Clough John Lesson 37

Prophecy and the Holy Spirit – John 7:32-39

As we go through this particular section of John, exercise your faith to permit the Holy Spirit to give you some insight and avoid distractions; it’s a very difficult section of the text but one which is quite worthwhile when you see it. The reason why this particular passage is difficult is because as we’ve seen many times the Gospel of John is written with several layers of irony. That is, a word can be said and can be taken three or four different ways, all of which are true. And John has this particular finesse of putting something together like this; ultimately getting it of course from the Lord Jesus Christ. But in this passage we see this developed to an art. In fact, probably there’s only one or two other passages we’ve dealt with so far that come up to a par with this one in intricateness. We said last time that Jesus Christ was in the temple on the time of the Feast of Tabernacles. In the terminology of the Jews for Jesus this, what you’re watching here is the tactics of confrontation. Jesus is confronting the mob and some are rejecting, most are rejecting and some are accepting and it’s causing a division among the people, a division which will ultimately result in Christ’s death.

Tonight there’s two sections of Scripture, one beginning in verse 32 and extending to verse 36, terminating at verse 36 and then a second section beginning at verse 37 and continuing to verse 44. We won’t finish all the second section but we will finish the first section and part way into that second section. Now the first section continues with the kind of conversations we’ve observed so far. These are conversations not about what Jesus taught, they’re conversations about people’s reactions to what He taught. So far in John 7 we haven’t had one discourse yet about the content of what Christ was teaching. We have only the haranguing back and forth between Christ and the mob.

And now in John 7:32 we continue that same harangue. “The Pharisees heard that the people were murmuring such things concerning Him; and the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take Him. [33] Then said Jesus unto them, Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto Him that sent Me. [34] Ye shall seek Me, and shall not find Me: and where I am, thither ye cannot come. [35] Then said the Jews among themselves, Whither will He go, that we shall not find Him? Will he go unto the dispersed among the Gentiles, and teach the Gentiles? [36] What manner of saying is this that He said, ye shall seek Me, and shall not find Me: and where I am, thither ye cannot come?”

In verse 32 we have the escalation of confrontation between Christ and the authorities. The Pharisees are hearing that the people are murmuring. What are they murmuring? They are murmuring what we studied last time in verses 29-31, a radically divided group of people. There is no peace; there is no harmony in this group of people. Faced with the Word of God there’s disharmony, there’s discord, there’s division. There is not harmony when the Word of God is taught, there will always be division. So since this Gospel, John, was written very late, and in fact was written during the time of the early Church we want to look at it from that perspective. This will help you perceive some things about this passage. On a time line the Lord Jesus Christ has died, He’s risen from the dead, the Holy Spirit has come. And depending on your chronology it could be anywhere between 30 and 33 AD. And the Gospel of John was written way late, say around 80 to 90 AD. So you’ve got a time gap and by the time this passage was written, and by the time this passage was circulated to believers the Church had already been formed and so you have people looking back from the vantage point of the early Church history. So think of this when you think of the Gospel of John. It is written through the eyes of the early Church.

The other Gospels, the Church was kind of just getting started but in this Gospel the Church had already begun to operate and as the Church began to operate there would be confrontations similar to this, in the synagogues all throughout the eastern Mediterranean, confrontation after confrontation. Some might ask, is this the gospel of peace? Is this the kind of thing that Christianity is supposed to bring to the world, discord, mother against father, father against son, daughter against mother; is that what is supposed to be the result of the Prince of Peace? Well, the Gospel of John is assuring believers that confrontation like that is normal; discord like that is normal. You need not fear that this is some carnal operation just because you have discord. The sign of discord is not necessarily a sign of carnality. It’s a sign of the working of the Holy Spirit and no other example could better brought to our attention that Christ Himself in the middle of the temple. So the murmuring crowd of verse 32 is not only reported to tell us what happened, it’s reported to encourage us that when we have similar murmurings today it’s in line with what always happens.

“The Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers to take Him.” Notice the two classes, Pharisees and chief priests. Pharisees represented one party, chief priests the other party; the chief priests were the Sadducees. The Sadducees and the Pharisees had two completely different theologies at many, many points. They were two completely different groups; two groups that never agreed upon anything except that we must get rid of the Lord Jesus Christ. On that they did agree. And so they sent officers out to arrest Christ. Christ is now teaching in the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles, He’s surrounded by thousands of people in that great temple arena. There’s a mob in there, thousands and thousands of people, and Christ, suddenly in the middle of the Feast, He’s there. So far He infiltrated the Feast unknown to the authorities. He sneaked in to the temple but now the time for sneaking has stopped; now the time for teaching the Word of God has begun, and now Christ is no longer taking protection on His physical body, now He risks physical violence to teach the Word of God. When the officers are sent out and dispatched into the crowd, apparently from what we can gather in this passage they didn’t have a flat order to arrest Him, they were more or less sent out to see if a situation might arise that could be twisted into an arrest type crime.

So when Christ sees that the priests are circulating in the audience, He notices the agents, Christ is omniscient, Christ knows what they’re there for, the people who appear to be interested in the Word of God but really aren’t, He knows why they’re there. And when He sees them slowly infiltrate and come up close to where He’s teaching, He says this: “Yet a little while,” and notice John 7:33 begins, “Then,” but in the Greek it doesn’t begin with “then,” it begins with this particle, oun, which is a logical particle, “therefore.” It relates verse 33 to what precedes verse 33, and so therefore we have this statement, “Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto Him that sent Me.” That was said particularly to the police who were coming, just because they were there Christ said this. He said, “In a little while I am with you, and then I go unto Him that sent Me.” Now here’s where irony begins and here’s where it demands your attention to the text because in several places we even have a double irony. We have two ironies going at the same time. Now at this point Christ has already said something and those of you are looking at your Greek texts will notice what He has said.

