Most of us learned early in childhood to stand with hand
over heart facing the flag of the United States of America and recite
the Pledge of Allegiance. In recent years, we witnessed great controversy over
the Pledge, as numerous court cases have been heard regarding the wording of
it. Irreligious families have protested their children having to recite the
words “one nation under God,” and court rulings have come down on both sides of
the issue, with the most recent ones upholding the phrase, but granting freedom
to individuals to refrain from reciting the pledge. Yet, as the past few
election cycles have shown us, and as we see in political rhetoric across the
nation’s airwaves every day, perhaps the “under God” phrase is not the most
controversial part of the Pledge. The most controversial element of the Pledge
may well be the word “indivisible.” The very “liberty and justice for all” that
the Pledge proclaims has become the basis for division between red states and
blue states, people on the right and on the left, and in all sorts of other
factions. It remains to be seen if America will continue to be “one
nation under God, indivisible.” Whatever will happen to America is yet
unknown to us, but it is fully known to God. Division may not be far off in the
grand scheme of history, and God is not obligated to prevent it from happening.
Division is often unpleasant. We see it affect nations. We
see it affect families. We see it affect churches and every other institution
of society. Unpleasant as division may be, it is often a necessity, especially
where truth claims are involved. People fall into opposing factions of those
who believe the claims and those who do not. The great preacher Charles
Spurgeon once commented on a church, in which it was reported that there was no
division and no quarreling. He said of that congregation that “there were no
religious bickerings because there was no religion; there were no religious
strifes because nobody had anything worth striving for. And that,” Spurgeon
said, “is not a state of things over which I can rejoice.”[1]
Where matters are of great importance, we must expect there to be great
divisions. And there is nothing so important as the Person, the work, and the
words of the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, we must not be surprised to find the
entire world divided over Him. After all, He promised that this would be the
result of His coming. He said, “Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on
earth? I tell you, no, but rather division; for from now on five members
in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They
will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against
daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and
daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (Luke 12:51-53). So we must not be
surprised to read the words in our text today: “a division occurred in the
crowd because of Him” (v43). The Greek word there is schisma. It is the same word that Jesus used to describe the
tearing of a garment (Matt 9:16; Mark 2:21). The crowd is torn apart like a
garment over the singular issue of Jesus of Nazareth.
What we see in this crowd of people is a microcosm of the
entire world – people divided by Jesus. So, let’s look at the division that
occurs in this crowd, and then draw some applications to how the world is
divided by Jesus today.
I. Some think that Jesus is significant, but not the Savior
(v40).
I can still remember the conversation I had many years ago
with a Muslim in East Africa about who Jesus
is. “He is merely a prophet,” the man said. I said, “That’s an interesting
word, ‘merely.’ What do you mean by that?” He said, “Well, I believe that Jesus
was a prophet, who came from God, to enlighten people about the truth. But I do
not believe that He was God or the Son of God.” So I said, “Let me get this straight. You believe He was
a good man?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “You believe He was a good teacher?” He
said, “Yes.” I asked again, “You believe He taught the truth?” He said, “Yes.”
I said, “Then what do you do with the fact that He taught that He was Himself
truly God, the Son of God, and the only way to know and access God?”
Uncomfortably, the man’s only available recourse was to say, “Well, you say He said that, but He never said
that. You Christians have corrupted Bibles. Jesus never said those things.” I
said, “How do you know?” He said, “If He had said them, the Quran would tell
us.” I said, “How do you know the Quran is not corrupted, or that the Bible is
not true?” He finally conceded that He could no longer argue the point with me;
he had run out of answers; but his mind was still made up. Jesus was
significant, but not the Savior.
I think about that man, and many others like him with whom I
have had similar conversations, whenever I read statements like this one in
verse 40. Because of the things that Jesus said, some of the people were
saying, “This certainly is the Prophet.” Now, they are not saying that Jesus
was merely “a prophet.” He was a
prophet, yes, but they are saying He was something more than just a prophet. He
was not just another one in the line of Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so on. He
is, they said, “THE Prophet.” This is a very specific and significant person in
redemptive history. In Deuteronomy
18 , Moses gave a stern warning to the people of Israel that
they were to avoid the spiritual practices of the pagans from the surrounding
nations. They were not to use divination or witchcraft, omens, sorcerers,
spells, mediums, and the like. These were things that the pagans did in order
to find some supernatural word to direct them. But God said that these things
were forbidden for the Israelites. Instead of these things, God would speak to
the Israelites for Himself. Now, previously, when He thundered audibly from Mount Sinai , the people said to Moses, “Please give us
some mediator between ourselves and God for we cannot bear a direct
confrontation with Him.” So the Lord had determined to provide for Israel a
heritage of prophetic ministry. Moses tells the people, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a
prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him.”
