As we continue in this study of the fifth chapter of John, I would remind you of the claims that Jesus made concerning Himself in the second half of this chapter which we studied last time.  They really are amazing.  Jesus claims to be the Son of God, equal with God, the One sent by the Father, the source of eternal life,  the one in perfect unity with the Father,  the judge of all the world, and that He would raise all the dead in the earth either to stand in judgment before Him, or that He would give them eternal life.  Now those are exceptional claims.  No man in history has ever made such extraordinary claims.  

As I said last week, Jesus was either the Son of God as He claimed, or He was a lunatic and a blasphemer deserving of being locked up or executed. But there is no middle ground.  He could not be just a good teacher, or a good man, or just a prophet.  He was either God incarnate, or a complete fraud. Jesus doesn’t give us any other choice.

It’s no wonder really, that the Jews were skeptical of Christ’s claims.  When you consider His claims in spite of lacking a religious position or priestly pedigree,  you can almost understand the animosity towards Jesus by the Jewish establishment.  But I say almost understand because in reality there were many accompanying signs which should have validated who He claimed to be.  The fact is, that the evidence that He was the Messiah was overwhelming, but they choose not to believe in Him, because He did not fit into their template for how they wanted the Messiah to operate.  It’s almost as if God sent Jesus the Messiah to the Jews, and they looked Him over pretty good, examined His resume, and said, “No thanks.  He’s not what we’re looking for right now.”  

So John says in vs.18, that the Jews were already conspiring to kill Him.  Not only did they not accept Him, but they believed the best way to get rid of Him was to murder Him.  Pretty amazing really.  They hated Him without a cause.  Without  justification.  They hated Him simply because He did not fit into their agenda. 

The first part of the chapter illustrates their attitude perfectly.  Jesus healed a paralyzed man who had been sick for 38 years and all they seemed to care about was that Jesus healed him on the Sabbath Day.  They really didn’t care about the sick man or the Sabbath Day.  They just wanted to exercise their power and position over Jesus and the traditions of the Sabbath served their purpose.  They really wanted Jesus to have to submit to them instead of them submitting to the Messiah.

And that’s not just an attitude exclusive to the first century, by the way.  That’s a common 21st century attitude as well.  We still have people who want Christ to serve them, rather than to submit to serve Christ.  People may be willing to believe in Christ to some degree, but they see Him as a means to achieve their agenda, to get Him to help them achieve their goals, their happiness, their success.  What they need to realize is that the crux of the gospel is the cross of the gospel.  And as Jesus went to the cross for us, so we are to go to the cross for Jesus, sacrificing our glory, our goals, our priorities for the sake of Christ.  So we have the same problem today that the religious Jews had in that day.  A convoluted, self serving sense of entitlement at the expense of Christ.

So Jesus made these outrageous claims, in effect saying that He was equal with God, and now in verses 31-47 He is going to present validation for His claims.  And to do so, to establish His deity, He is going to put forth five witnesses.  That was in keeping with the law, by the way.  The law said in Deuteronomy 19:15, that every fact was to be corroborated by 2 or 3 witnesses.  In other words, in a court of law, in order to establish truth, there must be at least 2, or better yet 3 witnesses to validate one’s statement as truth.  So Jesus is upholding the law here and actually exceeding the requirements of the law by offering multiple testimonies to His deity.

I have to say as I have studied John’s writings over the years, I’ve often struggled with his writing style.  I get the sense sometimes that he is overlapping things or being repetitive in laying out certain principles.  And I have to admit sometimes I am almost frustrated by it.  I kind of want him to step up the pace a little bit.  But as I was thinking about this writing style that John seems to have, I remembered something which is called in engineering terms, redundancy.  According to Wikipedia, in the field of engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system.  So redundancy is very important in engineering things like airplanes.  When you are 30,000 feet in the air in a tin can going 600 miles an hour, it is comforting to know that the essential hydraulics and components of the engine have redundant features.  So if one system should fail, there is at least one or two more that are designed to sustain the aircraft.  Redundancy may produce a more complicated system, but it generally produces a more reliable system.

And perhaps that is what John does with His gospel.  He takes the essential doctrines of the gospel, and overlaps principles or evidences or witnesses in such a way as to provide a fail safe gospel.  It provides for a faith that will prove to be reliable, no matter how great the stress that is placed upon it.  And that should be a comfort to us as we go forward in his gospel.  Sometimes as we study it, it may seem overly complicated, but I hope when you feel that way you will remember that the principle of redundancy is there for your safe keeping.

