symbolic of life, the life of

God. And particularly it's symbolic

of the life of God because it brings joy when you drink it,

you, you have a good time. That's the idea, right?

So you have, they're there at this wedding, but the, the

central point of the wedding can't be reached.

They've got all this other stuff, all this party,

everything has been set out. But suddenly it's like, but

we've got no wine. We've got all of the form, but

no substance. In other words, and this is a

critique of the whole religious system.

It's saying this whole a tradition that you've inherited

gives you the form, but it gives you no substance.

It leaves you wanting. It's like the rich young ruler

who comes to Jesus and saying what must I do to receive

eternal life? And Jesus says keep all the law

and the prophets and he said I've done that, but I still know

I don't have it. Something in my heart I know

I've done all the things I'm supposed to do, but it hasn't

solved my problem. And that's the the symbol here

in this story. 6 ceremonial jars full of the holy water.

They can't do it but 6 + 1 = 7. So here's Jesus.

He's the 7th one, right? And when it's 6 + 1, suddenly

the water is transmuted into the wine of the Spirit that they say

is the best wine, which is completely counter intuitive.

So with again within the story, you see the reversal of the

natural mind. The natural mind expects the

best thing to come first and then it's kind of depreciate

over time. But the mind of the spirit says

you go from one measure of glory to another, that it's ever

increasing glory. It's the same with the story of

Moses face, which I'll also come to in a moment.

Moses covers his face after he's encountered God because the

glory was fading away. The Bible says Moses didn't want

the Israelites to see that the glory was draining away from

him. So under the Mosaic covenant,

you have this divine infusion at the beginning which just drains

away and leaks out and it gets diminished over time.

But that's not the way things work with Jesus.

With with Jesus, it goes from one measure of glory to another.

Exponential growth, exponential increase, ever increasing glory.

So you see, this is the first sign, right?

And it's the first sign because John is trying to tell us, pay

attention to this first. This is a key entry point to

understanding the ministry of Jesus throughout the whole of

the Gospel of John. It's telling us to refer back to

it when we see what he's doing. When he's arguing with the

Pharisees or they're arguing with him, he doesn't really

argue with them, He just kind of grenades them.

But when he's engaging with them, all these other things

he's doing, it's kind of a an ongoing expression of this first

sign, water into wine. Every time he turns up into a

situation, he transmutes it from an ordinary watery situation

into a very divine alcoholic situation.

It's constantly elevating people into this, this kind of altered

state of consciousness, which is actually to become conscious of

true reality. That's the image here.

But he goes straight from changing water into wine, into

cleansing the temple. And as I said in the other

gospels, he cleanses the temple at the end of his ministry and

it's part of what gets him killed, right?

So he he goes and right at the end he cleanses the temple, has

this direct confrontation with the Sadducees, and then within a

week he's crucified. But John has the cleansing of

the temple right at the beginning.

And that's once again for a purpose.

He's trying to say to us this act that Jesus performs is very,

very important to understand what the whole message in the

trajectory of this gospel is going to be.

So keep it in mind. That's why he's put it right at

the beginning. Just like with the prologue,

keep it in mind because he's put it at the beginning.

This is the logic. So you have this interesting in

the second-half of Chapter 2, again, you know the story he

you've got people selling animals in the temple.

And he says, get out of here, stop turning my father's house

into a market. His disciples remembered what it

was written. Zeal for your house will consume

me. Then the Jew said, what sign can

you show us to prove your authority to do all this?

Does this question all throughout John, what authority

does Jesus have to do and say the things that he does all the

way through? You'll notice it comes up again

and again. By whose authority do you do

this? What gives you the right to make

the kind of claims that you do? Jesus.

And his answer is remarkable. And I don't know if you've ever

stopped and really thought about this.

He says, destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three

days. That's a remarkable answer.

So John has Jesus driving people out, cleansing the temple, gets

accused. Why are you doing this?

Why do you have the right to do it?

What sign can you give to prove you have the right to, you know,

tell us what to do? And he says destroy the temple

and I will raise it again in three days.

And we know from the other gospels that everybody was

extremely confused by this statement because it comes up at

Jesus trial. He gets accused of, of being a

revolutionary. Who's going to who that he is

going to come and destroy the the Jews temple.

I think, look, he's you see, he's a, you know, he's a

radical. He's going to blow the temple up

or whatever they, you know, they would do in those days, destroy

this temple and I will raise it up.

So notice that he's telling them you destroy it.

He's not saying I'm going to destroy the temple.

He's saying you're going to destroy the temple.