The Lord said “I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all
that I command him” (Deut
18:15-18 ). This promise lays the foundation for the entire lineage
of Hebrew prophets. But, there is a greater sense in which all of these
prophets, from Moses to Malachi, were foreshadowing the coming of an ultimate
prophet. He would be a “second Moses,” a deliverer of the people.
If you remember back in Chapter 6, when Jesus fed the
multitude, miraculously multiplying two fish and five loaves of bread, the
people “saw the sign which He had performed,” and they said, “This is truly the
Prophet who is to come into the world.” Just as Moses had been able to provide
bread miraculously for the people in the form of manna (though it was God and
not Moses who provided it), the people concluded that Jesus must be the second
Moses, because of His miraculous provision of food. But Jesus chastised those
people and rebuked them because they were not interested in spiritual truth –
they were just interested in filling their bellies. Thus, the bulk of Chapter 6
is devoted to Jesus expositing what the true bread of life is – namely that is
Him. They should not come to Him expecting Him to give them food. They must
come to Him believing that He is the food
that their lives so desperately need. Most of that crowd abandoned Jesus
because they could not wrap their heads around the truth He was proclaiming to
them (6:66).
But now Jesus is surrounded by a different crowd of people. Among
this crowd are some who are more wise, more discerning, more spiritual (we
might say) than those others. They are not driven by the hunger of their bellies.
They are not persuaded by signs and wonders that they have seen. They have
heard Jesus speak. What did He say? “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me
and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, from his innermost
being will flow rivers of living water” (7:37-38). He said this on the day of
celebrating that Moses had provided water from a rock in the wilderness on two
occasions (though it was God and not Moses who provided it; Exo 17 ; Num 20 ). In the minds of some who
heard him, since Moses could provide water from the rock, and since Jesus
claims to be able to provide water as well, He must be the second Moses, the
long-awaited Prophet who was to come. He is “the Prophet.”
You know, there are many in the world today who have nothing
but good things to say about Jesus. They recognize that He is a significant
person in the history of the world. He said important things. He challenged the
status quo, confronted corrupt institutions, started an influential and
important historical movement. He is on any short list of historical figures
that a person needs to know about in order to be historically and culturally
literate. Significant indeed, but not the Savior – that is how Jesus is viewed
by many today. They view Him as an enlightened person, a prophet perhaps, who
has come to enlighten us. But Jesus is so much more than this. He is not merely
enlightened, He is the Light. He is not merely a prophet, but the ultimate
prophet, not only speaking for God, but speaking as God in the flesh. And He
can enlighten us, but He has come to do more than this – He has come to save us
and rescue us from our sins through His life, death, and resurrection. So, if
you or someone you know is one of those who believe that Jesus is significant,
but not the Savior, I would like to challenge you to go back to the Gospel
accounts in the Bible and read for yourself what He said about who He is and
what He came to do. You are to be commended for recognizing that He is
significant. But He is so much more than this. He is the Savior that all of us
need to rescue us from sin and reconcile us to the God who made us.
II. Some think that He is the Christ, but not the Crucified
One (v41a)
When we speak of Jesus Christ, we need to understand that
“Christ” is not His last name. It is a title. We are saying that Jesus is “the
Christ.” The Greek word Christos corresponds
to the Hebrew word Mashiach, from
which we get the word “Messiah.” Both words mean “the Anointed One,” and speak
of a person who will be anointed by God to reign over His people. And
apparently, one group of people who heard the words of Jesus at the Feast of
Tabernacles concluded that Jesus was this anointed Christ, or Messiah.
Now, to us, it would seem that these groups are saying the
same thing, and so the division is unnecessary. One group says He is the
Prophet, one group says He is the Christ. We say, “What’s the difference?”
because we understand both titles to refer to Jesus. However, it is likely that
Christians were the first to equate these two titles to one person, because
Christians saw Jesus as the fulfillment of both promises. Prior to His death
and resurrection, however, Jewish people believed that the Prophet would come,
and that the Messiah would come, but they were not the same person. In fact,
among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was found one document which speaks of a
coming prophet and TWO coming Messiahs – one who would be a priestly Messiah in
the order of Aaron, and the other a kingly Messiah from the line of David.[2] Most
people in Jesus’ day viewed the Messiah as a great political and military ruler
who would come and deliver the Israelites from the oppression of foreign
powers. Throughout Israel ’s
history, the nation had been dominated by one foreign nation after another – Egypt , Assyria, Babylon ,
Greece , and at this time in
history it was Rome .
The heartcry of the people of Israel
was that they might be liberated and set free from this oppression, and they
longed for the coming of a deliverer who would make it happen. After seeing and
hearing all that Jesus had done and said, there was one group of people at
least who were convinced that He was the Christ, the Messiah!
