TITLE
John 7:1-24 – Right Motives and Wrong Discernment
EXPLANATION
After losing some of His followers, Jesus continued
His traveling ministry. He restricted
His movements to the area of Galilee, because He knew that the Jewish leaders
were seeking His life in Judea. However,
the time for the Feast of Booths was now approaching, and this feast was
celebrated in Jerusalem. At this point,
Jesus’s brothers urged Him to go to Jerusalem for the festival, and in so doing
they demonstrated their own lack of faith in their brother. They encouraged Him to gather acclaim and
human praise for Himself. They wanted
Jesus to seek after temporal fame and prestige rather than continuing to, as
they saw it, muddle about in the backwater areas of Israel, ministering to the
poor and needy who could not possibly repay Him with earthly rewards.
In spite of the short sighted and man centered advice
of His brothers, Jesus chose to continue ministering in secret. He initially told them He was not going to
the feast because He knew that it was not yet time for the final confrontation
between Himself and the Jews. After
telling the brothers this, Jesus turned around and did go up to Jerusalem. Did Jesus Lie about His intentions? No, He did not. When He told His brothers He was not going,
it was in the context of what they were wanting Him to do. That is, making a spectacle of Himself and
artificially drawing the people’s attention with parlor tricks. Such was not Jesus’s motivation. He did intend on going to the feast, but as a
teacher rather than a miracle worker.
And, this is precisely what He did.
In the middle of the feast Jesus went into the public
area of the temple and began to teach.
His teaching astonished the Jews, because they could tell He was
knowledgeable even though He had never been formally educated. Jesus’s explanation for His wisdom continued
His traditional habit of being counter cultural. He identified His teaching as coming from
God. And, He turned this truth into a
point of confrontation. He said that
anyone who was truly seeking God’s will would recognize whether Jesus’s
teaching was from God or not. The
implication was that if they thought He was not from God, then they proved the
point by their unbelief that they were not truly seeking the will of God.
Jesus went on to teach that someone who teaches based
on his own authority is seeking after his own glory as well. However, someone endowed with the authority
of another works and teaches for the purpose of magnifying the authority of
their master. Then, Jesus again confronted
the ridiculousness of the Jews’ lack of faith.
They wanted to castigate Him for healing on the Sabbath, because they
saw it as a form of work. Yet, they had
no problem circumcising a Jewish child on the Sabbath when necessary. Again, the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the
Jews was demonstrated.
APPLICATION
In following Jesus’s teaching and His example from
this passage, we should walk away with two very strong points of
application. First is to avoid the
praise of the world. Jesus’s brothers
were not interested in the glory of God.
They only had eyes for how their brother might be able to become famous
and prestigious. Jesus, on the other
hand, had pure motives that began and ended with what His Father wanted.
The second point illustrated by this text is the
importance of exercising good judgment and sound discernment. The Jews should have known that Jesus’s
teaching was from God. They had no
excuse for their unbelief. All they
would have had to do is consult the Hebrew Scriptures with an open mind,
uncontaminated by their own pre-conceived notions, and they would have
immediately recognized the source of Christ’s power, authority, and
instruction. Of course, we know from the
previous section, that they were incapable of making these theological
connections in and of themselves. Only
God is capable of granting such faith.
Yet, that did not absolve the Jews of their responsibility to believe
and their culpability in disbelieving.
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