Kaleo San Diego Church

INTRODUCTION

Tonight we are going to continue our study of the Gospel of John, picking up where we left off in chapter 11 and studying verses 45-57.

This portion of chapter 11 contains the responses to the resurrection of Lazarus. In the beginning of his Gospel, John said this about Jesus: "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not" (1:11).

The rejection of Christ by the people of Israel became the pattern for the rest of this Gospel. After ministering and doing miracles for about three years, faith was the response of only a few, and hatred and indifference was the response of the rest.

Ultimately we know that Jesus Christ, the God-man, the bread of life, the living water, the resurrection and the life, and the good shepherd was finally rejected and nailed to a cross.

But before universal humiliation reached its climax on the cross, God--who is always jealous for the Son's glory-- designed that Christ should do one climactic miracle in the face of all the rejection. That miracle was the resurrection of Lazarus. It was an incredible expression of power that made a man live again who had been dead four days.

That miracle was for Israel to recognize that even if they rejected Christ, He was still who He claimed to be and able to manifest divine power. God exposed and defied Israel's unbelief by demonstrating that Jesus was God and that He had almighty power. He gave glory to Himself and His Son in this miracle of resurrection.

We know in verse 15, the purpose of the miracle was to grow the faith in Jesus’ disciples. It revealed Jesus' identity to them and strengthened their faith, which was waning in the face of increasing rejection. The miracle had the effect of causing some unbelievers to become believers.

Yet it elicited different reactions from the people who saw or heard about it. In fact, those first-century reactions are not much different than how men react today to Christ.

There are many individuals within the academic and evangelical circles that genuinely believe if we present enough evidence and facts, we will win over the lost to Christ. They believe that a solid philosophical argument, a list of historical proofs, a biological explanation for life, will certainly win over the unbelief of those that seem to be gaining in popularity and power in our educational institutions, our governments highest offices, and the media.

So we see books named “Evidence that Demands a Verdict,” or the updated “New Evidence that Demands a Verdict,” “The Case for Christ,” “The Case for Faith,” “The Historical Evidence for Jesus,” “More than a Carpenter,” and “Letters from a Skeptic.”

All of these books have one thing in common; they attempt to prove the validity of Jesus life, death, resurrection, and miracles, by offering proof after proof that is “sure to win over unbelief” in the hearts of those that are not yet convinced.

We have row after row of books in the “Charismatic Interests” section of your local Family or Bereans Christian Bookstores, each with authors like T.D. Jakes, Henry Wright, Derek Prince, all claiming that “Jesus wants to heal you, let Him do His job.” They believe the reason you are poor, sick, or hurt, is because you simply don’t conjure up enough faith. They want you to believe in believing, to have faith in faith, to pursue faith as if it is a god to be worshipped.

We have televangelists like Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Don Stewart, and Peter Popoff, telling us that “Jesus was rich and wants us to be the same,” “We should name what we want and claim it as our own,” “If you send them 50 dollars they will pray over your letter and heal whatever is ailing you,” They say they can prove that Jesus is alive because they are rich, and the way you can know He is real is by their “anointing power” that they possess to prove Christ to you.

We even have our own news filter, called the “Left Behind” series that claims to be able to discern the times by reading the news into the Bible or reading the Bible into the news. We can win people to Christ by scaring them into believing that the war in Iraq is the prelude to the establishment of Babylon! That at any moment Armageddon will burst forth and leave you behind. They encourage us to listen to their predictions and interpretations of current events all for the purpose of proving that God is real.

Amazing…How quickly we forget Jesus own words “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him…”

We have unfortunately adopted the Fox News slogan “we report, you decide,” so we run around trying to memorize facts and arguments, trying to read the news as if it the events taking place every day fulfill all of the Old Testament prophecies, we create bible codes to prove the validity of the Bible, and all the while we pray as if God is sovereign, yet we act as if He is impotent when it comes to saving someone.

We rely heavily upon our own intellect, our own arguments, and our own evangelistic methods to “win” people to Christ.

