Clough John Lesson 35

Only God Worthy of Unconditional Love – John 7:1-9

We begin a new section in the Gospel of John. Because we do we ought to remember some of the sections that we have studied. From John 1:1 on through John 2:11 we have the introduction of the Word of God to the nation Israel. From John 2:12 on halfway through the Gospel it’s all dealing with the incarnation of the Word, showing the various details and how He showed Himself to the nation. From John 2:12 through John 3:36 the emphasis was upon the first Jerusalem trip. John the Apostle sets up his Gospel on the basis of Jesus Christ’s trips to the city of Jerusalem and he does so because one of the reasons for this Gospel is to show why the nation rejected their Messiah. Who was responsible? Why did they do that? And on that first Jerusalem trip what did John emphasize but the cleansing of the temple and the subsequent meeting with Nicodemus. So on that first Jerusalem trip you have the rise of the animosity that eventually led to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.

John 4 dealt with His ministry in Samaria and Galilee, and showed that by way of contrast with the city of Jerusalem the people in the countryside seemed to respond to Him. In John 5 we have the second Jerusalem trip and here the discussion gets more intense, we have the famous Son of God discourse in which He gives us a very clear picture of His relationship with His Father, that though He is God, nevertheless, He was always submissive to God the Father’s will. And then in John 6 Jesus Christ has gone back to the country and there’s the feeding of the 10,000 plus people and to also be weeding out of the movement. John 6 is the peak of Jesus Christ’s popularity. From this point on He declined in total numbers and from the public viewpoint the movement was a fizzle. From a human perspective everything was lost here. He peaked and He declined.

Notice the setup of John; in Jerusalem, outside of Jerusalem; in Jerusalem, outside of Jerusalem. So you’d predict that John 7 is back in Jerusalem and sure enough, John 7 starts with the third trip to Jerusalem and this trip will extend through chapter 7, 8, 9 and 10; great emphasis on Jesus Christ in Jerusalem.

Now this is the opposite of the other Gospels because in the so-called Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, the emphasis is upon Christ’s ministry outside of Jerusalem, not in Jerusalem. John’s Gospel is focusing more on an analysis of the leadership of the nation and why the leaders, the people responsible for that nation rejected Messiah. John’s theme, then in John 7, is going to be the third Jerusalem trip. The problem that he’s trying to deal with in writing this chapter is to show further why Jesus Christ’s movement fizzled out. John 6 showed that it fizzled because there were never any widespread numbers of people committed to Him. There was never a widespread commitment to the Word of God. It was just a surface kind of thing and now in John 7 we find the Lord Jesus Christ acting a lot different than we found Him acting up to this point. And this is true in all the Gospels; about halfway through each Gospel Christ shifts His whole strategy, shifts His tactics, everything shifts because of the response of the people. And He does some very interesting things and tonight we are going to study the first 9 verses of chapter 7 dealing with Jesus Christ protecting Himself and Jesus Christ’s relationship with His family, two areas that are very contemporary in application.

John 7:1 begins, “After these things,” after these things is an expression in the Gospel of John that refers to a topical gap. Now John, you see, John is not writing history as we know it, he’s not writing strict chronology. What he’s doing, he’s taking an event out of Christ’s life here, another event over here, and linking the two together, and he usually… “after these things,” in other words, after number one, number two. It doesn’t mean there weren’t intermediate things; there’s no conflict with the Synoptic Gospels. The Synoptic Gospels record a lot of things happening in here that John just completely skips over. If you want a modern day counterpart to this kind of writing it would be if you were assigned to write a thousand word essay Monday after the Raiders lost on Saturday you would not write in the thousand word essay every single play that was called in all four quarters. What you would try to do is pick out the significant plays and then you would skip to the next significant play. But because you’d skipped didn’t mean the game only had four or five plays in it, and so here, John’s Gospel skips. In fact, between the end of John 6 and the beginning of John 7 six months of time expire. John 6 is written in the spring, written about the spring and Passover season; John 7 was written in the Feast of Tabernacles, Succoth season, and Succoth is a feast in the fall where you have the various tabernacles display which I’ll get into in a moment but the idea is that it’s around September or October so you have a six month gap between John 6:71 and John 7:1. By saying “after these things” John means the next significant thing I want tell you that happened was… and then he goes into it.

