The Importance of Why the Self-Testimony of a Human is Not True

May 13, 2021              John 5: 31-32

 ²⁸Do not be astonished at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice ²⁹and will come out—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation. ³⁰“I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me.

³¹“If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. ³²There is another who testifies on my behalf, and I know that his testimony to me is true. ³³You sent messengers to John, and he testified to the truth. ³⁴Not that I accept such human testimony, but I say these things so that you may be saved. ³⁵He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. ³⁶But I have a testimony greater than John’s. The works that the Father has given me to complete, the very works that I am doing, testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me. ³⁷And the Father who sent me has himself testified on my behalf. You have never heard his voice or seen his form, ³⁸and you do not have his word abiding in you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent.

            Jesus anchors his testimony is the flow chart from heaven to earth.  Because it is a flowchart.  God to Jesus to us and back again.  That is how it is going to develop…does that make this SPOILERS?  Last post was all about the two persons of Jesus, the human and the divine.  We pointed out that this theological division is NOT explicitly laid out in the Bible.  It is the after-market interpretation of what God tells us by people sincerely and deeply trying to understand the wisdom of the Lord.

            Because that division makes sense here.  If we assume Jesus to be fully God and fully human, this is the human being who is speaking to his disciples.  “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true.”  A human claiming to be God, well, that is usually an attempt by some trickster to invoke powers to convince other people of what he wants for himself.  It is a fair question to ask how this is different for Jesus.

            Unlike a sinful human being (oh yeah, the other piece of Jesus as human is that he is tempted in every way but not sinful), unlike a sinful human being who would have their own agenda of power and leadership, Jesus was never about the power.  His message has always been about the Plan of God, how he must die and come back. 

            This does not mean there have not been sinful human beings who are about the death as well, but they usually do not want to die alone.  When there is a mass suicide by a cult (and these religious-types who think they are God usually devolve into a cult), it is the leader claiming that the mass death is needed to pass on to whatever comes next.  In my experience, I cannot name a cult leader who died, claiming that their death would open the way for their followers.  And it is usually secret knowledge, this desire to mass suicide.  Because if the leader openly spoke of their all needing to die, the authorities would step in.

            If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true.  Those words as applied to Jesus, if we applied them to someone like Jim Jones or David Korresh or another leader that takes…extreme measures…with their cult, these words stand in judgement of them.   

            There is another who testifies to Jesus, and because of that testimony, we know the truth.  That testimony is from God.  In human consideration, we divide God the Father as fully God from Jesus who is fully human and fully God.  Now, where human consideration can get sidetracked is in the division of the minutia of what entails God and what entails Human, and how we try to reverse engineer our understanding to grasp who/what God is.

            The important piece to remember however is that God is love.  And that is the testimony that is coming from God the Father to God the Son.  And Jesus is very clear on how that works.  There is nothing hidden, nothing secret.  We are not called to retreat to some secret location or to cut off friends and family.  Any of those should be clues that this testimony is just from the one who wants our loyalty/money/lives.  It is the love of God, which we see worked as a God who loved us that God sent God’s only begotten Son to die for us, that is the basis of understanding how the testimony about Jesus, from God, makes it true.  From the divine, to the human.

            More later.

Peace, Pastor Peter