Look at the statement very carefully in verse 33 and verse 34. In verse 34 “You will seek Me, and shall not find Me, and where I am, there you cannot come.” Now when you see in the English “I am, in the Greek you have a construction ego eimi, I AM, and that is the title of God in the Old Testament. And wherever you see ego eimi in John it has that ironic effect. Christ says “I AM” and it can be taken two ways and both are correct. “I am here,” that’s one way of taking it; that’s a superficial way of taking it. But when Christ says ego eimi He is also saying what God in the burning bush said to Moses when Moses asked: and God, what is Your name that I should tell these people when I go back to Egypt. And God says tell them ego eimi sent you; tell them I AM sent you. This is the name of God Himself.

So now Christ is saying something; “A little while I am with you, and then I go to Him who sent Me.” Now all up through this discourse up to the present moment, “Him that sent Me” has been a title for the Father. It’s a title for the Father here, but there’s a reason why Jesus brings this out. “Him that sent Me” is Jesus’ authority. Remember every time that the crowd has challenged Jesus’ authority, because Jesus doesn’t teach like the other rabbis, the other rabbis will quote this man, quote that man, give you 24 footnotes why something is true. Jesus when He teaches says this is true because the Father has said it’s true, period. The Father is the final authority. So what He does is say I am going to be with the final authority that you people despise, that you people reject. It’s a challenge to them. Conceivably there might be some people who listen to the Lord when He says “I am going to the One who sent Me, that is the One who is the final authority that you people reject,” and that person could at that time said I’m interested in that, who is this One who has sent you that is Your final authority, or, there could have been, No, we don’t want to hear that, here He is bringing up the One who sent Me again. Let’s not think about “the One who sent Me,” after all, to think about the One who sent Jesus is to think about absolute truth and final truth and we don’t want that in our system; we want man’s truth, relative truth and we will do everything we can to turn our face from “Him who sent Me.”

So in verse 34 Jesus develops the irony, “You shall seek Me then” he says, and by the way notice before we leave verse 33 what the connection is between that and the police. Why does He bring this up when the police start showing up in the mob? Because Jesus recognizes that the animosity of the rulers shown by dispatching the police into the mob that day will eventually culminate in His death and His removal from the scene, and it reminds Him, as the police infiltrate, this thing is going to someday redound to My own crucifixion and when that happens I leave. And so that’s why the connection there in verse 33, I have a little while with you, intimating that this little thing is going to go on just so much and then I’m taking off, leaving you.

In John 7:34 He amplifies the point and develops the irony in a deeper way. “You will seek Me then, and you’ll not find Me: and where I am, there ye cannot come.” Now if you’ll look carefully, the irony is so plain and so evident that you hardly can miss it. But I’ll bet you that 99 out of 100 reading that text can’t see the obvious, but there’s something wrong with the verb tense. Notice the first part of verse 34, “you will seek Me,” in that future time, and “you will not find Me,” in the future time. Now you would expect if tenses were coherent and logical, “and where I will be,”… “where I will be, there you cannot come.” Now isn’t that interesting, Christ says “where I am you will not be able to come.” A shift in a tense but boy what that shift in the tense means because this is ego eimi, and what Jesus is saying, I am going back to the Godhead, so to speak, and when I am there, when I am in heaven sitting at My Father’s right hand you people are going to seek Me across the face of this earth and you’re never going to find Me. The reason is because where I am now you aren’t able to come. The reason you won’t be able to find Me in the future is for the same reason that you can’t find Me now; although I will be absent from the scene historically the principles remain the same: I AM, I AM God Himself, and because I AM God Himself, and you have turned against Me and My authority and you cannot stand to have Me around and you rebelled constantly against My Word, you aren’t able to come to Me. You are unable to come to Me now and you’ll be unable to come to Me then. And so in verse 34 we have another one of those little insinuations about the deity of Christ, so sneakily put into passage after passage of this Gospel.

Now the irony continues and increases in John 7:35, “Then said the Jews among themselves,” and here you have, they thought an intended word of sarcasm, “Then said the Jews among themselves, Where is He going to go that we’re not going to be able to find Him. Will he go unto the dispersed among the heathen, and teach the heathen?” Now verse 35 is sarcasm; verse 35 is saying where is it that any Jew couldn’t dirty his feet; why, a good Jew wouldn’t dirty his feet going out into the dispersion and mixing with Gentiles, the low class rejected race. So when they say Jesus is going to go some place where we cannot come they completely reverse it. Instead of saying we cannot come because of what Jesus meant, you cannot come where I because you don’t have righteousness; it’s required. The Jews turn it around, well, where He’s going we cannot come because we have too much righteousness. But they’re trapped by their own words because in verse 34 it says, “Where I am you are now not able to come.” And the Jews understand that where they cannot come must be some place that conflicts with them ethically, they think in a reverse direction, that is the pollution of the Gentiles is some place where they can’t get dirty. But what Christ means is exactly reverse, the place where they can’t come is because they’re dirty and when they look at this and they hear His words, “I go to Him that sent Me,” that is back to God Himself, they put forward He must be going to the Gentiles.

