SE010205
Gospel Truth
4. JOHN
INTRO:
In this series, we’ve been looking at all four biographies of Christ, but the one we look at today, John, is different from the other three. The other three are what we call the synoptic Gospels. The word synoptic means same sight - it means Matthew, Mark, and Luke they had roughly the same look at Jesus Life because they all used similar source material…
But John is not a synoptic gospel. That doesn’t mean his gospel is telling a different story, it just means he went with his own recollections instead of borrowing from the gospels that were already circulating. So his gospel has a really different look. Who wrote it? John was written by one of Jesus three inner-circle disciples, Peter, James and John. John wrote probably 60 years after Jesus death, while he was in exile or teaching near Ephesus as a 90 year old man.
Why did he write? Early Church tradition says that certain misunderstandings about Jesus were becoming popular in John’s day, so to refute those, John scanned his memory of periods of Jesus’ life that the other gospels don’t mention. John refers to himself in the story with the title “the disciple whom Jesus loved”. And the book has the feel of a man who has been changed by that love.
John is a reliable eye witness, as judged by archeology, but he was no unbiased observer of Jesus life. His gospel is an attempt to help us discover the LOVE he has known from his first hand, eye witness vantage point. He tells us plainly at the end:
John 20:30?31 - Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have Life in his name.
Later, when writing a letter to Jesus followers, he let’s them know again the unique vantage point he had:
1 John 1:1-3 The one who existed from the beginning is the one we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He is Jesus Christ, the Word of life.
I AM
Now, one of common phrases in John, is this one: I AM. We use the phrase more than any other, every day. But “I AM” in the Bible is something more than just the simplest possible sentence in any language: subject, verb - it is also God’s own name for himself. In Exodus 3:14 God tells his name to Moses:
I am that I am.
Now when we read any name in the Bible, it has deep meaning. I like meaningful names. My wife likes unique names. So we named our boys Joren and Jadan, and our animals Yoda, Yikes, Tank, Dozer, Manitoba and Kokanee:
S Joren’s name means farmer because all my ancestors were farmers.
S Jadan’s name is a melding of two of his grandfather’s names
S Yoda was a cat with big ears that stick out to the side
S Yikes is a cat afraid of his own shadow
S Tank and Dozer are cat brothers, like the characters so named from the Matrix
S Manitoba is an Northern dog built for the snow
S Kokanee is a dog that likes beer.
So, what does this name of God mean? It communicates that God just IS. Other things “come to be”, but there never was a time when God wasn’t.
When dealing with the subject of creation, an objection often put forward by people ranging in age from 6 to 66 is: ok, so maybe a Cause was needed to launch the universe, but answer me this: who created God? Someone always supposes they’ve got you stumped with that one, because everything we know has a Source. They think, if you can pass off the riddles of our origins with the word ‘God’, they can pass of the riddle of God by saying,
‘we’ll how did GOD get here’.
The answer is, God has always been here. And that’s what his name means. His very name addresses the question of his origins: He doesn’t have any. The quality shared by everything that ever has been or ever was is that it emerged from something else. EVERYTHING that is, except God. Gathering scientific evidence is saying that such an uncaused Cause is exactly what the facts demand.
And God’s name has been saying it all along: I AM.
Tell this to your children when they ask you where God came from: God stands outside the universe, like a man stands outside the house he made. Time is a property of the universe he made, therefore it’s meaningless to talk about the beginning or end of God. There are no clocks in heaven. There are no suns to measure days, there is only the brilliant light of God’s amazing presence in the eternal NOW.
Therefore he is I AM.
I hope that gives you just a little bit of the wonder of what God’s Name communicates about God’s infinitude. His limitlessness. His omnipotence and omnipresence. If you get that, then you will be struck by a very interesting aspect to John’s Gospel:
You see, those two words - I AM - come up in John a lot.
He notices how many times Jesus would strategically use those two words. Maybe it was so subtle that most times, no one noticed it. I mean, how many times a day do you say those words together: I AM? “I am going to the store,” “I am hungry” etc – a dozen at least. So the other gospel writers don’t pick it out.