Some have even taken the road of emotional manipulation to try to trick you into parroting some prayer that is suppose have so much power, that if you pray it, you are saved with no questions asked.

This type of evidential thinking can be traced to a period of time called Modernism. We could close in this period of time from Bastille to Berlin. Two walls that contained a worldview within them.

The storming of the Bastille, a French prison, on the 14th of July 1789, became a symbol; it was proof that power no longer resided in the King or in God, but in the people, in accordance with the theories developed by the Philosophies of the eighteenth century.

Berkley, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant, each were influential in shaping the thought of this period before and after the French revolution.

Of the of this period, the most important was a faith in the power of human reason. People came to assume that through a proper use of reason, unending progress would be possible—progress in knowledge, in technical achievement, and even in moral values.

Many opted for a form of Deism, accepting the existence of God and of a hereafter, but rejecting the intricacies of Christian theology.

This non-Christian form placed faith in the reason of man to solve all of mans problems. They believed they could find absolutes in man not in God.

This view ultimately failed. Toward the early 20th century philosophy began to change from its idealistic assumptions that man is so bright and capable to help himself, that there was a loss of belief that man would ever truly rid himself of bankrupt morality or social decay, by using the scientific method or idealistic philosophical assumptions.

Husserl, Heideggar, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, and Russell were many of those that didn’t share the same optimism of the modern period.

The fall of modernism came with the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the 9th of November, 1989, the Border separating Western from Eastern Germany was effectively opened. This period of arrogance in the modern mind came to a close.

Yet this type of thinking still exists today. It an arrogant assumption that we can actually do anything in the work of conversion, other than preach the Gospel.

This arrogance leads us to formulate silly theories to try to “prove” the mind of The Infinite by appealing to the mind of the finite.

The Scriptures don’t tell us that the reason of man is the power of God unto salvation. The Scriptures boldly declare the “Gospel is the power of God unto salvation.”

We live in a society today that no longer cares about proof. We live in what is called a “Post-Modern” period. It simply means “after modern.” It is this period of reaction to modernism that is so prevalent today in our culture.

For Post-moderns the issue is one of authority and power. They see all leaders and all texts as a means by which someone exercises authority and power over another. They see all authority and power as inherently bad and prefer experience over truth, relativism over absolutes, and tolerance over judgment.

The result is that they will reject any singular interpretation of Scripture arguing that it is your perspective and that there are other perspectives and none are true so we should all of them as true for each of us.

They reject any leadership and shun away from what they call “organized religion” and prefer to have their “personal relationship and experiences with God”.

They also shun being in any form of officially responsible leadership, which makes them terrible parents and spouses and church members. This is because we are dealing with common sins that have simply now been given a philosophical name:

These people don’t care how well you can argue for the historical proofs in the resurrection. They don’t care how well you can argue for the objective reality of absolute truth. What they care about is how they feel, and how you are making them feel.

They interpret truth by their feelings and not feelings by truth.

So here we are, lining up with our guns loaded, telling people to make a logical decision based upon strong facts and figures in our mountain of evidence, all the while they either hear the voice on the other end of the phone in Charlie Brown, or they wisely but wrongly assume, that if they can find contradictory evidence against your evidence, there is no need for them to believe what you claim.

Remember, we war not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

People don’t need good arguments, they need the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They need the power of God to come upon them and to regenerate their hearts so that the once enemy of God, who hated God, and thought the cross of Christ was foolish, will now fall to their knees in humble brokenness and cry out to God for mercy in the Son of the Father.

This Gospel should be both preached and lived in our lives. We should be a representation of the living Gospel in the lives of the hopeless.

In doing this, there will be certain responses that those that are in darkness will give. We are going to look at 5 different responses in our text tonight.

We should look at these responses in the context of the story of Lazarus resurrection, the light of the sign which is Christ’s ultimate resurrection and of course the new life we have been given in our own spiritual resurrection.

