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The Spirituality of the Gospel of John: Part 2

John 2-4

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of New Testament Studies from John 2-4.


If I were to attempt to expound in detail all of the passages in John’s gospel that talk about the relationship between God and human beings, you would be here for a very long time indeed, so I have to be a bit selective. What I propose to do in this next hour is to draw your attention to certain verses in chapters 2, 3, and 4. In chapter 2, especially, this business of the temple (chapter 2, verse 13 to the end of the chapter). First comes the cleansing of the temple (verses 13 to 17), but I’m going to skip that for the moment and focus especially on verses 18 to 21.

“Then the Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ The Jews replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body.”

At one level, of course, the Jews here referring to the temple authorities (perhaps representatives of the Sanhedrin) had the right, indeed the obligation, to challenge the credentials of someone who would take a whip and drive out the moneychangers and so forth. I mean, this from the point of view of public decency and order was an extraordinary act.

Nevertheless, they display no critical self-examination to reflect on whether Jesus’ charges were just. They are more interested in power and authority and precedent than in worship itself. Moreover, if Jesus had just been a hooligan, some punk who was determined to be as disruptive as possible, then there were already ample laws on the books for handling this. You didn’t need to engage him in conversation and start asking, “By what authority do you do this?”

Can you imagine asking some punk who is disruptive of public worship somewhere, “By what authority do you do this?” In other words, their question shows they all recognized more is at stake. Jesus is not simply some vandal. Therefore, the issue of his putative claims of his discourse of what he’s trying to do must at least be evaluated. It can’t simply be written off.

If God is revealing himself in Jesus, then strictly speaking, they don’t really have the right to judge him. It’s the other way around. But it is Jesus’ answer that is so shocking. Verse 19: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” Then John tells us what Jesus meant. From these verses it seems to me we must learn at least three things.

1. Jesus sees himself as the ultimate meeting place between God and his people.

After all, that’s what the temple stood for. It was the meeting place between God and his own covenant people. This is, of course, of a piece with a much broader Johannine typology. In John’s gospel, Jesus is the Lamb of God. In the next chapter, we’ll see he is the serpent of God from Numbers 21. He is the manna of God in John 6. He is the true vine. He is the true Passover. He is the true tabernacle. He is the true Sabbath rest.

That’s just in John’s gospel. That’s before we get to the rest of the New Testament where, for example, 1 Corinthians 6 says he’s the Passover. You turn to Hebrews and he’s the High Priest. He is both the priest who offers the sacrifice and he himself is the sacrifice. His heavenly sanctuary is the better sanctuary. There is an entire typology that works out in a variety of ways.

It is important to see John is not here, then, out of step with other New Testament writers who make him out to be the antitype of these Old Testament models. If I had more time, I would justify the Old Testament exegesis that warrants this identification. I’m not going to do that here. In other words, I’m arguing this way of reading the Old Testament Scripture traces back to Jesus himself.

2. In particular, it is Jesus’ death and resurrection which establish him as the ultimate meeting place between God and his people.

He does not simply say, “I am the true temple of God.” He says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it in three days.” Then the subsequent verses show he is referring to himself as the true temple of God.

In other words, it is precisely Jesus’ death and resurrection that constitute him the temple. Of course, there is a sense in which the incarnation already is presupposed, and the first bit of temple language shows up as we have seen in the prologue: “The Word became flesh and tabernacled with us.”

Thus, in one sense his incarnation constitutes him the great meeting place between God and human beings, but in fact, in the entire drama of the gospel, the incarnation by itself is not enough. Rather, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” This, then, constitutes him the great meeting place between God and his people.

Many have argued there is very little real atonement theology in John’s gospel. It’s all a theology of revelation and belief, but there is no emphasis on atonement. I dispute that fundamentally. We will see again and again and again atonement language, often evocatively put because it is still before the cross, is nevertheless presupposed throughout, and this is one of those passages. We will look at more that are even stronger.

3. In addition, Jesus’ death and resurrection establish his authority.

In other words, it is important to understand the link between chapter 2, verse 18, and chapter 2, verse 19. “By what authority do you do this?” Jesus replies, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I’ll raise it again.” Unless he’s just dropping this in out of the blue, unable to follow a coherent conversation and just making his own way and saying whatever he wants to say, you must see he understands verse 19 to be a response to the question put to him in verse 18.

In that sense, he’s saying the authority he has to cleanse the type, to take on the type, to challenge the type, is precisely that he is the antitype, which is validated ultimately by his resurrection. Whether or not everybody understands this at the time is not the point. In fact, the next verses make it very clear they don’t.

Nevertheless, in Jesus’ own mind, the public ratification of his authority to do what he is doing is finally granted by the resurrection. It is astonishing in the New Testament how many things turn on the sheer facticity, the sheer historicity of the resurrection including, now, Jesus’ authority to cleanse the temple, to challenge the current religious practices, to insist on the direction in which they point.

There may also here be an allusion to Malachi 3:1. “See, I will send my messenger …” which is, in my view, referring to John the Baptist “ ‘… who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,’ says the Lord Almighty.” He has come to his temple all right. To his temple. In so doing he now announces he himself is the very antitype of that temple. The temple he owns becomes that which points ultimately to him who owns it.