So John is going to be somewhat redundant in this passage in order to verify the claims of Christ, upon which we base our faith, and thus our salvation.  And so he records  several testimonies or witnesses of Christ.  And the first witness that Jesus mentions is that of His own testimony.  He gave witness of Himself as we read in vs.19-30 last week. In them He makes the claims that we stated at the beginning which are all statements reserved for deity.  But Jesus says that they don’t accept them as true.  And so Jesus sets His own testimony aside, because He knows that they will not accept His testimony alone as legal proof.  However, of course we know that His testimony is true, just as we know His words are true, because the Spirit says amen in our hearts.  But these men who don’t know God, do not have the Spirit of God, and so they do not know the truth, nor recognize the truth.  They were blind to the truth, even as Paul said in 2 Cor. 4:3-4 “And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”

The second witness that Jesus presents is that of the Father.  In vs.32, Jesus says, “There is another who testifies of Me, and I know that the testimony which He gives about Me is true.”  Now He is going to go on in the next verse and speak of the witness of John the Baptist.  But in vs.32, He is speaking of  His Father.  And he picks up this testimony of the Father again in vs. 37, “And the Father who sent Me, He has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time nor seen His form.”

Now how did God bear testify of Jesus? Well, through multiple dispensations.  There were several instances at His birth when angels who are the messengers of God spoke concerning Him as being born of the Spirit of God, as the Son of God and as the Savior of the world. And God appointed a special star to shine out of heaven to guide the wise men to birth of the King of the Jews so that they could worship Him.  Then there was the Spirit of God in the form of a dove descending upon Him at His baptism in fulfillment of prophecy.  And there was the voice of God declaring “You are My beloved Son, in You I am well-pleased.” So God the Father bore witness of Christ’s deity.

The third witness Jesus brings forth was that of John the Baptist. Vs.33, “You have sent to John, and he has testified to the truth.”  Now John was an important witness, and yet Jesus says in the next verse that He did not receive the testimony of man.  What does He mean by that?  He means that God is self sufficient. Jesus does not need the testimony of man to validate Himself. Christ needs no letters of recommendation from man – He is able to establish His own credentials.  But He includes John’s testimony because it was important for our salvation.  So then, He brings up John not to prove Himself, but as a benefit for our salvation.  God has ordained that by the foolishness of preaching men are saved.  And God has chosen to use men to preach the gospel to other men, so that they might believe.  So He includes John’s testimony for our sake, and not for His own.

He goes on to say that John was a lamp that was burning, and they were able to rejoice for a while in that light. They received for a while the ministry of John. It was a novelty in their minds, he was popular for a while.  But because they did not truly believe his testimony concerning Jesus as the Christ, they eventually discarded him.  But Christ says that His own testimony was greater than the lamp of John, because He was the light.  John was a lamp in which the light was reflected.  But Jesus is the Light of the world, that sets ablaze the lamps of men. Jesus’ testimony is greater than John’s testimony even as the light is greater than the lamp.  But nevertheless, God uses lamps to draw men to Himself so that they might be saved.  God has designed you to be a lamp as well.  You are to reflect the light of Christ in your life that men might see your light and be drawn to Christ.  We are told not to hide our lamp under a bushel, but set it on a hill that men might see the light of salvation and the result of that salvation reflected in us.

The fourth witness then which is greater than the witness of John was the works of Christ. Vs. 36 “But the testimony which I have is greater than the testimony of John; for the works which the Father has given Me to accomplish–the very works that I do–testify about Me, that the Father has sent Me.”

Now we know that the religious leaders knew that Jesus did the works of God, by the testimony of one of their own and that was Nicodemus whom we were introduced to in chapter 3.  Remember Nicodemus said in 3:2, “Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.”  They knew that He did miracles that only God could do, and so He had to be of God.  And yet they still planned to kill Him.  That’s why I said last week that I am convinced that the Jews knew that He was the Son of God, and yet they still wanted to kill Him because He did not fit into their religious agenda which was designed to promote themselves.  That is a damning accusation, and as such it is more than enough justification for God’s judgment to fall upon Israel which it did in AD 70.

So the miracles and works that Jesus did were testimony to the fact that He was God incarnate. You know, John the Baptist didn’t do any miracles.  Did you ever think of that?  God ordained that John would simply preach the gospel of repentance.  The miracles Jesus did were evidence that He was the Son of God. The miracles that the apostles did were evidence that they were spokesmen for the Son of God, appointed for the foundation of the gospel.  Paul said in 2Cor. 12:12 “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, by signs and wonders and miracles.”  Are there true apostles today?  I would say there are not.  The apostles were specially commissioned men who had been with Christ that were given attesting miracles to show the veracity of the word of Christ that they were speaking.  