But after 60 years of reflection on the most significant 3 years of his life that changed both him and the world, John recollects how intentionally and powerfully those two words showed up in the life story of Jesus. And he wrote them down to nail down the same point that the other gospel writers had already made.
Now, many times our English Bibles don’t even let us in on how often John records those two small words. In the Greek they are simply EGO EIMI. “EGGO” which is where we get our word for? Waffles, that’s right. No, EGO… It means simply “I”. And eimi is the verb “to be.” Often the translators feel it necessary to add a word for readability, but in many cases, the Greek just has those two simple words:
I AM.
For example,
S when Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4, at one point the woman says, “someday, I know the Messiah will make everything clear to us.” Jesus looks at her and most bibles say, “I that speak to you, am he.” But the literal translation would be
S “I AM that speaks to you.”
S when the disciples are caught in a storm in chapter 6, we read that they’re terrified to see the figure of a ghost walking on the water toward them. But over the water they hear the familiar voice of the rabbi which your bible records as saying, “It is I, don’t be afraid!” But the Greek actually says simply:
S “I AM, fear not.”
S in chapter 8 when arguing with the religious leaders, they accuse him of making false claims about himself. He responds by saying - verse 24: “unless you believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins.” The Greek says,
S “unless you believe that I AM, you will indeed die in your sins.”
S he immediately follows this up by saying, “when the Son of Man is lifted up (referring to his crucifixion) you will know that I am he”, or literally…
S “you will know that I AM.”
S in chapter 8, when describing his origins, those two words come up unambiguously and so here almost every translation has Jesus saying,
S “before Abraham was, I AM”.
Now you understand why Jesus made so many of the Jewish people mad! He claimed their God’s NAME for himself. He said, I AM over and over again. With a sort of brazen audacity, he just appropriated God’s name. John doesn’t want you to miss it, so with a sort of sacred redundancy, the refrain gets repeated.
Now we also understand why he writes so boldly in the very first verse:
in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the word WAS GOD. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
John is saying, Jesus is the ETERNAL GOD - made manifest in human skin. That’s how great Jesus is. Jesus isn’t even on the same page as other religious leaders. You can’t use the same scales to compare them.
S Jesus and Krishna? Please.
S Jesus and Mohammed? Mohammed said he had the truth, Jesus said he WAS the truth.
S Jesus and Buddha? Buddha didn’t even know if there was a God. Jesus said, “I and the Father are ONE”
S Jesus and Moses? Moses gave the law, but Jesus was grace and truth personified.
Jesus is far superior to them all, the exact radiance of God’s glory, through whom the Father made the universe, and this Jesus, John says in 10:10
- has come that we all might have Life, Full to the Brim and Overflowing.
So John spends his gospel fleshing this out: If Jesus is the great I AM we should expect him to bring his God Life to us; bring his eternal, every present now, unending kind of Life… to us. In fact, John remembers 7 other times when Jesus made critical statements about who he was again using those words I AM.
S I am the bread of life
S I am the light of the world
S I am the Good shepherd
S I am the true vine.
S I am the way the truth and the life.
S I am the resurrection and the life
RESURRECTION AND LIFE
I can’t cover all those, but I would like to touch on the last one because it concerns a topic of utmost importance to us all: DEATH. No one wants to look at death. When someone dies, we cover up as much of the cold, harsh reality of death as we can. One of the ways we do this is by coming up with euphemisms for it.
S He’s passed away.
S Kicked the bucket.
S His ticket got punched.
S She expired - milk?
Here’s how certain professions have their own death euphemisms.
A writer’s association:
S Lost in translation.
S Permanently Out of Print.
Or computer programmers
S Reformatted by God
S Bought the disk farm
S Information Superhighway Road-kill
Or Star Trek fanatics:
S Sleeps with the Tribbles
S Zeroing out the Tricorder
S Boldly Going… Going... Gone
S Achieving Warp Zero
S Inducing a phase variance in the iso-linear array to contain the tachyon particle overload... if you know what I mean!
But when DEATH hits us in the face, we realize why we joke so much about it. The philosophers say, Death is the main fact of life. We live our lives as one great diversion to distract us from the reality of that FACT and that we are racing towards it at great speed.