Now keep in mind the date of the Gospel; the date of this Gospel, 80-90 AD and what had happened in 80-90 AD to the gospel of Christ. Where in 80-90 AD was the gospel of Christ being preached? Was it not being preached throughout the last part of the book of Acts to where? To the Gentiles. And looking at the book of Acts very carefully, how was the gospel usually preached to the Gentiles? Wasn’t it because the apostles went where? Where is the first place the apostles went when they moved into a new Gentile city? They went to the dispersed among the heathen, to the Jews in the Diaspora. They went to the Diaspora and then from that synagogue locally they branched out and evangelized that particular Gentile city. So in verse 35 the mob thinks they’re being sarcastic, but in effect, very unintentionally they have, from their own lips, proclaimed the entire book of Acts. From their own lips unintentionally they have prophesied, they have prophesied the exact methodology that would be used in the coming decades to spread the gospel of Christ.

Here is an illustration of that principle you find often in Scripture, God uses the wrath of men to praise Him. The crowd sang it with a spirit of hostility and apostasy, and even in their apostasy they can’t help but prophesy what God is going to do. And the irony is even further because why is it that God must turn to the Gentiles? Because precisely the attitude that sent the police into the temple room, wasn’t it? Precisely because the leadership of the nation had rejected Chrsit, that was precisely the reason why then Jesus had to go to the Gentiles and the Diaspora among the Gentiles. So not only do we have the crowd in verse 35 prophesying the exact methodology in the book of Acts but we have them admitting that that’s going to be the next step of history, much to their consternation because of their very attitude that Christ has exposed.

And then John even develops the irony further in verse 36. What manner of saying is this that He said, Ye shall seek Me, and shall not find Me: and where I am, thither ye cannot come?” What kind of iron is this? Now usually in John’s Gospel, when John has people, reports people repeating what Jesus says he never quotes, he usually just says they said thus and such, and that’s the way John’s style of writing usually conveys it. But John interrupts his usual style of writing to report a very interesting thing; this day, on this afternoon when Jesus said something and the crowd repeated it, John doesn’t report them as they said Jesus said this. He reports that they said what Jesus said verbatim and what was one of the words that they said verbatim? “Where I am,” the crowd confessed the deity of Christ by their very question. Here the crowd in utter rebellion against the Word of God prophesies the strategy of Acts and even out from their own lips admit, because they admit that they heard those words from Christ’s lips, He did say, “Where I am you cannot come.” And here John is giving us testimony, he’s saying to us in so many words, he says don’t you see how blind these people are, the Son of God standing a few feet in front of their face, He says words, they say the same words back to Him and they have no more idea what He’s saying than if they’d been 100 miles away from Him. They’re so stupid, so blind to the gospel that they repeat the gospel and don’t even believe it. This is the theme of the iron of John.

Now John’s theme has been the light and the darkness and what John wants to do is edify and encourage Christians who are having trouble in the Church Age. What he’s trying to do is comfort you when you come across loved ones in your family or unbelievers you care very much for and it seems like you teach them the Word, you teach them the Word, you teach them the Word, they know the Word, they’ve heard it, they can repeat it back to you and nothing happens. John is saying to us don’t worry, that’s normal; see the crowd, see that same thing happened when Jesus taught, they repeated His very confession of deity from their own lips and while they the sound was coming between their lips they had no inkling what they were really saying. He says that’s the irony of sin; you can be there, it can stare you in front of your face and yet you don’t see it. That’s what John is describing as blindness… blindness, so so deep; blindness.

Now that ends that section, the dealings with the mob and now for the first time in this day of confrontation we have the first teaching that John gives us of Christ. Up to this point it’s just been a discussion, a jousting between Jesus and the mob. Now we have one of Christ’s lectures. And in John 7:37-39 you have some very, very complicated words said. And the way I’m going to approach, we’re going to go back and forth between some slides of the temple because I’ve got to explain what was happening when this happened, I want you to pay attention not only for tonight but I’m going to tell you some things that are going to prepare you for what’s going to happen in John 8. So we’re going to have to work back into the Feast of Tabernacles.

To start turn to Leviticus 23, we’ll get some background from the Old Testament, then we’ll come to the slides and you can actually see what was happening. It’s much easier to understand the impact of what Christ has just done if you share some of this Jewish background as to what was happening. Leviticus 23:33, here’s the establishment of the Feast of Tabernacles, also known as Succoth, and this is the way the modern Jews refer to the Feast of Tabernacles. He probably wouldn’t know what you mean if you said to him the Feast of Tabernacles but he would know what you meant if you talked about Succoth. This is the autumnal festival; it’s established in Leviticus 23:33, [And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying,] God says, [34] “Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, shall be the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days unto Jehovah. [35] On the first day shall be a holy convocation: ye shall do no servile work therein. [36] Seven days you shall offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD. On the eighth day shall be an holy convocation unto you; and y e shall offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD: it is a solemn assembly; and you shall do no servile work therein. [37] These are the feasts of the ORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations.”

And it goes on to describe, Leviticus 23:39, “In the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land,” notice this, it is a fall harvest festival, “when you have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto the LORD seven days. On the first day shall be a Shabbat,” or “Sabbath, and on the eight day shall be a Sabbath. [40] And ye shall take on the first the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook; and ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God seven days. [41] And ye shall keep it a feast unto the LORD seven days in the year. It shall be a statute forever in your generations: ye shall celebrate it in the seventh month. [42] Ye shall dwell in booths seven days;” the booths of verse 42 are made from the branches of verse 40, “Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths.”

