Jesus Confronts Negative Volition; John 7:10-30

In this section of John, going back to the fifth chapter, we are seeing a series of public confrontations between our Lord and the religious leaders in Israel, as well as the people. In chapter five Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath, which raised the ire of the Pharisees, and there was a confrontation. There we saw the Son of God discourse. Then in chapter six Jesus was back in Galilee and we saw the feeding of the 5000, the miracle of His walking on the water, followed by the bread of life discourse which challenged the multitude to believe on Him and accept Him as the Messiah. We saw that at the beginning of the chapter the multitudes were with Him but by the end of the chapter they had left and there were only the twelve disciples who stayed. Now we have the third confrontation which is found from the seventh chapter through the tenth chapter. Jesus is on His third trip to Jerusalem, He is no longer popular with the masses, in fact He has now somewhat of a notorious reputation. Everyone is wondering who He is, where He is, what He is teaching, and what will happen when the Pharisees finally carry out their death threat. So He makes His way to Jerusalem in some secrecy.

We need to look at some Old Testament passages. Zechariah 14:16 ^NASB “Then it will come about that any who are left of all the nations that went against Jerusalem will go up from year to year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to celebrate the Feast of Booths.” This is a prophetic passage which refers to the situation in the Millennium. The “LORD of hosts” is Yahweh, the covenant name of God emphasising His relationship with Israel, and the term “hosts” is the Hebrew word sabbaoth which means armies. So we see here that the feast of tabernacles figures prominently in Millennial expectations. So when they6 are coming to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of tabernacles what is on their mind is the coming of the King, the coming of the Messiah who will give them political victory and restore to the nation a glory even greater than that of David and Solomon. So it is a very patriotic time, a time of national and ethnic pride.

Malachi 3:1 is a prophecy that has a primary reference to John the Baptist. It also has expectations related to the messiah and His coming. ^NASB “Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the LORD of hosts.” Here the Lord of the armies is a reference to God the Father because He is referring to another person, another Lord, Adonai. The phrase we want to focus on is “will suddenly come to His temple.” This concept has been built into the Jewish messianic expectations. They are looking for a Messiah who will suddenly appear. In their thinking by the time of the first advent the rabbis were taught that the Messiah would sort of supernaturally appear, without genealogy, without background, without personal history; He would just suddenly appear upon the scene. Remember that because that is the Old Testament context for understanding the events that are going to transpire in Jerusalem.

In John 7:1, 2 John sets before us the context, the setting. Jesus was unwilling to walk in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill Him. In vv. 3ff we see the antagonism that Jesus had, even in His own family. We see that none of them are believers, in fact they are operating on pure human viewpoint expectations of religion, of ritual, of the Messiah and how the Messiah or religious leader ought to operate. What we see here is that the world, i.e. unbelievers and carnal believers who don’t have a clue as to what the Scriptures teach are always caught up with trying to compare Christianity with other organizations, institutions and methodology. They want to make the church a social organization, a political organization, some kind of lonely hearts club or civic organization, and they think that the church operates on principles like all other organizations. Then bottom line problem is that they start thinking that the principles that govern a church are the principles that govern a business. Whatever the latest fad is in business, then sooner or later that makes its way into the church. The problem is that the church is a unique organization in history. It is an organism, the body of Christ, and it operates specifically and exclusively on principles related to the dynamics of the Holy Spirit and the dynamics of the spiritual life. And even though there might be some overlap and some parallels, if we start trying to run the church or evangelism, or anything like that, on the basis of human viewpoint salesmanship techniques then we are going to fall apart.

Here in chapter seven Jesus refuses to compromise with the human viewpoint assumptions of His family. They are coming to Him and saying: “Be like everybody else. If you want to be a prophet, then go and act like all the other prophets and go to Jerusalem.” He refuses to compromise and He stays behind. One of the reasons He stays behind is because Jesus is not a fool. He has an agenda. He is operating on God’s plan and purpose for His life and he knows that His appearance in Jerusalem at the wrong time could escalate things and put the plan in jeopardy. So He is going to remain in control of His schedule and His plan. He knows that there is a hostile environment awaiting Him in Jerusalem and he takes the proper precautions necessary to ensure that the Father’s plan is not going to be prematurely interrupted.

John 7:10 ^NASB “But when His brothers had gone up to the feast, then He Himself also went up, not publicly, but as if, in secret.” Back in verse 8 Jesus told His brothers to go up to the feast but He would not go up because His time had not yet fully come. The implication is not that He was not going to go, He is saying His time hasn’t come, He is not going yet. Then after they went He went up in secret. He didn’t to precipitate events and so He waited until everybody else had gone. He goes up to Jerusalem somewhat secretly, incognito, not making a display of His presence or challenging anyone.