John 11 is a story about death. There we meet a family very close to Jesus – a group of siblings, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Word comes to Jesus that one of them – Lazarus is deathly ill. Jesus’ response:
This sickness will not end in death, but will be used to spotlight the Father, and me, his Son.
But guess what? Lazarus dies! SO did Jesus get it wrong? What did he mean? When Jesus gets there Lazarus’ sisters mourn, and get upset with him. Jesus calms Martha with these words, "Your brother will rise again." But she’s confused? What do you mean?
Jesus said to her, 11:25 “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, even though he dies, yet shall he life; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
This is his seventh and GREATEST I AM statement, a culmination of what he’s been saying all through the book of John. “I said I was the Truth, the Vine, the Door, the Bread, the Shepherd, the Light! Get this, Martha I am LIFE! It’s founded in ME! And no other. Resurrection Life – I can make a person live again.”
Sure, there is still a moment of physical demise (Although he die) but it’s not an end, it’s a door (yet shall he life). Like a sleep. That’s what the early Christians started to call death: sleep. One more sleep and it will be Christmas, we tell our children. Sleep is the door you go through to wake in a new day. Sleep is not an end. Though he dies, yet shall he live - if he trusts in me!
Then Jesus saw her weeping, and the weeping of all the other mourners… and John says, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled – John uses unique terminology to describe the almost angry, indignant way Jesus approached Lazarus’ tomb. A cave with a stone laid across the entrance.
Jesus weeps loudly there. Friends, Jesus knew what it’s like to lose! He mourns evil and pain and death too, he doesn’t like it, he’s not the source of it. It grieves him, it angers him too**! Jesus is looking out at Mary and that crowd and they’re wailing in grief and he weeps with them, but then, another part of him John says, is seething. Seething! Burning with hot anger.
Why? Because this is a showdown. You can almost see the tumbleweeds flowing through that graveyard. Why? This is an ultimate confrontation. I mean He’s our hero, and the bad guy dressed in black has showed up in that spectacle of mourners. And Jesus sees in the tears his enemy, the evil of death, it’s unnaturalness, it’s tyranny. It is DEATH that is the object of his rage, and behind death, the One who has the power of death.
Friends, naturalism teaches us that death is normal and it’s all there is. But the Bible says, death is not normal, and it wasn’t meant to be the end, or a fear inducing thing. Listen:
Heb 2:14-15 Because we are human beings — made of flesh and blood — Jesus also became flesh and blood by being born in human form. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the Devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he deliver those who have lived all their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.
So he advances to the tomb like a liberator preparing for a showdown. But Martha would like to save Jesus from embarrassment. “The body will smell,” she says... Thank you for that moving lesson in biology, Martha! Yes, death stinks. It really does. Last time I looked the statistics were holding about even on this, about 1 in every 1 person dies. But step aside Martha: Jesus has a point to prove, that death was not normal, it was not meant to be final for creatures made in the Image of God. It was the enemy. And he was ready to do battle with it...
So they took away the stone and when he had prayed, Jesus called in a loud voice,
"Lazarus, come out!"
And the dead man came out! His hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them,
Take off the grave clothes and let him go.
You know, these days we sugar coat death for everyone. Avoid it, pretend it’s not scary. The Bible does affirm that every soul lives on after death… but for folks who want no part of God’s life, they will be obliged – in hell. Life in Hell is properly called a second death in the Bible, because every quality that marks life will be absent. Those who die, die eternally – their souls are destroyed, Jesus said.
But those who accept Christ’s God LIFE don’t stay dead.
Friend, ultimately, the whole exercise with Lazarus is an illustration of some greater lesson. Obviously! Why? Because Lazarus dies AGAIN! He’s not still alive in Israel some place is he? No, he died again. To show us that we may live again – in heaven! Jesus is able to make death NON-PERMANENT. That he had authority over it.
For us who follow Christ, death no longer stings and it no longer stinks! Death is a door. We sleep but we are still Alive - made so by his grace - and we wake up in his arms!
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