The temple is destroyed and raised again, and certain things follow from this. In the following verses (22 to 25) as the temple of God, Jesus is misunderstood. “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.”

It’s important to see the disciples themselves misunderstood him because the critical events had not yet taken place. The text says, “After Jesus was raised from the dead.… Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.” In other words, what was needed for them to come to grips with what Jesus said was a further step in the ongoing unpacking of redemptive history. It wasn’t more explanation. It was the next turning point in redemptive history.

That is a common theme in the Gospels. According to the Synoptics (from Matthew 16 on and parallel in Mark and Luke), it is said at Caesarea Philippi when Jesus is identified by Peter as Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus speaks more and more openly of his impending death and resurrection.

Jesus told them the Son of Man must go up to Jerusalem and suffer many things and be put to death at the hand of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and then, on the third day, rise again. Clearly, they didn’t understand him. It seems so obvious to us now, but we live this side of the cross.

Jesus said so many other enigmatic things, didn’t he? “Let the dead bury their dead.” Deep. Deep. You can just see the difficult things he said going around in their minds which seem, more or less, obvious to us this side of the cross, but that side of the cross where they had no category for a crucified Messiah? “It must be some symbol-laden thing. We’ll understand it someday.”

The proof they didn’t understand it, of course, is that Peter himself on the occasion says, “Never, Lord! This shall not happen to you.” Although Jesus repeats that thing five times in Matthew’s gospel alone, although Jesus repeats this again and again and again, once Jesus actually is in the tomb, actually dead, you don’t find the disciples upstairs in an upper room saying, “Yes! I can hardly wait till Sunday,” because they have no category for a crucified Messiah. At this point, the whole thing seems desperately opaque.

Even Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ is not quite what we mean when we confess the Christ. For this side of the resurrection it is impossible for anybody to confess the Christ without confessing him as the crucified and risen Christ. That means our coming to faith is always in some measure qualitatively different than the disciples’ coming to Christian faith, because for them to come to genuine Christian faith (that is, the kind of post-Pentecost faith that is merely presupposed by us) they had to wait for the passage of time until Jesus actually died and rose again, let alone for the gift of the Spirit. We don’t have to wait.

If we wait it’s because we don’t understand or because we are rebelling or we choose to disbelieve or we’re wandering in a moral wilderness or we haven’t heard very much, but we don’t have to wait for another event. The crucial events have already taken place. They are already in the past.

That is why you can’t legitimately preach through the Gospels primarily offering the Gospels as wonderful psychological profiles in how people come to faith, because although there are psychological profiles in the Gospels that do show something about how people come to faith, nevertheless, their coming to faith is, in this respect, qualitatively different from our coming to faith because they have to wait for the next great event in redemptive history.

At this point, not only the opponents but the disciples themselves did not understand what Jesus was talking about. The Gospels, in other words, are not given to us, first and foremost, to give us profiles in how people come to faith. They’re given to us, first and foremost, to talk about Jesus, which should be obvious on the face of it. Use the Gospels to preach Jesus, who he is, what he has done, how he ties old and new together.

Thus, the disciples misunderstand him because the critical events have not yet taken place, but that means, then, their experience of him as the crucified, risen Messiah who, by his death and resurrection, is the great meeting place between God and human beings is still very vague. It’s very thin. They don’t have any mental categories for it at all.

Their experiences of Christ are the experiences of the God-man doing wonderful things and saying wonderful things and handling himself really well and performing miracles and exorcising demons and preaching wonderful sermons, but still they do not have the fundamental Christian categories of how human beings meet God and experience him by faith in the crucified Messiah. Their faith is always, in some sense, qualitatively short, and in any case, some misunderstand Jesus, the temple of God, because all they want is some kind of power religion.

“Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man.” One of the things you discover in John’s gospel as he worked through all of the references to believing that or believing in the name of or whatever is there is not some technical expression for genuine belief. Everything turns on the context, and there is belief, and there is belief in John’s gospel.

Thus, for example, “If you continue in my Word, then you are my disciples indeed.” John 8:31. Here, they put their faith in it. They believed in his name (that’s what the text says) when they saw the miracles, but in this context they saw the miracles and they believed in his name, but that doesn’t mean they understand they must ultimately put their faith in him as the true temple, as the destroyed and built again temple. They have no category for that at all. Jesus does not entrust himself to some of these so-called believers.

Once again, then, what we discover in John’s gospel is this intimate relationship between human beings and God turns on what we would broadly call the gospel. That is, on Jesus’ death and resurrection, on him being the temple, which in the old covenant terms was the great meeting place between God and human beings. The great meeting place in the new covenant for God and human beings is Jesus himself, the true temple of God.

We turn now to John 3. How shall we understand this new birth? Verse 3: “ ‘I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.’ ‘How can a man be born when he is old?’ Nicodemus asked. ‘Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!’ Jesus answered, ‘I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.’ ”

As you know, this pair of verses (John 3:3 and John 3:5) have been interpreted in quite a lot of different ways. What is the first birth? What is the second birth? When Jesus says in John 3:5, “Unless you are born of water and the Spirit,” is water referring to the first birth and the Spirit the second birth? If so, what does the water refer to? Does it refer to the amniotic fluid which breaks when the water breaks? Even our expression, the water breaks, is your natural birth and after that you need another kind of birth, the spiritual birth. Many have taken that position.