“…Jesus kept walking in Galilee,” all the verbs in verse 1 in the Greek are imperfect verbs; imperfect verbs are continuous action in past time. And so the emphasis is on a state that has developed, not one event in particular but a lifestyle that Jesus Christ was now following. He was constantly ministering in Galilee. Well, that’s exactly what the Synoptic Gospels tell us and they tell us about what He was doing in Galilee and John doesn’t bother to do that. He just says He “was constantly walking in Galilee, for He was constantly willing not to walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill Him.” Now John 7:1 teaches you how John uses the word “Jew.” If you don’t understand this you’re gong to accuse John of anti-Semitism. John isn’t anti-Semitic because he’s a Jew himself. John uses the word “Jew” in his Gospel at 90 AD or whenever the Gospel was written, very late, he is telling us, looking at it from a 90 AD perspective, the Church had already split between the Hebrew Christians and the Judaic Hebrews. The Hebrew people that followed Judaism; the Hebrew people that followed Christianity had already pretty well split. And so by this point John is just labeling those unaffiliated with the Christian movement as Jews and he calls those who are affiliated with the Christian movement just believers. So the word “Jews” here doesn’t refer just to every Jew that came along; it’s referring particularly to unbelieving Jews.

Moreover, he uses the term even more specially than just unbelieving Jews; he’s using the word for a restricted set of unbelieving Jews, those Jews that ruled in Jerusalem because they are responsible to lead the nation. And so he singles these people out and this is why Jesus Christ ministers in the northern part of the country and does not go into the area around Jerusalem. Why? “…because the Jews are constantly seeking,” that’s imperfect tense, they are constantly plotting to trap Him, “to kill Him.”

Now I want you to notice a wisdom principle from how Christ behaved. Jesus Christ took common sense precautions against His life. Jesus Christ, because he was God didn’t go, well, come on baby, kill Me. He didn’t walk around openly challenging people for trouble. The reason is that He could have very well gotten Himself into a fix where He would have had to have used His deity to save His life. God, even the Son of God, must use common sense. And Jesus Christ took evasive action when evasive action was called for. At this point in His ministry evasive action consisted of physically avoiding people that were a threat to his life, and you can never accuse Jesus Christ of being a coward. Jesus Christ was wise; no coward would have died on the cross for someone else’s sins. But Jesus Christ took common sense precautions and avoided those situations which could have led to an unnecessary conflict and have a premature confrontation. Jesus Christ here, watch Him, He has a perfect comprehension of the timing of God. He has a sense of the schedule of the Holy Spirit in His life. He doesn’t get ahead of the schedule, He doesn’t fall behind the schedule. There’s a quiet confidence that the Spirit works on a certain number of units of work a day; He doesn’t rush and He isn’t lazy, He just moves along with His constant pace. In other words, one of the marks of Jesus in His humanity is that He very, very wisely paces Himself. He avoids situation.

Now at one point in His life He did something that many people just shudder at and people who are particularly liberal in their persuasion can never stand the passage so turn to Luke 22:35. This is the other evasive action Jesus took in His life. “And He said unto them,” this is just before the Garden of Gethsemane incident, in fact He’s just about to be arrested. Now at this point in His life Christ has a problem. He wants to get arrested by the right people. When the official police come to arrest Jesus Christ He surrenders completely; He submits perfectly to their authority. But the problem is there are a lot of people in Jerusalem that want to get rid of Him and they’re not the authorized people. And so Jesus Christ must be ready to submit to the authorities but He must be ready to defend His movement against a premature physical assault.

And so therefore in verse 35, “He said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip [bag], and shoes, did you lack anything?” That was the years before when it was more peaceable to teach the Word of God. “And they said, Nothing. [36] Then He said unto them, But now, he that has a purse, let him take it, an likewise his money; and he that has no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. [37] For I say unto you that this is written must yet be accomplished in Me, And He was reckoned among the transgressors; for the things concerning Me have an end. [38] And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And He said unto them, It is enough.” Jesus Christ then, at this point, armed the believers. In His humanity Christ used swords that were capable of killing people to defend physically the movement. He was not a pacifist. He utilized armed force and was ready to use armed force if that was necessary to defend His life.

