SERIES: The Gospel of John
SERMON: Believing Is More than Seeing
SCRIPTURE: John 12:37-50
SPEAKER: Brad Harper
DATE: April 18, 1993
Introduction: In the mid-1920’s, America seemed to be on the way to its greatest hour. There had been some tough times during the First World War, but spirits were soaring as the economy seemed impervious to decline. For many, there was hope for a bright future as the stock market soared and the conventional investment wisdom seemed to prove that you really could get something for almost nothing. People partied and waved their proverbial palm branches in worship of the arrival of the American dream. But it was not to be. The foundation of the dream was made of sand and in 1929 the flood waters of economic reality brought the dream to a sudden collapse.
The story of the last week of Jesus’ earthly life is not unlike the crash of `29. For on the heels of the triumphal entry, surely the greatest day of public acclamation for Jesus, John moves us into the deepest days of public desertion. As John pauses at this point in his gospel to summarize Jesus’ public ministry, he exposes for us the shallow commitment of the throng that welcomed Jesus to the city. They were willing to welcome a deliverer king who would save them from the oppression of Rome, but they were not willing to welcome a suffering savior who had come to release them from the bondage of sin. John focuses particularly on the many Jews who had witnessed the miraculous signs Jesus had performed and yet still rejected him. For them, the old adage “seeing is believing” did not apply. For us, the passage teaches that believing is much more than merely seeing.
Certainly, being exposed to the work of Christ is a prerequisite to belief, for, as Paul asks, how can anyone believe in Christ without having heard about him? But it is not enough just to recognize the amazing works of Christ, or even to marvel at them as some of these unbelievers did. The step must be taken from seeing the work of Christ to placing faith in him as Lord. And this step, laments John as he reflects on Christs’ ministry, is exactly the one which most Jews did not take. Notice that John is mystified at how this could be. “Even,” he says, “after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs.” How could they not believe? And as you know from our study of John’s gospel, these signs were no cheap magician’s tricks—changing water into wine, healing a lame man, giving sight to a man born blind, raising a man who had been dead three days. And these were not just miracles. They were the very miracles that the scriptures foretold would be the sign of Messiah, the savior of Israel.
Now a skeptic might look at this large-scale rejection of Jesus and assume that these miracles must have never really happened. But John’s historical record is emphatic. Notice his comments in chapter 11, vs. 47-48: “Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.‘What are we accomplishing?’ they asked. ‘Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.’”
The Jewish leaders had seen the signs and knew that people were being drawn to believe in Jesus. But rather than place their own faith in Christ, they worked hard to discredit him. And in vs. 1 of our passage, the word John uses indicates that the miracles took place right in front of their eyes. Still, John says, they continued, despite miracle after miracle, in unbelief. How is this possible?
First, the Jews rejected Christ because the very scriptures which prophesied the coming of Messiah also prophesied that he would be rejected. The prophecy John quotes here is from Isaiah 53. Now there are other prophecies which reflect the rejection of God’s servant by the Jews, but the prophecy John has chosen perfectly reflects this last rejection of Jesus. If you go back to Isaiah 53 and read this prophecy in context, it shows that the reason the Jews would reject Messiah are the exact reasons that they did indeed reject Jesus. Isaiah speaks of a suffering servant who was to come who would not be a majestic figure, who would be persecuted by the authorities, experience the judgment of God, and die for the sins of the people. Isaiah says, “Who will possibly believe such a thing?” Why would it be so hard to believe? Because such a savior did not fit the categories of the Jewish people’s hopes. They were more interested in the prophecies of a deliverer who would restore Israel to a place of military and political glory. It’s as if at the very moment God is revealing to Isaiah what the Messiah would be like, Isaiah says, “But God, no one will believe that! No one will believe that such a man is the strong arm of the Lord!”
Well, he was right. They would not believe, and they didn’t. Notice back in vs. 34 how they protested, “The real Son of Man must not be crucified! This is not the Son of Man we’re expecting.” The bottom line is this: They rejected the savior as it was predicted they would, because he did not fit their categories for a savior. They were concerned about the power of Rome. He was concerned about the glory of God. They were concerned about the ultimate destiny of the nation of Israel. He was concerned about the ultimate destiny of their souls.
