Jesus is…the Son of God. Jesus is…the Lamb of God. Jesus is…the Teacher. Jesus is…the Messiah. Jesus is…the Temple. Jesus is…the giver of eternal life. Jesus is…the giver of Living Water. Jesus is…the Lord of Creation. Jesus is…the bread of life.
Today’s conversation with Jesus reveals more about who He is, but it also reveals something very important about who we are created to be and how we are created for relationship with God. It’s an incredible conversation, so let’s look at John 7:27-36.
“But we know where this man is from. When the Messiah comes, no one will know where He is from.” Jesus was still teaching in the temple courtyard. He cried out, “Yes, you know me. And you know where I am from. I am not here on my own authority. The One who sent me is true. You do not know Him. But I know Him. I am from Him, and He sent me.” When He said this, they tried to arrest Him. But no one laid a hand on Him. The time for Him to show who He really was had not yet come. Still, many people in the crowd believed in Him. They said, “How will it be when the Messiah comes? Will He do more signs than this man?” The Pharisees heard the crowd whispering things like this about Him. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees sent temple guards to arrest Him. Jesus said, “I am with you for only a short time. Then I will go to the One who sent me. You will look for me, but you won’t find me. You can’t come where I am going.” The Jews said to one another, “Where does this man plan to go? Does He think we can’t find Him? Will He go where our people live scattered among the Greeks? Will He go there to teach the Greeks? What did He mean when He said, ‘You will look for me, but you won’t find me’? And what did He mean when He said, ‘You can’t come where I am going’?” (NIRV)
Jesus was at the temple in Jerusalem speaking and teaching. It was during the Feast of Booths, or the Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkot in the Hebrew. It’s celebrated in mid-Fall which in the Hebrew calendar is toward the end of the year, this year between September 20-27. The feast marks the end of the harvest time and the end of the agricultural year. The feast is meant to be a remembrance of the Israelites time in the desert for 40 years, and a celebration of the way that God provided for them during that wandering time. It was a mandatory feast for Jewish people, and people would often travel from all over Israel to Jerusalem to celebrate.
As Jesus was teaching those who had gathered, we’re told this, “The Jews there were amazed. They asked, “How did this man learn so much without being taught?” (7:15, NIRV). Even though Jesus had no formal training in the temple, at least no more so than any other Jewish boy would have had, His teachings showed that He had a much deeper and richer grasp of the teachings of God than the priests and Pharisees had. The people were astonished, and were wondering if He could be the Messiah they had hoped for.
However, there were some who argued and said that there was no way that Jesus could be the Messiah. Look at 7:27, “But we know where this man is from. When the Messiah comes, no one will know where He is from.” They reasoned that just because they knew where Jesus was from, that He couldn’t be the Messiah because no one knows where Messiah would be from.
Have you ever believed some doctrine, or some theological belief that you were sure it was right, until you couldn’t actually find it in the Bible? Maybe something like, “cleanliness is next to Godliness”? Or that it was an apple in the garden of Eden? Or that a whale swallowed Jonah? Or that money is the root of all evil? Or God will never give you more than you can handle? Or God helps those who help themselves? None of these is actually Biblical, and the same holds true for what the people said about Jesus’s place of origin. They held to the belief that the Messiah would be so mysterious that no one would know where He was from. This had no grounding or history in the Old Testament at all. It wasn’t in the law of Moses, the Torah, wasn’t in any of the prophetical letters or writings or the wisdom books.
This belief that they held to came from a book in the extra writings we now call the Apocrypha. Through much debate and wisdom of many Spirit-filled believers of old, it was determined that the books that now make up the Apocrypha were not the inspired word of God and would not be included in the books that now make up the Bible. But, some sayings and beliefs persisted, even though they were clearly not of God! This belief about the Messiah was one of those.
Jesus cried out, “Yes, you know me. And you know where I am from. I am not here on my own authority. The One who sent me is true. You do not know Him. But I know Him. I am from Him, and He sent me.”
I’m really intrigued by what He’s saying here. “Yes, you know me. And you know where I am from.” The people knew quite a bit about Jesus at this point. They knew His hometown: GALILEE. They knew His family, that Mary was His mother and Joseph His father and they knew His brothers and sisters. They knew that He was a carpenter by trade. They even knew His religious background because if you’ll recall, they were amazed at His teachings even though He was not trained up in the temple like a Pharisee would have been. They think they know all about Jesus because they know these things.
