Clough John Lesson 24

An Example of Faith – John 4:39-54

This portion of Scripture, John 4, falls in the first part of the Gospel in which John is showing the contrast and the reception of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have studied from John 1:19-2:11 the first recorded week in Christ’s ministry. From 2:12-3:36 we have the first Jerusalem trip, when Jesus Christ confronts the authorities with His claims and we have the opportunity in that portion to observe a fundamental discussion that occurs between Jesus and a member of the religious establishment, and also establishes for all time the modus operandi of Christian apologetics. From John 4 on we have Christ’s ministry after He left Jerusalem in the country side, the ministry outside of Judea. It is to show by face to face situations intimate relationships involving Christ’s glory. The glory that John is interested that we see in Christ’s character is only visible to those willing to pause long enough to meditate upon the text. These details don’t hit you all at once; you have to work with the text to see what he is getting at.

The truth that we have seen so far, that Jesus addresses the woman and the disciples, the woman He talks about water; the disciples He talks about food. The woman is an unbeliever and therefore He makes the issue one of grace to this unbeliever, that salvation is completely by grace and is completely a gift. He makes this over and over. Water is given, freely given, and so is our salvation freely given. But then when He talks to the disciples about food He changes the subject; no longer water, now food. Water is given, food is worked for, and the truth that He communicates in this story is the same truth as in Ephesians 2:8, Paul taught the same truth here in a different way, nevertheless the same truth. Paul, in this verse which is an old, old memory verse in many Christian circles, “For by grace have you been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, [9] Not of works, lest any man should boast. [10] For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them.” Now verses 8 and 9 speak of the water; that is what Jesus Christ has taught the woman; “For by grace are you saved.” The woman was not saved because she was a Samaritan; she was not saved because she was particularly bad or particularly good. She was not saved because she was educated or because she was uneducated. She was not saved because she was a woman or in spite of the fact she was a woman. She was saved because she responded to the claims of Jesus Christ, period, no other issue.

And in Ephesians 2:8 Paul again makes the statement, “For by grace have you been saved through faith, it is not of yourselves.” And that means that your salvation does not hinge upon anything within yourself. It does not hinge on having some titillating emotional experience. It does not hinge upon some crisis that you have had in your life. It is solely a result of God’s grace through Jesus Christ. Now after discussing the water, Jesus Christ comes to food; that’s taught in verse 10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” So what Paul says is first you have the grace; grace enters you into the plan of salvation; grace gives you a new creation. And because grace gives you a new creation it means that you are created to do something and you can’t understand what salvation is for unless you go back to the original creation and ask why the original creation. After God created man out of the dust of the earth, what was man created to do? What did He say? He said you are created to subdue the earth; you are, in other words, created for works, you are created to produce, and therefore Paul, following the first creation says the second creation is like unto the first; the second creation you are born again and you are born again and created anew for good works, divine good, God’s good, good that reflect Christ’s righteousness. That is the end goal of salvation. And this is the measure then, whether true salvation has occurred.

It is legitimate to ask questions, whether certain conversion experiences are genuine conversion experiences or whether they’re just psychological conversions that have happened because of group pressure exerted on that individual. And altogether today too often you find, if you examine honestly, evangelistic situations people are experiencing psychological conversion that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Word of God. They don’t know enough to be converted because whoever was doing the evangelizing has never clarified the issue, has never given enough content, has never repeated himself 2500 times before the person understands what has been said. You don’t invite Jesus into your heart, Jesus Christ is not a great psychological aspirin; conversion is not some sort of psychological transformation and Freudian substitute. The regeneration spoken of in Scripture happens at the instant in time that the individual trusts in Christ’s finished for their moral rebellion against God’s authority and that’s it. And a person can be converted driving their car down the street; a person can be converted driving a B-52 and 40,000 feet, a person can be converted walking down the street, a person can be converted sleeping, a person can be converted standing up. I say sleeping because there are some people that just automatically zip out when they hit the pew here and they always have and always will; I’ve seen some people sit in the same place in the pew week after week after week and they go off into this Sunday zombaic trance just after the last hymn is sung and somehow miraculously awake from the dead at the benediction. Now how this manages to go on I don’t know, I kind of feel for them, poor people probably don’t get sleep at home and this is the best place, everybody else is quiet around them, there’s a reasonable degree of order and so it probably is a place they can catch a few zzz’s in quiet. But we have people like that and somewhere along the line every once in a while I notice that some doctrine comes out of their mouth and it got in there some place and I don’t know how it did so I just presume that the Holy Spirit is being very gracious and by some osmosis the Word of God has gotten into their soul, but that’s the exception.

In most normal cases it requires concentration and attention. And the reason is that we area God’s workmanship created for a role in history and He expects us to act out our faith. It doesn’t secure your salvation any more, any more than Adam hoeing a few weeds out of the Garden of Eden would secure his first creation; it didn’t add to the solidarity of the creation because Adam and Eve were pulling weeds out after the fall. But it confirmed their position in creation, that that was what they were to do, so also then good works ought to follow Christian conversion. And that’s what the food is all about in the discourse to the disciples. Remember they came down from this area near Sychar, they came down from Sychar to Jacob’s well in the valley and they were more concerned about eating than they were about God’s Word.