The difficulty is, first, that nowhere in the ancient world have I been able to find any description of natural birth, whether on the Jewish side or the Greco-Roman side, that is described as being born of water or that sort of thing. It’s just not an expression that would naturally spring to mind. I can’t find any source that suggests this. In fact, one Scandinavian scholar 60 or 70 years ago argued the closest you get is where water sometimes symbolizes life, and thus, indirectly symbolizes semen. So being born of water means you’re naturally born from semen.

Then, you’re born of Spirit. That’s the second birth. You have a first birth and a second birth, a natural birth and a second birth, but it’s an obscure, late, rabbinic reference which is very hard to show it was actually even around in Jesus’ day (it’s Talmudic), and certainly it was not common. It’s an obscure reference buried in the Talmud.

Shall we go further? Shall we suggest this born of water and the Spirit is born of baptism and the Spirit? It’s a kind of Spirit baptism birth. Many have taken that view, not least in the Lutheran tradition but not only in the Lutheran tradition. After all, a little later in this chapter there’s a controversy about baptism, is there not, between Jesus’ disciples and the disciples of John.

The difficulty is, of course, despite the fact many have argued to the contrary, I don’t think John’s gospel is a very sacramental sort of book. Even in the beginning of chapter 4, the author goes to some pains to point out in the baptismal practices of Jesus and his disciples Jesus himself didn’t bother to baptize anybody. He left it to his disciples. If it was so absolutely critical to new birth, one wonders that he didn’t get involved a wee bit more.

It’s a bit like the apostle Paul writing to the Corinthians. “I did baptize the odd family here or there but not many. I mean, God didn’t send me to baptize; he sent me to preach the gospel,” which makes it very difficult to put baptism on a kind of logical par to faith. It is part of the Great Commission. It is taught by Christ. It is insisted upon, but it is not part of the gospel in the same sense that faith is, or else Paul is really saying something extraordinarily stupid.

It seems to me that is not a transparent interpretation either. Moreover, when you look at verse 3 and verse 5 and put them in parallel, you discover something rather important. Just lay them out and cancel out the common bits. “Truly I say to you …” That’s common in both. “… unless a man is born of the Spirit, he cannot see [or cannot enter] the kingdom of God.”

Verse 3: “No one can see the kingdom of God. Verse 5: “No one can enter the kingdom of God.” Probably the same sort of thing. It’s just a slightly different metaphorical understanding. “I tell you the truth, no one can enter [no one can see] the kingdom of God unless …” What is in the “unless” clause? Verse 3: “… unless he is born again.” Verse 5: “… unless he is born of water and the Spirit.”

“Unless he is born again” seems to be parallel to “unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” The “born again” language which refers only to the second birth (the born again birth) seems to be parallel to the born of water and the Spirit clause in verse 5. In other words, it appears on the face of it verse 5 (“born of water and the Spirit”) is not itself talking about two births. It’s talking about this birth that is already mentioned in verse 3.

By the time you get to verse 6, clearly there are two births that are in view, so many read verse 6 back into verse 5. “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” Clearly there are two births there, unambiguously. If you read verse 6 back into verse 5, you might think flesh giving birth to flesh refers to the water and the Spirit giving birth to spirit gives the description to the new birth. Yes, you might.

The difficulty is, of course, if you’re reading through this in a nice Asian way, slowly and carefully, you haven’t read verse 6 by the time you’ve read verse 5. What you have done is read verse 3. You’re more likely to read verse 5 in the light of verse 3, and you cannot then help but see the parallelism.

In other words, Nicodemus doesn’t understand in verse 4, so Jesus unpacks it a little more in verse 5. What verse 5 gives, therefore, is the explanation of verse 3. What does it mean to be born? In Greek, anothen. Anothen in Greek is a pun. It can mean from above or it can mean again. What does it mean to be born from above? What does it mean to be born again? The language is transparently translatable either way.

Jesus unpacks it again, and he says, “I tell you the truth, you cannot enter the kingdom unless you are born of water and Spirit.” In other words, of water and Spirit now is cast as parallel to anothen, again or from above. There’s another clue that is given. By the end of this section, down in verse 10, Jesus says to Nicodemus when it really hasn’t registered yet what he does mean, “You are the teacher of Israel and you don’t understand these things?”

Not a teacher of Israel. The expression is pretty strong. “Ho didaskalos tou Israel.” What that means is, “You are the teacher of Israel.” Probably a title. “You are the Grand Mufti. You are the Regius Professor of Divinity and you don’t understand this?” In other words, it seems not only that he was a distinguished rabbi but he had some title in rabbinic circles. He was the Grand Mufti. He held the chair, we would say. “And you don’t understand this?”

In that case, we should ask what Nicodemus should have understood. What should he have grasped? On what basis does Jesus rebuke him? The area of his expertise, of course, is what we mean by the Old Testament, so the question now becomes where in the Old Testament is there some reference to being born of water and Spirit? The short answer is there isn’t one.

On the other hand, there are places where there is a collocation of the two terms water and Spirit. Not many of them, but a few. The most impressive is Ezekiel 36, which is one of the new covenant passages of the Old Testament. “In those days I will sprinkle your heart with clean water, and you will be clean, and I will pour out my Spirit upon you.” It is one of the new covenant promises, what will take place under a new age.

