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
John 4 dealt with His ministry in
Notice the setup of John; in
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
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
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
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
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
The
calendar of the nation
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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