Why, what is the meaning of this ceremony that goes on and on. Leviticus 23:43, “That your generations,” notice it’s a historic testimony, just like Passover, just like our communion, “That your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. [44] And Moses declared unto the children of Israel the feasts of the LORD.” Now Leviticus 23 presents us with the Feast of Tabernacles occurring in the fall of the year, I demonstrated last time the prophetic implication of the Feast of Tabernacles, that it is a prediction of the fact the millennial kingdom will begin in the autumn and the millennium in the future will begin literally on Succoth.

The Feast of the Tabernacles in the autumn is after the harvest; it’s a picture of the harvest of history. Down through history God’s plan has harvested the believers and they are going into the prosperous future kingdom and it was pictured by the farmers bringing their crops in and then rejoicing at this thing. But it was more than rejoicing at the past, it was also looking forward to the future. Turn to Zechariah 14:16, further information on Succoth. Not only did it look back to the fact that God had made provisions, not only was that true but it looked forward. This is talking about the millennial kingdom and the Succoth feast will be in operation then. “And it shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep Succoth, [the Feast of Tabernacles].” [17] And it shall be that whoever will not come up of all the families of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, even upon them shall be no rain.”

And so the second feature of the Feast of Tabernacles was not only that it looked back to God’s provision and thanked Him for the harvest of the past crop but it looked forward to the new crop and it was in essence a thank you but it was a thank you saying that we want rain for our next year’s crop. It was a prayer for the winter rains that would come, wetting the soil and preparing it for the next crop. The point is that people who do not thank God for past blessings are not going to get the blessings continued; that’s the issue that was used in the Old Testament. Prophetically what does this look at? It looks at history and the beginning of the millennial kingdom. And the millennial kingdom will be a time of great prosperity, prosperity pictured by the source of prosperity in an agricultural economy, which is rain. So the rain pictures God’s grace coming to the people.

Now as this developed over the centuries the Jewish people had many things that they did, some which are not discussed in the Word of God because they were developed in detail. But it’s necessary that I read to you some of the Mishnah, this is a book that describes the laws of the Pharisees, written after the time of the New Testament but does portray what was happening in New Testament times. I’m going to read you a section about Succoth because it shows you that they had a little feature here about this rain that developed and led to something which I’ll show in a moment.

First, you remember in Leviticus it talked about you will cut off those palm branches, the willow trees, and you’ll make tabernacles from these. This was called in the Mishnah, the lulav and they would wave it and then they’d stick it around the altar or they’d make tabernacles out of this lulav. Here are the directions that were being followed in that day. “Oh where do they shake the lulav, at the beginning and the end of the Psalm, O Give Thanks unto the Lord.” Now that tells you something else? What did I just say? It didn’t Psalm 118, that’s what it means; they didn’t have numbers on their Psalms. So how did they refer to Psalms? By the first verse of the Psalm. Many of you have sat through Easter sermons and listened to the last words of Christ and in that place where Christ is dying on the cross it says, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me.” And we don’t read that right, we think that’s all Christ said; no He didn’t, He said Psalm 22 and that’s just the author of the Gospel’s way of saying: And Christ said Psalm 22. He didn’t have 22, the number, so he just gave us verse 1 of Psalm 22, and hoped that we’d understand that Christ said the whole Psalm, but most of us don’t understand that. But here in the Mishnah literature we see it. “When do we shake the lulav? At the beginning and the end of the Psalm, O Give Thanks unto the Lord,” which is Psalm 118, “and at the verse, Save now we beseech Thee, O Lord,” which is Psalm 118:25, now keep in mind because Christ is going to say something here and you’ve got to see what the mob is doing to see what Christ is doing. The mob has been, for four or five days, has been shaking the lulav, and when they shake the lulav, what do they say? “Save now, O Jehovah.” “Save now, O Jehovah.” And the context is the context of rain. And how is God going to supply their needs? By supplying rain. That’s what it means to “save now O Lord,” save our economy by giving us a good crop to come. “And then do this also at the verse, O Lord, we beseech Thee, send now prosperity,” which the same point. And then it describes how they do it.

There’s a second section having to do with this, “What was [can’t understand words] of the willow branch fulfilled.” Here’s a description of where they got the willow branch and what they did with it for the lulav. “There was a place below Jerusalem called Motza, thither they went and cut themselves young willow branches and they came and set these up at the sides of the altar so their tops were bent over the altar. And then they blew on a shophar,” which is a wet ram’s horn, “a sustained, a quavering, and then another sustained blast. And each day,” each day, “they went in procession, a single time around the altar, saying, Save now, we beseech Thee, O Jehovah, Save now, we beseech Thee, O Jehovah, and send now prosperity.” It was a prayer, a prayer for blessing and blessing particularly in the form of rain. “But on that day,” the same words in John 7:37, “on that day,” on that last day of the feast, “they went in procession not once around the altar but seven times around the altar and they said: [sounds like: ohnee wahoo], save us we pray, ohnee wahoo, and they did it seven times. And what did they say when they finished? Homage to thee, O altar, homage to Thee,” and then it goes on with various comments.

Now I want to show you a little background of how this willow branch thing works. [He shows slides.] There is a picture of the kind of tabernacle that was made so get in mind the kind of thing that was built out of these willow branches and palm trees and whatever else that they used; notice how tall those things are; that’s the size, they weren’t just waving Kleenexes. They had long high things, if the branch was that long it would droop if you only supported it at the bottom, and that’s how they formed the tabernacle. In the Mishnah it said they went to a place west of Jerusalem; today the main highway, all the way to the Israeli coast, Tel Aviv, has a sharp curve as it comes down from the west side of Jerusalem and there is the village of Motza, the village is still there. And that’s the place; about four miles west of the present city of Jerusalem where they went to pick up these willow branches. So there’s the setting for the thing and now we want to pick up some more background on the Feast of Tabernacles itself.