How hard it is for us to accept God on his terms! As selfish humans we struggle to accept reality if it isn’t on our terms. We do this with friends, with our children, even with our spouses. I had a friend years ago when I worked in the snow ski industry in California. For his honeymoon he took his wife to a wonderful ski vacation at Lake Tahoe because that was his idea of a great honeymoon. The only problem was that she hated skiing. So he skied and she sat in the lodge. What a dumb thing to do!
We want life to operate according to our categories. But God doesn’t come to us on the basis of our categories. We have the perfect picture in our minds of how God should orchestrate the circumstances in our lives. But so often it seems that God brings us into a scenario that doesn’t at all resemble our plans. It is painful for us, but the more I read God’s Word, the more I am convinced that he does this to us regularly in order to force us into making a difficult choice. Do we become bitter and reject God because he doesn’t conform to our image of him, or do we trust him even though we sometimes wish he would treat us in different ways?
It was to this place of decision that the Jews had come, and even though they had witnessed his marvelous works, they could not place their faith in him because he did not fit their mold. And as we go on in the passage, we see that as a result of their rejection, God sovereignly blinded their eyes so that they could not believe. Repeated rejection led to the hardening of their hearts. This reality also occurs in the lives of some Christians. I must say that one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed is a believer who has been confronted by Christ with a call to change his thinking or his way of life and has repeatedly rejected that call. There comes a point when God just puts that person on the shelf and says “I’m through with you.” And the joy of salvation deteriorates into bitterness and cynicism.
How often do we find ourselves in a situation where we’re saying “Lord, if you would just do this one thing in my life, then I could really get with your program.” But seeing God work the way we want him to is never enough, as Philip proved when, after three years with Jesus he said, “Lord, just show us the Father and it will be enough for us.” If you’re waiting for Jesus to prove himself according to your categories, you will be disappointed. He proved himself as the suffering servant who died for us. He comes to us as he is and says, “take it or leave it.” Believing him means placing our faith in him when he doesn’t meet our expectations, simply because he is God and we have no one else.
After summarizing the situation of those who saw the great miracles of Jesus but rejected him anyway, John describes another group which, at first glance, seems to stand in stark contrast to the unbelievers. The story of Jewish unbelief has been all bad news to this point. Then John says, “Yet at the same time …,” and our hopes are raised, as it seems he will give us some good news. And, indeed, he does. Not all the Jews rejected Jesus. Many, John says, even among the Jewish leaders believed in Jesus. But even this is a good news/bad news situation, for John tells us that these believers would not confess their faith. They believed Jesus was the promised savior, but they were not willing to express their belief publicly. And so, John shows us that believing in Jesus means more than just believing that he is the savior. It means being willing to confess Christ as Lord.
There were two reasons these believers were unwilling to do this. First, they were afraid. They feared the power of the Pharisees, who had made it clear that they would expel from the synagogue anyone who professed faith in Jesus. So there was a price to pay for public confession—excommunication from the temple, which entailed separation from much of the social and religious life of Israel. It was not a small price to pay. But, if you remember, the blind man who Jesus healed was willing to pay it. In his integrity he was willing to look right at the Pharisees and tell them that if they would deny the one who had saved him, then he had no use for them, no matter what the cost might be.
In the mid 1930’s a young Lutheran pastor in Germany, named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, became increasingly uncomfortable with the willingness of much of the German church to go along with the racist policies of National Socialism. In 1933 he organized the Pastors’ Emergency League to oppose discrimination against Jews. In 1934 he helped form a new movement of churches which would stand for the principles of Jesus and oppose Nazi policies of violence and racism. By 1936 he was declared an “enemy of the State” and removed from his university teaching position.