So then we might wonder if God is doing miracles today?  I would say yes He does, according to His will and purpose.  But I would add the caveat that God does not work through apostles any more, and He has not appointed certain people to be healers.  God may heal as He sees fit, but the purpose of that healing is not to validate the word of God, nor to validate a person as a spokesman of God.  God has sufficiently done that through Christ and the apostles and so His word is established and verified and sealed as being true.  It does not need continual verification by miraculous means.  But yet God may still heal as He sees fit.  

I remember a service we had on the beach a few years ago, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said that she had recently been diagnosed with stage four cancer.  She was a believer, yet she wasn’t coming to me for healing, but simply to ask for prayer and to let me know that she desired to live out her remaining days for the glory of God.  I prayed with her there on the beach, and I asked that God would grant her wish that her life would bring glory to God, and that if it was His will, that He would heal her.   Well, that lady’s name is Pat Nordstrom.  And I can tell you that today that Pat is cancer free.  I don’t know how or claim to have anything to do with it.  I am not a healer.  Lot’s of people besides me I’m sure were praying for this lady.  But I will tell you that God healed this woman, and all the glory goes to God.  And today she is very involved in a Christian ministry.  So God heals as He sees fit.  

But I also will tell you another story. I had a brother in law that was a pastor/missionary in Australia.  He was a godly man who spent decades living in Australia starting churches and training pastors.  And after decades on the field he got a respiratory disease that caused him to be unable to preach or teach or even to fly back to the United States.  After about a year or so he was finally came back to the States, and after another year or so of intense struggling to breathe, he succumbed to the illness and passed away.  I can assure you that his family was praying fervently for his healing, I was praying, and many other Christian churches were praying for him to be delivered from his illness.  But God chose not to heal him but to take him home.  God heals as He wills.  Not according to how much faith we have, but according to His eternal purposes which we are not able to comprehend.  Even Jesus, as we discussed when we talked a couple of weeks ago about His healing of the paralytic, did not heal everyone. But the miracles that He did testified to His divinity.

The fifth witness that Christ brings forth is the testimony of scripture. Vs. 38 “You do not have His word abiding in you, for you do not believe Him whom He sent. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me;  and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.”  What was amazing about this statement was that the Jews were the custodians of the scriptures.  They of all the people in the earth had been given the word of God and were supposed to be stewards of it.  Yet  though they physically possessed the scriptures, they did not spiritually possess it.  God wrote the law upon tablets of stone, but He desired to write it upon the tablets of their hearts.  

That is speaking of salvation by the way. Jesus will say in the next chapter in John 6:63  “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”  When the word of God is combined with the quickening power of the Spirit of God, then it brings about spiritual life.  Jesus gave a parable concerning the soils, and He said that the seed was the word of God and some fell on good soil and some fell on bad soil.  That soil which was good caused the seed to spring up into life, producing fruit, which was spiritual life.  These men were those who were illustrative of bad soil, on which the seed fell but did not remain.  So that Jesus says they didn’t have the word abiding in them.  And they didn’t have spiritual life because they did not receive Jesus whom God had sent.

Ironically, they searched the scriptures, they memorized the scriptures, they knew the scriptures backwards and forwards.  And because they knew them, they thought that they had eternal life.  They saw the rules and the laws and read ordinances between the lines and found symbolism in every syllable, and they thought that they could keep the law and find righteousness, thereby earning eternal life.  But they missed the point of all the scriptures.  The scriptures present Jesus Christ from Genesis to Malachi, and yet they did not see Him.  They saw only themselves as being more righteous and honorable and deserving than others, and so they missed the entire point of the scriptures.  So in vs.40 Jesus says that “you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.”  You missed out on eternal life, because you do not come to Him who is the source of eternal life.  He is not talking so much about ignorance, as about their will.  There was ample evidence, but the problem was that they were not willing.  

I think that is true of all men that reject Christ.  It is not because there is not enough evidence of God that men and women become atheists. It is because they do not want to have this Man rule over them.  People today champion independence as a virtue.  While that may be true of nations, it is fatal for individuals.  Our total salvation is dependent upon being dependent upon Christ.  That is one of the reasons we go to church by the way.  We go to church to declare publicly our dependence upon God.  Those that claim to believe in God and yet will not bow to depend upon God, and declare that dependence in the congregation must still be intractable in their independence from God.

Note that is what Jesus continually asserts He cannot nor will not do.  He is never independent from God.  What God does, He does.  What God says, He says.  They are unified, but never acting independently.  And by the way, that is the purpose of the Holy Spirit as well.  So many Christians today seem to think that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath, and that was replaced and done away with by Jesus Christ, who is the God of love.  And now that Christ has gone into heaven, He has given us the Holy Spirit, who is the God of experience.  So when some spiritual experience happens in the Christian realm, whether at church or a concert or crusade or whatever, they attribute such things to the Holy Spirit.  