Added to the Feast of the lulav and the waving of the willows there came eventually into the development, by the time of Christ, something new. And what this something new was the details of the day. Now keep in mind Christ has showed up in the middle of this; people have been going… this was a 24 hour a day for seven days, nobody got any sleep, so you can imagine people were a little pitchy toward the end. That’s the background for John 8. Now at the beginning of this thing, here’s what the days activities look like. The Jewish day starts at evening so at evening they would go into the court of women and they would have a blast there all night; I mean a wild party, they believed in enjoying themselves before the Lord and they had a real knock down party, and this went on for seven days. Now this is not to justify every little immoral thing that comes along but my point is to show you that when they worshipped their God they enjoyed it, they used real wine and they relaxed and had a ball. God, Jehovah, was enjoyable to the Jews and they weren’t afraid of saying so.

As this went on all night, toward morning two priests would get up in the temple and here’s what they would do: “While the greater part of the night was thus spent, singing, playing and dancing, two priests stood high above the humming crowd at the upper gate which led from the court of the Israelites down to the women’s court. In their hands they held trumpets and they stood, listening for the first crowing of the cock. As soon as they heard the cock crow,” and by the way, this ceremony is the background for Peter’s denial of Christ later on, why that cock crowing there is given to Peter but we’ll bring that up when we get to that point in the Gospel. At this point the sun is about to rise and the two priests stand there with their trumpets and they’re listening for that first cock crow. “As soon as they heard the cock crow they lifted up their trumpets to their lips and they blew three blasts; these sounds were a signal for the end of the night’s merriment. The crowd arrayed itself in the wake of the priests to a descending procession to the well of Siloam. The procession which went out through the eastern water gate moved slowly and was brought often to a standstill by repeated trumpet blasts, and when they reached the water gate the people turned back toward the west, faced the sanctuary and declared: Our fathers who were on this place stood with their back toward the temple and their faces toward the east and they prostrated themselves eastward to the sun; but as for us, our eyes are turned to the Lord.” Now keep that in mind, for seven days every morning when the crowd went out to get the water they turned back to the temple and they said “for us, our eyes are turned to the Lord.” This is the background for what Jesus is going to say.

“Then the procession moved on and when it reached Siloam the priest who was in charge of drawing the water from the well filled his golden pitcher, which after the whole procession returned the way it had come.” So they went all the way down, you’ll see this in a moment, I’ve got the pictures and the terrain, and they went all the way back. And they poured water into one of two bowls that were placed by the altar. So you visualize the priest, he leads the people down, hundreds and hundreds of people in this procession, they go, the priest dips this golden pitcher in the pool of Siloam and then he holds it up and they go in a magnificent procession back up to the temple. When the priest walks into the temple he takes the water in the bowl and he pours it into one of the pitchers. There’s one of these pitchers by the altar with a tube that goes down to the earth, it’s called water libation, and then there was a second bowl, wine libation. And so the priests would pour wine in one of these bowls and it would drip down into the earth, and then he poured a second one, water, into the first bowl and it would drip down into the earth.

The Mishnah records a few other details associated with this: “The water libation, seven days, what was the manner of this? They used to fill a golden flagon holding one and a half pints with water,” a small amount, “when they reached the water gate,” this is on the way back, “they blew on the shophar sustained and quavering and another sustained blast.” Notice three again. The priest, whose turn of duty it was, went up the altar ramp, turned to the right, were the silver bowls. Rabbi Judah says they were made of plaster but their appearance was darkened because of the wine,” and it goes on and describes what happened. That’s the feast of water libation; to get an idea of what happened, where this feast occurred we’ll now take a look at the temple.

This is a map of the city of Jerusalem as it exists today; the main city of Jerusalem is over on the west side; the temple site is right here in the middle of the map and extending down south from that temple is the plateau on which the Old City of David was built. At the furthermost point of that plateau is the pool of Siloam. [He shows slides.] In Jesus day the temple looked like this; the court of women is this outer area; it was from this area that the people amassed for the teaching. It was in this court that Jesus gave His famous address of John 7. The water gate is one of the gates on the east side, they processed out of that gate; outside the wall they turned around, did a 180 and faced the wall and said, “Our forefathers looked to the east and worshiped the sun but we look to the Lord, our eyes are upon Him.” It was out of this area they came. This is the center part of the temple and you’ll notice steps; those steps are, according to Jewish tradition, the steps on which were chanted Psalms 120 up to I think 139, the Psalms of the ascent; each one of those Psalms in your Bible you’ll see it says Song of Ascent, and they’d chant one psalm per step. It was on the top of those two steps that those priests waited with their shophars, waiting for the first light of dawn and when the light came they’d blow it and it would be heard, not only within this whole area but it would be heard outside this wall where the massive crowd was.

Then they’d come down this plateau, the City of David and here just to the left is the pool of Siloam. By the time of Jesus day the pool had ceremonial buildings around there, it wasn’t just a simply pool like in the Old Testament. This is the way it looks today; the pool is still there, without water. As they came back they would come back through one of these gates. That’s the background for the feast and for the long procession that had just finished.