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Revolution.
Before this would-be Messiah could ever overthrow the Romans, He went and got
Himself killed! Not only that, but it was almost like He tried to get Himself
killed. He was going around telling people that He was going to get killed when
He got to Jerusalem .
They thought He was the Christ, and then He ended up crucified. And in their
minds, there could be no such thing as a crucified Christ. Those two words go
together about like the words “crash landing.” If it’s a crash, it’s not a
landing; and in their minds, if its crucified, its not a Christ. And yet, it is
through this crucifixion that Jesus accomplished the Messianic deliverance for
which He came. He did not come to deliver from Rome or from any other nation’s oppression.
Had they been set free from Rome ,
they would have still been enslaved. Just like the entire human race, we are
all slaves to sin, captive under the oppression of Satan. This is what we need
to be liberated from. And Jesus makes that liberation possible through His
life, death, and resurrection. In living for us, He fulfilled the righteous
demands of God’s law on our behalf. In dying for us, He took the penalty that
our sins deserve upon Himself. In rising from the dead for us, Jesus has
defeated our sins and their penalty of death and hell forever, so that we can
be set free, saved, and secured to Him throughout this life and in heaven
forever. They thought that Christ could not be crucified. Jesus demonstrated
that He is the Christ by His crucifixion.
Was He the prophet, the priest, or the King? He is all
three. The prophet who came as the Word made flesh; the priest who not only
offered but became the sacrifice for sin; and the King who has established His
Kingdom in the hearts of those who follow Him, but who is coming again in glory
to put all nations under His feet. So Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling
block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews
and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the
foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than
men” (1 Cor 1:23-25 ).
If you look at Jesus as the victim of a tragic historical
accident, a case-study in “what might have been,” a martyr who died for a noble
purpose before He could achieve His ultimate potential, then you are sorely
mistaken. The death that He died was the very reason for His coming and it is
the very basis of our hope. Our only hope to be rescued is through His cross.
If you think that He cannot be Christ because He was crucified, the fact is
that He is Christ because He was crucified, and was crucified there for you and
me and for our sins, to save us.
III. Some think He is a liar and not the Lord (vv41b-42)
Among the people of the world today there is a very small
minority who have only negative things to say about Jesus. Most people who know
anything about Him express something positive about Him, even if they come
short of being a full fledged follower of Christ. But then there are those who,
for whatever reason, have such hardened and bitter hearts toward the Lord that
they just cannot stomach Him. They despise Him and want nothing to do with Him
at all. They seek to discredit and destroy Him. We find such ones as these in
the crowd around Him in our text. While some say He is the prophet and some say
He is the Christ, we find this one group saying, “No, none of the above. He is
a liar!” And they think they have proof. They’ve studied their Scriptures. They
are more learned than many of their peers and they are able to say about this
Jesus that He cannot be the Messiah for He is from the wrong place and the
wrong people. They’ve searched the Scriptures and they know that the Messiah
was to be born in Bethlehem .
Micah 5:2 makes it
plain. But everyone knows where Jesus is from, right? Is He ever called Jesus
of Bethlehem? No, He is called Jesus of what?
Nazareth Nazareth , and what do the
people say about Nazareth ?
“Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ?”
(Jn 1:46 ). So these
people say, “Surely the Christ is not going to come from Galilee ,
is He?” They are convinced He is a liar and a deceiver, so they want Him dead.
Not only is He supposed to be from Bethlehem , but also from the descendants of
David. And who are Jesus’ ancestors? Well, the crowd doesn’t really know. They
have heard stories, though. They’ve heard some stories about His mom, you know,
that she wasn’t married yet when she got pregnant with Him. And they might have
heard about His dad, some carpenter in Nazareth
who hasn’t been on the scene in a long time. But every time they ask Jesus
about His lineage and where He is from, He just keeps talking about God being
His Father and Heaven being His home. They must think He is some kind of
lunatic, but all questions of His sanity aside, He is definitely not who He
says He is, because He’s from the wrong place and the wrong people. Or so they
think.
It is a terribly tragic thing, and I have met numerous
people who fall into this category, people who know their Bibles but do not
know Jesus. Had they put as much effort into knowing Jesus as they had put into
finding reasons to reject Him, they might have discovered that Jesus actually
satisfied the very criteria they used to disqualify Him. We can chalk it up to
laziness on their part. They went with things as they appeared on the surface
without probing further. Do they want a Messiah who is from Bethlehem ? Do they want one who is a
descendant of David? In Jesus they could have both, for He actually did come
from David’s lineage; and He was born in Bethlehem .
