John 8:12-20

Okay, everybody, thanks for being back with us.

We should have a full week this week with,

schedules and trips and holidays.

It's good to be back with you.

And we are excited to continue making progress through the Gospel of John.

We're in the eighth chapter picking up with the 12th verse.

I don't know what you say about this section, Michael.

Just kind of a lot of, a lot of John stuff happening.

That's right here. So the best stuff.

Yeah, maybe let's, let's read it and then we'll, we'll have some discussion

about it.

Again, Jesus spoke to them and said, I am the light of the world.

Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

Then the Pharisees said, you're testifying on your own behalf.

Your testimony is not valid.

Jesus answered, even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid

because I know where I have come from and where I am going.

You do not know where I come from or where I'm going.

You judge by human standards, I judge no one.

But even if I do judge, my judgment is valid.

For it's not I alone who judge.

But I am the father who sent me.

In your law it's written

that the testimony of two witnesses is valid.

I testify on my own behalf, and the father who sent me testifies on my behalf also.

Then they said to him, where's your father?

Jesus answered, you know neither me nor my father.

If you knew me, you would know my father also.

He spoke these words while he was teaching in the treasury of the temple,

but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.

So when I when I say that, I think this strikes me as a vintage John passage.

What I mean by that is

that the voice of John

and the voice of Jesus here, I think, really work together.

Jesus says these words, and John highlights them

and their theological words.

They're there less

teaching words.

This isn't a parable with a kind of simple takeaway.

This is Jesus having a theological argument with his opponents

over the validity of what he's saying, and really

the validity of of who he is.

And and then we get to this bottom.

No one arrested him because he's

our had not yet come, which is just beautifully vintage.

John, we should note that we start this passage

with the second of the I am sayings we've told you before.

There are seven of these in John.

I am the bread of life.

I think we started with.

And now we have.

I am the light of the world.

And each of these tells us something important about how Jesus

understands his mission and who we understand Jesus to be.

Not a lot of follow up about the

the comment here, because we move on to this other stuff, Michael. But,

this is underneath this

is the idea of who has authority

and what does it mean that Jesus claims to speak truth

when those who are opposed to him accuse him

of being untruthful or being in error or being deceptive?

And there's rich theological ground there, though

it's in this format

that John uses that I think makes it a little less accessible.

You have to do some work to get to it.

I guess I would agree with that.

And I, I do think, Clint, that we need to orient ourselves

somewhat intentionally towards that point as to, you know,

the different things that we can take away from a teaching like this.

And I think one thing I just want to make note of right at the beginning here is

when you're studying the Gospels, you know,

I think some of those setup details may seem unimportant when we begin

the conversation about, well, you know, this gospel we think was dated later.

The gospel, John, that maybe it was the the final gospel written,

that may seem unimportant, or maybe it just seems a little bit like

kind of trivial knowledge and not really that germane to studying the book itself.

But I think it's actually really important here, Clint,

because if we really pay attention, if we look really closely,

the the Pharisees response in verse 13 is really instructive.

They say you are testifying in your own behalf

and your testimony is not valid.

I think that concern is really, really important,

especially when you figure that some of the people

receiving this book, some of the people for whom the Gospel of John will be read

for the first time, they are going to be living in an era

in which they had no access

to see or know Jesus, the resurrected one.

For them,

the question of who is testifying to the truth of who

Jesus is is a relevant question, and I think that this book is relevant

to us

in similar ways, that it would have been in the first generation

of those who read it. There's a real concern, right?

Like, well, of course Jesus says he's the revelation of God.

Of course he says the light.

He is the light of the world. Why?

Because that's in his best interest.

Because he's a guy out there just saying these things,

and he's garnering attention and he's sort of advancing his

his notoriety, his image that these kinds of things

are being actively discussed in Jewish synagogues across the known world

by people who were opposing the earliest Christian churches and Christians

that met in those places all the way up until the destruction of the temple in 70.

So I Clint,

I realize that I'm taking a diversion here, but I think your point is

well made that when we come to this book, we have to be willing to ask

some of the questions of what these earliest Christians would have found

hopeful in these recounting of Jesus's teaching.

And I do think here we see Jesus in his own words.

John is giving us a small window to Jesus, making a case

for how his revelation is authoritative.

Since he's the revealed Son of God, there's no one else

who can give testimony to the truth, because he is the truth.

And John is being upfront about that point

that he's making in a really theological way.

And if you can't sort of get the context on the front end of it,

I do think that this is going to sort of just tend to roll off your back

and you'll keep plowing through

looking for what that next teaching or that next miracle story might be.