You destroy it and I will raise it again in three days.

And then John sort of tries to help us.

It says the temple he had spoken of was his body.

And after he was raised from the dead, his disciples.

And John's saying me like I, I recalled what he had said.

And then they believed. So Jesus is making reference to

the temple. He's making reference to his

body. And he's saying to him, this is

the sign that is going to show you by whose authority I say and

do the things that I do. The sign is going to be this,

you destroy the temple and I'll raise it again in three days.

Super confusing. No wonder they they had no idea

what was going on. I've said many times, often

people will say the reason Jesus talked in parables was to relate

spiritual truths to ordinary people so that they can

understand them. But that's not what the Bible

says. The Bible says he spoke in

parables so that people couldn't understand them.

He did it to veil truth so that the natural mind would be

confused. Remarkable, you'd think a

teacher like today. I'm trying to make things

intelligible, right? I'm trying to put it out in a

way that is that you can follow and grasp.

But that's not how Jesus taught. He didn't teach in a in a

systematic, intelligible way. He taught in a way that when you

listen to him, you were extraordinarily confused, spun

around, dizzy, but yet in your heart you felt like this is

life. I just can't.

I can't explain it. I can't put it into any scheme

that makes sense to me. My heart is burning within me,

but I can't rationally make sense of any of this stuff.

That's how he taught over and over again.

And I think there's, I don't know who said this.

It was someone, some famous church person said, for, you

know, Jesus began his ministry by turning water into wine.

And the, the church has spent the last 2000 years trying to

turn it back into water again. So hopefully we're not going to

do that today. But this issue of destroying the

temple, what is the temple? Well, we've, we've got 2 temples

referred to here. 1 is the physical temple that they're in.

And then the second one, the more important one, he's talking

about his body, right? John tells us that his body.

In the Jewish scheme, the temple is the place where God is

supposed to live. The temple is the place where

you come and approach the divine presence, but you can't go fully

into the divine presence. The temple is there to teach us,

to form within us a sense of the sacred.

We recognise sacred presence because we've got a place that

we can look at physically and identify it as this is a sacred

presence. There are sacred protocols that

we adopt when we go to the temple.

All of that is supposed to enculturate us with the idea

that OK, there is. God is not just ordinary, right?

It's supposed to create an awareness of the sacred.

It's supposed to do something in society, in the community, that

gives us a sense of there are things we need to treat as

sacred that we we take seriously, not things that we

just take lightly. We have an intuition towards the

sacred, and the temple is supposed to do that.

The whole of the religious practise is supposed to do that.

But here's the the kicker. The purpose of building the

temple is to destroy the temple. So the Temple is part of the Old

Testament story. It's divine in origin, divine in

design, but its whole purpose is to be destroyed.

It exists so that it will be torn down.

It does not exist so that it will remain forever.

It's like the law. The Jewish law exists so that it

can be torn down, not so that it remains forever in in that form.

That's what the Apostle Paul says through the law.

I died to the law so that I could live to Christ.

The Christ in his flesh abolished the law with its

commandments and ordinances. So when we're looking at the

temple, when we're looking at the the Jewish law, when we're

looking at that religious system, which is the water in

those ceremonial jars, it promises a lot, but it delivers

little to nothing and it's diminishing returns.

The whole purpose of that is to be set up so that we'd get

knocked down. You build the temple to destroy

the temple. Like through our lives, we have

all sorts of practises and experiences that acclimatise us

to what is sacred, what is important to.

We recognise, you know, we differentiate between things

that are good, things that are not, things that are clean,

things that aren't. But the whole purpose of that in

developing our intuition towards the sacred is so that ultimately

it can get torn down completely. And in the tearing down, we

discover that the whole earth is a burning Bush alive with the

presence of God, that the whole world is the temple of the of

the Spirit of Christ. Because in John one verse one,

it is the logos who is made flesh.

What is the logos? The Logos is is the divine mind.

It is the sometimes called the wisdom of God.

The idea of Lagos is that the whole of the world emerges out

of an invisible matrix that is the mind of the God who created

it. And while we can't know the mind

of God directly, we can we can see the hallmark of the

fingerprints of the mind of God in what God has created.

So you can see something of the nature of the artist in that

artwork. You learn something of the

Craftsman in their craft. You learn something of the the

person who's designed an organisation in the way that

they organise it. We talk about having values.

We have a mission, you know, here at Hope.

We have things that we value. Ideally you would be able to

know something about the identity of this church by the

way people act and behave. But the, but the values that we

have are helping us get into alignment within those

particular things that we prioritise as a community.