Now in John 4:39 we come to the result. Remember what Jesus has done, He’s gotten the woman out of the way for a while and the reason He got her out of the way is because He had another subject He wanted to talk about in private to His disciples before that woman went up the hill, evangelized and brought down a mob of people. The disciples were in no shape to witness for Christ while they were chewing on their sandwiches at Jacob’s well, and they were in no shape to do it because they were bound in a religious legalism. You remember that one of their shots upon coming back from Sychar with the food that day was to find their Beloved Rabbi speaking with a woman in public, which violated the norms and standards set by Judaism for a good rabbi. A good rabbi, as I read to you last time, could not be caught in public talking with his own wife, leave some strange woman and leave alone that kind of a woman alone at the well.

So Jesus Christ challenged a legalistic concept, a concept which His disciples held and obviously a concept that was ruining the ministry of these disciples. You see, legalism always that, it always destroys the Christian witness. It always confuses the issue; it always puts on a very, very poor front to the non-Christian. He never can understand what’s going on because there is so much legalism. Well, Christians don’t do this and Christians don’t do that and Christians don’t do this, Christians don’t do this. You ought to be a pastor for some time, you’ll see what Christians do. Christians do anything an unbeliever can do except he can do it better. He has enough of the Word to be more skillful at whatever he does. So the point remains that Christians can do anything, and when you start saying Christians can’t do this and Christians can’t do that, Christians ought not to be there and Christians ought not to do this, what you’re saying to the unbeliever and how it comes across to him is well, I’ll never become a Christian because that means I can’t do this and I can’t do that. And that’s not an issue with them at that point. What is an issue with the unbeliever is whether or not he recognizes his true state before God and what God has done about that true moral state for him. That’s the issue, that’s the basic issue, and anything you add to that confuses the issue, whether it’s some apparently harmless thing like praying and inviting Jesus into their heart or whether it’s coming down an aisle, all those things may or may not be used by the Holy Spirit but they are not part of the good news, they are not the gospel. The gospel is what Christ has done for that individual, and that’s the extent of the gospel; that is the full gospel, there is no post-salvation additions to that gospel.

Now when this gospel is going to be communicated to Sychar and this village it has to be communicated by a woman who is grace oriented. I want you to notice this early in the ministry, it is a woman that communicates the Word of God. You had a situation where at least four disciples could have witnessed to the village of Sychar but didn’t. And here you have one woman who takes on the whole job herself. And the reason this woman can do this is because she has no preconceived notions about how righteous she is. She isn’t going to be embarrassed as they will later on do to her in this passage when they make some snotty remark her way because by this time the woman has the well that springs up into everlasting life and she is not immune to social hurts but these no longer cut deeply into her soul any longer because she has stabilized her basic need in life. It doesn’t men that a person gets a thick skin when they become a Christian but it does mean, if their eyes are on Jesus Christ they have stability when people start throwing snotty remarks, as this woman demonstrates in the passage tonight.

So it says in John 4:39, “And many of the Samaritans of that city,” “that city” of course is Sychar, it is one village among many. If you want to see the follow up to this particular revival read Acts 8 where you have a Samaritan Pentecost, the second time that tongues are mentioned in the book of Acts is mentioned because the gospel spills over outside the camp of the Jews into the Samaritans and therefore it has to be authenticated, and the only time you see tongues ever in the book of Acts is when you have the gospel going into a new area, and particularly a new racial area. That’s the only time tongues are ever noticed in the book of Acts. In fact, there’s an argument that can be done that not all those believers ever did speak with tongues, only about twelve on the day of Pentecost, the disciples.

So you have the tongues phenomenon later occurring at Samaria when the church reaches that area, but for this time there’s kind of a preliminary revival in this one lone village of Sychar. They “believed on Him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.” Now when that woman went up the hill to talk to those men, she ran great risks, personal risks, not physically but mentally. She would have to walk up that hill, confront men who knew what kind of a woman she was, and have to say to those men that this man down at the well told me all that I have ever have done. What more vulnerable way to preach the gospel than that way. Now how could this girl pull that thing off? Because she was secure; she was basically a secure individual, her needs had been met by the Lord Jesus Christ and she wasn’t going to be swayed by social pressure. Social pressure didn’t quite have the pressure it used to have in her life because now she was oriented to Christ. Her status quo didn’t depend upon the men of the village accepting her. Her image of herself was one that came out of the Word of God and was gracious. So she was basically a very stable individual, and she walked up there and she told the men this and we went over that last week, how she did it, all this time Jesus is preparing down at the bottom of the hill the disciples for the result of this woman’s ministry. At this point there is only one woman who is reaping the harvest. The forum disciples are inoperative down at the bottom of the hill getting straightened out.