John 7:11 ^NASB “So the Jews were seeking Him at the feast and were saying, ‘Where is He?’” This is the imperfect tense of zeteo [zhtew] which means that the Jewish leaders were continually seeking Him. This is their day in, day out, all day long, having their spies out in the crowds looking for Jesus.

John 7:12 ^NASB “There was much grumbling among the crowds concerning Him; some were saying, ‘He is a good man’; others were saying, ‘No, on the contrary, He leads the people astray’.” There was arguing, disputation, among the multitudes. The people have Him on their lips. We see here that there were two positions: that He was a good man. The Greek word for “good” is agathos [a)gaqoj] which means good of intrinsic value. So it is a recognition that not simply that He is a nice guy, not simply that He is a good moral teacher; these are the ones who recognise that Jesus is indeed who he claims to be, the Messiah, and they are in the minority. This is indicated in the Greek. On the contrary, the vast majority were saying He was a deceiver. The word here for leading astray is planao [planaw] which means to deceive. So they are calling Him a deceiver. What we need to recognise is that these are the only options people really have about who Jesus was.

John 7:13 ^NASB “Yet no one was speaking openly of Him for fear of the Jews.” Here we see that nothing is more indicative of an enslaved population than those who fear the authorities.

Now we see the confrontation start in the next five verses, 14-19. We see Jesus suddenly appear in the temple. Remember Malachi 3? So in the middle of this week-long feast Jesus is suddenly in the crowd. Nobody saw Him come, nobody knew He was coming; suddenly He was there and He was teaching. People are reminded of the Malachi passage. In the midst of this the Jews are going to challenge His credentials and He is going to throw the challenge back to them.

John 7:14 ^NASB “But when it was now the midst of the feast Jesus went up into the temple, and {began to} teach. [15] The Jews then were astonished, saying, ‘How has this man become learned, having never been educated?’” This is the response of the Jewish religious leaders. They can’t understand how Jesus has this kind of authority.

John 7:16 ^NASB “So Jesus answered them and said, ‘My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me.’” “Teaching” is the Greek word didache [didaxh] which means doctrine. Jesus wasn’t afraid to use the word “doctrine.” You have to learn certain things academically before you can ever apply them. We are to renovate our thinking and that must precede the renovation of our life and our overt activity. But so many don’t want to think, they just want to go to church and have their emotions stimulated. The church has become impotent in our society because believers don’t know doctrine anymore. Doctrine has become a bad word for a lot of people and they are afraid to even use it. [17] If anyone is willing to do His will [the will of God the Father], he will know of the teaching [doctrine], whether it is of God or {whether} I speak from Myself’.” So Jesus challenges their whole concept of the standard authority and He claims that His doctrine comes directly from God the Father. Then He makes one of the most important statements in the Bible about how we learn things. This is something that will challenge our thinking. This is what is called in philosophy “epistemology,” the study of how we know what we know, the study of knowledge. How do you know truth? How do you really know what is true and what is false? Jesus said: “If any man is willing to do His will.” This is a 3^rd class construction in the Greek, which means that some will and some will not. It’s focus is on positive volition—If any man is positive to doctrine. This is an orientation in your soul: do you really want to know the truth or not? What Jesus is saying is that in your soul, in your volition, if you really want to know the truth you shall know the doctrine and whether it is true or not. The fundamental issue in knowledge, therefore, is not a moral issue, is not an IQ issue, not an academic issue; it is a volitional issue. What Jesus is saying to these very religious, very moral leaders, is that if they were really positive they would know the truth. Their basic orientation to doctrine was negative. What a slap in the face to the Pharisees!