So the logos is what does God prioritise?

How does God think what's going on in the mind of God that would

even mean that he would create anything.

That's John. One in the beginning was the

word, the logos. This is this divine matrix out

of which everything else is. It's the substructure, if you

like, of the whole of creation, if you like quantum mechanical

analogies, maybe you would think about it like the Higgs field,

what that, that even people call the, the, you know, the Higgs

boson, the God particle, because scientists are thinking about it

as the substrate from which all reality emerges.

You know, why do we have substance?

Why do we have matter? And they're thinking about it in

mechanical terms. But for us, we think about it as

this is the Logos, this is the divine mind which has given rise

to the creation of everything. It matters that it is the Logos

that has been made flesh, the divine mind, the way that God

thinks, the way that God processes and views everything,

that has been fully embodied in the person of Jesus Christ.

So when we see him talk about his body as the temple, well,

that actually starts to make perfect sense, because within

him, within his physical body is the fullness of the Godhead,

right? Is the fullness of God.

Everything, every thought that exists in the divine mind is

within Jesus. He is the thought of God.

He is the word of God. Hebrew says this is the word by

which God upholds the existence of all things.

He's the very fabric of reality. But we don't see the fabric of

reality. We can't.

We can't grasp it, we can't conceive of it.

And so we create all these religious structures to try and

acclimatise us to it, to try and reach for it.

These are the six jars. We're trying to hold it somehow,

but we can't hold it. We can't contain it.

Here comes Jesus containing it in its fullness and every place

he goes into he he's constantly like digging up the ground, he's

ploughing the ground, unearthing what's really going on under the

surface. When he says destroy this temple

and actually he's talking about his body, he's saying in at that

at that point you're going to see the authority that I have.

I mentioned that I am sayings. I am the bread of life.

I am the Good Shepherd. I am is an important phrase here

because this is the name of God in the Old Testament, God who

reveals himself to Moses. Moses says, who are you?

And God says, I am Yahweh, right, Jehovah.

I am. When Jesus says I am, I am.

I am over and over again he is identifying himself as Yahweh.

Sometimes people who don't understand this will say, well

Jesus never claimed to be God in the New Testament.

Oh he absolutely did. Every time he says I am, he is

directly invoking the divine name and applying it to himself.

7 specific times in John's gospel and then at least two

other times. Once when asked about Abraham

and he says before Abraham was I am and another time when in the

Garden of Gethsemane they say where is Jesus of Nazareth?

He says I am and they fall to the ground.

If you remember that part. So there's a two additional ones

at least, but there are the 77 symbolic ones and each one of

these is Jesus referring back to himself.

By what authority do you do this?

I do it because I am. I am who I am as Jehovah said to

Moses. So let me tie this together.

Jesus who is I am. What does that mean?

I am is a reference to the fact that he is the ground of all

being. All the reality emerges from the

I am. That is the log offs of God.

Everything emerges from that. In him we live and move and have

our being. The Apostle Paul says everyone

and everything has a pre established relationship with

Jesus because he is the very ground of their being moment by

moment sustaining their life and existence.

He is the ground of reality. But just to say that he's the

ground of reality doesn't tell us what reality is like.

Because if you you look around you can see all kinds of

terrible things and good things. And we might infer that God is

both good and bad if we were just to look at the natural

world. But Jesus comes to show us the

fullness of the character of God that we can't see apart from his

physical human life. So the ground of being what?

What this is telling us is how should we view the entire

universe, not just how should we view our Christian activity or a

Christian experience. It's setting us up for a

Christian cosmology. What is the nature of the

universe? What?

What is the universe's origin and what is its destination?

Well, the answer is Christ as the divine Logos.

Everything we see in Jesus, everything we see revealed in

Jesus, is informing us that this is actually how the universe

works and operates. As Richard Raw puts it, if God.

So if Jesus is the face of the Father and if God is a Trinity,

therefore we are living in a benevolent universe, which is a

remarkable statement. Now if you look around, the

universe does not appear benevolent.

Nature's does not appear benevolent.

Supernova millions of light years away do not appear

benevolent. There are many things that do

not appear benevolent in the material world as we look

around. As long as we're just looking at

those things, we will be deceived and confused as to who

God is. We can't infer who God is just

by looking at the natural world. Fact as part of the Christian

witnesses that there is something disordered about the

natural world and it's a bit of a mystery how that happened.

But when Christ comes in, he shows us in himself the pattern

of how things were designed to be and actually the pattern that

they're still held in the logos. It's other focused self giving

love. It's water into wine, it's joy,

it's life, it's light. My yoke is easy, my burden.