The problem is we every once in a while read in the papers about some clergyman has his congregation come up and dump all their firearms and so on and disarm themselves. Idiots! That’s exactly what certain elements want you to do is give up your arms. I’m proud to know that most people in this congregation have at least one gun in the house; a number of men have a whole arsenal, and that’s good because you may need it sometime and I hope you will remember this passage if you ever do need it because here is your one perfect illustration of Jesus Christ utilizing armed force to defend Himself and His disciples. All right, it’s come down to a fight and had Christ been challenged He would have used the sword at this point in His humanity. So we find, then, that Jesus Christ used common wisdom principles. There are many more cases in point in the book of Proverbs, you may want to look them up sometime. Proverbs has many capsule summaries of how to use common sense in protecting yourself, but Christ in His humanity exercised wisdom.

Let’s go back to John 7; I take you through that little episode with the swords to show you something about wisdom. Jesus Christ was not a believer in fatalism. He didn’t say “what will happen will happen.” He knew that if He allowed Himself or His disciples to be destroyed prematurely the cross would never have happened. Christ had to have defend Himself or He would never have died on the cross. It took means to get to certain ends and that’s what wisdom is all about.

Now the background behind all this, before we get any further, is that Christ has four problems. They’re causing tension in Himself and in His followers. First of all, Jesus Christ has just experienced a catastrophic decline of popularity. The Gallop and the Roper Polls would have reported a plummeting fall in His popularity at this point. That stressed the system as it would any group of people, to suddenly build up to a climax and then the air comes out of the balloon. What happened? That was a pressure point. Another pressure point was that not only was the public declining in their allegiance to Him but His own disciples had defected, the second thing we saw from chapter 6. So He was faced with pressure from within and from without. And not only had His disciples begun to defect in mass from the movement but even one of the twelve He spotted as a traitor, Judas Iscariot. And now He has all the Jewish leaders in open hostility to Him. So He has four areas of pressure brought to bear against Him from every direction. That’s the setting for the next series of verses.

In John 7:2 John gives us a little notice. “Now the Jew’s feast of tabernacles was at hand.” The Feast of Tabernacles. John always seems to surround us with the feasts. Chapter 2 was a feast, a marriage feast. Then it was the Passover, then we had the Passover again in the beginning of chapter 6, and then in chapter 5 you have another feast in Jerusalem. Now it’s time that we brought some of these feasts together and took the Jewish calendar and looked at it a moment.

The calendar of the nation Israel had two parts to it. It had what we call the spring cycle and the fall cycle. There were certain festivities that God demanded that the people celebrate because of a theocentric patriotism. Celebrating these feasts was an expression of your loyalty to Jehovah’s nation. This was a divine viewpoint patriotism. In the spring, the first one was Passover. Passover, obviously spoke of Christ’s death on the cross. It was accompanied by a feast called the Feast of Unleavened Bread; it lasted a week. And then somewhere toward the end of that week there would be Firstfruits. During the Firstfruits, which was dictated primarily by the spring harvest, the first sheaf of barley that would be taken from the field, it would be cut, it would be brought and it would be waved before Jehovah, back and forth, back and forth the priest would wave this sheaf and it was a sign that God had blessed them and therefore the sheaf was a guarantee that the rest of the spring harvest would be finished. It was the first part of the harvest, the harvest lasted a long time because of the sequencing of the crop maturity.

So you had these three areas: Passover, Feast of Unleavened Bread, and Firstfruits. Then fifty days later you had Pentecost. At Pentecost a sheaf was not taken but the wheat, the spring wheat would be used and they’d make a loaf of edible bread from it. So what was presented before Jehovah was not the raw grain from the field but was the grain processed into an edible form and that was presented before God. Now observe what happened in history. What day did Jesus die? He died exactly…we don’t know the year that’s a debate, some people say 30 AD, some say 32 AD, some say 33 AD, there’s a problem with the calendar, but whatever the year was we know the day. He died exactly on the day of Passover. Now was that just an accident that it worked out that way? Or, was the same God of history in Jesus’ time the God of history that told Israel how to set up their national calendar. So Jesus Christ died exactly on the day of Passover that year. And Jesus Christ rose from the dead exactly on the day of Firstfruits; the day that the priest would take that barley sheaf before Jehovah and wave it as a signal that there was more coming and that the harvest indeed was coming to maturity was the day that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. So what was Jesus Christ’s resurrection a signal of? Just like the waving of the barley sheaf, it was a signal that more was to come.