John 4:40, “So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them: and he abode there two days.” So you have the attraction to the person of Christ acting as its own magnet. Jesus Christ did not walk into Sychar with advanced math; didn’t have commercials on the radio station, He didn’t have any commercials, any advertisements, nothing. Jesus Christ focused on His own character and there’s a principle here that can apply to your job, it can apply to a service, a Christian service that you may be involved in, it can apply to a local church, it can apply to yourself as an individual, and that is something that occurs again and again in John, and that is that glorification that he’s talking about, in this case glorification of Christ, that glorification proceeds from the inside out.

Now let me show you some illustrations of that. In the Nicodemus discourse back in Jerusalem, what had happened? Did Jesus go seek Nicodemus out? Not at all. What happened? Jesus Christ said something at a point in time in front of a lot of people; Jesus Christ did something in front of a lot of people and the natural result was that this man came to seek Him out. Here at the well Jesus Christ talks to one woman, that’s all, just one woman, as a result the whole village comes to Him and the more they come to Him the more they see of Him, the more they see of Him the more they want of Him, the more they want of Him the greater their faith is growing.

Now what do we mean by glorification proceeds from the inside out? Just this; Jesus Christ let people discover His character; He didn’t push His character on other people. Now that’s a very valuable lesson to learn in life. Some of you cannot relax in a personal relationship with individuals, whether it is some candidate for right man/right woman you think or whether it’s some business relationship where you’re hustling for a promotion, you can’t relax and you’re always gumming up the works by trying to push your own image, your own character onto this other person. Now if you’d just back off and relax and trust the Lord with the relationship and let the person discover you as you are, and that goes for on the job. The Lord is in charge of promotions and if you do a good job as unto the Lord, whether your manager, whether your overseer is watching you or isn’t watching you, whether you think this is going to get on the report or isn’t going to get on the report is not the issue. You, on your own, before the Lord, do the best job you can; He sees that you’re doing the best job you can, and sooner or later the right people will notice. But you don’t worry about whether the right people will notice, you just keep cranking away doing your job. And you just trust the Lord that people will notice. And you young people that are looking around for Miss Right and Miss wrong and Mr. right and so on, this applies to you. You don’t have to get uptight because you think oh my gosh, I’m 20 years old now and I’m getting beyond maritable age, and I’m in a big panic, you do your job spiritually as unto the Lord and run your life and subdue it as unto the Lord and the right person will notice. There have been some couples married here in LBC and they are fine examples of this, they didn’t go around hustling to find out who was going to see them, parade up and down the aisle a couple of times before the service to make sure that everyone knows they’re there. They didn’t do that; circumstances just worked out and these people met and that was it. Now that’s the way the Lord works.

And here in this situation of John 4 you see the same kind of thing. This woman went up there and she told these people about Christ. Christ didn’t push Himself on the village; all He did was stop His lunch and talk to a woman. It was as natural as that and your witnessing opportunities ought to be as natural as that. On the lunch hour, or some other thing, you do that job, take advantage of that opportunity as God opens the door and you will have people coming down the hills wanting to see what you have to say too. It will always work that way, but this is a basic lesson in life and it is a basic lesson in Scripture: you don’t get anywhere trying to sell yourself to somebody because you get ahead of yourself every time. And sooner or later this other person is going to find out and they’re going to see that all is not what it appears to be on the cover and you’re going to have disappointment. If you’re in a local Christian group then you ought to make your needs known and so on but keep your advertising low key.

People find out about you, you have to let your name be around a little bit but people will find out, but don’t go pushing yourself, doing this, doing that, our group has bigger balloons than your group, and the boy/girl ratio is better over here so come on over here, that kind of stuff. You don’t find that in Scripture and every time you resort to those kinds of gimmicks it shows two things. It shows number one God isn’t big enough to solve your problem obviously, as far as you’re concerned, you have to add to His work, and the second thing that it shows as far as the unbeliever is concerned, God isn’t there and working because obviously you are no different than the non-Christian businessman advertising for customers. Where’s there difference? There ought to be a difference and that’s the point that Christ is making here.

These people come down quite naturally; this whole thing flows. Christ lets His own words and works speak and that’s all. And people can take it or they can leave it. Don’t worry if someone isn’t sold, you do a good job and you have good orientation on your job, you speak your peace and tell in a gracious way how things ought to be done, and someone doesn’t like it and you’re right, they’ll find out sooner or later. The roof may cave in before but the will find out, sooner or later. Time always vindicates character…always! A person who is maligned, who is criticized, will always have the advantage if they can just cool it for a while and let the Lord work with the situation. This is David and the Psalms. Lord, these people speak against me and they speak against me; quiet them, he says in Psalm 13. And what does God say? David, I’m not going to quiet them because you’re asking me to terminate history, I can’t quiet them at this point and not quiet all history. I’m going to let them go ahead and speak but David I’m going to make a place of safety for you that you’ll be safe from them while your character shines forth; you just trust Me for that. So these are the kinds of lessons that you want to see as Christ witnesses to His own character and in turn as we as ambassadors witness for Him. Let the character shine out, don’t get ahead of yourself by putting your lip in front of your life. And that’s what’s happening here and what would have happened had the disciples not been briefed.