Think about yourself for just a minute. People might know where you’re from, who your family is, what you do for a living, maybe even your religious history, but does knowing these things mean that someone really knows who you are?
No! Because we know that people are more than their hometown, their families, their jobs, and their religion. People are complex, with complex thoughts and ideas, beliefs, actions, perceptions. We simply can’t reduce someone down to any of these four things we might know about that. But, we often try to do that very thing, to put someone into a box based off a few things we know about them and we are tempted to make judgment calls off what we see, and surface level knowledge, rather than the core of who someone really is.
That is exactly what the people were doing with Jesus. In fact, Jesus told them as much in John 7:24, “Stop judging only by what you see. Judge in the right way.” Not only were they judging Him only by what they could see easily, or find out easily, but they were also holding Him against a belief standard that wasn’t based in God’s Word!
Jesus set them straight, “I am not here on my own authority. The One who sent me is true. You do not know Him. But I know Him. I am from Him, and He sent me.” Jesus is FROM GOD. This statement implies so much, it tells us so much about the nature of who Jesus is, but it also reveals something very important about who we are created to be and how we are created for relationship with God.
The first thing Jesus reminded them is that the One who sent Him is true. He is referring to the Father, God, the Lord, Yahweh, Jehovah, the covenant One of Israel. Jesus reminded them that God is true. Whatever God has said, or done, or will say, or will do, is true. He is the source of truth, and He Himself is truth. As the One that God sent, Jesus is also true.
What He says is true, what He does is true. He is truth. We know this because God sent Him, and what God does is true, so Jesus is true. This told the Jewish people gathered there that not only is Jesus the Messiah sent by God, but that they could trust what He was saying as truth because He was not speaking with His own authority, but rather with God’s authority, and God is true.
Regardless of what tradition might say about who the Messiah would be, regardless of their beliefs taken from the Apocryphal books, He was telling them that He is the Messiah, and He is true because He is from God and God is true.
Jesus then teaches them, “You do not know Him. But I know Him. I am from Him, and He sent me.”
Later in the book of John, in John 14:6, Jesus declares, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” So we understand that the Jewish persons gathered before Jesus didn’t know the Father because they didn’t really know Jesus, and knowing Jesus is the only way to come to know the Father.
Matthew 11:27 says, “And the only ones who know the Father are the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to make Him known.” (NIRV) Only Jesus can reveal the Father to us. We can only know the Father through Jesus.
The amazing thing is that we can know the Father! That was one of the main reasons why Jesus came, so we could know the Father! So we can know more than just what He’s done or what His titles are, but so we can know Him intimately. So we can have a relationship with Him and walk with Him moment by moment just as Adam and Eve did in the garden. So we can walk with Him as closely as Jesus does. This was Jesus’s purpose and prayer, “that they may all be one; just as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us,…The glory which You have given Me I also have given to them, so that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity,” (John 17:21-23, NASB)
In fact, knowing God through knowing Jesus Christ is, John will go on to say, eternal life, “And what is eternal life? It is knowing you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3, NIRV)
Jesus further proves that the Pharisees gathered did not know Him because after He tells them that He know the Father and they do not, the Pharisees try to have Him arrested. We are told it was not yet time to have Jesus arrested, and so He went on teaching. If the Pharisees had properly discerned the mind of God at any point, if they had known God’s path, they would have known that Jesus was speaking the truth, and they would have known that the time for His sufferings and death had not yet come.
They did not know God because they did not know Jesus. Knowing Jesus is the only way to know God because Jesus is from God. But, He desires for us to know Him, to know Him through knowing His Son, believing in His Son, and following His ways.
1. Some people believed incorrect things that were not from God about who the Messiah would be. Have you ever believed some incorrect thing about Jesus, or the Bible, that did not come from God? If so, where did that belief come from?
2. Jesus told the people to stop judging Him only by what they could see, but to judge in the right way. How important is it for us to know what the Bible says about any given thing in life?
3. You were created to know God, to walk in relationship with Him. What does 2 Corinthians 2:10-12 say about this?