Witness from Scripture

RIVERSIDE INDONESIAN FELLOWSHIP
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Witness from Scripture

Riverside Indonesian Fellowship
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2020 · 29 November 2020

Here in this chapter is revealed the most important and foundational truth that any human being will ever come to understand. And that is the truth that Jesus is God. If you don’t believe that, you’re going to hell forever. But you must believe not only in who He is but what He did and what He proclaimed in the gospel in its fullness. Whoever believes will not perish but have everlasting life.

So this passage is important because starting in verse 17 and going all the way to the end of the chapter, the theme is the deity of Jesus Christ, claims that He is making to be God which are necessary to be believed. Up to this point, that has been the emphasis of the writer John. It was necessary for the disciples and all other believers who first followed Him to believe that Jesus is God.

From verse 17 to verse 30 is Jesus own personal testimony to His deity. Remember, He says He is equal with God in nature, equal to God in work, equal to God in power, equal with God in truth and consequently He is equal with God in honor and worship. This is a massive claim on the part of Jesus who is talking to Jews who want Him dead because He is assaulting their false religious system.

As we come to verse 31, there’s a shift. Jesus now moves from His own testimony to the testimony of others. Look at verse 31, “If I alone testify about Myself, My testimony is not valid.” Jesus means that in their eyes, in their mind, that’s not enough to establish the truth. It has to be corroborated. Deuteronomy 17, 19 says, it has to be corroborated by two or three witnesses.

Verse 32, “But someone else is also testifying about Me, and I assure you that everything He says about me is true.” Who is it? Answer: it is God the Father, the one that they would acknowledge as true. And the Father gives testimony three ways, through John the Baptist, through the miracles of Jesus, and through the Old Testament. This is a vital portion of Scripture.

The Father worked in all three of these forms of testimony. In the first one, it is John the Baptist and verse 34 says, his testimony is not from man. Which means it’s from the Father. And in verse 36, it’s the miracles of Jesus, where He did the works which the Father had given Him to do. And in verse 37 - 39 it says, “But the Scriptures which you search all point to Me.”

However in spite of what they affirmed as the divine source of these ministries and these evidences, verse 16 says they were persecuting Jesus. Verse 18 says they were wanting to kill Jesus. And verse 40 says they were unwilling to come to Jesus to have eternal life. What we have is the rejection that is declared in John 1:11, “He came to His own and His own received Him not.” So let’s look at the three testimonies.

When John began his ministry, what did they say? The popular word was that Isaiah 40 had been fulfilled. That’s even quoted in Luke 3:4, “He is a voice shouting in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord’s coming!” So everybody knew John was a prophet. The leaders even affirmed that. But it put them in a terrible dilemma because they should have believed what he said.

Secondly, it was the Father speaking in the miracles, verse 36, “But I have a greater witness than John—my teachings and my miracles. The Father gave me these works to accomplish, and they prove that He sent me.” The second way which is greater than the first way, is through the miracles. John 12:37, “But despite all the miraculous signs Jesus had done, most of the people still did not believe in Him.”

We are sympathetic with the nation Israel, we ought to be compassionate and we ought to love them with gospel honesty. But part of the message you have to give to the Jews is you are not in a favored position. If you reject Jesus Christ whom you know about and reject, hell is reserved for you. If you hate Him, you have no relationship to God the Father whatsoever, and those are the words of Jesus.

The third one then takes us to John 5:37 - 39 it is one unit. It’s a flow of reasoning or logic. Verse 37, “And the Father Himself, who sent Me, He has testified of Me. You have never heard His voice or seen Him face to face.” This is God the Father’s testimony because, verse 38, “But you do not have His Word in your hearts.” So the Father’s testimony is through the Word.

Starting in verse 37, take the sentence, “He has testified of Me,” then go to verse 39, referring to Scripture, “and these are they which testify about Me.” So the means the Father is using here is the Old Testament, the only Bible the disciples ever had, the only Bible anybody in the New Testament ever had was an Old Testament. And the Father in the Old Testament gives testimony about Jesus Christ.

Verse 37 is also written in a perfect tense which means it’s ongoing, it’s sustained. The testimony of John the Baptist was for a season and the miracles of Jesus also came to an end. But the Word of God is forever. The Scripture is for all seasons in perfect tense. This time the Father who sent Me, that one has testified, in perfect tense, in the past with sustained reality. The greatest witness then is Scripture.

Paul said in 2 Timothy 3, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” Hebrews 1:1 says, “God who at various times and in various ways spoke in times past by the prophets.” So God spoke in the Old Testament. The Jews all believed it. They believed Jesus’ miracles had to be by the power of God until they attributed them to Satan. That would be a house divided against itself, why would Satan cast out Satan?

Jesus says in verse 37, “You have never heard His voice or seen Him face to face.” Those are the two senses by which we learn. Jesus is simply saying, you don’t have any knowledge of God at all. This was a devastating condemnation to say to these Jewish leaders. But, verse 38, Jesus gives them the reason, “You do not have His Word in your hearts.” You do not understand the Bible.

You have it in your hand, you have it in a scroll, but you don’t have it in you. You don’t understand it. The world is full of Bibles. It’s about having the Word in the Scriptures in your heart. John 8:31-32, “Jesus said to the people who believed in him, “You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teachings. 32 And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

As far as God is concerned, they’re deaf and blind. People who have Bibles and don’t know the truth, don’t have the truth. They are cults, false religions, all the false prophets, all the corrupt forms of Christianity. How do you know? Verse 39, “For you don’t believe Him whom He sent. You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to Me.”