In fact, I think there is a dissertation out there waiting for somebody to do. That is, the elusive uses of Ezekiel in John’s gospel. I think this is one of them. A lot of people see this one, but I think behind the resurrection of Lazarus there are some allusions to Ezekiel 37. Behind Jesus’ description of himself as the Good Shepherd come some wonderful allusions to Ezekiel 34 where Yahweh himself promises he will shepherd his people, not like the shepherds that merely fleece the flock.

I will be a shepherd to my people. I will pasture them. I will lead them by streams of water.” I think behind all of that is a broad theme in the Old Testament that is crystallized in Ezekiel 34 and then comes to fulfillment in Jesus in John 10. There are many elusive reference to Ezekiel, and this is one of them.

“You’re the teacher of Israel and you haven’t got this together?” In fact, by and large, the rabbinic scholars of Jesus’ day had thought very deeply, very penetratingly on many, many issues bound up with law (law as demand, not law as Torah or teaching, but law as demand, law as requirement, law as gift, as covenantal stipulation).

Hence, the law was analyzed until it was broken down into the various things that were either commanded to be done or prohibited (613 of them). They had thought deeply and penetratingly on many, many, many of these issues. What you do not find are many profound discussions on the nature and promise of the role of the Spirit in the eschaton. Yet, those passages are found in the Old Testament too.

How shall we understand Jeremiah 37? How shall we understand Joel 2? How shall we understand Ezekiel 36? All of these passages are picked up in the New Testament precisely in the context of the giving of the Spirit or the dawning of the new age or the promise of the new covenant.

Joel 2 is picked up by Peter on the Day of Pentecost. Jeremiah 37 is picked up by Hebrews in chapter 8 and chapter 10. Here, Ezekiel 36 is picked up by John and elsewhere as well. In other words, what is promised under the terms of the new covenant is, “I will sprinkle your hearts with clean water, and I will pour out my Spirit.” That is, you will be cleaned up, you will be purified in this new birth, and you will have something of the life of God himself in you by the Spirit.

Although the Old Testament does not actually speak of new birth, it does speak of such a time of renewal that all those within the covenant will have water sprinkled on them such that they will be clean and the Spirit poured out upon them such that they will have the life of God himself pulsating within them. All that Jesus has added is the metaphor of birth. That’s all he has done. “My dear ol’ Nicodemus, you should have got that one.” That’s what Jesus is saying.

There is much more that could be said in unpacking this interpretation. I think it can be much more broadly justified. If I had more time I would unpack this further. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the flow of the argument in the rest of chapter 3 down to verse 21. Just the flow of the argument.

If Jesus tells us what he means by the new birth in verses 1 to 10, in verses 11 to 13 he justifies how he can talk about it with such authority. “I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?” Then, as we’ll see in a moment, verse 13.

There is an initial difficulty in the flow from 11 to 12. Why do we move from the first person plural to the first person singular? “We speak of what we know. We testify to what we have seen.” Verse 12: “I have spoken to you of earthly things.” How do you understand that? The overwhelming majority of contemporary critics argue this is proof of a nasty anachronism.

That is to say, it’s as if the writer, John, is associating himself and the Christians of his day with bearing witness to the truth. “We speak of what we know.” This is reflecting ongoing debates between the church and the synagogue. Now, John is ostensibly telling the story of Jesus, but in fact, he’s really involved in a kind of debate between the church and the synagogue.

He sort of slips here, and now he says what he’s really involved with. “We Christians, we people who are in the line of Jesus are bearing witness to the real truth. You don’t understand your own Scriptures.” Then he says, “Oops! I’m actually trying to ascribe this to Jesus.” So he puts it back in the first person singular in verse 12.

Of course, one of the things that presupposes is as a writer or an editor John the Evangelist is pretty incompetent, pretty stupid. Why don’t you go back once you’ve seen you’ve made this mistake and simply cross out the “we” form and put in the “I” form. Then the next person who copies the manuscript will then get it right. It really does make him out to be a bit thick.

Still, you have to explain, nevertheless, why there is this we here. If you take it to be a kind of royal we then why does he switch to the first person singular? Although John’s gospel is, from a literary point of view, one of the simplest of all the Gospels, it is in some ways one of the most profound too. Someone has described it as a pool in which a child may wade and an elephant may swim, and I think this is one of those places.

How does the whole account open up? In chapter 1, we’re introduced to Nicodemus, ruler of the Jews. He approaches Jesus, and what does he say? “We know that you are a teacher come from God for no one could do these miracles you are doing unless God were with him. We know this. We do.”

In other words, although there is a certain kind of respectful approach to Jesus (he calls him Rabbi) and although he is not betraying the skepticism of some in rabbinic circles who wanted Jesus completely marginalized, nevertheless, there is a certain air of condescension. In the first century, rabbi was not a technical term like reverend. That didn’t take place until the end of the second century.

You could not be called rabbi at the end of the second century unless you had gone through the rabbinic schools and been properly recognized. Then you got all sort of “rabbied up,” just as people today get “revved up.” Yet, in those days (in Jesus’ day) rabbi was an informal term, and for someone who was the teacher of Israel, to refer to this northern prophet as rabbi was already pretty respectful. He was listening to Jesus. He had to make some sense of him and realize he was not some charlatan but was actually doing some very remarkable miracles.

