But I have testimony greater than John's.
John the Baptist, the works done by Jesus, the Father himself, and the Scriptures all testified to the identity of Jesus. But none of these was sufficient to overcome the hardness of heart in his adversaries. They were "for a while content to rejoice" in the light of John the Baptist, but clearly could not accept it when John pointed beyond himself to Jesus, the lamb of God, the one John foretold would be greater than he. The works done by Jesus ought to have revealed the fact that he was sent by the Father but instead his works were criticized and his motives were maligned. Had his opponents had a genuine connection to the Father or a place for his word in their hearts they could have recognized Jesus as the one sent by him. But there was no way for them to have such an openness to the Father while at the same time rejecting the Son. There was no way to hear the Father's voice without at the same time hearing the one who was the Word of God, and thus they "never heard his voice" and did "not have his word remaining in" them. They thought they could evade this difficulty by searching the Scriptures but "even they testify" on behalf of Jesus. Everywhere they sought to look there was testimony to Jesus. They liked to think of themselves as proficient in Scriptures but in fact the only alternative to recognizing Jesus within them was for them to twist them to their own self-destructive ends.
You search the Scriptures,
because you think you have eternal life through them;
even they testify on my behalf.
But you do not want to come to me to have life.
How sad are those words. We can't imagine Jesus saying them with anything but compassion. Why would anyone not desire to come to Jesus for life? Why would anyone reject the outstretched arm of God offering salvation? Isn't life of the sort promised by Jesus what we most deeply desire? How then do we not more sincerely and completely come to him to receive it? Why do we hedge our bets by putting limits on what we are willing to hear from the voice of the Father? Why do we insist on our own interpretations of Scriptures that confine their authority and restrict the scope of the promises contained therein? Aren't the things promised honestly better than those things that we obstinately insist on believing?
How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another
and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?
It is likely the case that all of us place different limits on the power and the promise of God based on the ways that we are all uniquely wounded and in need of healing. But for these opponents of Jesus it seems that they were so caught up in what others thought of them that they weren't able to form a genuinely new thought that wasn't already expressed around them by the popular and the important. But this can be a challenge for us today no less than then. For if we insist on accepting only ideas already vetted for us by celebrities and politicians it is unlikely that we will attain to truth. If we insist only on the famous scholars of well accredited universities we may still miss the simple and unvarnished truth of the Gospel. We can't count on asking the world who they say Jesus is. The witnesses he has already given far outweigh all of the voices in the world arrayed against him. It is up to us to answer the question of whether or not we will heed these witnesses. It is finally a choice that no one else can make for us as to whether we will come to him to have life.
They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them,
making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it,
sacrificing to it and crying out,
'This is your God, O Israel,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt!'
At the slightest hint of the absence of God we quickly turn to alternatives in order to sate the needs he no longer seems to meet. Idols are a problem for us now just as they were then. Fortunately we have an intercessor before the Father who "[w]ithstood him in the breach" even more so than did Moses, Jesus the Christ.
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time (see First Timothy 2:5-6).
Objectively considered, all of our molten calves are pathetic and unsatisfying. May we have the grace to realize that they can never give us the life that we truly desire so that, with all of our hearts, we can turn to the Lord.
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