Folks, that is poppy cock.  That is borderline heresy.  The Trinity is One God.  There is one faith, and one baptism.  God is the same yesterday, today and forever.  And furthermore, listen to the unity of the Trinity as Jesus describes it in John 14 an 16. John 14:9-11 Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.  Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves.”  So everything Jesus did was mirrored in the Father.  He was the exact representation of the Father.  

Now consider what Jesus says about the Holy Spirit in John 16:13-14  “But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you.”  So then, Jesus is the perfect representation of God the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the perfect representation of Jesus Christ, so that all three are One. One nature, One essence, and one voice, but separate in persons. And that is a good way to test the spirits, by the way. If something is occurring in the church and you want to know if it is of the Spirit or not, then ask yourself is it something Jesus did. If Jesus didn’t do it, then the Holy Spirit isn’t doing it. The Holy Spirit will not act on His own initiative.  He is not glorifying Himself. He glorifies Christ, who glorifies the Father.

So in vs.41, Jesus says that He does not receive glory from men.  He does not need glory from men because He  receives glory from God.  But Jesus is rebuking them because they should have been glorifying Him, but they were not.  He says that they don’t glorify Him because they don’t have the love of God in them.  That means that they don’t love God.  Instead, they love the glory of men.  They love receiving honor from men.  That’s the condemnation of mankind, that they are lovers of self, and lovers of men, lovers of ungodliness, and rejecters of righteousness.  That is our nature.  We love darkness rather than light.  We love the applause of men.  We love the glory of men.  And as such we dishonor God who made man for His glory.

That is why repentance is a constant staple in the diet of a Christian.  We must constantly be renouncing the pride which is such a part of the fabric of our lives that we hardly even recognize it.  Pride of life seems normal, and perhaps it is.  But normal means natural and therefore it is not spiritual.  That’s why God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.  God hates pride.

So because men love the honor and glory of men more than God, then God will give them over to a deluding spirit.  Jesus says that they will receive those that come in their own name, that seek after their own glory, and in accepting those false prophets they condemn themselves.

Jesus says in vs. 44 “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?”  Paul classified such men this way in 2Cor. 10:12 “For we are not bold to class or compare ourselves with some of those who commend themselves; but when they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding.”  

The point is that they used religion to compare themselves among themselves and even to commend themselves, and as such they did not seek to glorify God nor the glory of God.  And so they are unbelievers.  And as such they will deserve the judgment due them for rejecting Him.  Vs. 45  Jesus said, “Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope.”  Moses wrote the Penteteuch, the law.  The very scriptures in which they professed to know, will be the thing that accuses them and judges them.  

But, Jesus says in vs.46, if you truly believed Moses, you would have believed in Me, for He wrote about Me.  But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”

I think that Jesus is indicating there that the greatest witness of all is the Word of God.  Not the miracles, though God did use miracles.  Not some experience, though God may use experience.  But the great expression of God is the Word of God.  John says in chapter one vs one, that Jesus is the Word of God manifested in the flesh.  To reject the Word of God is to reject Jesus Christ.  To believe the Word of God is to believe in Jesus Christ. It is the testimony of God, the testimony of Jesus, and the testimony of the Spirit all in One.  That is a greater testimony than miraculous works, that is a greater testimony than John the Baptist, and it is a testimony that will endure forever.  1Peter 1:25 “BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER.”And this is the word which was preached to you.”

I hope that you do not reject the testimony of God’s Word concerning His Son.  If you believe in Him, in all that He claimed to be, then you will receive life, and His word will abide in you, and you will be fruitful.  But if reject His Word, then you are rejecting the solemn testimony of God, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and as such you will enter into judgment.  And that judgment will be merciless.  Because you have rejected Mercy and lived independently.  

When I am judged, thank God I will not be judged independently.  I will be judged as dependent upon the righteousness of Jesus Christ.  Because I have trusted in Christ as my Savior, and my substitute.  2 Cor. 5:21 “God made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”  When I come before God I will stand dependent upon Christ’s righteousness alone, and not my own.

You can either be found righteous in Him on that day, or you will stand alone in your independence, and have no answer when you are asked why you rejected the gift of God’s Son’s righteousness.  You want to remain in your sins and face that judgment?  That is your choice.  But I pray that you choose to come to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the One equal with God, the One sent by the Father, the source of eternal life,  the One in perfect unity with the Father,  the Judge of all the world, and the One who will raise all the dead in the earth either to stand in judgment before Him, or choose Him, and believe in Him and be saved.