And at the end of the Pentecost period what happened? The Holy Spirit came and the Holy Spirit came to create a unified nation. On the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came just as scheduled. The only problem was, as we’ll see in the book of Acts, when we get to the day of Pentecost something strange happened. Instead of the moon turning dark and the sun turning dark the way it was supposed to happen, all of a sudden you have tongues. Now of all the signs of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, tongues was not a sign. All the signs of the coming of the Holy Spirit were supposed to have been something completely different. So here you have the Holy Spirit coming on the day of Pentecost but somebody changed the cards, He shows up differently. Why? Because the nation rejected her Messiah and the Holy Spirit came loyal to God’s Word, exactly on that day, but the nation being not loyal to God was unable to take it, and so the Holy Spirit came in a new way and we’ve had the erection of the body of Christ, some new entity. But had it theoretically worked out the Holy Spirit, like the farmers would take their crop and they’d turn it into an edible form and present that before God, here was the raw produce poured into a usable product; the Holy Spirit was going to take the nation and bring it into a usable form for God.

All right, the spring part of the calendar has been fulfilled. The Day of Pentecost was fulfilled. The Day of Firstfruits has been fulfilled, and the Day of Pentecost has been fulfilled. This all is past history. But though people who are not premillennialists, who don’t believe in interpreting prophecy literally, have a very, very great problem with the fall part of Israel’s calendar. They have the Feast of Trumpets, they have Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and they have the Feast of Tabernacles, three holidays, three things in the fall calendar. And the problem with those who don’t accept a premillennial literal interpretation of Scripture is they never can find out when are those ever fulfilled? They haven’t been fulfilled, nothing happened in the fall of that year, nothing has ever happened precisely on those days. And so the fall part of the nation Israel’s calendar has yet to be fulfilled.

Now we don’t know the year that Jesus Christ is going to come back but from now on you know what month He’s going to come back, at His Second Advent, not the rapture, but when Jesus Christ comes again it’s going to be in the fall of the year, and something, we don’t know what it’s going to be but something is going to correspond to the Feast of Trumpets. The Feast of Trumpets was a calling of the nation to alert it to the coming of Yom Kippur, alerting it to the fact that the nation would have to make confession. We know in prophecy the fulfillment of Yom Kippur will be when the nation Israel falls down on its knees and recites Isaiah 53 and makes their confession nationally that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ. Now we know that is going to happen; we know it will happen on Yom Kippur. We know it will happen in the fall of the year. We don’t know what’s going to happen on the Feast of Trumpets, that’s open but it’s going to be some event happen in history, maybe it’s going to be some sign in the heavens but something is going to happen that will cause the Jewish nation to begin to think in terms of changing their entire attitude to the person of Jesus Christ, and within a matter of several weeks the nation Israel will make this national confession.

And then the Feast of Tabernacles in the fall was the time when the fall harvest was in, the year was finished, and the people would rejoice in the finished product of both spring and fall. The grape harvest would be in and they would have wine, they’d have all sorts of parties, some of which continued on down to Christ’s time and we’re going to see that in John 8. But it was a time when people were celebrating; they had some pretty wild parties on the Feast of Tabernacles, that’s the background for John 8, in case you want to read ahead.

Now, the Feast of Tabernacles as a time that commemorated in prophecy that feast on that day when the feast starts Christ will set up His millennial kingdom. It will be that time, Yom Kippur has happened, the nation Israel has confessed, Christ has come back, and now the culmination of history will occur in the fall of the year because just as that spring Christ was crucified and He rose in the spring to fulfill that part of the calendar, Christ will come back again to fulfill the fall part of the calendar.

Now the Feast of Tabernacles involves a manufacture of these little tents and huts. And while I was in Israel this summer we took some pictures of tabernacles that are still built and I want you to get and idea of what a real tabernacle looked like. These tabernacles were built for several reasons; first they were built out of what God had supplied; they were built out of reeds, palm trees, and every Jew had to build one, whether he was rich or whether he was poor, he had to build the same style of tabernacle. So at the beginning of the kingdom you don’t have rich and poor start out with sort of a different ration; you have everyone accepted into the kingdom at the starting. It doesn’t mean Christ is going to have a socialistic kingdom but it means at the start, people start with the same assets. And so the Feast of Tabernacles was a leveler, before God rich and poor alike would have to appear in the same way. [he shows slides] This is a Wadi, this is the oasis where they first saw water, that oasis is still there, it’s mentioned in Deuteronomy 1; it was at that place where we found the tabernacles. This gives you and idea of the size, today they park their cars in them but during the Feast of the Tabernacles they lived in them and it’s a picture of what God has supplied, protection for man.