So these are statements literally indicting them on their behaviors. They were relentless, fastidious in the handling of the Old Testament scrolls. They gave it great honor. They labored over the Scripture in their own characteristic, rabbinical way. But they had a problem, they did not have the Holy Spirit. They were natural sinful men who did not understand the things of God.

The Jews had defective principles of interpretation. They came up with unbelievable and unacceptable interpretations because they were into deduction rather than induction. Rather than let the text speak, they imposed on the text their own ideas. They were full of allegory and mystical things and hidden meanings. They could obscure anything in the Bible. They were good at doing that.

Occasionally ancient rabbinical interpretation does provide some true interpretation, but much of it is bizarre and that would be the same with modern rabbis today’s handling of the Old Testament. All that wasn’t necessary, they could have understood it because Jesus says many times in the New Testament, “Have you not read?” If you had read it, it’s clear enough you would have understood it.

Simeon and Anna understood it. Who were they? Just a couple of saints at the Temple when Jesus came to be circumcised. Some fishermen in Galilee understood it. Samaritan outcasts understood it. The Jews affirmed that the Old Testament was the Word of God, but then they obscured its meaning by their manipulations because they were unwilling to believe the truth.

In Luke 16:19-31, Jesus tells this story about a rich man who dies and a beggar who dies and in the story. He has Abraham say because the rich man is in hell, he’s in torment, and he says to Abraham in the story, “Send somebody to warn my brothers so they don’t come here.” And our Lord has Abraham say in Luke 16:29, “They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.”

If they listened to Moses and the prophets, they would all come to Christ. Verse 30, “He said, “No, no, Father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, then they’ll repent. 31 But He said, if they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t be persuaded even if someone rose from the dead.” Well Jesus did rise from the dead, but they lied about it and created a false explanation.

In Luke 24:25, Jesus meets some of His disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they’re moaning about the fact that they thought Jesus was the Messiah, and now He’s dead, and they don’t understand. So Jesus says, “O foolish men, you find it so hard to believe in all that the prophets have spoken.” You don’t believe your Bible. 26, “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things to enter His glory?

Verses 27, “Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” And then in verse 44, “He said, “When I was with you before, I told you that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and in the Psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”

Verse 46 - 48, “And He said, “Yes, it was written long ago that the Messiah would suffer and die and rise from the dead on the third day. 47 It was also written that this message would be proclaimed in the authority of His name to all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem: ‘There is forgiveness of sins for all who repent.’ 48 You are witnesses of all these things.”

There are also details about His birth, ‘the virgin will conceive and bear a child’ in Isaiah. There are details about the place of His birth in Micah, He’ll be born in Bethlehem. There are details about His crucifixion as described in Psalm 22, described in further detail in Isaiah 53. Psalm 16 points to His resurrection. It’s all there. You could go on and on with all of that, as you well know.

The Old Testament is full of passages about His reigning, about His throne, He is a King, He’s the anointed one, He’s going to rule and reign and bring about the fulfillment of all the promises to David in the Davidic Covenant, and all the promises to Abraham in the Abrahamic Covenant. The glorious Kingdom is coming and that Kingdom is described in detail by the prophets.

But He’s not just going to set up His Kingdom. Something else has to come first. Look at Genesis, God creates, everything’s good in Genesis 1 and 2. In Genesis 3 man sins and in that day he begins to die. The death principle takes over the human race. And since then everybody is going to die. That’s clear because in Genesis 5 you have a genealogy of everybody who lived and died.

In Genesis 6 Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord, that’s why he survived. God is a God of grace, Exodus 22:27, Moses writes the words of God, “I will hear him for I am gracious.” And in Exodus 33:19, “I’m compassionate, I’m merciful and I’m gracious.” Not only that, Exodus 34, “I offer forgiveness for sins and forgiveness for iniquities.” But what about the Law? The Law crushes me and kills me.

“My heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” How can I be righteous before God? How do they get this forgiveness? We find that in Genesis 15:6, “Abraham believed God and God credited it to him as righteousness.” That’s justification, that’s imputation. But how can God do that? Because if God gives a man who doesn’t deserve it righteousness, that’s grace. But what about the man’s sin?

Genesis 3, Adam and Eve are aware of their sin, what does God do? He kills an innocent animal, takes the skin and covers them. We have an illustration that a substitute is going to bear the judgment in order to provide covering. In Exodus 12 there is a Passover lamb that pictures the innocent dying in the place of the guilty. In Leviticus you have all these sacrifices for sin that are substitutionary.

But they have to be repeated and repeated because none of them is ever enough. But they are all pointing to one who will be. And you finally meet that one when you get to Isaiah 53 and guess what? He is the servant of Jehovah, a Messianic title, and He will be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. And after He has been crushed and killed in our place, He rises from the dead.

That’s why in Galatians 3:24, Paul says, “The Old Testament was intended to lead us to Christ to be our teacher.” So if the Jews believed in the Father, they would have accepted Christ, on the basis of the testimony of John the Baptist a prophet. They would have accepted Christ on the basis of the miracles that He did, and they would have accepted Jesus because He is the subject of the Old Testament.

1 John 5:9-10 says, “Since we believe human testimony, surely we can believe the greater testimony that comes from God. And God has testified about his Son. 10 All who believe in the Son of God know in their hearts that this testimony is true. Those who don’t believe this are actually calling God a liar because they don’t believe what God has testified about his Son.” Let’s pray.



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