Now, like David, Jesus left Bethlehem
and never returned to it; but that was His place of birth. But the people were
too lazy to investigate and discover these truths. John Calvin says, “Our
nature is such that in small things we are ashamed of our laziness, but with
the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven, we sleep on unconcerned.”[3]
I’ve often wondered, why didn’t Jesus just break out His
birth certificate or something and show them that He really was a descendant of
David, born in Bethlehem ?
The fact of the matter is that it wouldn’t have changed a thing. Their minds
were made up to reject Him. It would have been no sure fire proof that He was
the Messiah if He could prove He was a Bethlehem
born descendant of David. We really have no sledgehammers when it comes to
defending the claims of Christianity and of Jesus Himself. There is no card we
can play that says, “Wham! There’s your proof!” Jesus didn’t do things that
way, and we can’t either. The realization and acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord
and Savior is a matter of faith, prompted by revelation from God, not by
argumentation or debate.[4]
When Peter confessed at Caesarea Philippi, “You are the Christ, the Son of the
Living God,” Jesus did not say, “Well Peter, upon what evidence do you base
this claim?” Nor did He say, “My, my Peter, you must have seen some pretty
compelling proofs and heard some really convincing arguments.” No, instead
Jesus said, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona because flesh and blood did not
reveal this to you, but My Father
who is in heaven” (Matt 16:17 ).
He had heard the words of Jesus; He had seen all the signs. But it was the
revelation of God the Father that accomplished the work of bringing Him to
believe. And so it will be with you and your friends and loved ones. You can
argue ‘til the cows come home, and present one evidence after another, but
unless the Spirit of God moves upon a human heart that heart will remain dead
in trespass and sin and will belligerently refuse to believe upon the Lord
Jesus. Arguments and evidences have value – they take away excuses for
unbelief. They provide assurance to those who already believe. But they will
never compel an unbeliever to believe. If God moves upon his or her heart, that
person will believe with or without evidence or argument. And if He doesn’t
move upon their hearts, all the evidence and arguments in the world won’t
change their minds about Jesus.
So, if you are like these folks and believe that Jesus is a
liar and not the Lord, make sure that you haven’t taken the lazy way out – have
you really investigated the basis of your unbelief? You might find that the
very things you are claiming keep you from believing in Him will be the things
that lead you to Him as God reveals His truth to your heart.
Jesus divides people. He divided this crowd. He’s dividing
up the whole world. He said He would. Throughout Scripture, He promises that He
divides believers from unbelievers; those who walk in the light from those who
walk in the darkness; the sheep from the goats; the wheat from the tares; the
children of God from the children of the devil.[5]
Jesus said, “He who is not with Me is against Me; and He who does not gather
with Me scatters” (Matt 12:30 ).
There is no middle ground. “People confronted with the revelation of God in
Christ do not have the luxury of remaining neutral” about Him.[6] We
live in a world divided by Christ. But here’s the beautifully unusual thing
about that: In the midst of this world, where people of one and the same
nation, one and the same family, etc., who ought to find many reasons to be
united, so many are divided from one another because of Jesus Christ. And yet,
you have this thing, created by Christ Himself, for Himself, called the church.
Within the church
of Jesus Christ
So as the lines are drawn between the entire human race, in
the end, there will only be one great division. Those who are His and those who
are not. Among those who are not, there will be any number of factions of those
who have widely varying opinions about who Jesus is. What they will have in
common is that none of them believe He is who He said He is. None of them have
received Him as Lord and Savior. So, it may be that someone here is a part of
that great mass of humanity. Have you really considered who Jesus is and what
He has said and done, and that He has done it all for you? Would you be willing
to read the Gospels with an open mind and ask the Lord each day to show you the
truth about Jesus as you read them?
But, among those who do belong to Him, no matter what other
reason they have to be divided from each other, they are bound together in
unity in their faith and love for the Lord Jesus who has rescued them from sin
and reconciled them to God forever. In a world that is divided by Christ, are
you among those who have been united by Him? Are you willing to labor to
preserve and defend that unity, and even to expand it to encompass others?
[1] James
Montgomery Boice, The Gospel of John
(Volume 2; An Expositional Commentary; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 2.589-2.590.
[2] 1QS
9:11. Robert Mounce, “John” in Expositors
Bible Commentary (Revised Edition; Volume 10; Grand Rapids : Zondervan, 2007), 466.
[3] John
Calvin, John (Crossway Classic
Commentaries; Wheaton , Ill.
[4] Mounce,
466.
[5] John 3:18 , 36 ; 1
Jn 5:10Jn 8:12 ;
12:35 , 46 ; Eph 5:8 ; 1
Thes 5:51 Pet 2:91
Jn 2:9Matt
25:32-33 ; Jn 10:26 ;
1 Jn 3:10Jn 8:44 . John MacArthur, John
1-11 (MacArthur New Testament Commentary; Chicago: Moody,
2006), 318.
[6] Mounce,
466.
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