The idea in the Feast of Tabernacles is two-fold. God has provided and God has protected. Keep in mind the protection theme because John is going to weave an ironic counterpoint to the whole Feast of Tabernacles. The underlying theme, as you look at this thing again, the protection from the heat is what is what it is and that is an illustration of Jehovah God protecting the Jew from pressure in history. And in John 7, as we continue to study it, watch how John very cleverly takes the Feast of Tabernacles and turns it right around on its head and shows you that the very opposite has happened in this chapter.

John 7:3, here it is, Feast of Tabernacles, everyone’s got their mind on how safe it is to dwell under the reign of Jehovah. And here Jehovah incarnate can’t even dwell in safety amidst the Jews. See the irony, and you’ll see that come out again and again in this chapter. The very feast that spoke of the Jew being safe under Jehovah, Jehovah isn’t safe under the Jew. Now verse 3, after Christ has those four pressure points applied to His humanity… I’m stressing this because I think so many of you still think that Jesus had an easy time in His humanity, that somehow when you read Hebrews where it says He was tempted like we are yet without sin, somehow you still can’t make yourself believe that He really was tempted and He really was pressured. So this is why both here in and in Matthew I’m showing you point after point after point where Christ was under pressure. He was under four pressures; popular declines, the defection of the disciples, the traitor among His twelve closest people, and the threat of the Jewish leader’s violence. Now any normal human being in this situation, at least has one place, usually, where he can go for counsel, consoling, comfort, and that’s his family.

And what John is going to demonstrate that even in His humanity Jesus couldn’t even go to His own family for comfort, that even His own family turned around and made a fifth pressure point against Him. The crowd was against Him, the Jewish leaders were against Him, the disciples were against Him, one of the twelve was against Him and now His own family is against Him. What does He have, who else does He have? Now if there was ever a good cause for paranoia this would be it. But Jesus Christ always responded to pressure in a Biblical way. Jesus Christ could have slipped in, like a lot of people do, go off and worry about mental attitude pity, self-pity, one of the most vicious horrible mental attitude sins you can ever have, sit around and pout, oh, the world hates me, everybody is against me. He could have gone to a psychiatrist and had Himself analyzed as having low self-esteem or something. Now Jesus Christ faced what would have driven most people into paranoia. But Jesus Christ did not respond in a paranoid way and Jesus Christ did not die of an ulcer worrying about it because Jesus Christ responded to this kind of pressure in a Biblical way.

John 7:3, “His brethren” Jesus Christ had numerous brothers and sisters, in case you happen to believe in the immaculate conception or something and that Mary never had any more children after she had Jesus; I’m sorry but the Gospels speak of His brothers, not only His brothers but He had two of them that wrote books of the Bible. Jude and James were Jesus’ half brothers. And the interesting thing was, all of these boys at this point rejected their brother’s claim to being the Messiah. No one in Jesus Christ’s family believed on Him. It’s very interesting; next time you hear this little ditty, well if so and so lived the Christian life everybody in their family would be brought to the Lord… isn’t it strange it didn’t work with Jesus. He must not have lived the Christian life properly. Verse 3, “His brethren, therefore said unto him, Depart hence, and go into Judea, that thy disciples also may see the works that You doest.” Little smart alecks, you like to do miracles big boy, why don’t you trot down to Jerusalem, you’ll have a bigger audience. Sarcasm as only sweet brothers and sisters can do to one another.

This represents a very vicious dig at a very low point in Jesus life. When He needed most His family to stick with Him they deserted Him. So you are watching the pressure develop and watch how He works with it. Some of you need this lesson badly.

John 7:4, “For there is no man that doeth any thing in secret, and he himself seeks to be known openly. If thou do these things, show thyself to the world.” You can almost hear Satan speak with his little voice through His very brothers. No one in His family, remember, no one in His family apart from His mother… and Joseph’s disappeared some place by this time, we don’t know of one believer in this family. All of them are doubters, in verse 4 that is a first class “if,” if you do these things you claim to do, well why don’t you go show them. The idea is they are presupposing it’s true for the sake of argument, if you are really doing these things and you really want it, why, you ought to take our advice Jesus, after all, we’re your family, we give you all sorts of advice. Doesn’t the Bible say that you’re to honor your family; why don’t you go take our advice. And their advice, of course, is satanic.

John 7:5, “For neither did his brethren believe in Him.” And it’s imperfect tense, for a long time His brothers and sisters never accepted Him as Messiah. We don’t know whatever happened to many of Jesus sister’s, we only know at least two of His brothers did trust Him.