So they come down the hill, they beseech that he stay with them, and notice what has automatically happened by the end of verse 40. By the end of verse 40 one of the great prejudices between the Samaritan and Jew has been dissolved. Now was that sociological change, for that’s what it is, that’s what a modern sociologist would drop his teeth over. How did Jesus change the mores of a rural Samaritan village within a matter of 15 minutes. Age-long mores that were there for years. How did Christ ever do it? What sociological manipulation did He do? What kind of a deal did He work on these people? Absolutely nothing, He just showed His own character and they were so impressed by what they saw that the social pressures dissolved. That’s how Christ… you see Him smashing the legalism of His own disciples and then He turns around and He smashes the legalism of the Samaritans against the Jew. And so they invite Him to live with them for two days. How’s that for breaking down prejudices. Did it happen by crusading over the issue? It did not. How did those prejudices dissolve? By centering on the person of Christ and that’s how it will always dissolve and can’t be dissolved any other way.

John 4:41, “And many more believed because of his own words,” this is an added verse to show the principle that glorification comes from the inside out. The longer they were exposed to His character the more His character vindicated itself; their faith grew the closer they got. They were not deluded the more they got to know Christ, the more they got to know Christ the more impressed they were, and that’s the difference between Christ and all false Christ’s. False Christ’s have an initial allure; people can become infatuated with false Christ’s and they have, think of the Germans in the 1930s if you want a good example close by. People become infatuated but after a decade what happened to the infatuation? It was shown for what it was. All right, the Scriptures argue exactly the opposite, the longer the time of exposure to Jesus Christ the more impressed people become. And that ought to be a reminder as to your own personal attitude toward the Word of God. The Word of God is Christ’s Word to you; the Word of God reveals Christ’s character and the longer you are exposed to the Word the more impressed you ought to become.

And if after a long time of exposure to the Word of God you are not becoming more impressed you have some very serious questions to ask yourself, like for example, where am I spiritually. If I can think and take into my brain God’s own thoughts from the pages of His own Word and not walk away after months of this, after years of this, with a stronger faith and more impressed, there is something drastically wrong, and I mean drastically wrong with that kind of a person. The point is somebody can walk to the Scriptures and walk away from the Scriptures with a short exposure but people who have been exposed for long periods of time and are not impressed, they must be insulating their souls in some way. They must be at their own deepest root completely apostate. So watch it and ask yourself how many years have you been exposed to the Word and what’s been your growth? How impressed are you with the [can’t understand word]. Do you act like a little baby Christian that needs your hand held every five minutes? Do you need a gimmick? Do you need to be entertained? Or is the Word of God sufficient? Those are some serious question and that’s a test of your own spiritual maturity.

All right, so Jesus and His disciples stayed and the Samaritans believed more. And then of course they have to cut the woman more, John 4:42. “And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.” This is kind of to put her in her place, you can see them rejoicing; it’s also an admission of the fact of glorification for saints from the inside out; the more they’ve seen Christ the more they believe but it also is putting the woman in her place. And of course we don’t have her response, we can only go by her initial response, she didn’t mind it, she just rode with the punch and moved on.

John 4:43, we shift the scene. “Now after two days he departed thence, and went into Galilee.” I’m going to four slides of the trip that Jesus Christ took so you get an idea of the background and become familiar with passages of Scripture. Here’s our map, here’s Sychar; Jesus Christ and the disciples leave Sychar and move north along this road, the ancient road is in the same place the modern road is. They go all the way to Nazareth; notice this hill country; this hill country is Galilee; don’t think of Galilee as just the Sea of Galilee; Galilee is all the way over to the coast, al this mountainous area is Galilee. So the disciples come up the trunk route, hit Nazareth and keep on going, the road goes right through Nazareth, over this mountain ridge and over here to Cana. And this is the place where all this is going to take place that you are not about to see. They’ve descended out of those mountains, I showed the terrain of Mount Ebal and Gerizim, you’ve seen the area and terrain of Samaria. Just south of Nazareth is the home of Jonah the prophet and that village is important because Nathanael says to Jesus there’s no good thing come out of Nazareth and other people would say there’s never been a prophet out of Galilee. Wrong! Right from this village came Jonah. Over here you have the village of Cana, that’s where the wedding feast took place and that’s where the event you’re about to hear took place.

[John 4:44, “For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country.”]

John 4:45, He went into Galilee, “Then when he was come into Galilee, the Galileans received him, having seen all the things that he did at Jerusalem at the feast: for they also went unto the feast.” Now verse 45, as we’re going to see very shortly, is sarcasm. It’s a deeply sarcastic verse. It’s sarcasm directed by John the Apostle at the Galileans. See, he starts out saying isn’t it sweet, the Galileans received Him, and he uses the word dekomai, and that word in the Greek means to welcome, it’s the word to receive in 1 Corinthians 2, “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God.” That “receive not” is dekomai. He doesn’t welcome spiritual things. So the word has “welcome,” and he says the Galileans welcome, they sure did, and then he lets you down with a sarcasm, “having seen all the things that He did at Jerusalem,” and this is going to explain a remark that Jesus makes that sounds completely out of context, in fact it sounds downright rude, what Jesus answers to the nobleman unless you have this context. Verse 45 is setting us up for something that’s coming, so just take it from me right now that it’s going to turn out this way, it’s sarcasm. This is not an arbitrary interpretation, it is a sarcastic reference to why these Galileans were acting the way they were.

