Making It Plain

Jesus answered, "If I glorify Myself, My glory is nothing; it is My Father who glorifies Me, of whom you say, 'He is our God'; and you have not come to know Him, but I know Him; and if I say that I do not know Him, I will be a liar like you, but I do know Him and keep His word." (John 8:54-55)

The confrontational interchange between Jesus and His opponents is nearing a climax in these verses. In these words Jesus pretty much sums up the core of what is being argued about. Who's God is He anyway and who are His legitimate children?

The very pious religious leaders who had spent pretty much their whole life dedicated to refining the practice of religion to a fine art felt scandalized at the very suggestion that possibly their claims of being the most loyal followers of God might be in doubt. It was the highest insult they could think of to have someone suggest that their opinions about God and their practice of religion lacked integrity and was inadequate to satisfy the requirements for righteousness in order to please God.

This radical Jesus who was upsetting nearly every established teaching and belief they cherished and taught was claiming that He knew God better than they, that He somehow had the inside scoop on religion and truth and was openly challenging everything they stood for. In this interchange they had sought to expose Him as being a fraud and a counterfeit, yet He stood His ground and turned each of their accusations back on themselves. Instead of being shamed and intimidated by their threats and insinuations and accusations, Jesus stated that it was they who were reflecting the devil's attributes and it was He who was the accurate reflection of the God that they claimed to believe in and represent.

In this verse Jesus pushes it even further into an area which many still struggle to accept today. Jesus says here that it is not enough to simply claim that God is our Father and that we are obedient to what He says we should believe and practice. Jesus says that what is really needed is that we get to know Him as well as to cherish what He says in active participation. Jesus states bluntly that these pious leaders whom everyone believed were stalwarts of righteousness, did not in fact really know God and were not keeping His Word even though that was their primary claim to fame as guardians of the truth.

Jesus also included a strong implication about what a proper relationship with God should look like. These religious people spent a great deal of effort managing their reputations as godly men, men who knew the Scriptures inside and out, men who should be respected and listened to and submitted to as teachers of true doctrine. They had invested years of their life cultivating the respect and honor of those around them earning expensive degrees and piling up external trappings to draw attention to their piety and superiority. As it is today, they wanted people to call them by their titles that they had spent so much effort earning through education and great effort and they craved the honor and attention of others to make them feel important. Yet Jesus said that this kind of glory was absolutely worthless.

Jesus did not here explicitly accuse them of seeking to glorify themselves, but that was implied in His statement about Himself. Instead of trying to draw attention to His importance or gain accreditation for human accolades, He demonstrated that true glory has to come from the Source of all honor, from an intimate relationship with the Father. The kind of accolades that come from participation in the true system of God's order cannot be earned by piling up degrees or great accomplishments in men's eyes but come from living in humility and reflecting the true character of God to others.

Glory in God's system must always come from outside sources. God Himself operates in total harmony with this principle and demonstrated how it works in the life of Jesus. God's is glorified in the praise and the true gratitude of all those who come to appreciate how valuable He really is. And in turn, Jesus demonstrated that each of us must trust God to be the one to honor us, to value us publicly, to be our source of identity and the One whom we can rely on who makes us worthy. To seek importance for ourselves instead of trusting God to provide it for us is to short-circuit His system and to damage our lives as a result. Honor and glory always must come apart from our seeking it for ourselves. And by the same token we are to give honor and glorify those who truly deserve it and especially give our highest praise and honor to the Source of all life, love and truth.

Some of these words of Jesus may at first appear to be very harsh as He exposes these men as liars. But in the context it becomes clear that He had little choice given the public accusations by His opponents. Jesus would not leave the truth about Himself in doubt for those who had serious questions that needed to be addressed and though He was always humble, gentle and patient He also remained very clear in expressing truth. Because these religious leaders who had so much credibility with the people had accused Him of being a false Messiah and a counterfeit, Jesus insisted on setting the record straight for those who needed to know that nothing He was saying was a lie and that the real liars, the real deceivers were those who had so long been trusted as sources of truth.