 John 7:6, “Then Jesus said unto them,” and with this He begins to systematically separate Himself from His own family. You see the theme in the Gospel from this point on is this progressive separation. Jesus separates from the Jews by walking in Galilee, and now as His family turns against Him He must learn to separate from His family. And so you’ll notice in verse 6, verse 7, verse 8, you’ll notice the contrast over and over between “ye,” plural you, and “Me.” See how many times you spot that contrast in these verses. He uses it in the way He uses the possessive pronoun; He makes a division between Himself and His brothers. He didn’t say oh brother Jude, let Me sit down and give you a theological lesson. “Then Jesus said unto them, My time is not yet come: but your time is always ready.” The word “time” is kairos and it means your opportunity, your day, we would say; “your day is always here, Mine isn’t yet.”

Do you know what He’s really saying? What was the Feast of Tabernacles talking about? The coming day of Jehovah. And what would mark that coming day of Jehovah? When the kingdom would be set up and there would be blessing. That’s what He says, “My day hasn’t come,” My day isn’t here yet. This is your day. And what has He now said about His brothers? Your day is always here. Who’s the god of this world? Satan, so it’s a very insinuative type statement. He’s saying your day, you’re comfortable because the world system is your backyard, you’re citizens of Satan’s kingdom and so this is your time. You would say Jesus wasn’t quite Christian in the way He spoke to His brothers, would you.

John 7:7, “The world cannot hate you; but Me it hates, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil.” Notice in verse 7, “The world can’t hate you,” why can’t it? Because they are autonomous and the world loves the spirit of autonomy, the spirit of man deciding who and what is going to be the final authority. And so there’s no basis for hatred whatever. “The world cannot hate you, but it hates Me.” See the emphasis, you, Me, “because I testify about it, that the works thereof are evil.” In other words, this is category four type suffering for the believer; identification with Christ in Satan’s world leads to suffering and here’s what you see, one of the sufferings. Christ analyzed the doctrine of suffering and He applied it to His situation.

See, here’s a perfect model of the faith technique at work. What’s Christ’s problem? His problem is hostility and pressure; His problem is one of suffering. Now He can do one of two things as a normal member of the human race. He can revert to some human viewpoint gimmick or he can revert to a divine viewpoint. In a human viewpoint sense Jesus Christ can say, why isn’t this horrible, the fact that everybody hates me, that justifies me to act peculiarly, that is enough justification, because I’m under this kind of pressure I can do this, this, this and this, that justifies anything I want to do including sit here and pout to myself, and going into a mental illness type operation. But no, what does Christ do? He takes the doctrine of suffering, He moves it into the soul and He uses that doctrine, trusts in it and He moves on. Now there’s a model of how to take pressure. He just used doctrine; he was the most excellent student of the Word of God and as the most excellent student He applied it. So applying the doctrine of suffering He moves on and He gives His brothers advice.

John 7:8, “Go ye up unto this feast: I go not up yet unto this feast: for My time is not yet full come.” And here John moves one further step. Up to this point we’ve said it’s just this basic idea of the Tabernacles and the coming kingdom but Christ also has a sense in which He’s going to reveal that coming kingdom right in the middle of the Feast two or three times. We have some of the most audacious things that Christ ever pulled of in His ministry in this third Jerusalem trip; things that when you get through studying the background of what He really did in some of these chapters at two points particularly, you will come away convinced that Jesus Christ was either the world’s greatest lunatic, nut, or He had to be the Son of God, but you cannot, after reading these chapters you can never conclude that Jesus was a good man because of the magnitude of what He’s going to do. Well, that’s what He has in mind, “My time has not fully come,” Christ is going to wait until there are particular ceremonies being done during that Feast of Tabernacles; He is going to stay away from Jerusalem because He’s trying to avoid physical violence and He’s going to slip in very quietly into the city and right smack in the middle of one of their key ceremonies, bang, He shows up inside the temple court and pulls something off right in front of the thousands of people. And everybody is wondering, how’d He get here, how’d He get here. He slipped into the city unnoticed. There was a system of evasion and infiltration that He used.

John 7:9, “When he had said these words unto them,” when He was speaking them, “He abode still in Galilee.” That’s the point, the element of prophecy in this statement. He has this whole long range plan in mind before He got to the city of Jerusalem.