Now I think we’re ready to work with Jesus’ words. Let’s look at the schedule for the day: all night we had the party; at the crack of dawn the trumpets would sound and there would begin the water libation. The water libation was the going down to the pool of Siloam in that long procession, coming back and then ceremoniously pouring the water out onto the earth. Keep that picture in mind; all these pictures come together in Jesus’ words, so this is why it’s so hard to teach, there’s about a dozen different pictures that He’s making use of here. Then after this was done they would go down to Motza for the willow branches; that’s when that thing started. They’d have another procession; then they’d come back from that procession and they would have sacrifices and teaching the rest of the day until sundown. When sundown came they’d start the cycle all over again, party, next morning trumpet and so on.

Now let’s go to John 7:37, keep all that in mind and now watch what Jesus does. “In the last day, that great day of the feast,” this could be the seventh or the eighth, there’s a big debate on it, if it is the eighth day they did not have the water libation this particular day, but nevertheless, the mob, for seven days, at least, has gone through this ritual and has chanted, every time that water libation occurred they walked and they said our eyes are now turning upon the Lord; and every day when they waved the lulavs they said, “save now oh Lord, we beseech Thee.” And every day they would watch the priests gather the water from the pool of Siloam and pour it out on the earth, by the altar. Now on the last day, after the crowd has had seven days to experience the typology of the feast, Jesus Christ had been standing, it’s pluperfect, it’s a dramatic tense of the verb because John wants us to see Christ standing almost a little bit above the crowd. He had been standing there for some time looking out over the crowd. And then suddenly, we don’t know whether it was in the early morning or afternoon, probably in the afternoon when the teaching was finishing up, “Jesus stood and cried,” it’s the same word here that was used earlier, it’s the word to scream out, He says, “saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink.”

Now before we get into the details let’s remember certain things. Let’s remember that the Lord Jesus Christ has the audacity to do this with the police watching Him. Remember that’s the lead in, this whole thing is full of fear, and so now for the second time in the feast Jesus Christ screams out across the court so everybody in the court has that gone through this ritual for the last seven days hears these words, “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.” Now how would you take this, if for seven days you had been involved in that procession, all the way down to the pool of Siloam, all the way back, and the whole motif of the Feast of Tabernacles was the coming of rain, was the fact that the pouring out of the water had been connected with the prayer for rain. See, that water libation was not only thanks for the past but it was for the future. Here’s why: the farmers in that time understood, obviously, they observed their wells and they knew that when the rain came the water in the well increased. So when you had rain you also had a rising of the well water.

Now the water libation is a concrete way of praying for rain, which was the theme of the Feast of Tabernacles. And when the priest went up there and he poured the water I said that the water went down into a tube into the ground. Why was that? Because they were saying God, this is what we want; we want water in our wells so we’ll have water to grow our crops. The Jewish background of this is explained in this book about rabbinic teaching. “The heads of two competing schools, Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi [sp?], who lived some decades after the destruction of the second temple, both agreed that the Feast of Tabernacles is the time when the amount of rain for the following year is being decided upon in heaven. Rabbi [sp?] said the Torah said pour out the water at the feast of water libation which is the period of rain, that the rains may be blessed for you.” Again, Rabbi Eliaser said, “When on the Feast of Tabernacles the water libations are carried out deep says to deep let thy waters spring forth, I hear the voice of two friends, the water and the wine poured on the altar.” So it’s a picture of the stimulation of blessing in the future; that’s the overall motif.

We’ve dealt with some of the details of that motif, and now Christ makes His announcement: “If any man thirst,” who would that be? It would be the person who was thirsting for the water not only for Himself but for his crops, “If any man thirst,” Jesus said, you “let him come unto Me.” Now how could Jesus be a good man and say this in the middle of the feast of water libation, when everything, when the crowd said our eyes are upon the Jehovah, when the water was poured out before Jehovah, so Jehovah could supply the rain. And Jesus gets up and makes a statement like this? “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me.” How could that have ever been made in a monotheistic society without the claim to deity? Obviously this is a claim to deity. This is one of those obvious places, it couldn’t be taken any way else but a claim of deity. Any Jew in the court would have understood what He was saying. “If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and let him drink.” It’s a picture of belief on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Then He says, John 7:38, “He that believeth on Me,” that is after salvation now, status of a believer, “He that believes on Me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” Now here’s where we get a little complicated. First of all, nobody can agree on what the Scripture was; what is this Scripture that Jesus is talking about? Well, we’ve got to go back to a lot of Scripture and pick up some themes to tie this together. So far I’ve given you the ceremony that was going on at the time; that was the concrete thing the crowd was experiencing. Then suddenly this guy gets up and He shouts this across the whole court.

Now what we want to do is tie exactly what He said to the temple and to the believers. Turn to Genesis 2:10, what we’re doing is studying a Biblical motif about the “rivers of water.” This would have been understood in that day, it’s not today so we have to go through it. What are these “rivers of water?” I’m doing this detail, that’s the only way to get through John 7 and come out with something that’s really worthwhile and can’t be misinterpreted in some sort of a charismatic bushy kind of exegesis. In the original creation how was the earth watered? How were crops raised? It says right here, there was no rain, we know that from verse 6, [“But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.”] So how did the water come out? It says sin verse 10, “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted and became four heads. [11] The name of the first is Pishon; that is it which compasses the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.” Verse 13, “And the name of the second river is Gihon; the same is that compasses the whole land of Ethiopia.” This is the typology of the pre-flood world which doesn’t correspond to our continents today. [14] And the name of the third river is Hiddekel; that is it which goes toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.” That’s why the present Euphrates is called Euphrates because the people who first settled came out of the ark, the ark was sitting Mount Ararat, they came down, they named the first river after the river that they had known in their original pre-flood world, the Euphrates River then.

