What a wonderful time of the year! The feel of fall is in the air. We often think of spring as the time of new beginnings—and it is. But so is fall. This morning we mark the beginning of a new Sunday school year. As part of that, many people moved up into new classes. That’s a new beginning. We’ve started a new church year and will be spending the next few weeks seating our new committees. We’ll start our new AWANA year in the next couple of weeks. The new school year has started. And of course, one of the most important things of the fall has started this past week. College football. With all of those new beginnings, it’s only appropriate that we have a new beginning in our study of the book of John. We started about this time last year looking at the book of John. We made it all the way through the first part of chapter 5 before we took a break this summer. But now it’s time to pick up where we left off. You might think it’s strange that we took a break where we did. Because as you read through chapter 5, this seems like one long continuing narrative. But really what we have here is what I call a hinge passage. John uses several of these transitional passages throughout his gospel. And the three verses that we’re focusing on this morning are one of them. He’s just finished telling us about a time when Jesus healed a man. It’s the third miracle that John records. The first one was when Jesus turned the water into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. The second one was when Jesus went back to Cana and healed the nobleman’s son. You remember that the nobleman came to Jesus and asked Jesus to come and heal his son. Jesus didn’t come. But He did heal the son from a distance. The third sign was when Jesus went to Jerusalem and picked out one “impotent” man out of the crowd of sick and diseased people who were gathered at the pool of Bethesda. That man had been physically impotent for 38 years. Jesus healed him. He told him to take up his bed and walk. And the man did. There are a couple of things that John is very clear to point out, as he tells us about these signs. After Jesus turned the water into wine, His disciples believed in Him. But what’s interesting is that they didn’t believe because of the miracle. They believed because of Jesus’ Word. In the second sign, Jesus healed a man’s son. Out of all the people who were there in Cana, lots of them believed in miracles. But only one of them believed Jesus. When Jesus told the man that his boy was healed, he didn’t offer a bit of proof. He didn’t offer a bit of mystical, emotional feeling. As a matter of fact, Jesus offered nothing more to the nobleman than His Word. And that’s all it took. The nobleman believed Jesus because of His Word. And because of that, he and his whole family were saved. Then we get to the third sign that led up to our passage this morning. When Jesus healed the man and told him to take up his bed and walk, the man did. He believed in the miracle. But he failed to believe in the One who gave him the miracle. When the Jewish leaders confronted him about breaking Sabbath laws by carrying his mat, do you remember what he did? He basically said, “Don’t blame me—He’s the one that told me to do it.” And then when they asked him who it was that told him to do it, he said, “I don’t know.” Then Jesus sought him out one more time. He gave him one more opportunity. He told the man that he’d better live a sinless life or he was going to be in worse shape than he was to begin with. What would have been the right response to Jesus? To say, “Jesus, I can’t live a sinless life. I am a sinner in need of a Savior.” Then Jesus would have saved him. But the man didn’t heed the Word of Jesus. Instead, verse 15 says that he departed. And not only did he depart, he went and told the Jewish leaders who it was they should be looking for. The lesson so far in the book of John is that miracles don’t make believers. As a matter of fact, most of the time, miracles make people who are focused on miracles—not people who are focused on Christ. Jesus did miracles to show people that He is God and to validate His word as God’s Word. But when most people saw the miracles, they loved the show. They just didn’t love the Word. And because they didn’t love the Word, they were lost. How did John put it in 1:11? He came unto His own and His own received Him not. And that’s where we get to this hinge passage. Now, John moves us up the rejection scale. When Jesus went to Cana the second time, the people received Him, but only for the cool stuff He could do. They received Him for the show He could give them. Jesus made it clear that what looked like acceptance on the surface was really rejection. Then the rejection got turned up a notch by the pool of Bethesda. Even the one that Jesus healed rejected Him. Not overtly or directly to His face, but he rejected Jesus just the same. He accepted the gift of being healed, but still rejected Jesus as His Lord and master. Now, in this hinge passage, John brings us to the next level of rejection. And we will be at this level until we get to the final level which is the crucifixion. But it’s this level that we’re entering into that will lead to that final level. When I originally outlined this passage, I started with verse 17. But as I studied it, I realized that verse 16 is where it really starts. Verse 15 ends the particular event that started this level of rejection. And verses 16-18 give us the overview of all the rejection that is to follow. We can see that in the verb tenses in verse 16. Unfortunately they don’t come through in the KJV. I don’t know why the translators chose to use the past tense. In the original, the verbs are not past tense. They are what is called the “imperfect” tense. The imperfect tense of a verb means that it’s talking about an ongoing action. In other words, it starts