Bonhoeffer suffered continued oppression until escaping to the U.S. in 1939. But after a month he decided he must return and suffer with German believers. He continued to speak out for Christ and against the government until his arrest in 1943. On April 9, 1945 he was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp, just days before the end of the war. Bonhoeffer knew there was a price to pay for confessing Christ. Interestingly, the title of his most well-known work? The Cost of Discipleship. And the name taken by the church movement he helped form? The Confessing Church.
Friends, there is a cost to confessing Christ. And the cost is on the rise in our country. Last week I was rummaging through my files and found an article I had saved. The title of the article was “Is Christianity on the Wane?” The article quoted historian James Hitchcock of St. Louis University and Tad Ward of Michigan State University. “A religious downswing is coming,” these men said. “There are going to be more and more points of crunch ahead for Christians…. In a rather short time we can expect to see Christians put in decision dilemmas in which their scriptural beliefs run strongly counter to the general will of the people.”
Hitchcock and Ward cited such issues as abortion, euthanasia, and state domination of education, noting that secular humanism would move from a place of seeking tolerance for itself, to “seeking to make its philosophy the only acceptable one in American life.” After reading the article, I turned it over to see that it had been published in the San Jose Mercury News, October 25, 1975. That’s why what these men were predicting does not seem like a prediction of the future, but a present reality.
I believe the fear of confessing Christ and his values in the public arena in this country will continue to grow, and Christians will increasingly be asking themselves if they are willing to pay the price. In this passage, John shows us that the willingness to confess Christ is affected not just by fear of doing so, but by the object of our love. Notice the way John summarizes the sad condition of these believers in vs. 43: “For they loved praise from men more than praise from God.” That may just be the most disastrous corporate epitaph in human history. When believers love the approval of culture more than the approval of God, they are lost. They will lose all capability of confessing Christ to a world which, by its very nature, is hostile to God.
Do people outside this church know you are a Christian? Do your life and words confess Christ at your job, in your neighborhood, and in your schools? I’m not talking about bumper sticker Christianity. I’m talking about a lifestyle of words and deeds that, over time, make it unmistakably clear to those around you that you are a believer in and follower of Jesus Christ. Such confession is a hallmark of the church throughout history. It is the reason the church has always practiced public baptism, a way of confessing Christ which, by the way, you should strongly consider if you have not already done so.
Is it possible to be a Christian and yet refrain from publicly confessing Christ? John does not make that clear in this passage, but he certainly focuses some doubt on it. But the apostle Paul is not unclear when he says in Romans 10, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you shall be saved.” The picture the Bible paints of a true believer is that he not only places his faith in Christ, but that he is willing to confess him before the world.
In the next section of this passage, John moves from his own narration into a discourse by Jesus. And it is here that Jesus takes the definition of belief in him to an even higher level. He begins by emphasizing that to see Jesus is to see God the Father, not just because they are like each other, but because Jesus is God in the flesh. I believe Jesus says this to stress that belief in him is no simple acquiescence to the greatness of a mere man. It is a matter of being confronted with the eternal holy God himself. Here Jesus repeats the confession of John the Baptist that Jesus was God in the flesh who came as a light so that people could see God. Modern cultural perceptions of Jesus, even in the church, can be so shallow. He is Jesus the uncritical acceptor of all people, Jesus the liberator from oppression, Jesus the feminist, Jesus the therapist and psychologist. But Jesus calls to people to recognize him as the living God himself.
What difference should this make? Jesus says that when a person sees him for who he truly is, and believes in him, he will no longer remain in darkness. What is this darkness? Ignorance? No, not in John’s gospel; it’s the evil ways of the world. In vs. 35, Jesus said that the person who walks in this darkness is lost. Believers are those who not only place their faith in Christ as Lord and confess him as Lord, but who walk with Christ as Lord. To be a believer in Jesus is to be transformed, says the apostle Paul, not just by our minds and our perceptions of God being reshaped, but by presenting ourselves daily as living sacrifices to God. It is as “doubting Thomas” showed when he recognized the risen Jesus as Lord and God and fell before him in worship and obedience.