Now an important lesson that comes out of all this in the application of the believer and his family; you have one incident of it here and I’m going to give you two other passages that we’re going to teach but before we do that let’s look at the divine institutions. God has so structured the creation that believer and unbeliever alike must operate in certain institutions. It doesn’t make any difference whether someone has personally trusted in Christ or not.

The first divine institution we call responsibility, that is, you are judged on your responsiveness as an individual. Application areas would be labor, finances and money, these kind of… this is one part of the sphere of life. A second part of the sphere of life is the area of marriage and sex; that’s the second area and that is set up according to certain norms and standards which must be followed. The third divine institution is the family; that involves parents, authority, education and the training of children, a third part of the sphere of life. The fourth and the fifth part on this chart are displayed in blue because they came after the curse. They are post-fall institutions. Justice, law and punishment at the hands of man; delegated civil authority is the fourth divine institution. The fifth divine institution is the international community of tribes of men that have been caused dispersion by Babel and involve the area of diplomacy, war and peace, and history. And finally the area of the Church which is the area of grace.

Now all of our lives are lived and the degree to which we are successful is the degree to which we use wisdom in every one of these sectors. Now the sector it’s talking about now is the third sector, the sector of the family. In human viewpoint there is always a tendency to make one of these sectors lord over all the other sectors when God alone should be the Lord over all of them. Horizontally looking at it, all these divine institutions have the same height on this chart, but human viewpoint men think, always want to exalt one over the other. So the tendency, for example, in our day is to make the fourth very large, let Caesar run the family, let government be the father and the mother of every living citizen, let government take over the family. Pretty soon the government will be advising you on who you can marry and who you can’t; give it time, it’ll try to take that over too. So there’s that tendency.

Now historically, of course, communism, Marxism is the philosophy that has the least consistently deified that fourth divine institution. But tonight we come to a problem in many Christian circles where we have a deification of the third divine institution. Here family becomes everything. And certain teachers are known to teach that no matter what the family says one is to abide by that teaching. And this is nothing more than what the communists have done to the fourth divine institution, what these teachers are doing to the third divine institution, ripping it out of its Biblical context and demanding that everybody submit absolutely and unconditionally to the family authority. Wrong! You submit unconditionally to only one authority and that is God and His Word. The Church does not ask your unconditional allegiance, the nation does not ask your unconditional allegiance and not should the family ask your unconditioned allegiance. That’s being a traitor to Jesus Christ.

So we have tendencies to deify the family or we have tendencies to deify the nation; these are always problems, but there are two passages beside John 7 that show the danger of the deification of the third divine institution. Turn to Deuteronomy 13:6-11, this is found in a passage of the Law that deals with loyalty to God, and God is setting His loyalty over against all human institutions. So in verse 6 we read, “If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend who is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers. [12] Namely, of the gods of the people who are round about you, near unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth, [8] Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shall thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him. [9] But thou shalt surely kill him; tine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. [10] And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die, because he has sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God,” and here the point is that one should be willing to betray their own family for the sake of the Word of God. That’s pretty strong language but that’s what the Word of God is all about.

God has set up the family but He has set up the family, always remember that; the family itself does not have an inherent authority, it only shares the authority given to it by God and His Word. And when that authority is misused and is used to obstruct the playing out of the Word of God, then that authority can be legitimately disobeyed, just as, for example, when the state would come I here and argue that I cannot conduct worship service, I can be filling of the Holy Spirit and absolutely defy the civil authorities at that point because they have transgressed their sector; they have spilled out over into the Church sector and they have no authority to speak in the area of the Church sector. The state has no authority to tell me what I am going to teach and what I am not going to teach; what we do in our nursery or what we don’t do in our nursery. That is a business strictly of the Church, not of the state. So just as these boundaries sometimes get very tacky and very difficult, it’s not carte blanc to go revolting against the state or the family; it’s just to say there do come those times when loyalty to the Word of God takes precedence over loyalty to the family, you understand that.

Obviously when someone trusts in Jesus Christ and they have unbelieving parents and those unbelieving parents try to obstruct the growth of that individual the unbelieving parents are out of line, the unbelieving parents ought not to be obeyed in that situation; they should be carefully obeyed in other situations and due respect ought to be given, but when they come to interfere with worship, with partaking of the ordinance, with attendance and fellowship with believers, they are out of line. So this is just a little word of advice about these family situations. Some of us wouldn’t be in the ministry if we had listened to our families. I know many men in Dallas Seminary, called to the ministry of God and their families absolutely under all circumstances forbid it. Now these men would obviously not be in the ministry if they listened to the human viewpoint cranked out by unbelieving authorities in the family. I would no more listen to that kind of a situation than the man in the moon; if it came out of my own father or my own mother I would not listen to it. It’s what God’s Word says first, period over and out, no discussion.