I, I do think there's a sense in which

one of the ways in which

John is different is

that John spends

perhaps the most time, or gives the most attention to

the actual conflict with religious leaders.

That's in all the other gospels, right?

We all know that Jesus got sideways with the scribes and the Pharisees

and Sadducees, that that's that's written into all the Gospels.

But I think in a way that is maybe a little more

so than the other three Gospels.

John dives into those conflicts and

and that means for us, instead of just knowing,

oh, they got mad at Jesus because he said that John wants us to unpack

that, or John wants to, on our behalf, unpack that theologically.

So here we have an argument about how many witnesses

and what validates a testimony.

And I and I know that I speak the truth, but you don't know that I speak the truth.

And I suppose there's this there's a gift to us in that,

which is that we get to

enter Jesus world, perhaps a little more, rather than just say,

oh yeah, they got mad at Jesus and hung him on the cross.

John tracks us through

Jesus, standing up to them, arguing with them.

We're going to see a lot of that as this chapter unfolds,

and moving in to the ninth and 10th chapter as well.

And it I think you're right.

I think there's that demands a little more effort from the reader than say,

you know, the Good Samaritan or the story of Zacchaeus

or some of those other things that are a little bit more narrative.

This is this is a little deeper in some ways than that,

but it gives us a better insight as to

what is the conflict between Jesus and the religious people.

And speaking

for many

of us who would count ourselves as religious.

Yeah, I think that does make this very interesting.

It's just that it's not always easy to process.

So I'm going to try to make a distinction here that I don't see as oppositional.

I see as maybe different aspects of the same thing, two sides of the same coin.

And you may push back on this and please do.

But I think I want to make a case here that whereas when you read, say, a book

like Luke, you're going to encounter these teachings of Jesus,

which you can imagine being delivered to the people standing

on the hillside that day or whatever crowd has been following him.

You can sort of imagine being with them in the crowd.

I think what you're discovering in John is that here

Jesus is not just teaching those that follow him, but John is

using these teachings in such a way

to reveal Jesus to us in our place.

I think that there's some theological lens being put on here that that is intended

to show us that while Jesus is teaching, I mean, look how this ends, right?

In John that this passage ends.

No one arrests him because his hour had not come.

That's all John cares to tell us

about the ending of this story, because it's irrelevant.

Jesus is our hadn't come.

There's no political intrigue.

There's no question of how Jesus gets out of it.

We don't need any information about the path that Jesus takes out of the

temple, or where he's going to go next, that ultimately what John wants us to see

is that Jesus Christ is the revealed Son of God.

This has a theological,

foundational importance to the Christian's life that you understand.

You know, this is actually who Jesus is.

And and we get that teaching in a way that isn't quite portrayed in the same way.

I think we get that descriptively through what Jesus

does in the other gospels, but here we get it explicitly.

I mean, the teaching is both from Jesus himself

and then the way that John creates the narrative around

it, Jesus is revealing himself as the one true God.

In this text, Jesus is saying that wherever there's light,

wherever there's revelation, wherever there's knowledge

of God's plan and will in the world, it's coming from him.

I mean, he's he's commanding the center.

He is the sun in this case.

I mean, the sun. He's the source of light.

And so any darkness.

And by the way, these teachers are going to be,

you know, metaphorically representing that darkness

because they're unable to see the light for what it is.

It doesn't reveal for them the truth.

It rather continues to confound them.

The fact is that Jesus is claiming here a kind of theological purpose

and substance, and John is providing us

a way to access that in a way that we just wouldn't have from any other gospel.

So I think if you're a narrative reader, this gospel is going to be a slog.

If you're willing to pull back in to ask some of those theological questions,

which I think the earliest audience of this book, the first readers,

I mean, would have also been challenged by and been interested in.

Then this book begins to come alive because of what it has to say about who

this man is.

And, if you get off that track, I think there's just a whole lot of thorns

and bushes.

You're going to have to wander through because it's going to be hard to read.

This is probably a thin analogy, but I was driving through a small town recently.

A police

officer pulled me over after a stop sign and said that he had thought

I rolled through or didn't come to a complete stop.

Now, I could tell you that story and this isn't what happened,

but I could tell you that story and imagine that we had argued,

and I argued with the police officer that I did stop.

He argued that I didn't.

That might be a somewhat compelling story.

Now imagine the next step where I have to go to court

and I have to argue precedence is and I'm, say, citing case law and I'm,

you know, then all of a sudden you think, oh,

well, that's that's less exciting.