TEXT

I. Miracle=Belief

Verse 45 Then many of the Jews who had come to Mary, and had seen the things Jesus did, believed on Him.

The first response is the right response. Many that had come to comfort Mary, and had witnessed the power of Christ in resurrecting a man who was dead for 4 days, cast their belief upon the Son of God.

If you are a child of the Father, you have also cast your belief in God’s Son, who is the only way to the Father. You have placed everything under the subjection of the Son of God, so that you have now been adopted into God’s family as His son’s and daughter’s.

The miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus produced belief, as Jesus Himself knew who it was that would believe in Him.

The power of Christ who was resurrected from the dead, by the Spirit of God, has become a miracle for us to place our unending obedience and faith.

And the miracle of our testimony, the witness of what God has done in and through us in granting to us repentance and life, is often the visual catalyst for those in our lives to believe in the Son.

II. Miracle=Rejection

Verse 46 But some of them went away to the Pharisees and told them the things Jesus did.

As there were many that had come to believe in Jesus, there were many, too many, that did not believe and actually rejected Jesus. Those individuals then seek out the Pharisees to tell them what Jesus had done.

This was not for evangelism, but to gain praise in the eyes of men for being the ones that help them catch Jesus.

This miracle produced a people that never deny the event of the miracle, but because their hearts are hard, this only hardens their hearts more towards their rejection of God’s Son.

As we live in a culture that is intolerant of those that appear intolerant, we find ourselves in the middle of experiencing this very same reaction.

There will be many that will reject you because of your allegiance to the Messiah. They will mock you, they will ridicule you, and they will even turn you in to your boss if they think would dare to tell them that Jesus is the only way.

Our culture hates absolutes and Jesus represents the ultimate absolute to them.

He says, I am the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me. (John 14:6)

The book of acts declares that there is no other name in heaven by which men must be saved. (Acts 4:12)

John tells us in his first Epistle, he who has the son of God, has life, he who has not the son of God, has not life. (1st John 5:12)

Jesus also tells us early in this Gospel, "He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him." (John 3:36)

Jesus has no problem making exclusive intolerant claims to absolute truth. He tells us that He is the sum total of all truth.

This will quickly get you a free copy of “how to win friends and influence people” if you continue to evangelize your lost friends.

III. Miracle=Confusion

Verses 47-48 Then the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered a council and said, "What shall we do? For this Man works many signs. 48 "If we let Him alone like this, everyone will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation."

Here we see the chief priests and the Pharisees who have been active opponents of Jesus ministry confused. They simply are caught between “the rock” and a hard place.

But their confusion is not theological confusion, their confusion is one that has already made its decision not to follow Christ, but now tries to figure out what to do with this man who obviously has the power to raise the dead.

They are concerned about their own position. They are concerned about job stability. They make this concern seem as if it is a patriotic national concern, when all along they only care about themselves and how they can prolong their position of authority.

These are the people that the Post-Moderns should be angry at. These are the power hungry, hypocritical, crooked, authority figures that find their way into a position of religious power.

This is not much different than the corruption of Rome, or even of our own government that seeks to make their stay in power a permanent one.

What do men with power want more than anything? More power! It is never enough, and anything that you do to try to remove the power hungry from power, will reap from them the venom that runs through their veins.

Christ brought with His identity and miracles confusion, and today the same can be said as we live out our lives according to His example.

We bring confusion to those that thought they had the world systematically wrapped in a nice little neat philosophical package, then we tell them things like “He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it,” “take up your cross and follow Christ,” “you must be born from above.”

But let us all remember that the confusion that comes with the Gospel is not passive or innocent. The confusion that comes with the resurrection of Christ in the Gospel, is a result of unbelieving sin.

Always this is the case for those that refuse to accept the remedy prescribed by God for their terminal disease called sin.

IV. Miracle=Hatred

Verses 49-53 And one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing at all, 50 "nor do you consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should perish." 51 Now this he did not say on his own authority; but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, 52 and not for that nation only, but also that He would gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad. 53 Then, from that day on, they plotted to put Him to death.