John 4:46, “So Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine. And there was a certain nobleman, whose son was sick at Capernaum.” Now Capernaum is further northeast; here’s the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum is located here. We’ve come across the valley of Jezreel to Nazareth to Cana and here is Capernaum. So over at Capernaum, about 20-30 miles away this nobleman’s son is, imperfect tense, was in a state of sickness, some fever producing illness, we’re not told what. But the interesting thing is not the son but the father. If you’ve had a little Greek, you see this word, basilokos and that should remind you of a basic vocabulary word which you should have learned the first year of Greek, the word for kingdom. And that word doesn’t just mean a wealthy man, it’s not a nobleman; what that word means is he is a member of the royal court. He is part of the king’s administration. That’s what’s going to be very significant about this next incident that happens. The oddest people show up in the Gospel of John. First you have Nicodemus, then this woman at the well, and now of all people you have an insider, inside the administration of Herod Antipas. And who is Herod Antipas? He’s the man who is very shortly going to kill John the Baptist. So within the high up in the political administration of King Herod you have this man whose son is sick.

And I want you to see how God works this out. No matter how high an office this man had in the state, he is still a creature. Remember we said how Jesus always meets people on the common ground of their creature hood. Remember at the well He didn’t start in with now lady, what belief do you have about God. He didn’t have any common ground with here in the area of faith; the common ground He had with that woman was that they both as creatures needed water. All right; so here we have common ground, the nobleman, and what is the common ground? He’s a creature and his son is about to die. It doesn’t matter now whether he is a high official in King Herod’s administration or not, his son is going to die and be just as dead, regardless of his father’s assets. Nothing his father has will save his son, and in this instance a man high up in the political administration of his day is brought down to the same level of any other creature; a father who cares very much for his son and a father who can do nothing for his son because his son has something that money cannot change. Political prestige cannot change; his son is dying. At this point he is a man on the same level with all men, on the same common ground, one of Adam’s sons in trouble. And so we find this man goes twenty miles

In John 4:47, he hears that Jesus Christ has come into Galilee, “When he heard that Jesus was come out of Judea into Galilee, he went unto Him, and besought Him that he would come down, and heal his son: for he was at the point of death.” Now what this man did, and again one must understand the cultural and custom background for this because Christ is going to pull something off here that just blows his mind and is going to blow the minds of everyone in Cana but you won’t catch what He’s done unless you understand the custom. So here’s the custom: the custom of the day for illness was as follows. If a person was sick in this kind of a situation it would be customary to seek out a rabbi who was known for his successful prayers, to seek out not any rabbi but a rabbi that was known for his prayers. You can read this in the Jewish Talmud, this was standard operating procedure. Then after the rabbi was contacted, who would do the praying, the custom would be that the rabbi would come to the bedside of the person who was ill and pray there at the bedside, possibly with the laying on of hands, we don’t know. We don’t know whether James 5, that business about anointing with oil in James 5 is a carry over from this early Jewish custom or not. But we do know at least that the rabbi would be called to the bedside to pray for this person. So at the point of verse 47 what the nobleman is doing here, he’s just responding, he sees Jesus, more or less, as a super rabbi. Surely, he reasons, my son is dying, I need somebody’s prayers, somebody who can get through to God and convince Him that my son must have a second chance. So out of desperation he goes to what he thinks is just a suitable rabbi.

And he comes to Jesus, notice it says in verse 47, he “besought Jesus that Jesus would come down,” we’ll see why in a moment. John 4:48, “Then said Jesus unto him,” and this is a very, very strange reply, this doesn’t look at all like what would be the polite thing to do. It certainly doesn’t look at all relevant to his request. Here he comes in, tired after a quick trip from twenty miles, because it’s about 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon when this happened, he comes breaking in, we don’t know whether this was in Nathanael’s home because we know Nathanael did live in Cana, but somehow this man breaks in and he says Jesus, you must come to heal my son. And Jesus looks up and says, “Unless ye people see signs and wonders, you’re never going to believe.” What kind of an answer is that to give to a man who’s in desperation. Why did Jesus somehow almost give a remark that seems to us as being quite rude, quite callous to this man’s need.