In the 19th century, Charles Sheldon, a pastor who came to realize that true Christianity meant more than correct theological beliefs, wrote the classic In His Steps, in which he asked the simple question, “How would it change the way you live if Jesus were standing right next to you?” Of course, the idea was to help Christians see that being a true believer means recognizing that we are daily in the presence of the Lord of the universe. As such, we must be asking ourselves how we must live our lives each day in the light of his lordship. So it is that Jesus tells us that to believe in him is to come face to face with a holy God. Such a confrontation must cause us to walk in the ways of that holiness.
I want to take a detour here, to provide a kind of postscript, as John does, on Jesus’ attitude towards unbelievers. The entire passage up to this point concentrates on what it means to be a believer in Jesus. But in the last verses Jesus comments on his attitude towards the unbelieving world. Listen as I read vs. 47-50:
“If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. 48 There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day. 49 For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. 50 I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.”
We know from the context of this passage that the one who hears Christ’s words is one who not only hears them but recognizes their truth and rejects them anyway. Amazingly, Jesus says his purpose in the world is not to judge such a person. Repeating the affirmation he made to Nicodemus in John 3, Jesus says that the Son of Man came into the world not to condemn, but to save.
If Christ himself did not come into the world to judge it, but to bring it the positive and powerful message of salvation, then we, as Christ’s ambassadors, should be careful to see our mission in the same light. God has not given believers the responsibility of judging the unbelieving world. But sometimes we act as if he has. Indeed, some of us seem to have refined judgment into an art form. It seems that sometimes it is easier take refuge in our self-contained Christian community and judge the world than it is to take the message of Christ’s love into that hostile world by word and prayer and action. I sometimes wonder if we were to spend as much time praying for Bill and Hillary Clinton as we do judging them, things might be different, at least in our attitudes.
Certainly, this world is in need of judgment, and it will be judged. But not by our condemnatory words. The world will be judged in the end by the words of Jesus. As people bring their excuses before the Lord of history in the last day, his words will silence them all. “I am a religious person,” some may claim. They will hear the words, “You must be born again.” Some may say, “Lord, I am a broad-minded person. There must be other ways to heaven.” They will hear, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.”
God has given us a message to speak, but it is not primarily one of judgment. May we be able to say about our message, as Jesus does here: “Not my message, but God’s. Not my method, but God’s. Not condemnation, but eternal life.” Friends, all of this is not to say that we should not condemn immorality and sin when we see it, for as we have seen in our current Sunday night series, “Holes in the Moral Ozone,” we must be able to recognize immorality and stand against it. But on the whole, Christians should be known for their positive message of God’s love and hope, not the negative message of condemnation. Nor is the church’s message to be the naive philosophy of positive thinking, which is devoid of the reality of sin, but it should be the message that sin is forgiven.
Conclusion: So, what does it mean to be a believer in Jesus Christ? What John tells us here about belief is nothing earth-shattering, or even new. For we have been hearing it from Jesus all through John’s gospel. Clearly, belief in Jesus is not being one of the seventy some odd percent of Americans who say Jesus was the Son of God. It is not putting “honk if you love Jesus” bumper stickers on your car. It is not even coming to church every week and being attentive during the sermon.
Being a believer in Jesus is Martin Luther, standing before a hostile crowd and saying “Here I stand. I can do nothing else.” It is Hugh Latimer being burned at the stake by Bloody Mary and yelling to his friend Nicholas Ridley, who was also burning, “Be strong Ridley. We will this day shine a light in England which will never be put out.” It is Dietrich Bonhoeffer returning to Germany to speak the truth in a country that did not want to hear it.
In essence, believing in Jesus is martyrdom. It is the giving up of our lives for Christ. It means trusting Jesus fully when we don’t fully understand him. It means confessing him in word and action before a hostile world and being willing to pay the inevitable price. It means standing before the living Lord and offering up every area of our lives to his Lordship. According to Jesus, believing in him means saying, “Lord, I know who you are, I believe in you, and I have decided to follow you.”
Song: “I have decided to follow Jesus”
Tags:
Belief
Confessing Christ
Walking with Christ
Judgment