here, but it keeps on continuing on. In verse 16, when the Jews persecuted Jesus, that’s when they started. But that was their beginning point. They kept on persecuting Him from that point on until they finally saw Him hanging on a Roman cross taking a punishment that He didn’t deserve. Another verb in the imperfect tense is where it says “He had done these things on the Sabbath day.” In other words, this wasn’t a onetime action by Jesus. He healed people continually on the Sabbath. The Gospels only record a few incidents, but Jesus did it repeatedly. And as a result, what we have over the rest of chapter 5 is a collection of Jesus’ words as He defended Himself against the accusations of the Jewish leaders. From this hinge verse until the end of the chapter, John steps out of the linear timeline. He gives us a listing of Jesus’ words that He used to explain His works. If this was a trial, then the Jewish leaders would be the prosecutors. Jesus would be the defendant. And do you know what Jesus’ defense was? The same one it is today. Jesus defense was and is that He is God. Over the next six weeks we will be looking at the six specific claims that Jesus made to say that He is God throughout the rest of this chapter. This hinge passage introduces that by giving us two reasons that the Jewish leaders wanted to kill Jesus.
The first reason they wanted to kill Jesus was that He healed people on the Sabbath. As I said, the man by the pool of Bethesda wasn’t the only one He healed on the Sabbath. He is just an example of the many people. Why was that such a big deal to them? You’d think that they’d be happy that someone got healed, wouldn’t you? But they weren’t. They weren’t because they were so focused on their legalistic rules and regulations. I’m not talking about the Law here. The Law said that they weren’t allowed to work on the Sabbath. That was pretty straightforward. But the Jewish scholars created a whole system of rules and regulations that they said constituted work. One of their rules was that they said a person couldn’t carry their bedding on the Sabbath. But it didn’t really matter what their rule was. The point is, understanding why they made all the rules in the first place. They made the rules because they thought that they could be good enough to earn righteousness. They were smart enough to know that God is righteous. And the only way to have a relationship with a righteous God is to be righteous like He is. A righteous God will not dirty Himself by entering into a relationship with unrighteous people. Their problem was that they thought they could earn enough righteousness to work their way into a relationship with God. Instead of approaching God on the basis of His grace, they wanted to approach God on the basis of their works. And Jesus violated their ideas by challenging their rules. Not the law—Jesus never challenged God’s perfect law. But he openly challenged and even defied their additions to the law. Because of that, they wanted to kill Him. Jesus showed them that their attempts at righteousness was really a house of cards that He was going to knock down. And they hated Him for it. And that was the entry point for why they hated Him most.
The second reason that the Jewish leaders wanted to kill Jesus was that He equated Himself with God. There are many people today who will tell you that Jesus never claimed to be God. The people who say that have obviously never honestly read the book of John. From this point forward, Jesus continually makes that claim. Of course, that’s what the whole book is about. Remember back to the introduction in John 1:1-3: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” That’s the claim that John makes about Jesus. But here in verse 17, Jesus makes the claim about Himself. He told the Jewish leaders that God is His father. That’s not as dramatic in our minds as it was to theirs. All throughout the Old Testament, God is only referred to as Father a few times. And each time, He is only referred to as Israel’s Father—collectively as a nation. He is never thought of as a personal Father. Because in their minds, when a person is a son to a father, he is of the same essence. He is of the same stock. So when Jesus said that God was His Father, what the Jewish leaders heard Him say was that He is the same essence as the Father. We don’t really think like that, but the closest we can come is this: When CJ calls me his father, he is acknowledging that he is a Drake. Just as I am a Drake, he is a Drake. We are of the same stock. That’s as close as we can come to that thinking, but in their minds, it was even more so. They immediately understood that Jesus was calling Himself God. Just as the Father is God, Jesus is God. And they couldn’t handle that. They had spent generations building their theology. And just because it was wrong wasn’t going to get in their way. Jesus stood before them and claimed to be God incarnate. He was God in the flesh. And as God in the flesh, He wasn’t what they expected. They expected God to come and recognize them for how righteous they were. They expected God to be indebted to them for all that they had done to keep things cleaned up for Him. They expected God to glorify them and praise them—not the other way around. Think of it this way, they expected God to worship them just like they had been worshipping themselves for so long. “God, we’ve got everything under control here, you just come in and tell us what a good job we’re doing. Give us our kingdom we’ve worked so hard for and pat us on the back because of how good we are and everything we’ve done for you.” Jesus blew that up in their face. Because He showed them that all of their legalistic self-worship was nothing but filthy rags. And they hated Him for it. They hated Him because He healed on the Sabbath and they hated Him because He equated Himself with God.