Well, the answer is in the subject of that verb in verse 48, “you,” in the King James you’ll notice it is “ye,” not “thee,” and that can’t refer to the nobleman because that’s plural. So Jesus is not addressing the nobleman by this remark; He’s addressing the people who are around him. The people who are around him? Who are the people who are around him? The Galileans. Now what has been previously said about the Galileans a few verses back? What was characteristic of their faith? Where was Jesus Christ when He was growing up as a young child? Galilee. Where did He do His first teaching in the synagogue? Galilee, and these people refused to believe until they saw miracles down in Jerusalem, and then they would accept His word. And so that’s the kind of onlooker to this incident that’s now about to happen. Jesus is going to do something but before He does something to this man in desperate need He has to turn to those who are around Him; maybe they’re in the living room of Nathanael’s house but He turns to them and He says you all, (if He were a good Texan), you all will not believe unless you see it, that’s the kind of people you are.

Now by implication what He has just said is I am about to show you one person who is not like you, who will believe without seeing any sign or miracle. Those of you who cannot believe Me apart from My miracles in Jerusalem, you watch this because I’m about to show you something about this man who came down the road from Capernaum, who, by the way, would not be well liked at all in Galilee because he was high up in the political administration of establishment. And Galilee was always known as the place for revolutions and revolts. The man comes in, and Jesus says “Except you see signs and wonders, you won’t believe.” But he’s talking to the onlookers.

Maybe at this point the nobleman wonders what’s happened, maybe he’s confused by the remark, again the Bible doesn’t record the nobleman’s response, all it says is that he booms out with his request again, John 4:49, “The nobleman saith unto him, Sir, come down or else my child is going to die.” And so it’s almost as though Jesus is playing with him, but not quite, He’s not playing with the nobleman, He’s playing with these people.

“Come down,” let’s just see for a minute what “coming down” means. [he shows slides] As you move west from this area you come down to the Sea of Galilee over here to Capernaum. It is a trip that geographically is going down. This is a highland area, approximately 800 feet above sea level and you come down to this area. The terrain looks like this. I show you this geographical detail to show you that John the Apostle, who was supposedly, according to liberals, a second century author has a remarkable understanding of terrain, doesn’t he? Here is the Sea of Galilee and this is a city near Capernaum, the ancient city is gone but this is the area so there is where the drama is occurring. John is very familiar with the terrain because John wasn’t the liberal second century author.

Now after this petition Jesus makes an astounding statement, a statement that would cut across everything the people anticipated for the custom was that the rabbi who was sought would go to the bedside of the ill person and Jesus says, John 4:50, “[Jesus saith unto him,] Go thy way; thy son lives.” Huh! You can just imagine, after the first crazy remark he got, about unless you see signs and wonders you won’t believe and he makes a second plea and he gets this one back, now what is going on? Jesus is again undermining anti-Biblical customs, just like He was with His own disciples at the well. It was wrong for a rabbi to speak to a woman, was it? Jesus showed it wasn’t. A woman is a human being like anyone else and you can communicate with her like you do any other human being. And the same here, Jesus would show this person he was not just a super rabbi but He was somebody who had power at a distance; keep that in mind as a characteristic of this story, power at a distance. It’s going to reflect on something else that happened here.

So the nobleman said come down and Jesus said your son lives, “And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way.” Now theoretically from where I showed you at Cana, all the way back to Capernaum, he could have gotten back there by sunset if he really hustled. At least he could have gotten back there before midnight the same day. But he didn’t; it says, because later on he meets the servants coming the other way the next day, because later on he’s going to say when did my son improve, and they said yesterday he did. So the man has such trust in Jesus Christ’s words that he apparently just puts up for the night here, relaxed and the next day he kind of takes his time and goes home. A man who comes in total anxiety with his problem, Jesus says one word and there’s total trust and relaxation in the word of Jesus Christ.

Why do you suppose this happened? One of those little accidents that happened under God’s sovereignty? Where of all places did this occur? In the very place where people demanded signs. And who was this nobleman? Somebody out of the clear blue who had never seen a miracle before, Jesus says one word, and he believes Him, on the basis of Christ’s integrity. In other words, Jesus argued from this incident, look at what this man did, he trusted Me basing it completely on My character, he didn’t ask Me to drag out miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle to under gird his faith. He was a desperate man, hungry for what I could do for his son and I told him a word and he relaxed. So there’s a demonstration here of the power of Christ’s basic character; this is what we mean when we say God’s Word is self-authenticating. We do not mean it’s a legal thing, what we mean is that when God speaks into history that word, that speaking is self-authenticating so you know it when you hear it. That’s the argument of the Gospel of John; it’s stupid to come up and say, John would argue, that if Jesus Christ were here and He spoke a word to you, you wouldn’t recognize it as God’s voice. If you didn’t recognize the words coming out of Jesus’ lips as God’s voice there’s something wrong with you, nothing wrong with the evidence.

God expects us to say “Yes Sir” when He speaks His word. The God-consciousness in our souls should unite with the external historic revelation to produce credibility; that revelation is not divorced from historical fact but the point still remains is that His word ultimately is self-authenticating. When God spoke the word to Adam and Eve in the Garden Adam and Eve were not supposed to say, you know, I heard a voice, it came from behind that tree, I wonder what’s behind that tree, do you suppose that’s God behind that tree, or maybe it’s Satan behind that tree, how can we be sure what that voice is. Now is that the picture you get? Not at all; man intuitively knows the voice of God. And the application is, we intuitively also know the voice of our own conscience and that’s why we’re held responsible. It’s not some philosophic thing, gee, I wonder if that’s my conscience.