Nevertheless, he casts himself as someone who is judging Jesus, evaluating him. “We know you must be genuine because no one can do what you’re doing unless God were with him. We do.” How does Jesus respond? “Truly I tell you, unless a man is born of God he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Why does Jesus respond the way he does in verse 3? It’s one of those places, again, where I don’t think you really properly understand verse 2 until you properly understand verse 3. Do we presuppose Jesus just changes the subject? “You asked for my credentials; let me tell you something. You’re not even born again.” There’s very little logical continuity. There is sort of one-upmanship perhaps but no logical continuity.

No, no, no. What Jesus is saying in verse 3 is very important. Nor do you have to presuppose some kind of long ellipsis. Some people presuppose Jesus is saying something like, “You asked me about the kingdom of God. You asked me where these miracles are coming from. These miracles are part of the manifestation of the kingdom, and you can’t really get into the kingdom, you can’t really see it unless you’re born again, so let me talk about new birth instead.”

There is a kind of logical continuity if you sort of presuppose a whole lot of propositions tucked in there between verses 2 and 3. A bit hard to snuff them all out, but you sort of have to presuppose them, don’t you? No, no, no. It’s simpler than that. Nicodemus approaches Jesus respectfully, nevertheless, from the point of view of evaluating him.

“We have come to this conclusion. You are really quite remarkable. I want to know more.” What Jesus does by preliminary way of response is smile as it were and say, “My dear Nicodemus, you really don’t see a cotton-pickin’ thing. You think you’re seeing the reign of God operating here. You think you’re seeing it. I tell you, you don’t see the reign of God unless you’re born again.”

In other words, what he is rebuking is the very claim to be able to evaluate, the very claim to be able to see the reign of God operating in the miracles of Jesus. You don’t see this reign of God. You see the miracles. You do not see the reign of God. You do not truly see it unless you’re born again, and even the small first person plural we in “We see you are truly from God” is slightly pompous, isn’t it?

Now Jesus comes back after rebuking him in verse 10, “You’re the teacher of Israel and you don’t understand these things? My dear Nicodemus, we see one or two things, too. We do.” You can almost see the twinkle in his eye. “We testify to what we know. We do.” It’s even here pricking Nicodemus’ pretensions.

Then he reverts to the first person singular after pricking his pretensions in this literary allusive way, and he says, “I can speak about these things because I alone have come from heaven.” That’s the whole point of verses 12 and 13. “If I have spoken to you of earthly things, how will you possibly understand when you can’t swallow this if I speak of heavenly things?”

In other words, from Jesus’ point of view the new birth is an earthly thing, not because it is in its origin from earth but because it takes place on earth amongst people who are on the earth. This is what takes place on the earth. “In fact, I have come from heaven. I could describe the throne room of the Almighty, but you can’t even swallow what I’m saying about the new birth. What’s the point of talking to you about the throne room of the Almighty?”

In other words, Jesus’ claim for his strong insistence about the new birth and for pricking the pretensions of Nicodemus is bound up … understand this … with revelation (“I have come from heaven”), which is why ultimately you cannot finally evaluate Jesus from a position of pretended neutrality. “Well, that seems like a pretty good revelation. On the whole, I’ll buy this bit and not that bit.”

How can you do that? If he really has come from heaven, then you bow before him. If he has not, you write him off as a charlatan. The claim, finally, is an absolutist one. It is a revelatory one, and all of our knowledge of God, all of this understanding of the new birth, all of what it means to know God, to walk with God, thus, turns not on a philosophical system but on the truthfulness of a revelatory claim which is itself grounded in the incarnation.

Then Jesus talks about the way this new birth is brought about and what it turns on. Once again, what are presupposed is the readers, or Nicodemus in the initial address, can pick up the Old Testament allusion. One of the reasons why you have to understand the readers of John’s gospel are biblically literate is because Jesus can make these allusions to the Old Testament, and he simply presupposes as John reports them that people understand what is being alluded to.

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that …” and so on and so on and so on. How many people know about the snake in the desert today? Walk the streets of Toronto and ask, “Have you ever heard about the snake in the desert?” They’ll probably call for people in white coats to take you away.

In fact, of course, it’s one long paragraph in Numbers 21. Let me remind you. “They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!’

Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, ‘We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. The Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.’ So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.”

That’s it! Jesus now says, “As the snake was put on the pole, so the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes on him will have eternal life.” Come again? Jesus compared with a snake? What’s going on? Think your way through the parallels between the interchange between Jesus and Nicodemus and what takes place in the Old Testament.

What takes place in the Old Testament is that people are busy evaluating God. “Don’t like this. Don’t like that. Those lentils back in Egypt weren’t bad. Give me a bit of garlic any day rather than this desert.” Standing in judgment of God, murmuring, and complaining, because, you see, at the heart of all murmuring and complaining is simply idolatry. You don’t trust God. You stand in judgment of him, and that brings sanctions. It brings judgment, and the only one who can reverse the judgment is God himself.

God provides the cure to all those who are dying in the wilderness by erecting a snake you look at, not as if a piece of bronze were a bit of magic, but because God provided it and actually then provided the means. That is, the means was faith. Whoever looked on it just with the faith of looking on it …? It wasn’t a sort of souped-up, high density, very profound spiritual faith. It was the faith object that was the releasing element, what God had provided.