In the New Testament this same priority is carried over; Matthew 10:25. Again I stress caution, this is not an excuse for acting in snobby ways toward parents; this is not some sort of a little card, well Charlie Clough said that I can talk back to you. I can just hear the phone ringing off the hook on Tuesday or the next spring break when everybody goes home; wait till the mail comes back from that one. So don’t go misquoting me, all I’m saying is there are limits to this doctrine of unconditional obedience to family; that’s all I’m saying. We’re to honor our parents because of their standing in the institution. You may not think they’re honorable and that’s not your opinion to think because God says we are to honor them, period over and out. No discussion!

Matthew 10:35, Christ warned that this very thing would come to pass. He said, “I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. [36] And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. [37] He that loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that loves son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me.” That’s a very tough command but what Christ is saying again is nothing in conflict whatsoever with the Ten Commandments of honoring your father and your mother. All He is saying is that that command, “honor your father and your mother” itself was given by Me and I gave you that command and I’ll give you another one to explain that command, and that means as long as we do not have a transgression, a flagrant transgression. You’re going to have some, every person is imperfect and all parents are imperfect, as every person who is over 12 years old is quick to say “amen” to. And your parents are always going to slip and fall and so do you. And a mere slip or getting out of line of the Word of God is not an excuse and that is not what we’re talking about.

What we are talking about is when you have a major conflict, like you have here, predicted. When God here, in verse 35, what Christ is talking about in context it is discipleship and He is saying I have called certain men to certain things. Suppose Matthew had some father and he said well, son, you’d better stay in the IRS because Matthew, as long as you stay in the tax business you’re going to get a pension, you can retire after 20 years. Now think of all that financial security you can have if you just stay in the government office. And then why don’t you go follow this Jesus character, after you’ve had your 20 year retirement thing; get all your points, you’ve got all the security and then add Jesus as kind of frosting to your human viewpoint cake. Work it that way. Well, Jesus doesn’t want to be frosting on someone else’s cake. Jesus Christ wants to be the One who has ultimate authority and command period. And so therefore when He said to Matthew I want you to be a disciple, what He is saying is Matthew, I don’t care what your father and what your mother tell you, I am not speaking through your father and your mother, I am speaking to you. Now “follow Me,” and Matthew said “Yes Sir,” and moved on. That’s what we’re talking about.

So he says in Matthew 10:36, and based on the personal experience of John 7, “A man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” Now Jesus is not trying to cause family feuds. And He’s not meaning to be a patsy for every time you disagree with your parents, and blaming it on oh, I’m persecuted for righteousness sake. That’s misuse of the passage. What He is saying is a major conflict of faith and principles of doctrine and calling, this kind of thing. And this is where, if a family is out of line it just has no authority. And notice in verse 37 the sword cuts the other way too, “He that loves son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me.” I oftentimes wondered why that part of verse 37 was tacked on the top part, why that had to be in there when He seems to be talking about this problem of discipleship.

Why would He be worried about a mother or a father caring for their daughter more than Me? Very simple, because one of the reasons why parents want to step into a situation in this discipleship thing and cut it off is because they think that by following the Lord you are going to involve yourself in physical danger, or economic danger and because they do love you they often give you the wrong advice. Their motive is fine but their carrying out the motive is very unwise and so at the end Jesus very wisely points out that the source of a lot of this is parental love for their children. But He says the problem is love that’s got out of hand; it’s the love that a parent says oh, I don’t want to subject my son to the kind of abuse he’s going to get doing that kind of thing, I don’t care if the Lord called him to do it, I just don’t want my son doing that kind of work; someone else’s son, yeah, I’ll even pray for him. But I’m not going to allow my son involved in that kind of a situation. Over-protectiveness and that’s exactly the kind of thing Jesus is attacking. His advice to the parents, you turn you son or your daughter over to Me and I’ll take care of them, if they’re following Me I’m responsible for their well-being. Now either you trust Me with your son or your daughter or you don’t, but there’s no middle ground.

So here you have a balance to what I hope is something that will give you a perspective on what Jesus is facing in John 7. Next week we’ll start into what happened proper as He moved closer to the city of Jerusalem.