Signs and Belief

So when He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken. Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name, observing His signs which He was doing. (John 2:22-23)

I know that I seem to jump around a bit at times in my study, but that is part of discovering hidden links and insights. I continuously move back and forth as I meditate on passages to see connections and clues both back and forward from what I am looking at to see how it all fits together. As I do so, I often perceive something rather compelling in previous verses that I hadn't noticed so much before and want to take the time to follow that trail to see what exciting place it might take me.

It is very obvious to me that this chapter, in fact the whole book for that matter, seems very intent on talking about several words repeatedly. What I am seeing here is a focus on three words in particular:

Signs

Authority

Belief.

I also sense that I really don't have a very good conceptual grasp of how important any of these words are. That is much of the reason I have decided to focus intently on the book of John for awhile. I believe that this focus will greatly enhance my relationship with God and my understanding of His ways and His feelings about me personally. Because of this desire I want to have a much deeper sense of why these words keep coming up so often. Since John more than any other disciple had the kind of intimacy with Jesus that I want to have, if I can begin to pick up on what he is trying to tell me about Jesus maybe I can begin to enjoy more intimacy like he had with Jesus for myself.

In this first verse I see John referring to the metamorphosis that most of the disciples experienced after the resurrection of Jesus in their perceptions about what is really real, about the much bigger picture of reality and the truth about God than what they were used to thinking about. As a result of their spiritual blindness being opened to see reality completely differently through the new revelations about God in the life of Jesus, they were infused with an irrepressible enthusiasm to share with everyone possible the incredible good news about God as revealed through Jesus His Son. I want that experience for myself as well.

What I notice in this verse is that John differentiates between believing the Word of God in the Bible and believing the words that had come directly from Jesus Himself. I find that interesting and instructive and want to know more about why he said this.

I believe that God intends for us to have more than one source of truth to help us to define what real reality is just as the disciples did in those early days of the New Testament church. Jesus promised that when He left the Holy Spirit would take His place in sharing with everyone who was willing to listen, words directly from Jesus for them personally. But this role of the Spirit in no way diminishes the importance and validity of our need to depend on the Scriptures as an objective check by which to test the message from every spirit including the Holy Spirit. Otherwise people will be very susceptible to being deceived by counterfeit spirits pretending to be God's Spirit and sounding religiously correct while misleading us away from real truth.

What I like here is the fact that saving belief will come from using both of these sources to hear the truth about God and about reality. But then the question that I have been posing for most of my life comes back up for reexamination again – what exactly is it that I am supposed to believe? This is a most crucial question to understand or else I am still very open to being deceived even while trying to find truth from the Bible and listening to impressions that I feel inside of my head.

I really don't want to spend a lot of time and energy reviewing all the things that have confused me most of my life about this issue. I have covered them many times and I am now more inclined to focus on what God has made clear to me as real truth so that I can make more progress instead of reviewing all the things that kept me confused all my life. What I am clearly beginning to see recently is that the core belief that all of us must come to grips with is the ideas we have about what God is really like and how He feels toward us and treats us.

As I look again at these verses that becomes even more evident in the very next verse. When it says that many believed in His name, the real significance of the word name in the Bible relates to what someone is like, their personality and character. What is becoming crystal clear to me is that the sole purpose that Jesus came to this earth was to change our opinions about what God is like. Everything He said, did and communicated in every way was designed solely to change our perceptions about His Father.

Now as I think about this I realize that this is directly linked to the issue about authority. If Jesus came to challenge and wrest control of this world away from Satan through the sacrifice of Himself on the cross as a human, then it is crucial that we come to believe in both the truth about the character of God and properly understand the actions that He has carried out to demonstrate His unconditional love toward us. For it is only as we come to believe in the real nature of the love that God has for us will we ever be willing to properly live under His authority without feeling resistant to it.

Submission to authority without first being filled with love and gratitude always leads to legalism and counterfeit obedience.

This then ties back into helping me have more clues about this concept of what the word signs means as used by John so frequently. I still want to clarify what he really is trying to get across about this word though, because I still don't think I have a good grasp on the real significance of this concept, especially at the heart level. I intend to keep this very much in mind as I go through this book over the next several months. I want to have a much clearer grasp of what the Word and the Spirit has for me and see how they can help me to believe even more deeply from the heart as happened to those who first encountered it.