Anyone who looked on the snake was healed. In the same way, those who look on Jesus, the raised serpent, as he is lifted up (just look on him, the answer God has provided so we too may escape death), we too may live, which does not turn, then, on the intensity of the faith or the sincerity of the faith or the discipline of the faith or anything like that, but on faith’s object. It’s what God has provided.

Does Nicodemus understand all this? No, no, no. At this point, who understands the cross? But the models of the way God has prepared patterns by which sinful rebels may truly know him, experience him, walk in a spiritual way (that is, to be connected again, to have a relationship again with the living God) are already there. They’re already patterned out for us in the Old Testament.

Then John picks up this “lifted up” language. This is the first use of it. It shows up four times in John’s gospel. Each time it becomes a little clearer. The verb is hypsoo. It becomes a little clearer until it’s very clear Jesus is lifted up on a cross and by means of being lifted up on a cross he is lifted up to the right hand of the majesty on high. He must be the object of our faith, for it is by faith in him lifted up (that is, not simply in the incarnated one but in the one lifted up on the cross in despised odium) that we have eternal life.

All of this, then, is grounded in the love of God. “For God so loved the world that he gave his Son.” To interpret John 3:16 without seeing the force of that for (my father used to say, “Whenever you see a for or a therefore, see what’s it’s there for”) is to miss the flow of the argument, for this provision of Jesus as the serpent in the wilderness is grounded itself in the love of God taking initiative to send his Son.

In John’s writing the world is not so much characterized by bigness (God’s love must be very great because the world is so big) but by badness. In John’s writing the word world is almost always associated with the entire moral order and rebellion against him. God so loved this painful, rebellious, ugly world so much that he gave his Son.

Here, once again, spirituality (that is, human connectedness to the divine) turns on gospel structures, on the love of God in providing a Redeemer, a meeting place, one in whom we may trust, one in whom we must exercise faith in order that we may have eternal life. That is the context in which our connection with God is spelled out.

We’ll do one more before lunch, John 4. Once again, it would be very helpful if we could remind ourselves of the entire flow of the argument in 4:1–42, God seeking true worshipers. Let me give you an outline which I will not myself unpack until we get to the crucial point for the purpose of this series.

1. A lost soul who pursues material necessities, not spiritual necessities. Verses 7 to 15.

2. A lost soul who pursues self-distanced theological debate, not personal self-exposure.

“Our fathers say you have to worship here. You Jews say you have to worship there.” Everybody can get involved in theological debate, but she won’t expose herself.

3. A God who pursues true worshipers, not worship. Verses 21 to 26.

4. A convert who pursues Christ-centeredness, not self-centeredness. Verses 27 to 30 and 39 to 42.

5. A Savior who pursues his Father’s will, not his own comforts. Verses 31 to 38.

We’re going to focus for just a few moments on verses 21 to 24. “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth. “

I suppose verse 24 has become one of the most frequently quoted verses in current worship wars (“Worship in spirit and in truth”), which is often taken to mean something like, “Worship sincerely not merely with inauthenticity. Worship in spirit and truth. Put your whole heart into it. It mustn’t just be form and cold and ritual. Therefore, it must be sincere. It must be worship in spirit and in truth.”

Thus, in spirit and in truth connected with worship has come to mean in most of our parlance something like genuine sincerity in our worship or genuine authenticity. Am I misreading the situation? I think that’s roughly what it has come to mean, hasn’t it? I doubt that’s what Jesus has in mind at all, but clearly it has a bearing on how we understand again our connection with God because so much of our connection with God takes place in the context of corporate worship. Does it not?

There are private moments of worship and adoration and reflection and meditation and confession, but there are often corporate notions, too, and most of us, if we’ve been Christians for a while, have been in contexts where singing with 3,000 people the glorious hymns of the gospel or listening to someone unpack Scripture you know God is powerfully present, and it has been a corporate pleasure, delight, and fear to stand in the presence of God Almighty. You leave knowing God has met you in that place and there has been genuine worship.

“Worship in spirit and in truth,” you might say. I’m not denying that for a moment. That, too, is part of spiritual connectedness, isn’t it, so it’s part of spirituality. It should interest us, but I doubt that’s quite what is meant here. Verse 21: “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” This is picking up, of course, on the age-old debate between Samaritans and Jews.

The Samaritans were half-breeds, of course, made up of the residue of the 10 tribes after most of them had been transported by the Assyrians and the groups that came into the land and married with the residue. In the ancient world, everybody understood there was a kind of logical connection amongst three poles: land, people, and gods.

The gods were local. They belonged to a certain land and a certain people, a certain tribal group, so as a result, when an empire came to power there was always a danger of rebellion from the newly acquired conquered turf if the people in that turf saw themselves as rebelling in the name of their gods to protect their land (people, land, and gods all connected together).

What some of the ancient empires started to do (the Assyrians certainly did, and the Babylonians did it as well) was transport at least all of the elite of a particular tribe to some other land. What that did was break the connection. If the gods are connected with the land and with the people and you move the people to another land (to another place), then where are the gods? How do you feel loyalty to this land over here? That’s not where you belong. Cela ne veut pas votre terre. “It’s not my land. It’s not where I’m from.”