In John 7:18 He draws the contrast. He is going to take it case by case. Case # 1 is the autonomous man; case # 2 is going to be the person with humility who has positive volition. ^NASB “He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory…” This is always the way with autonomous man. He is set in negative volition, he is self-absorbed, and he is operating on the arrogance skills of self-absorption and self-justification, and is pursuing his own path to truth. He wants to determine what absolute truth is, and then come to God and say, God, you need my concepts of what absolute truth is. How many times have we hard people talk about what they think about God? They all start saying: “I think God is like this… I can’t believe God would ever do that…” We should just challenge them and ask: Where did you learn so much about God? What is your basis of authority for saying that? Most people have their own subjective impressions of the way they think God ought to act, and then they want to impose those autonomous ideas that they have generated in the arrogance of their souls upon the Bible and upon God. So because God doesn’t need my idea of what God ought to be like, then He can’t be God. That is the way human viewpoint and arrogance operates. Jesus said: He who speaks from himself, the person who is set in human viewpoint autonomy, is ultimately seeking his own glory. Human viewpoint always seeks to elevate man and make man the absolute standard, whether it is an individual or a collective group. “… but He who is seeking the glory of the One who sent Him [the one who is operating on positive volition], He is true, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.” He is speaking here of Himself, that He is seeking the glory of God. Notice here how the apostle John uses the word “true.” It is the Greek word aletheia [a)lhqeia] and he reserves this word almost exclusively to God in his Gospel. So Jesus is saying here: “I speak the truth because I am truth.”

So Jesus asserts His authority here in contrast to the crowd’s assertion of authority. When they question Him, How can this man lead us? they are basically asserting their own authority, the value of their own educational system. But here Jesus responds by claiming absolute authority, that He can speak the truth because He is truth, because He is the righteous one. He is challenging the facade of intellectual open-mindedness—open to everything but the Bible. You can bring any fact at all into the classroom but if it is derived at all from the Scriptures then you can’t bring that in. So that is not open-mindedness at all because the truly objective person will evaluate all the data.

Jesus challenges them. They challenge Him to produce His authority but he doesn’t specifically answer their challenge because it is based on human viewpoint concepts of truth and proof. We saw this back in chapter five. They basically said, prove that you are the Son of God. Whenever you have somebody say, prove that this is true, what do they mean by truth and what do they mean by proof? These are not value-neutral terms. When you talk about truth, what is the absolute criterion for truth? When they talk about proof, what is the final criterion for determining truth? What are the absolutes? So Jesus is not going to cave in to their pressure. You should never let the person operating on human viewpoint determine his agenda. Instead, He ignores what they say and He uses the same strategy He used in John chapter five. Rather than conforming to their concepts of truth and proof, which is a concept of autonomous man, He is going to challenge them and He is going to show that they can’t even follow Moses. He is going to prove to them how inconsistent they are and that they do not even understand what Moses taught. He is going to go on the offensive instead of sitting on the defence.

John 7:19 ^NASB “Did not Moses give you the Law, and {yet} none of you carries out the Law? Why do you seek to kill Me?” This must have rankled the Pharisees who prided themselves on how consistent they were in applying the Mosaic Law. He is going to point out their motive and challenge their very thinking. Then notice how the multitude responds.

John 7:20 ^NASB “The crowd answered, ‘You have a demon! Who seeks to kill You?’” They are caught up in self-deception. When we are involved in the arrogance skills, first there is self-absorption, then self-justification, then there is self-deception, and then we become divorced from reality. Reality is always defined by the Word of God. So Jesus is going to try to drive them back to reality and to remind them of what happened a little over a year ago on the visit to Jerusalem in John chapter five. [21] “Jesus answered them, ‘I did one deed, and you all marvel.’”

John 7:22 ^NASB “For this reason Moses has given you circumcision (not because it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and on {the} Sabbath you circumcise a man.” The legalists tended to identify circumcision with the Mosaic Law but Jesus is accurate here. Circumcision was the sign of the Abrahamic covenant. God gave the covenant to Abraham in Genesis chapter twelve. Every covenant has a sign. The Noahic covenant has the rainbow; the sign of the Abrahamic covenant is circumcision. What is the sign of the Mosaic covenant? The Sabbath. This is the issue: He healed on the Sabbath and they are claiming He violated the Law. “…and on {the} Sabbath you circumcise a man.” In other words, you recognise it is legitimate to circumcise a man even if it is the Sabbath, so you are going to violate the Sabbath law for the purpose of circumcision. [23] “If a man receives circumcision on {the} Sabbath so that the Law of Moses will not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made an entire man well on {the} Sabbath?”

It is instructive to go to the Mishnah here to see how they wrangled about the laws related to the Sabbath, because indeed Moses recognised the principle that the Sabbath was made for man, as Jesus put it, not man for the Sabbath. So there were legitimate exceptions. The purpose of the Sabbath was just to rest in the provision of God. It taught grace; it taught the importance of faith and trust in God in the midst of life’s difficulties, that God would provide, and so on the Sabbath you rested, you didn’t try to earn anything. The Pharisees got all caught up with what constitutes works, what is works and what isn’t works.