That's some of what's happening here.

It is, it is this sort of theological language

to present Jesus arguments with the Pharisees in a different way.

But however, when we get those, we we still want to look behind them.

And what is being said here?

Well, Jesus is saying, I am the light of the world,

and if you follow me, I like the way

you don't have to worry about being in the dark.

If you follow me.

Now, the religious leaders

are offended by that and they say, you can't say that about yourself.

You can't claim that for yourself.

And Jesus answers by saying, I'm not claiming it for myself.

God claims it on my behalf, and I'm telling you that it's true.

And then they say, And Jesus says, you know, neither me or my father,

because to know me is to know the father.

And so, again, don't miss the thing

Jesus is saying here, because this is a word to believers.

We stay in the light when we follow Christ.

And when we see Jesus at work, we see the work of God.

We see in Jesus,

the heavenly one, the Divine One, the Holy One.

That's the claim that the Gospel of John is making about Jesus

to readers, to believers.

Now, yes, sometimes that gets lost in language

from another time and another culture that has theology

and maybe isn't super accessible or really exciting, but read past that

to see what the actual message that's being conveyed here is.

And I think ultimately it's pretty helpful.

So I want to just add one piece to that claim and to point out

the subversiveness of this argument that Jesus is making.

So I want to point to the end of our red leather text here, verse 18

actually a starting 17, Jesus says to these teachers in your law,

which would be the Old Testament law,

this is sort of going back to that case law that you were talking about.

It is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid.

Now watch what Jesus does here.

I testify on my own behalf and the father who sent me testifies on my behalf.

And so the subversive move that Jesus does here is he says, hey,

your own law

that you are arguing on behalf of claims that two witnesses

is enough to establish the truth, but then see what Jesus does.

So Jesus is his own witness.

He testifies to himself.

And who's the second witness?

The father is the second witness.

Now, obviously, none of the people standing there that day would accept

if a person came in with a legal dispute and said, you know,

by the way, I, testify that I didn't commit this crime.

And God the Father testifies I didn't commit this crime.

So therefore, there's my two witnesses.

We can close this this case, it's shut.

That is ridiculous.

As an argument.

Unless you're in the Gospel of John.

Because as is all of these texts, you have the story that is told.

You know, the thing that just presents, the thing that nobody in the story

gets, it's sort of like this, the story ad absurd, but, absurdum.

Like, what in the world are you saying?

Jesus, you clearly are not a never ending living.

Well, right. I'd love to have access to that.

Water is what the woman said now in this book, Clint.

What Jesus does consistent is to offer a teaching like this.

I'm the witnessing.

God's the witness, and the only people who get it

are the ones who have the eyes of faith to understand.

Oh, he's claiming to be

one of the Trinitarian persons of God, right?

And there's this, this light bulb moment.

And then when you see it

from that perspective, the rest of this book is transformed.

And I don't know if you all have had this experience,

but this will be my closing analogy.

But have you ever done one of those 3D image books

where you have to look at the the picture and then if you, you know,

change your eyes a little bit, it sort of pops out of the page.

If you've ever done that, I think you've experienced with your eyes

the kind of thing that John wants to happen in our hearts,

that if you look at the story of Jesus, on its surface,

it just looks like random patterns and meanings and, and teachings

that were equally controversial, if not more so in his time.

If, however, you can look at Jesus's story through the eyes of faith,

you can look at a text like this one.

Then you can see when Jesus claims to be the witness

and the father to be the second witness, that what we're discover ING

is that when you see Jesus, you see God.

That when God is at work in the world, Jesus is the one who

we can touch and pray to and name and trust.

And Clint, this becomes the central of the, the central foundation

of the church's theological understanding of who Jesus Christ is.

It this is as deep of a theological text as you want it to be,

and this gospel provides those kinds of little moments throughout the whole.

And I just think, yes, it may be hard to just pick it up

and read it devotional,

but if you're willing to do some of the work, there's a richness to this.

Yeah.

I mean, stories about Jesus are easier to access, but it's important

for Christians to think theologically about who Jesus claims to be

and who we believe him to be.

And and John helps us in that category.

I think we're going to keep on going through the gospel, John.

There's lots more to come.

So if you found this video helpful, like it? Certainly.

If you made this far,

we hope there's been something encouraging and challenging for you in it.

And then also, friends, we will continue with our final study of the week tomorrow.

We would love to see you here live.

And then of course, everywhere else it's published, including the podcast.

Until then, be blessed. Thanks everybody.