Thus, there is much less likelihood of rebellion. Thus, the transportation of Israel was not just the transportation of Israel. It was part of imperial policy for the Assyrians and later for the Babylonians. This is the way you crushed dissent before it happened. The difficulty with that, of course, is that it also destroys your tax base.

You move all of these careful, skilled aristocratic types and all the upper business people and so on to another place and you make them dirt farmers again, starting out at the bottom, and you’ve just destroyed part of your tax base. You’ve paid for the peace at the expense of not having a decent tax base.

When the Medo-Persians came to power they decided to reverse it. Hence, by the decree of Cyrus, the Jews were permitted back at the end of the exile. It wasn’t just the Jews, of course. The Edomites were permitted back. The Moabites were permitted back. The Bible focuses on Israel, of course, because this is the covenant people of God, but in fact, it was part of imperial policy. God superintending in all of the nations. When you got to the Romans, they didn’t want to destroy the tax base, but they wanted peace, so they did something else.

Instead of moving the people around, what they did instead was arrange for god swaps. Whenever the Romans took over a new turf, they insisted the locals take on some of the gods in the Roman pantheon, and the Romans took on some of the local gods into their pantheon. Then, if there was rebellion, you couldn’t be quite sure which side any of the gods were on. It decreased the likelihood of rebellion. It was easier to move the gods than it was to move the people. It didn’t destroy the tax base.

Out of this, then, when the northern tribes had been moved out (or all of the elite of them), the Assyrians had likewise brought in the elite of other pagan peoples into the land, and eventually they had intermarried. That’s what had given rise to the mixed breed we call the Samaritans. In the course of time, they didn’t accept all of the Old Testament as their canon. What they accepted was the Pentateuch. That’s all.

The Pentateuch, then, says, “When you get into the land you will find an appropriate place the Lord will show you where you are to build, and that’s where you will meet with God.” That’s as far as they got. Because they didn’t then believe the rest of the Old Testament was really canonical, was really God inspired, then all the stuff about David and Jerusalem and all of that was just for the Jews. That’s not really part of what God had intended. Just read the Pentateuch.

The Pentateuch tells you when they got in the land there was this great scene at Gerazim and Ebal when you have the curses of the covenant and the blessings of the covenant shouted across the valley by the different peoples. That’s what Deuteronomy is about, so that was the right place to build the temple. That’s where they built their temple.

When the Jews came to power again after the Maccabean Revolt in the second century, they went in and destroyed the Samaritan temple, which did not sit very well with the Samaritans. That’s about where it was in Jesus’ day. The Samaritans felt put on by the Jews, and the Jews viewed the Samaritans as a bunch of half-breed heretics. It is to this debate, of course, the woman is referring in the preceding verses, but Jesus says, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when this debate will be obsolete.” It’s an eschatological argument.

He says, “A time is coming when neither in Jerusalem nor on this mountain will be the principle place where people meet with God,” because the very notion of meeting corporately with God was bound up with a covenantal structure where people ascended to the high place, to the appointed temple, whether in Jerusalem or on Gerazim or Ebal, to meet with God at the temple as God had prescribed in the Pentateuch according to the law. “A time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”

On the historical matter, Jesus still insists the Jews had it right. “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know. Salvation is from the Jews.” Having said that, he says, “Yet, a time is coming and has now come when that whole debate is obsolete, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.”

Thus, true worshipers are, in the first instance then, according to Jesus, under the terms of this new covenant of this new time of this new period that is being introduced eschatologically, this new time which is coming and has now dawned (it has now come), not geologically bound. They are not geographically bound.

This is not suggesting before Jesus’ death and resurrection there were no true worshipers. Clearly, there were true worshipers under the old covenant as under the new, but it is saying with the death and resurrection of Jesus, true worshipers need not go to the temple anymore whether in Gerazim or Ebal or in Jerusalem, for Jesus is the true temple. We just learned that in chapter 2.

In that sense, then, in spirit and truth does not simply mean genuinely. It turns, in part, on what is meant by “God is spirit” in the next verse. “God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” God is spirit is not saying God is a spirit, as if this might imply one of many. This is his nature. He is a spiritual type being, one of many, which is the way the Kings James Version has it. God is a spirit.

Nor is this a complete description of his metaphysical properties. Rather, in this context it is saying God is incorporeal and, therefore, is not finally located in a building, not even in the Jerusalem temple. Yet, it is saying something even more than that. God is not like us. God is God.

Listen to the parallelism of Isaiah 31:3. “But the Egyptians are men and not God; their horses are flesh and not spirit.” Listen again to the parallelism. “The Egyptians are men and not God; their horses are flesh and not spirit.” God and spirit over against horses and men. God is spirit. He is invisible. He is not reducible to his temple. He is divine as opposed to human. He is life-giving like the spirit of the Old Testament. He is God.

In spirit and truth means, first of all, our worship must be essentially God-centered not temple-centered, and such worship is made possible by this God who has disclosed himself in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the true temple, the ultimate exposition of what God is like, the ultimate grace and truth, the one who a few chapters later will say, “I am the truth.”

In other words, true worshipers worship in spirit and in truth. They worship this God who manifests himself in the one who is, in fact, the truth. This is Christian worship. It is not geographically bound. It is only temple related, as Jesus is the new temple. These are salvation historical, eschatological, Christian categories for worship.