Jesus speaks His self-authenticating word and the man goes back down, because John, remember, has written this Gospel so that you might believe, so he brings in the historic evidences to show you this man did trust. John 4:51, “And as he was now going down, his servants met him, and told him, saying, Thy son lives,” present tense. And in verse 52, read it slowly because there’s an added little detail here that’s very interesting. “Then enquired he of them the hour when he began to amend. And they said unto him, Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” Now what they’re saying is two different things. The man asked the servant something and apparently the servants don’t even hear him, he said when did my son begin to get better, and the servants don’t say well, his fever started dropping and finally he got back to normal by supper time. The word here means [can’t understand word]. Your son didn’t begin to get well, your son just instantly got well, that’s the claim these servants are making; it’s almost an incredulous thing; they say your son, the fever just left him, just like that, the seventh hour, which if it’s the time that we think it is would be 1:00 p.m. Notice why John put the 1:00 p.m. and the seventh hour in here; he wanted us to understand the details.

John 4:53, “So the father knew that it was at the same hour, in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son lives: and himself believed, and his whole house.” The point was that apparently the entire house, his household, his wife, and his other sons and the family trusted in Christ. Now oftentimes in the book of Acts we have this business, this is how infant baptism got started by the way, you would have the head of the house plus the family make a decision for Jesus Christ. Now for us in the west that’s hard to go on because we thinking terms of individual choice, but we are the exceptions. In other parts of the world people believe in groups; don’t ask me why this works but I’ve talked to enough missionaries, I keep asking them this very question. I’ve had missionary after missionary after missionary after missionary I’ve asked this question to, when you walk into a tribe and you talk to a large household and you talk to the chief, because they always witness to the chief first, or they witness to the man who’s the head of this tribal area, and he believes, not all, but many of his advisors will believe at the same point; there’s a community response.

Now in God’s Word it doesn’t make that much of an issue out of it but it does say that when the head of the home believes it has sort of implications for everybody else in that same house. It’s not arguing that in every case that’s going to happen because Peter argues what happens to the Christian woman with an unchristian husband so you can tell from there that it didn’t always happen but it apparently happened enough so that it keeps getting spoken of in Scripture, that when a man believes often his wife will believe and his children will believe. And so this man went back and the whole house believed.

And then John adds, John 4:54, “This is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judea into Galilee.” Now it wasn’t the second miracle quantity because He’d done many miracles (plural) in chapter 2 in Jerusalem, but this is the second miracle He did when He had come out of Judea into Galilee. In other words, every time He came back from Judea He would present Himself anew to the people of Galilee. But I said you wanted to note something about the quality of this miracle. Before we conclude there are two things we have to clear up.

Why did this kind of a miracle occur? Well, obviously it occurred to show Christ’s deity but if you turn back to John 1 the same kind of miracle occurred to Nathanael, didn’t it? In verse 48, Nathanael said to Him, where do you know me from? “Jesus answered and said unto him, Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” And where is Nathanael from? Cana. And what kind of a miracle does he get? The projected omniscience of Christ. This nobleman comes to Cana, what kind of a miracle does he get? The projected omnipotence of Christ. Christ speaks a word, twenty miles away instantly there’s results. That no super rabbi can do; no super rabbi can do that and that’s why the whole verse ends, this man, unlike the Galileans, he believed while he was there when he heard the word and his whole house trusted Christ.

Now as we come to this point in the Gospel I want you to notice something. Where has the evangelization occurred? With the disciples? No. With his own hometown gang from Galilee? No. What are the two instances of evangelizing? An unknown Samaritan woman taking off up the hill to Sychar and this royal courier from King Herod’s court, he goes back home and he leads his family to Christ. Notice where the evangelism has taken place—among non-religious people, people who came to Christ without religious legalism, people who came with a great basic need, they weren’t all screwed up with a lot of religious stuff and they responded to Christ quickly, efficiently and His message began to go out.

Now we can’t leave this passage without saying a few things about the problem of healing, the problem of so-called divine healing and so on. This is not the place to develop this subject extensively but I just want to make some closing points about this matter of healing. All sickness, of whatever type, is due to the fall ultimately. But the doctrine of suffering ought to be applied. When you get to deal with sickness you ought to automatically go back to the fall, if you know your divine viewpoint Framework you know what doctrine is associated with the fall. All sickness is ultimately due to the fall, sickness is suffering, it can be due to rebellion in our lives, 1 Corinthians 11 that I read every single communion service, over and over and over, before we serve the elements, confess your sin because many in the city of Corinth that did not confess their sin before they partook of the elements were physically sick and many died. So you can become sick by rebellion, specific spiritual rebellion against God. And obvious illustration is psychosomatic illness where you tear your own body apart by your worries, by vicious mental attitude, they’ll destroy you.

