John 7:14-24

Jesus Teaches at the Festival

14 Not until halfway through the Festival did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. 15 The Jews there were amazed and asked, "How did this man get such learning without having been taught?"

16 Jesus answered, "My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. 17 Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. 18 Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him. 19 Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law. Why are you trying to kill me?"

20 "You are demon-possessed," the crowd answered. "Who is trying to kill you?"

21 Jesus said to them, "I did one miracle, and you are all amazed. 22 Yet, because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs), you circumcise a boy on the Sabbath. 23 Now if a boy can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing a man's whole body on the Sabbath? 24 Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly."



Dig Deeper

I once had a friend that led the singles ministry in his church. We were having a long conversation about different aspects of the ministry especially as it related to working with single people. He pointed out that one of the constant complaints that he heard from the young men in his ministry was that there just weren't any single ladies available in their particular Christian community to date. He thought this was an odd complaint because there were actually a lot of incredibly spiritual single women that were available and willing to enter into a dating relationship with Christian men. He said that all of the men claimed that they wanted to find someone who was especially spiritual, but he just didn't believe that that was the case. I thought that perhaps he was being a little hard on the young men until he recounted a bemusing incident. A young lady that had left God and their church quite a while before had begun to come back into the fellowship. She was still going through a lot of spiritual struggles but she was officially welcomed back into the community one Sunday. The thing about this young lady was, that despite her spiritual struggles, she was extremely beautiful. My friend chuckled as he recounted how all the single men in the church nearly tripped over one another as they made their way to "encourage" this sister by asking her out on a date. They had all claimed that they wanted to date spiritually strong and focused women, but they failed to notice sisters like that all around them, because that really wasn't what they wanted, truth be told.

Jesus has stressed over and again that he is only doing what the Father has sent him to do. He does not do his own work, he doesn't testify about himself, and he doesn't even speak his own words. Everything that he does comes directly from the Father. Just as surely as the Father sent him, people can only come to him if the same Father testified about him and sent people to him through his word. This is exactly what Jesus said the Father had done. Yet, there was a problem. The people of Israel had waited for God to send his Messiah. They said that that was what they wanted. Now he was here, but they were soundly rejecting him. The reality was that, despite their claims, they didn't really want and weren't really looking for what God was doing. If they did, they would accept his teachings. What they claimed to have wanted was right there in their midst, but that wasn't really what they wanted, truth be told.

Jesus finally did go up to the festival in Jerusalem but he intentionally did not go with the pilgrims and did not go as a public part of his ministry. He began to teach, presumably in one of the outer porticoes of the Temple but probably not in the Temple itself where the festival of Tabernacles was still being observed. As Jesus enters into Jerusalem and begins to teach, there are two concerns or questions that are raised. The first was brought up in verse 12. Jesus was a teacher that was deceiving the people. This doesn't sound like a significant charge, but it was in Judaism. Beginning in Deuteronomy 13, and continuing throughout the Old Testament, Israel was warned that false teachers and prophets would come, testing them to find out whether they truly loved the Lord their God. They were to adamantly reject these false teachers and anyone associated with them. They were, in fact, to destroy the false teachers with impunity. Deceiving God's people was a serious charge, worthy of death, and would not be tolerated.

The other issue at hand is how did this man get such learning without having been taught. It would not have been unique for a Jewish man to know the Scriptures well, in fact that would have been expected. What was disconcerting to the Jewish leaders was how Jesus could apparently teach the Scriptures and ask pointed questions the way only a well-trained rabbi or Pharisee could. He hadn't been trained by anyone that they knew of, so where did all of this ability and knowledge come from? In addition to that, no Jewish teacher or rabbi would ever claim that his knowledge was original to himself. They would always appeal to other authorities or rabbis but Jesus did not offer any such verification except to say that he was telling the truth and had come from the Father.

Yet, his teachings were not his own. In the Judaism of his time, Jesus would have been immediately rejected if he had made such a claim. He had no mentor or rabbi to appeal to, his teachings came directly from God. Thus, Jesus was claiming that his teachings were not those of another rabbi but was direct knowledge from the Father himself. He was no false teacher, they were deceived listeners.

You see, it all comes down to the will of the Father. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve chose, at the behest of the Serpent, to do their own will rather than God's. When you boil it all down, sin is simply doing our own will rather than God's. The long, sad history of a sinful world is the history of human beings doing their own will rather than doing the will of the God who made us. Verse 17 is the key to what Jesus is saying here. Those who really are interested in doing the will of the Father rather than their own will, will accept Jesus' teachings and recognize that they come from the Father. Those who reject Jesus' teachings, do so because, when it comes right down to it, they would rather do what they will rather than God's will. It should come as no surprise that the motto of one of the most sinister and evil (yet also one of the most well-followed with self-proclaimed disciples from the members of the Beatles to Timothy Leary who began the drug revolution in America) Satanists of the 20th century, Alesiter Crowley, was "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

The reality is that when people do their own will, they are doing for their own personal gain or glory. When people reject God by rejecting Jesus, they were exalting their own desires and will over that of the Father's. In contrast, nothing Jesus did was out of his own will. His brothers wanted him to be exactly the kind of religious leader that gained personal glory and did things that were beneficial to him. Jesus wanted none of that. He was not doing things that were personally beneficial, quite the opposite. False prophets and teachers almost always engage in teachings that benefit them personally. Jesus, though, was doing things that benefited the Father and followed His will. In fact, any version of Christian or religious teachings that are based mostly on benefiting the individual, with only a thin veneer of doing God's will, will be clearly false to those who truly seek the will of God rather than their own benefit.

The main problem with clinging to our own will and things that are comfortable to or benefit ourselves, is that when we put a value on things of this age, we discount the values of the things of the new creation. Jesus' critics could not recognize the new creation that the Father was enacting through Jesus' words because they were holding too tightly to the old. One simply must die to themselves and their own will in order to recognize, appreciate, and embrace the values of the age to come and the will of God when we encounter it.

They have so embraced the old to the exclusion of the new that they have failed to accurately see that they have never, and never truly could uphold the law. The leaders themselves have demonstrated that they are incapable of keeping the law by the fact that they have plotted to kill Jesus. Moses gave them the law, they have not kept it, but now they want to kill him for supposedly breaking it (we can infer that this conversation has to do with the controversy still boiling over the man from chapter 5 that Jesus healed). The crowd, made up of primarily pilgrims, claim to know nothing of this plot and accuse Jesus of the blind ramblings of a demon-possessed man.

Jesus puts the whole issue in perspective by appealing all the way back to Moses. He had given two commandments that could apparently come into contradiction. Jews were supposed to keep the Sabbath but also circumcise their sons on the eighth day. What if those days coincided? It had been decided that it was permissible to perform the circumcision because it was the greater good. How then could they argue against healing a man completely on the Sabbath? They were clinging so tightly to the old order of doing things, that when a moment of the new creation broke in as Jesus healed this man, they simply refused to comprehend the truth. If they had judged the situation correctly they would have realized that Jesus was fulfilling the purposes of God not breaking them. This demonstrates the truth that it is quite possible to hold so tightly to faulty ideas, as religious as they might sound, that we can miss the truth, even when it is right in front of our face.



Devotiional Thought

Have you ever been tempted to be like the Jewish leaders here and emphasize a rule or tradition over the greater good of enabling God's new creation to break through in someone's life? Standards and beliefs are good but they must be tempered, balanced and placed in proper relation to God's overall purposes of reconciling people to Himself through His community of those who have entered into the life of Christ.