The issue of sincerity is a long way down in the pecking order of this meaning although, of course, sincerity is demanded elsewhere. I’m not saying so long as you get your eschatology right you can be as insincere as you like. I’m not suggesting that for a moment. All I’m saying is this verse is not simply primarily trying to underline sincerity.

True worshipers, Jesus says, are being released from a certain style of worship focused on the temple. After all, the Old Testament prophets spoke of a time when the whole earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. In the ultimate vision in Revelation 21 and 22, John says, “I saw no temple in that city for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”

Christian worship is foundationally God-centered, based on the Lamb, who is the Word made flesh, who is the true temple of God, the true sacrifice. That is the ground of our connection with the divine. In this connection, then, remember Jesus says, “The Father seeks true worshipers, and the true worshipers are those who worship in spirit and in truth.”

He does not say he seeks true worship, but true worshipers. There is a huge difference. Sometimes it seems to me because we are today ascribing more and more finite human emotional responses to God then we are inclined to think of God (I’ll overstate it) as sort of waiting up there in heaven for us to get our worship act right.

“I can hardly wait till Sunday until they worship me again. I’ve got to get my fix of worship. I’m looking for true worship. Oh, I didn’t like that worship at all. I mean, it did nothing for me. If only they had given me true worship in spirit and in truth, then I’d be much happier this week in heaven. I’m having a sort of bad hair day because it was bad worship.”

We wonder if our worship pleases God. What do we mean when we wonder if our worship pleases God? If we get the technique right? Guitars instead of pipe organ or the reverse? Choruses instead of hymns or the reverse? Thees and thous, or abolish them all? Then somehow God will be more pleased, and it’s worship in spirit and in truth? Or it will at least be authentic in spirit and in truth, and then God will be happy in his heaven.

Like most ridiculous positions it has a smidgen of truth to it. There is a sense, of course, in which we may come before God in our corporate worship in singularly bad ways, just as in exactly the same way you may come before the Lord, with respect to the Lord’s Table, in bad ways. Not because you are more worthy or less worthy. You can approach the Table of the Lord unworthily. It is an adverb not an adjective.

That is, the manner of your approach may be unworthy, and in the context, the manner of approach depends on repentance, on genuinely bowing before him and recognizing what it is pointing to, the cross of Christ itself. In your corporate worship, clearly you can come before God thinking about something else and just enjoying the beat or enjoying the lovely harmonies on a four-tier pipe organ. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re intoxicated with Bach or intoxicated with Bacharach. It doesn’t really matter. You’re still intoxicated with the music.

It’s still not what the point is here, and in any case, it’s wrong to think God is having bad hair days in heaven depending on how we approach him, for this suggests God is diminished apart from us. One of the things the Puritans spoke of was the aseity of God. It’s a word we’ve lost in English now. Aseity. The aseity of God. From the Latin a se, from himself.

They said he was so much of himself that he didn’t need us. Of course, that’s what Paul preaches to the pagans in Acts 17, isn’t it? Not as if God needed you or anything else. He doesn’t need us. God doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need my preaching. He doesn’t need my writing. He doesn’t need our worship. He doesn’t need our guitars. He doesn’t need our pipe organs. He doesn’t need us.

God is not in a symbiotic relationship so that his essence is bound up with my essence. That’s paganism. In paganism, the gods are finite and they have their needs and we have our needs, and the whole point of religion is if you scratch the back of the gods then they pour out blessings. You get the right scratching going on and they pour out the right blessings. There’s a certain amount of contemporary evangelicalism that is beginning to think of worship in those terms. “If we get our worship right, then God will be pleased and maybe he’ll be nicer to us.”

God doesn’t need us. He was happy in eternity past before we existed. He is entirely self-sufficient. He is the God of aseity. Of course, as soon as you’ve said that, you have to say some other things or else you can make God, suddenly, the God of deism, the God of non-responsiveness, the God of immobility.

That’s not right. God does respond to us. God responds in love and in wrath. He always responds in holiness and perfection, but it is never as a function of his personal needs. It is, rather, as a function of all that he is as God. God’s emotions do not trip him up and lead him in some direction where he would rather not go. His emotions are bound up as well with his will and his sovereignty and his goodness and his greatness and his perfections. They’re all bound up together.

My emotions may lead me astray. God’s emotions never do. They are part of all of his perfections. They cannot be abstracted from the perfection of his sovereignty and his will. It’s in that sense we speak of the impassability of God, not in the sense that God has no emotions (that’s merely heresy) but in the sense in which his emotions cannot lead him to some position other than what he is as God. He doesn’t need us. He is perfect in all of his ways and being. He doesn’t need us.

Thus, our worship does not add something to God that otherwise he would lack. It does not bring something to God which otherwise he would be missing. It is, rather, simply the acknowledgement of dependence of creatures upon Creator, of the redeemed upon the Redeemer. It is praising God for who he is with gratitude, not giving to God something he would otherwise not have.

For God is God and God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship, thus, in spirit (that is, in this whole realm of recognizing God as he is) and truth as God has disclosed himself truly and supremely in him who is the truth. This, too, lies at the heart of genuine human intercourse with God, connection with God, experience of God. It is part of Christian spirituality.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.