Equal With God

For this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. (John 5:18)

This verse has the potential for being easily misapplied and misinterpreted by many if they are not desirous of knowing the truth of the gospel as it is in Jesus. Particularly, there are many teachers and preachers keen on maintaining their control over the minds of millions of deceived followers who insist that Jesus really was breaking the Sabbath according to this verse and therefore it is safe to assume that Jesus was introducing a new era with a whole different Sabbath – or worse yet, no particular Sabbath at all. Equally, this text could also be construed to purport that Jesus was seeking to make Himself equal with God just as it seems to say.

Both of these assertions can be enforced with an argument that we must take the Bible at face value and not quibble with the plain meaning of what might be seen in this verse. However, if this is not taken in the larger context of the rest of Scripture then we are set up to be deceived by our own simplicity – or more accurately our own desire to believe notions that serve our own ends instead of coming to a better knowledge of the real truth as it is in Jesus.

What I am starting to see more clearly here is that the real problem was not in what Jesus was doing or saying but was with the picture of God that the Jews had that did not fit well with what they saw in the life of Jesus. Everything about Jesus tended to expose false ideas about God in the ideas and attitudes of the religious people of that day and as a result a great deal of resentment was aroused by Jesus when people refused to reconsider their assumptions about how God treats people, particularly sinners. It also strongly clashed with the real truth about how God feels in general and the characteristics that motivate Him in how He relates to all of His creation.

We are no different than the Jews of Jesus day no matter how enlightened we may think we are. We share the same lies about God that has pervaded humanity ever since Eve and Adam partook of the fruit and absorbed the lies of the great deceiver into their deepest psyche that was then passed on to all of their children. It is impossible to be born as a sinful human being without being infected with these iniquities, this system of lies about God that is passed down generationally from father to child. (That is one reason some believe that Jesus escaped this particular corruption because He did not have a biological earthly father through which this contamination would have been received. But that is another topic altogether.)

Right now I do not want to spend much time dealing with the false assumptions about the Sabbath that many might induce from this text. But what does interest me right now is the notion that somehow Jesus in fact did promote His relationship with His heavenly Father as some sort of leverage that He felt compelled to defend and to use against all who disagreed with Him. I find this rather interesting particularly because this assumption directly contradicts other verses in the Bible, especially that in Philippians where Paul states the exact opposite of what might be inferred from this verse.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness... (Philippians 2:5-7 NRSV)

Any Bible-believing Christian must accept that Jesus was indeed the actual and literal Son of God and that He was in fact part of who God is. Jesus was not an entity separate from God or created by God to represent Him but is part of the three-part expression of what constitutes the Godhead. So from this perspective most Christians do not have issue with the fact that this verse in John refers to Jesus as relating to God as His Father.

However, what might be easily missed here is not that Jesus is in one sense the Son of His Father who is God – a relationship that sometimes we still grapple to wrap our minds around properly – but that this verse is actually referring to assumptions in the minds of the Jews rather than assertions of fact by the writer of this book. John is not trying to mess with our mind here and cause confusion about either the Sabbath or about Jesus' relationship to God as His Father. What John was referring to in this particular verse was the fact that the Jews were making assumptions just as we so easily do ourselves, that their opinions about God and about proper Sabbath-keeping had to be the only right views and that anything that conflicted with what had been worked out by religious experts over many years simply should not be questioned.

Thus the stage was set for the ultimate rejection of the truth as it is in Jesus, not only about the real identity of who Jesus was as the very presence of God Himself among men but also many peripheral issues such as what it really means to embrace the Sabbath as a meaningful link in our dependence on God to save us from sin. When properly understood, the Sabbath is nothing like either what the Jews insisted it meant or even what nearly all Christians assume it means today. The Sabbath when properly perceived from a careful examination of Scripture is far more analogous to an intimate date with a lover than it is about following a list of detailed demands by a rule-obsessed Master looking to demand allegiance from His subjects or simply a nice idea, a suggestion of when people should show up at church.

Likewise, the idea of Jesus promoting Himself as equal with God to answer the objections of the Jews demanding to know by what authority He operated so far outside of their control – this assumption when read into this verse misses the whole point of the passage and the book of John. John was not trying to prove through arguments and facts that Jesus was the duly authorized Messiah that the Jews had to acknowledge in the face of all their resistance, but He was instead an expression of a God radically different than the one any of us have ever dared to imagine before.

While the Jews (and many even today) assumed that Jesus was promoting Himself as equal with God as a means of throwing His weight around and asserting authority so as to gain the upper hand in the power struggles that go on so often among us, Jesus was in fact simply demonstrating what every one of us is supposed to experience in our lives of obedience to the Word of God. Centuries before He had spoken the following words through His prophet Jeremiah:

Thus says the LORD, "Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things," declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 9:23-24)

Father, let me be afraid to brag about anything that I think I may have of my own that really comes only from You as a gift. But on the other hand, cause me to not be ashamed to brag about the fact that You have been revealing Your heart to me personally and that You desire to do the same for every person that responds to Your personal invitation to experience the same and far greater intimacy for themselves. I can now see better that Jesus was really inviting those Jews into a more intimate relationship with You and Your Father if they had not been so resistant and blind to what You were really trying to share with them. Open my heart to see what You are really like and what You really want to do in and through me for Your glory.