It's like all of these things that life does not feel like a

lot of the time. So whenever life doesn't feel

like that, the invitation is to go back to the temple, the

temple that is the broken body of Christ.

That reveals to us again who He is, what He's like.

Because if we can catch a glimpse of that, we will also

know that is what we are like. Because we are formed from Him

and out of Him and our life is held in him.

It's who we're designed to be. All the ways in which we are not

like that as individuals or a society or anything else is is

indicative of a lie that we have believed about who we are and

how the world is. We've been deceived and

disordered into being selfish, prideful, violent, greedy, often

hearted, feeling like we have to fight our own corners, be

controlling, fearful. All of these things are based on

a lie that we are something that we are not or that we are not

something that we actually are. Which is the same lie that is

there in the garden when the snake says to Eve, you know, oh,

you will be like God if you eat this fruit, even though it was

already established she was already like God.

So Jesus then last thought, we go to John 14.

It's page 1082 and 1083 if you want to take a look at it after

it's for time. I'm not going to read it, but I

just want to mention it. In the Old Testament, you have

this phrase that God actually says.

No one may see my face and live. He says that when he's talking

to Moses in Is it Mount Sinai? No one may see my face and live.

Moses asks to see God's face, and he says you can't see my

face, you can only see my back because no one can see my face

and live. So there emerges this idea that,

well, God is we can get close to God, but we can't get face to

face with God because if you get face to face with God, you're

going to spontaneously combust. That's Moses's testimony, right?

So the glory that Moses gets, he gets from the back of God, not

from the front of God. Then when he goes down the

mountain, that glory drains away.

Philip says to Jesus, show us the Father and that will be

enough for us. And Jesus says you've been with

me so long and you've not yet realised if you have seen me,

you have seen the Father. So Philip, face to face with

Jesus at the moment, at that very moment, has still not

figured out I am actually looking into the face of the

Father when I'm looking into the face of Christ.

And yet I did not spontaneously combust.

I did not dissolve away into nothing, going to some divine

holy conflagration. Actually, in being face to face

with him, I, my true nature has been rehabilitated and has been

brought forth. The apostle Peter, the first

time he meets Jesus, go away from me, Lord.

I'm a sinful man. He says not six months later,

he's arguing with the other disciples about whether or not

he would be #2 in heaven. The greatest in heaven is

extraordinary. You go from I'm too sinful to

even look at the holy preacher to six months later I might have

a shot at being the number 2 head honcho in the Kingdom of

heaven. What's happened to Peter in

those six months? He's just been hanging around

with Jesus. So what does hanging around with

Jesus do to us? How transformative is that?

The face to faceness that Peter experienced with Jesus was

liberating his true nature. So to be, to be true, there is a

fire when you look into the face of Christ, there absolutely is a

fire, but it's not a fire of destruction.

It's a fire of liberation. It's not a fire of retribution.

It's a fire of purification, of refinement.

It's a fire that that lifts us up into who we are, not a fire

that burns us up into nothing and gets rid of us.

This is the consuming fire that is in the face of Christ.

So he says to, he says to Philip and the others in that day, this

is what I'm going to finish with because I live.

You also will live on that day. You will realise that I am in my

father and you are in me and I am in you.

So he's telling them just before he goes to the cross.

You don't understand this now, but in that day and that day.

Next time I'll talk about chronological time and divine

time, but I'm not going to do that now.

But just think in that day he goes to the cross and then he

rises from the dead and he calls that a day.

Right in that day you will realise not I will be in you and

you will be in me. He says In that day you will

realise I am. Remember the divine name.

I am in You, I am in the Father and you are in me.

You're going to see it then, and this goes back to when you

destroy the temple and I raise it up again in three days.

Then you will know by whose authority I speak.

Here's his answer there in John 14 you're going to see the

authority is I speak by is my own authority as the very Logos

out of which all of creation has come into being in that day.

You will know you are in me. They were already in Him.

They couldn't recognise that yet because they're still seeing Him

in the flesh. How can I be in you, Jesus?

You're standing right there because He's the Divine Logos

who upholds your very existence and in whom you were created and

designed for a good purpose right from the very word go.

You're going to see that when you go to the cross because his

body is broken symbolically, His body being broken and his

insides being exposed, as gruesome as it is, is also

trying to tell us something that the very core of Jesus is being

is being revealed to us now. It's shining out of that broken

body. And just as the veil is torn in

the temple and ultimately the temple is done away with, the

physical temple, now what we see is the light of and life of

Christ shining out in and to and through all things,

regenerating, rehabilitating, bringing them back into their

proper designed divine order. And as we see many things that

are disordered in the world, as we recognise this and

participate with it, we also join in with reordering the

world, bringing things back into right alignment, right

relationship, sorting out the environment, whatever it is,

we're participating with Jesus in seeing those things happen.

