March 24, 2021 John 3: 33-34
29He who has the bride is
the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him,
rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been
fulfilled. 30He must increase, but I must decrease.’
31 The one who comes from above
is above all; the one who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks about
earthly things. The one who comes from heaven is above all. 32He
testifies to what he has seen and heard, yet no one accepts his testimony. 33Whoever
has accepted his testimony has certified this, that God is true. 34He whom
God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without
measure. 35The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his
hands. 36Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys
the Son will not see life, but must endure God’s wrath.
4:1 Now when
Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing
more disciples than John’— 2 although it was not Jesus
himself but his disciples who baptized— 3he left Judea and started back to Galilee.
When
Jesus is standing before Pontius Pilate in the 18th chapter of this
gospel, the Roman governor is going to ask, “What is truth?” Jesus will say in the 14th
chapter, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” And those are just two references that come
to my mind about truth from the gospels.
‘Truth’, as a thing, is something for John, both gospel writer and
baptizer.
Yesterday
was “one” and “he” and a throwback to Jesus talking about “we”, but as we roll
into verse 33, the pronoun identification is fairly easy to discern, it is
Jesus talking. To accept the testimony
of Jesus is to provide us with a profound…sorry…truth.
He
says things in an interesting way. To
accept the testimony of Jesus, John the baptizer says, is to certify that God
is true. God is true, that is the
presupposition. To accept the testimony
of Jesus is to certify it, is to believe it.
So then, to return to the other places where “truth” is used, and going
with the old math formula that if a=b and b=c, than a=c, what is Pilate asking
Jesus during Jesus’ trial?
“What
is God?” (He did not know the rest of
the formula).
And
Jesus is saying “I am the Way, and God, and the Life.” Pulls us back to John 1:1, where the Word IS
God. “Truth”, in the world, is the basis
for a whole lot of philosophical ink spilled and discussions laid out. Nice to have a brief summary in hand.
At
the risk of another side quest, there is another equivalency made about God,
not in the Gospel of John, but in the first Letter of John. In that case, God IS love (1 John 4:8). So God is true, God is love, God is
Jesus. Jesus is the Way. Jesus is the Life.
We
can say also that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-lots of kinds of
things. Preliminarily to that is knowing
that “God is true”. And it is good to
know that God is in control, especially when we know God is love.
John
the baptizer wants his disciples, the gospel writer wants us to know how God
self-identifies for our understanding and our edification. And we know all this from the testimony of
Jesus. And how can we trust the validity
of the testimony of Jesus?
Next
verse, He speaks the Word of God, He whom God has sent, He upon whom the Spirit
has been given without measure. Such is
the validity of the testimony of Jesus.
But
wait! (some would cry out). God is true
because the testimony of Jesus is certified.
And the testimony of Jesus is the collective ‘words’ of God from the God
who sent him. And the words of God, his
testimony, when certified, shows God is true…it is circular reasoning. It goes in circles. If my response were an unfeeling “So?”, the
response might be “Prove it!”
But
that is the basis of John the baptizer’s testimony. It was the basis for Jesus’ testimony to
Nicodemus. Some will accept and some
will not. It isn’t a matter of proof,
because, in this age of fake news and the rise in prominence of such nonsense
as ‘flat earth’, it is very clear that ‘proof’ is not the absolute discerner of
‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ that we would like it to be.
The power behind the words of God that Jesus speaks comes from the
giving of the Spirit without measure, that brings us to the Old Testament,
where God poured out his Spirit on the chosen, like Moses, who then ‘spread it
around’ to the others who helped him lead the people. It was poured out on Elijah, and a ‘double
measure’ was given to his successor, Elisha.
It is how the tabernacle was built to divine standards. It is how God flows through to us in
Jesus. But it does not stand on its
own. The Spirit was not just a ‘Jesus thing’,
but it will, in the course of time, be there for all of us. Acts 2, the story of Pentecost, not written
by John but by the author of Luke, will lay that out for us.
But
Jesus has a lot more to say about what the Spirit is in the lives of believers.
Pastor Pete
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