What Are We Doing?

Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council, and were saying, "What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs. If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." (John 11:47-48)

What are we doing? This man is performing many signs....

This question comes to me and everyone of us sooner or later. What am I doing in the face of the signs sent from God meant to induce belief in my heart. The truth is standing in front of me in the person of Jesus Christ and His example given to display more clearly how God feels towards me. But the vital question is, What am I doing about it?

John mentions many times throughout his writings that these signs were given so that we might believe in the Son of God. I have been learning that this means Jesus came to reveal just what His Father is really like, that I don't need to be afraid of Him but that I need to change my opinions about how He feels about me. It is my own misapprehensions of God that block me from coming into sympathy with His view of reality and to allow my patterns of thinking and living to synchronize with heaven's. It is by coming to believe the evidences presented by Jesus in a multitude of ways that I am transformed and drawn to embrace the truth about God and am thus made safe to come close into His presence.

What am I doing in response to these many signs that Jesus is giving me to entice me closer to Himself and into fellowship with His Father? What are we doing? This man is performing many signs, and the question persists, what are we doing in response to them?

The evidences presented by Jesus sooner or later force every one of us to have to ask of ourselves this question. We cannot live in indifference to God's love indefinitely. Either I will surrender my resistance to Him and renounce the lies I have embraced for all of my life about Him, allowing Him to reintroduce Himself to me and redefine my perceptions of Him, or I will cling to my traditions, my fears, my religion in place of the real truth about Him and end up like these men who were so intent on maintaining their religion they refused to change their stance toward God based on the signs from Jesus.

If we allow Him to continue like this, all men will come to believe in Him....

Really? All men?

Well, maybe not quite all. These leaders themselves were making a fatal decision to dig in their heels, to continue their intense opposition to the wooing of the Holy Spirit on their hearts through the many signs of Jesus declaring the goodness and love of God towards them by steeling themselves in their established views of God. In doing so, by rejecting any new ideas about what God was like and how He relates to sinners, they were hardening their hearts to the point of destroying their very capacity to be changed by love. By resenting the compassion and scorning the signs and seeking to discredit the greatest witness for God the world has ever seen, these men were becoming examples of the unpardonable sin.

Just what is the unpardonable sin? It is not some mystery of theology or some horrible act of violence or obscenity or shocking act of blasphemy. It happens through a subtle and repeated resistance over time to the softening influence of the Holy Spirit on the heart seeking to change our opinions about God, pleading with us to see Him as far better than we ever thought was possible. It occurs from resisting the truth that God loves unconditionally no matter how wicked a person may have become and refusing to accept that He never holds onto offense in His heart about any act of trespass against Him.

I am startled by the profound truths embedded in words from men who were fast becoming the greatest opponents of the truth about God ever seen in history. Like their leader Caiaphas who unwittingly prophesied truth about Jesus while relying on human logic, these men were uttering a truth that needs to be taken seriously by anyone facing the choice of how to respond to God. Indeed, if Jesus is allowed to continue to testify as to the real truth about God it will indeed exert an overwhelming influence to draw all men to Him. Jesus stated so Himself in the very next chapter. (12:32)

If He goes on like this all men will believe in Him. Oh that this were allowed to actually happen! Yes, if people would really allow Jesus to continue to infiltrate their minds and hearts with the truth about God He came to reveal to us without continuing to resist Him, we could all come to believe in Him. This statement was true, yet the conclusion they drew about what would happen next was based on their false perceptions rather than heaven's. Their beliefs of how life operates was based on Satan's principles of government rather than God's methods. The Roman empire epitomized dependence on the use of force and fear to govern and control its subjects while Jesus came to establish a kingdom based on very different principles. The conclusions assumed by these men were based on earthly logic and reasoning. As a result all they could see in their future was their being overcome by the forces of their enemies if they did not continue to maintain their defenses they had so carefully put into place.

