The Gospel of John - Outline Part 13 - Doing It by the Book

TITLE

John 5:30-47 – Doing It by the Book

EXPLANATION

Jesus continues His sermon from the previous passage.  However, this time, rather than leaving His rebuke general, He aims it straight at the hearts of the unbelieving Jews.

He begins by highlighting His own just nature.  This nature results in just judgment.  And, the reason is because He does not seek His own will, but rather the will of the Father.  The point is that one who seeks their own will is suspected of bias.  But one who seeks on behalf of the will of another is impartial with regard to the execution of their responsibilities as judge.

This alone bears witness of who Jesus is.  Yet, it is not the sole witness.  There is another witness, who is greater than even the greatest of all human witnesses.  He is John the Baptist.  Also, it is the works that Jesus did that bear witness to His identity.  Even this is not the extent of the witnesses who come forward on behalf of Jesus.  God the Father Himself weighs in on behalf of His Son.  Yet, this is not through visible form or audible voice.  It is through the Scriptures.  The very Scriptures that the Jews claimed to revere spoke of and revealed the Christ, who is Jesus, to them.  The Jews blindly searched the Scriptures, trying to find within their pages salvation, when the source of salvation that the Scriptures spoke of was standing right in front of their faces.

Jesus was not done rebuking the Jews for their faithlessness.  He went on to ridicule them.  He said they would believe an ordinary human being who came to them in his own name.  But Jesus came from the Father and the Jews refused to believe in Him.  This was reprehensible.  And, it is one of the great ironies of Scripture that Jesus had no need to accuse the Jews of unbelief before the Father.  The very one to whom the Jews turned to establish their own works based righteousness, Moses himself, in the Law, accused them.  He wrote of Jesus, the Messiah who was to come.  And, because the Jews refused to accept his written testimony, they stood accused by him.

APPLICATION

Jesus makes a powerful case in this passage for the sufficiency of Scripture.  He was incarnated in an era of great tendencies to fall away from the Scriptures as the sole source of truth.  The Jews relied on their oral law to supplement the Law of Moses contained in the Torah.  They viewed righteous living as obeying the Scriptures plus their traditions.

This was the same crime the Roman Catholic church was and is guilty of, and the issue for which the reformers fought and died.  And it is the same issue plaguing the church today.  People look to experiences, demagogues, or even science to supplement the truth of Scripture.  The issue is not that any of those things are inherently wrong.  The problem is that they must be secondary in priority to the biblical record.  Experiences are fine, but only if they authenticate what has already been revealed in the Bible.  Demagogues are only as good as their alignment with the Bible.  Science is only valuable to the extent that it confirms what has already been recorded in the Bible.  We must not lose sight of this.