Now, let me tell you what we have the tendency to do. When we hear things like that, the first thing we want to do is say, “Boy, I’m glad we’re not like that.” But you know what? When we say that, we’re saying the same thing that they did. Remember what the Pharisee prayed out loud? He prayed, “God, I thank you that I’m not like those other people—especially like that Publican over there.” At the same time the Publican was torn up in prayer. He was begging God to be merciful to him because he knew that he was a sinner. Boy, I’m glad we’re not like those Jewish leaders. They rejected Jesus because He healed people on the Sabbath. They rejected Jesus because He said that He is God. I’m glad we’re not like them. We aren’t? I think we’re more like them than we care to admit. Because we reject Jesus for the same reasons that they did.
First, we reject Jesus because He blows up all the ways that we try to justify ourselves. The Jewish leaders tried to justify themselves by their legalism. They came up with laws that they could keep and nobody else could. And when they did that, they made themselves seem righteous. How do we make ourselves feel righteous? We can tear down others. We can try to make ourselves look good and feel good by telling about how all those other people did things to hurt our feelings. We can justify our own sin by focusing on the sins of others. If I’m pretty good at helping other people, I can make myself look even better by pointing out all the other people who aren’t helping others. If I’m teaching children or working on a committee, I can call out all the others who aren’t. That makes me look better. But Jesus gets in the way of that, doesn’t He. Every time we try to justify ourselves, He reminds us that we aren’t capable of justifying ourselves. We can work and work and work and work and will never achieve anything in His kingdom that He hasn’t freely given us. Does that mean we are not to work? Of course not. In verse 17, Jesus said that He works and His Father works. The problem isn’t the work. The problem is trying to justify yourself by your works. When you try to justify yourself by your works, you’re trusting in your righteousness. And when you trust in your righteousness, you’re rejecting the righteousness of Christ. But that’s not the only way we’re like the Jewish leaders in our passage. Because we also reject Jesus because He destroys the way we like to worship ourselves.
See, when Jesus makes it clear that He is God, do you know what that means? It means that we can’t be. And ever since Adam and Eve, we people have had two problems. We wanted to be like God and we wanted to do something to be able to earn that godlike status. Isn’t that how the serpent temped Eve? Eat this and you can be like God? Do something. Earn it. Work a work. Do something to justify yourself and in the process, you can sit in the seat of God. You might say, “Preacher, I have never wanted to worship myself and put myself in the place of God.” Really? I have. And it’s something I have to battle every day. And if the truth be told, so do you. How many times have you failed to do what God wants you to do? How many times have you clammed up and failed to be a bold witness? Why? Because you were scared of what someone might say? Do you know what that means? It means that you were placing your personal comfort above God’s will. And anytime you do that, you are telling God, I’ll take it from here. You step down of the throne and I’ll run things from here. You are placing your worth above God’s. And that’s what worship is. Why did the Jewish leaders want to kill Jesus? Because He healed on the Sabbath and messed up their self-righteousness. And because He told them that He is God which meant that they couldn’t be.
Why are you rejecting Jesus? Do you think you’ve got it all under control? You can handle it on your own and don’t need His righteousness? Well, you’re wrong. Because the Bible says that you have no righteousness on your own. You can do the greatest works imaginable for your entire life and they will be as filthy rags in the presence of God’s holiness. Do you know what that means? It means that you have to take on someone else’s righteousness. And the only way you can do that is to step down off your throne. Relinquish control of your life to the only one who is truly righteous. Jesus is God. And as God He is the righteousness of God. And as Christ, He lived a sinless life and died in your place and rose again on the third day so that He could offer that righteousness to you. The only question is, will you continue to reject Him? Or will you quit justifying yourself and quit worshipping yourself and bow down before Him as your Lord and Savior? Will you let Him save you today?