Mishnah: They do not deliver the young of cattle on the festival but to help out. They did deliver a woman ready to give birth, they would call a midwife for her from a distant place. Notice how they split hairs! They violate the Sabbath on her account and they tie the umbilical cord. If somebody was cut on the Sabbath you couldn’t apply pressure to that wound to stop bleeding, they would just bleed to death. So they tie the umbilical cord, and they cut it, and all things applying to circumcision they performed on the Sabbath. They could cut wood to make coals to prepare an iron utensil for circumcision. So it is okay to sterilise the instrument. So they split hairs on every single detail trying to figure out how to apply these principles.

Jesus’ argument is this. You are willing to violate the Sabbath to heal one small member, to deal with this one small issue in relation to man—circumcision was also recognised as a hygienic principle as well as being related to the fulfilment of the Law—but when I come along and heal the whole man, now you are going to get mad at me? He is pointing out the fundamental absolute inconsistency of their legalism and their interpretation of the Scriptures. So He concludes: John 7:24 ^NASB “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.” In other words, you are so confused and so distracted in all of this that you can’t make a right decision because you don’t have the correct interpretation of the Scriptures. You cannot judge unless you have an absolute standard of righteousness. Jesus says: “I am the truth, and I am the one who is in your very presence.”

This is not the picture that so many religions paint of this meek, mild and lowly Jesus. He is right there in the midst of an incredibly hostile crowd and He just stirs up the pot—not for the sake of creating antagonism, not for the sake of causing anxiety, of arguing for the sake of arguing—for the purpose of bringing everything to a head in terms of His claim to be the Messiah and to make it abundantly clear, to give them more than enough opportunity to respond positively, so that it becomes clear not only to their own generation but for all time and eternity that for the leadership and the people in Jerusalem at this time there was every opportunity, every evidence and every witness to the truth. And they rejected it. It is their volition that is the issue. So the tension increases and the confrontation develops.

John 7:25 ^NASB “So some of the people of Jerusalem were saying, ‘Is this not the man whom they are seeking to kill? [26] Look, He is speaking publicly, and they are saying nothing to Him. The rulers do not really know that this is the Christ, do they?’” Now the crowd is confused. He is having this confrontation with the religious leaders and the crowd have heard that they want to kill Jesus, that there is a plot to take His life. Are they for Him or are they against Him? Well if He is out there like this and they are not arresting Him then they must be for Him. So the crowd cannot figure out what the religious authorities want to do and the religious authorities don’t have the courage to arrest Him in the midst of the crowd because He still has a measure of popularity.

John 7:27 ^NASB “However, we know where this man is from; but whenever the Christ may come, no one knows where He is from.” Remember Malachi 3:1. Jesus’ response: [28] “Then Jesus cried out in the temple, teaching and saying, ‘You both know Me and know where I am from; and I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know.’” krazo [krazw] is the verb here. He cries out, He raises His voice. See the tension here, this is dramatic. He raises His voice to make sure everybody hears what His claim is, and He uses sarcasm. He says: “You know me? And you know where I’m from? Do you really? What makes you think you know all about me?” “…but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know.” He is repeating this. He is walking around the temple surrounded by the Pharisees, the Sadducees and all the people and He is saying: “You think you know where I come from. You people don’t know me and you don’t know the Father who sent me; you don’t have a clue.” And He is directly challenging their whole religious system.

John 7:29 ^NASB “I know Him, because I am from Him, and He sent Me.” Jesus’ fighting words. [30] “So they were seeking to seize Him; and no man laid his hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come.” This reminds us of what John said at the very beginning of this Gospel in 1:10-12 ^NASB “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own [the Jews], and those who were His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, {even} to those who believe in His name.” The majority of the Jews rejected Him but there were those who accepted His claims to be Messiah. They knew that faith alone was the key to eternal life. And that is how John 7:31 begins. ^NASB “But many of the crowd believed in Him; and they were saying, ‘When the Christ comes, He will not perform more signs than those which this man has, will He?’” They realised that they saw before their eyes prophecy fulfilled as the Messiah came suddenly into His temple and they believed in Him. They saw the truth; they saw the evidence. These were the ones who were positive. But those who were negative, who had already rejected God and had chosen the path of religion and the path of arrogance, when they saw the signs it didn’t convince them. Why? Because facts aren’t the issue; they had all the facts necessary. The issue is volition. Jesus shows us here the importance of volition and the importance of positive volition first if we are ever going to understand biblical truth.