So you have the fall just general, you can have rebellion, you can have sickness because of association with others, just like you can have a suffering situation, you can have sickness come into your life because you are about to learn a lesson from God, we can have sickness in our life because it’s a satanic attack, we can have sickness in our life as a testimony to see how we’re going to handle it. Unbelievers, believers and angelic beings being those onlookers to our sickness, to see whether we’re going to use it as a Romans 8:28 situation or whether we’re going to rebel. But this ought to become reflex action to us all; when sickness hits our loved ones, someone we care for, someone you see on the prayer list, yourself, you have six reasons why you’re sick and you ought to think about these things, go through these six reasons. Go to the Word of God and see if maybe there’s something… if some of these are reasons why you’re sick you can get away from your sickness real quick. For example if rebellion is the cause of it often time confession of sin will bring relief within a day or so, simply because it was all engendered anyway by a guilty conscience. Some of these others, if it’s a learning experience then the quicker you learn the lesson the quicker you’re going to be out from under the thing. And the same with testimony to some degree. So that’s the first thing about sickness, it is all due to the fall but there are at least five other reasons why you’ll be sick.

And this, by the way, if you go through this it will keep you from getting sucked into these religious healing services where oftentimes it is pictured as though if you do not have faith to be healed then brother you just don’t have faith. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The second thing you want to understand is that Jesus Christ and the apostles healed very few people. They did not heal large numbers of people. Compared to the total population they hardly made a dent. So if the message of Christ was to cause all the people to be healed, they sure didn’t do a good job; there were a lot of sick people left after Christ died and rose again from the dead.

Why, then, did Jesus Christ and the apostles heal? They did it like Jesus did this miracle, to attract claims to the gospel message, to attract people’s attention that Jesus Christ was the healing Jehovah of the Old Testament. Jehovah was…I am thy God, He said, when He brought them out of Egypt, who healeth thee. And Jesus Christ as Jehovah’s Messiah would have to show that He is in the same character, “I am thy God who healeth thee.” And therefore as the gospel circulated within Jewish circles healing was a legitimate means of authenticating that gospel.

The third thing we want to understand is that the greatest miracle of all time is not the healing, it is the resurrection of Christ, therefore, after the resurrection healing declines. Proof: turn to 2 Timothy 4, one of the last epistles that Paul, the apostle, wrote. Paul had the gift of healing that was so fantastic early in his ministry, he could literally walk by people and they’d be healed, just like that. And I want you to see this passage; this is his last epistle. 2 Timothy 4:11, “Only Luke is with me.” Do you know who Luke was, what he did? He was a doctor. Now why do you suppose Paul, in his closing years, was under the constant care and attention of a physician, if he had the gift of healing? Obvious, he didn’t have the gift of healing toward the end of his life, it had already begun to phase out. The further history got away from the resurrection of Christ the less these miracles occurred because they weren’t, in the first place, designed to alleviate suffering, they were designed to authenticate Biblical claims. The second verse in this passage is 2 Timothy 4:20, “Erastus abode at Corinth; but Trophimus I have left at Miletus sick.” Paul had the gift of healing did he, how come this guy was left sick, when Paul needed him? Because Paul did not have the gift of arbitrary healing later in his life; he lost that gift. Healing declined in the New Testament.

Now is this to say there’s no such thing as healing today. No, God can heal today like He can heal anything; you can’t limit God, He can turn the air in here green if He wanted to. He usually doesn’t but could He? Yes, sure could! If we didn’t believe that God wasn’t interested in healing we wouldn’t have that item in our prayer list, praying for healing. But it’s always within the framework of the New Testament. We have seen God heal in this congregation, over the seven years I’ve been pastor, I’ve seen answered prayer to that and God has healed…sometimes, most of the time not, most of the time He’s used normal medical means. Why? Because that’s not the issue today, the issue is whether you’re going to trust in Christ or not; that’s the issue. And everywhere I go where people get trapped into this thing of healing, always it’s the experience of healing that assumes the [can’t understand word] in the conversation. These people can’t talk about anything else but God healed my big toe yesterday, or the Holy Spirit came upon me and my right leg lengthened a 16^th of an inch. This is going on down in Midland, they had an episode of this business of leg lengthening. Everyone is born, you know, with one of your legs shorter than the other one, to a degree. This is true of everyone, and somebody down there caught on to it and they thought it would be good for the Holy Spirit to even things up and so they got this thing about the Holy Spirit’s lengthening legs. Now can’t you just see that the Holy Spirit, in this age of crisis, where the Word of God is not going forth as it should be, all wrapped up about the 16^th of an inch they ought to add to someone’s heel bone. It’s comical but it’s sad that we have so many suckers in this part of the country that will bleed their wallets for this kind of activity. And that’s all it is, is one big religious racket. This is a con game that’s going on and wherever you have suckers, like Barnham said, there’s a sucker born every minute and there sure is, particularly in things religious. And you have people, old people, giving their last dimes to this kind of nonsense that’s going on. It’s ridiculous and don’t you get sucked up with some healing gimmick. The issue for you is whether or not you trust the Lord Jesus Christ, be the nobleman, not the Galileans.

Father, we thank You….