This is perhaps the most terrifying of each of these responses. The response to the miracle of Lazarus resurrection, was a decision to kill God’s Son.

This response was a response of utter hatred for who Christ is and what He has done.

Notice that nowhere in this entire story was the authenticity of this miracle ever questioned. There were enough witnesses present to clearly validate this miracle. It had nothing to do with evidence, truth, it had everything to do with those that hate the truth, who is Jesus.

Jesus tells us that "And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. "For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. (John 3:19,20).

It is ironic that Caiaphas speaks words that are so truthful that even he doesn’t understand them. Caiaphas speaks of Jesus resurrection without even understanding that what he speaks of is the salvation of Gods elect.

He thinks that killing Jesus would keep the people from believing in Jesus and from toppling their power, so he wants to put Jesus to death to keep the people alive, when less than 40 years later, 1,100,000 Jews will be slain at the hands of the Romans.

The very thing he assumed would save him, condemned him and the judgment of God fell upon the people of the nation of Israel.

But the true Israel of God, through the death of Christ, now brings children from afar off, in every tribe and tongue, together as one in Christ.

Just as there were those that hated Jesus, Jesus tells us that there will be those that will hate us also.

John 15:18-19 "If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. 19 "If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

1 John 3:13 Do not marvel, my brethren, if the world hates you.

We should not be surprised, but expect that as we bring a message of grace and condemnation to the lost, we will be hated. There will be those in our lives that react the same way as Caiaphas, they would have our lives if they could get away with it.

Yet Christ promised that through these time He will never leave or forsake His own.

Verses 54-55 Therefore Jesus no longer walked openly among the Jews, but went from there into the country near the wilderness, to a city called Ephraim, and there remained with His disciples. 55 And the Passover of the Jews was near, and many went from the country up to Jerusalem before the Passover, to purify themselves.

V. Miracle=Curiosity

Verses 54-57 Therefore Jesus no longer walked openly among the Jews, but went from there into the country near the wilderness, to a city called Ephraim, and there remained with His disciples. 55 And the Passover of the Jews was near, and many went from the country up to Jerusalem before the Passover, to purify themselves. 56 Then they sought Jesus, and spoke among themselves as they stood in the temple, "What do you think--that He will not come to the feast?" 57 Now both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given a command, that if anyone knew where He was, he should report it, that they might seize Him.

Here is the last of the 5 responses from those that have either witnessed or heard of this miracle. Their response is one of curiosity.

There were many during this time that thought they were passive in reaching any conclusions about Jesus. The like to watch the activities, see the miracles, listen to His teachings and even hang around Him and His disciples, but their were never more than curious spectators.

How sad is this truth today? How many of those that attend Church on the Lords Day sit and watch all the activity, sing all the songs, enjoy the teaching, and have fellowship with the saints, all the while never moving from curiosity and admiration of Jesus to conviction and adoration of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God?

People love to be voyeurs. They like to watch the action on the sidelines. People love to observe.

The problem with this type of response, is that they are in no better place when they breathe their last breath as the most depraved human that has ever lived. They both stand in judgment before a holy God without a defense.

Christ tells us that there is no neutral ground. He says “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters.” (Luke 11:23)

In the eyes of Christ, there is only one of two responses that are acceptable; 1. Belief and obedience, 2. All others.

There is no gray area, not middle ground, no “honest objective searching.”

To say that you have made no decision regarding Christ, is to have already made a decision. The decision is that you are not in and with the Son of God, and therefore you are actively against Him and His work and will one day be held accountable for that decision.

Apathy and curiosity is no comfort to those that are eternally separated from God in the depths of hell.

CONCLUSION

We have looked at 5 different responses to the resurrection of Lazarus as we have finished this chapter. Belief, rejection, confusion, hatred, and curiosity. Only one of these will be acceptable in the eyes of the God who made you.

Acts 16:31 "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved…”

Communion…

Let’s pray.

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