Now as the water went out across the face of the earth what would it be used for? It would be used to grow things. And why would God be interested in growing things? To provide man something to eat, because every herb had been given to man. So the ultimate physical blessing is the river. Now ask your self a question; where is this river coming from? It isn’t coming from the Garden of Eden, it’s coming from Eden; it is coming directly from the center of God, wherever God was at that time. He had a temple of some sort on the face of the antediluvian earth; it was this area where they were excluded from. For example at the end of Genesis 3:24, after the fall of man men were excluded from this zone, wherever the zone was, “So God drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” So the way of the tree of life, the place where God was in the antediluvian world, and by the way, the original sign of salvation was not the cross, the original sign of salvation was a fruit tree. And so the fruit tree that turns the water into something edible became the symbol for eternal life and it was from that place that water left, it didn’t go to the Garden, it came from the Garden and poured out across the face of the earth.

Now turn to Ezekiel 47:1, prophecy of the millennial temple. Ezekiel’s vision of the temple that will be established in the future, “Afterward, he brought me again unto the door of the temple, and,” now look, “behold, waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward,” now notice something. In the original creation you have the temple of God and water goes out from it. In Ezekiel 47 you have the future millennial kingdom and water comes out from the temple.

Now turn to Revelation 22:1, the new heavens and the new earth. This is not the millennial temple now, this is the temple in the eternal state and here is where God sets up His eternal temple where we will be for all eternity. “He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.”

We have just studied three passages, Genesis 2, Ezekiel 47, Revelation 22; in each passage you had a temple of God, in each passage you had God blessing the creation from His temple by means of water pouring out. This is a standard motif. Now I said that this must carefully be combined with the fact that John’s Gospel was written later than the other Gospels. What had come into existence by the time that John had written his Gospel? Turn to Ephesians 2:20, You “are built,” says Paul the apostle to believers, “ye are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone, [21] In whom all the building fitly framed together grows into a” what? “into a holy temple in the Lord; [22, In whom ye also are built together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” Now here we have the fact that the body of Christ, Paul says, becomes the living temple, the temple not made with stone but made with people. There will be a literal temple in the future but the literal temple will be staffed by people and the people themselves also constitute the temple. And what is that future royal people in history that will be forever and ever and ever in the presence of God in the new creation but the body of Christ. Every person who has ever trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are members of that temple.

Now we have one more passage to link all this background of “thus saith the Scripture.” You see what Jesus said, “as the Scripture has said,” you now get an idea of all the kinds of Scripture He had in mind. There’s one further Scripture which we must go back to, to make it complete. Isaiah 44:3, here we must complete our symbols, our imagery taken from Scripture. In Isaiah 44:3 water and the Holy Spirit are united. “For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground; I will pour My Spirit upon thy seed, and My blessing upon thine offspring.” So you see in that passage the water and the Spirit connected.

Now let’s go back and finish Jesus’ saying; you’ve got the physical background, now we’ve given you the theological background; now let’s run through this and see if we get the impact of what He’s saying. He stands up in the court that day and He screams out, “If any man thirst, let him come to Me and drink,” and the imagery that we know He has on His mind is the gut imagery, the primary imagery of all imagery, going all the way back to Genesis 2 and all the way forward to Revelation 22, the imagery that the only thing that satisfies man is fellowship with God and being a creature sustained moment by moment by the Creator, sustained forever and ever and ever as it says in Revelation 22, and sustained because the waters flow from the center from where God is. So Jesus stood and He cried and He said that, and “He that believes of Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”

Now we can pull together some but we still have a little problem here. So far from verse 37-38 we can say this: Jesus is here predicting the Church. He is predicting the beginning of a new temple, a temple that will satiate man’s inner spiritual thirstiness and He’s saying that where? Where does Jesus choose, what’s the location Jesus chooses to stand in and predict the building of a new temple? The temple. He’s there at the temple and precisely at that point Jesus chooses to make His announcement about the temple, just like He did in John 2, destroy this temple and in three days I’ll raise it up. They never understood, every time He’d get in that courtroom He’d make some remark about a temple and they never could get it together as to what temple it was He spoke of. Now we know that much from 37-38, but now we’ve got a problem in verse 38.

In what way can we take it that “he that believes, as the Scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” The Scripture we said is the temple motif; we know that believers, from Ephesians 2 are all in the temple, we’re [can’t understand word] for that temple, and the temple provides water for the entire creation; believes being part and parcel of the coming temple are put at the center of where God is. But it says out of the believer’s “belly shall flow rivers of living water.” This is a little bit of a problem because if you know Biblical psychology the word “belly” is never referred to conscience, and it doesn’t refer to mind; the belly always refers to your emotions. Now does this verse teach an emotional form of spirituality? We have to go back and control this word for obviously Jesus used it, He didn’t say out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water, but “out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” Out of his emotional pattern?

Fortunately for us, as God the Holy Spirit always does, He provides us with a Scriptural control on our interpretation. That control is found in Psalm 40:8, a Psalm that applies to Christ Himself but the only other place where this word “belly” is used in the form of spirituality. Usually the word “belly” is used in a detrimental sense, it’s your belly, says Paul, your emotional pattern that keeps you away from the Word of God, but there is one passage in the Bible where belly is used positively to denote a form of spirituality. Psalm 40:8, it’s used of Christ, it says, “I delight to do Thy will, O my God; yea, Thy Law is within My belly,” in the original language. Now since we have poetic parallelism in verse 8 what does that verse mean? We don’t know what the last of verse 8 means, that’s the very question we’re trying to answer, what does it mean, “Thy Law is within My belly,” within My emotions. Well, it means what it means in the first part of verse 8, “I delight to do Thy will.”