So John is trying to, he's trying to draw us into an

encounter with this Jesus, the Jesus who is the divine Logos.

Right back in the prologue, this is what he says.

In him was light. That light was the life of men.

And then all the way through we see the same thought is being

preached from different angles, going, it's like going round in

a spiral, looking at it from all sorts of different angles until

you get this culmination in the cross and in the resurrection.

So this is John. Is that too heavy for a Sunday

morning? Let me finish and let me finish

and pray because as I said at the start, this is not, this is

actually supposed to scramble our brains.

It's not supposed to sit, you know, logically and

methodologically in a way that that feels very comfortable.

It's supposed to scramble our natural thinking to reveal what

is more true, which is underneath our natural thinking.

And that is the reality of the Spirit inside us.

Christ in you, the hope of glory.

So Father God, my prayer for us all is that you would reorient

the furniture of our natural mind, that you would unearth the

reality that is Christ in US and that is our union in him.

Thank you Jesus, you are in the Father.

The Father is in you and we are in you.

Therefore we are in the Father and the Father is in US.

And there just as the fullness of the Godhead dwells in you in

bodily form, so the fullness of the Godhead now dwells in US in

bodily form. Thank you that the natural mind

cannot apprehend that or get even define its dimensions.

So we just lean back into you, we relax into you.

Thank you, Holy Spirit, you give us permission to just say we

don't know, but we are known. Whatever situation you're facing

in your life today, I want to speak that over you.

You do not know how it's going to work out, how to solve it,

how to address it, but you are completely and fully known.

And in being known, you are completely and fully loved.

Holy Spirit, would you make that truth blaze so brightly in us as

individuals and as a community that it will be impossible for

us to miss it, and, if possible, for those of us around us to

miss it as well. And then thank you.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Paul.

We've got to go and collect our children now.

But I think one thing I think God's been putting on my heart,

which is that, you know, Jesus sat at the feet of Mary and

Martha was distracted by the diaconos, which was like, not

just it. People think of Martha as doing

the kitchen work. And it wasn't about being

domestic. It was about being a sitting at

the feet of Jesus as a rabbi, as a learner.

But in that story, actually, she was in ministry.

It was like leadership. It's a leadership role.

She was busy doing the things of God and she was distracted

because Mary had chosen the better part, which was to sit at

the feet of Jesus, listening to his word, looking at him.

And I think Paul talked a few times about this idea of being

face to face with God, which is we see, you see that image in

Genesis 1 and John 1. And So what I'd encourage us to

do is to prioritise that sitting at the feet of Jesus like Mary

and actually taking time to look at Jesus because we're very

capable, prolific people and can often miss him because we're

doing extraordinary and interesting things.

And I think he's calling us to Mary.

He actually said she really has chosen the better part, the good

part, which is quite a strong statement.

There's something about, I think what what Paul's bringing about

this revelation of who Jesus actually is and gazing upon him

until we really see him for who he is and therefore see

ourselves for who we are, that requires us to take time to do

so. I think I'm going to bless us

with that as we go away. It could be we do that in

community with other people. It could be on our own, but but

actually almost like an intentional action.

This isn't about a quiet time or solitude or any of those things.

It's literally about who are you?

Who are you, Jesus? I need to sit here and know who

you are because in knowing who you are, I will know who I am

and I will know who everyone else is.

Lord, I thank you that you have. You give us that gift of that

story of Mary and Martha, and You make us prolific and gifted

and active leaders in so many areas.

But actually, the better part is to sit and look at your face

because that's reality looking at your face.

And we desperately need you to help us to do that.

We pray like Paul prays in the Bible that the eyes of our

hearts are enlightened, that we may know you better.

May you literally turn the lights on so we can see you for

who you are. We can see ourselves and we can

see everyone else the way you see the world, the way the world

actually is. We just cry out to you in this

community that your kindness will lead us to a repentance.

Your kindness towards us will lead us too.

I love how Paul puts it an upgrade in our thinking, a light

bulb, just more clarity as to who you are.

If this is true, that you hold the universe together, you hold

us together, you hold everything together, which I believe is in

Hebrews and Colossians. You say that then we need to

have fresh revelation on who you are.

So we, we, we just cry out to you to give us that gift of

fresh revelation. Amen.