For their survival these Jewish leaders had come to depend totally on their ability to negotiate compromises with their enemies while harboring deep hatred for them at the same time. It would be no stretch to say there was no love lost between the Jews and the Romans. But at the same time these leaders had carved out a tentative though fragile peace if it could be called that with the Roman occupiers. Jesus' influence was seriously threatening that fragile balance of power and they knew that the status quo was impossible to maintain so long as the ideas of Jesus continued to increase His influence in the hearts of the masses. Jesus presented a fatal threat to the economies of this world, the politics of this world, the methods and religious of this world. This had become unavoidably clear to these men and they were determined to do whatever it would take to stop His influence and try to return things to the way they believed life must operate.

Notice that there are two specific things mentioned that are under threat from the ministry of Jesus. The first is our place.

After examining a number of translations of this verse I am reminded how nice it would be to have a more complete knowledge of the original languages to better understand what this might mean. It appears they may have been referring to a specific but unmentioned place such as their city but more likely their temple which they revered more than God Himself. One version even implies that they may have listed three things rather than two, the third being themselves.

My impression from my study of this is that they are afraid of losing their power and prestige at least as much or more than their losing a physical place. But if the place, especially if that place was the temple upon which their prestige and power was based, were to be removed by the Romans, then they felt that this would likely be the worst thing that could ever happen to them. This potential of losing their identity and temple which had become the source of their status in connection to worship as they had defined it, and their political position which was dependent on their fragile arrangements with the Roman occupiers, was simply untenable.

Another fact I see emerging from this passage and the comments of Caiaphas is that up to this point in the narrative they seem to not have accepted the option of creating a detailed, overt and coordinated plan to destroy Jesus. While the gospels report a number of instances where they wanted to kill Jesus, evidently that desire had not yet coalesced into a willingness to degrade themselves to the point of coordinating their efforts together to consciously work out overt plans to eliminate Him. Apparently it was in this meeting that the sadistic, pragmatic high priest finally found his opportunity to present his option of forming coordinated plans to destroy the work and person of Jesus as a matter of policy for the nation. Rather than having various leaders simply wish that Jesus would die or attempting uncoordinated attempts to put Him away, they had all now become so united in their fear and hatred of Him that they were willing to stoop all the way down to endorse a united plan to kill Jesus. They were now willing to do whatever it took for the sake of maintaining what they considered more important for their own agenda and to protect their preferred sources for value and identity.

When people come to the place where they are willing to sacrifice another person's life to maintain the status quo and protect their own agenda, it is then that they have sunk to dangerous levels of satanic immorality. The world thinks little of resisting this kind of thinking because the world is largely in sympathy with the principles of Satan's kingdom. But it was to expose these false principles by bringing to light the true principles of heaven's government that Jesus came to this earth. It was through revelations of the goodness of God that all of this was brought to a head and that flushed into the open these attitudes, pushing these leaders to stoop to choosing to kill an innocent man rather than to question their own agenda.

This spirit of placing higher priority on self-preservation and the status quo above human life is a hallmark of the kingdom of darkness. It was to contrast this spirit with the disposition of God that Jesus came to this planet. Far from coming to appease an angry God bent on punishing sinners, the purpose of Jesus coming to this earth was to reveal a God who was not at all like what we have become.

While it sometimes appears that Jesus' death may have come about because of the plans of evil men, it was in actuality the free choice of Jesus to submit to the outworkings of humanity's selfishness. He allowed Himself to be treated as He was to the point of death to expose the true nature of sin. No amount of planning on the part of humans or even demons could have brought about the death of the Son of God if God Himself in Christ had not chosen to submit Himself to be subjected to those schemes. Jesus' death was His own free choice to willingly allow evil to fully expose itself without resisting it. It was in this way that God induced evil into the open, to be seen more clearly so that in horrifying every intelligent being they might be completely cured of ever again choosing to take any direction that would tend in a direction of sin and selfishness. By allowing these circumstances to mature God was working out His incredible plan to inoculate the universe against the virus of sin ever being repeated.