So now we have an interpretation of what Jesus meant: out of the believer’s belly others shall be blessed, just as from Eden the water flowed out across the surface of the earth. What is the believer’s belly but sanctified emotions which appreciate the will of God? In other words, what John 7:38 is saying, out of his belly shall flow, not immediately, but eventually will flow rivers of refreshing water to other people. And the rivers will not flow until they can flow out of the believer’s belly. Well, when does a believer get in the position where the waters are able to flow from his belly? When he is sanctified enough so that his emotions are responding correctly to the Word of God, when he has that level of growth so that now the Word of God, he not only understands but because it has become so much a part of his soul he can appreciate it.

Said another way, the last part of us to be sanctified is our emotions. Now few people understand this truth, but in counseling you come across a situation, a person will walk in, well, I just don’t know… you mean the Word of God says I’ve got to do that. Yes, you have to do that. Well, I don’t like to do that. The Word of God doesn’t ask you for your opinion on whether you like to do that or not, it tells you you will do it. But I don’t like it; you will do it, period. Now in practice in your sanctification it will always be this way. You start off gritting your teeth and doing what God’s will says, with no enjoyment the first couple of times. Eventually your depraved emotions will come into line with your obedience to the Word of God and you will begin to enjoy what you’re doing. And then you have the sanctification enlarging out into the area of your emotions.

Now let’s look carefully at John 7:38 again, Jesus said, “He that is a believer,” the Christian, “out of His belly shall flow rivers of living water,” that is water that can give life to other people. What is it that gives life to other people but those people who are so mature that they enjoy the Word of God. This is not talking about novice believers; this is not talking about every believer; it says, if you read the text carefully, “He who believes in Me, out of his belly will,” in the future, “flow rivers of living water, a certain sanctified state is needed.

Now I said at the very beginning tonight to watch something about John and I told you two or three times to watch something about John. What is it that we’re supposed to watch about John? That John was written after the Church began; John was written to report Christ’s life in such a way to give encouragement to Christians and what was going on in John’s day in 80-90 AD but evangelism. Now if somebody inevitably walks up to you and says where in the Bible does it tell us to witness, quite frankly I think I’d be hard pressed to answer that. There’s the great commission that involves a lot more than just witnessing. And in all the hundreds of admonitions I the epistles isn’t it strange that there aren’t any admonitions to witness. There’s admonitions to love your wife, admonitions to the wife to submit to her husband, admonitions to raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, admonitions for the employer to do his job as unto the Lord, but where are the admonitions to witness? They’re strangely lacking. Now we’ve got to come to the conclusion, obviously God is interested in us witnessing but why aren’t there any admonitions there? I think this verse tells us why and gives us a norm and a control on this whole problem of witnessing and evangelism.

What this verse is saying is that the rivers will flow out of the belly when the wells are full. The Feast of Tabernacles looked forward to a crop, when the wells would be filled and the rain would come, then you would have your crop. And so what Jesus is saying, when the Spirit comes and He does His ministry unto the point of sanctifying your emotions, then the rivers of living water will proceed out of and reach others. And so it’s not a question of an admonition in this epistle or that epistle; it’s a question of the fact that personal evangelism follows upon maturity and thus the Holy Spirit when He writes the Scripture is very careful not to keep beating us over the head, got to get out there and witness, got to get out there and witness, got t get out there and witness, got to get out there and witness. You don’t find that in the New Testament, yet you know the Holy Spirit is interested in witnessing because He’s given us the great commission. So the only way you can resolve it is to say this: when we do the admonitions given we love our wives, we submit to our husbands, we raise our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, as employers and employees we adhere to the standards of the Word, when we are involved in doing those things then the belly will be filled to the point where it can overflow and then the people around will receive living waters.

John adds in John 7:39 what we’ve been hinting at all through this, I wanted to show you that it proceeds logically from this and John doesn’t just tack this on, “(But this spoke He of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)”

Now let’s sum up what we’ve seen; we’ve come a long ways tonight and a lot of this material I’ve presented is going to come again and again until we finish all these chapters. We’re going to meet it again in chapter 8, we’re going to meet it again in chapter 9, so don’t think we’re all done with those details. What have we seen? We’ve seen the tremendous irony of John, the crowd sitting there ridiculing Jesus, Ha, where are you going that we can’t go, out in the garbage can with the Gentiles? Precisely, out in the garbage can of the Gentiles because that’s the only place where God can go where He’s accepted with all this righteousness here in Jerusalem. So we have the irony of negative volition fulfilling prophecy.

And then we say when Jesus said to the crowd, “I AM” and the crowd says He said I AM, who is it? The irony, they just said who He was. And then in the middle of the water libation right, after seven days of traipsing all over Jerusalem carrying water, pouring it out, saying Lord, Jehovah, save us, give us rain that You’ll supply all our needs, and walking out the door and saying our eyes are not turned to You, Jehovah, with all that ceremony Jesus gets up and in essence says oh, you’re pouring out water to Me, you want Me to bless you, you your eyes are not turned to the east like your fathers but they are turned to the west and looking at Me, well then come unto Me and drink, and then when you have you will find that you are the source of blessing. You see, this is why the theme of John’s Gospel is that “these are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that believing you might have life through His name.