These religious experts were in fact misrepresenting God to the world and causing many to turn away in disgust from knowing Him better because of their pride, selfishness and abusive practices in the name of God. Though their religion was based on teachings that originated with God, their spirit and their interpretations of those Scriptures had piled up great mountains of tradition and fear and unnecessary requirements that never were God's intention for His children. Jesus came to cut through all the deception, to sweep away all the traditions that obscured the loving heart of the Father and to introduce to the world the truth about how God feels about lost sinners. Jesus came to explain that God is not prejudiced like religious people are here on earth. Jesus came to demonstrate that love is the motivator in all of God's family, not guilt, fear, force or intimidation. Jesus came to set the record straight as to who is really telling the truth, who is the witness that reliably speaks on behalf of the true Father in heaven.

Jesus depended on His Father to bring Him honor instead of trying to solicit it for Himself. In doing so He demonstrated that the Father too is not selfishly seeking honor for Himself but is simply revealing the truth that the only way His created beings can find true fulfillment and joy is in giving honor and glory to the One who brought them into existence.

Jesus is also challenging the traditional view of God from the corporate mentality that has been placed on His reputation over the centuries. Part of the great deception foisted on us by Satan is that of the hierarchal system that categorizes people by differing values based on economics or social status. Jesus rejected this artificial reality we have created on this planet that causes us to view God as a king who exercises arbitrary and dictatorial powers over His subjects. Jesus repeatedly throughout His ministry and teachings kept shifting the language and the emphasis toward a family model instead of the kingship model, even though many times He had to employ terms that people would currently relate to to get them to listen.

In this passage Jesus states that He is in relationship with God as a Father and was His Son rather than on a basis of a king and a subject. In the following verses He also talks about their Father Abraham as someone who understood this family relationship. Abraham was a close friend of Jesus in Abraham's day. This claim was of course too much for these religious bigots to swallow and they fiercely resented Jesus portraying Himself as an intimate friend with the one they considered one of their main hero ancestors, one of their most cherished icons. By challenging their assumptions about their ancestors and on whom they based their identity, their pride and their prejudices upon, Jesus was undermining the very foundations of everything they taught and was threatening their control over the masses.

But what about us? Are we so attached to our traditions, so enamored with our educational systems, so dependent on our achievements and degrees and titles that we feel threatened when Jesus exposes it all as insufficient? Do we feel more comfortable depending on our social status or our political systems while discounting the greater importance of embracing the family system of heaven, the model that totally levels the playing field for everyone? When the real value of our titles and degrees suddenly come into question, when our achievements and medals are not acknowledged by heaven, when what we depend on for value is suddenly exposed as nothing more than a cheap trinket and we are faced with the truth that we have been trusting in false assumptions most of our life, how will we react? Will we feel like attacking those whom God uses to expose the emptiness of all we have depended on for our identity and worth or are we willing to accept a whole new system of interrelationships and learn to live in God's family instead of seeking to gain merit and value through our own achievements?

Never See Death

Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he will never see death. (John 8:51)

This morning I decided to do some research in the original language to see if this verse might be more explicitly clear there. It did not take long to discover that this is the case. The sense that nearly every version conveys in their translations of this verse leads one to assume that Jesus was saying a believer will never see the kind of death we normally think about on this earth. But from that perspective we are saddled with the problem of dealing with the reality that every believer does die here and we wonder why Jesus said this the way He did.

But in the Greek it is much more clear and explicit. As I looked over the words in that language a number of interesting things emerged in this verse, some of which can be seen in the English translations and some which are not so obvious.

The first two words, truly, truly are much stronger than we typically view them. Actually in Greek they are the word Amen used twice, the same word that we usually put at the end of a prayer. The reason theologians don't use them at the beginning of a statement even though this is actually the case many times is simply because its use in this way violates our cultural way of speaking. But Jesus tended to use this phrase quite a number of times in His teachings and He did so whenever He wanted to strongly emphasize something very important. It was not just a habitual cliché like we might fall into the habit of using in our religious jargon, it was more along the line of how we might say, “I can't emphasis the importance of what I am going to say enough. If you miss everything else, pay attention to this!”

The second thing I find compelling in this verse is the word translated keep in relation to the word of Jesus. The Greek word for this conveys the idea of guarding something very carefully like a military contingent would pay very close attention to guarding something of extreme value to protect it. It also implies paying very close attention to it and valuing it as extremely important.

Another fascinating insight I discovered was the double negative relating to death. It is like Jesus was saying, you can be absolutely guaranteed that you will never, never die!

Next I looked over the words relating to death and Jesus' promise about this for those who take Him seriously. What emerges from the Greek rendition of this is much more clear about the kind of death Jesus was talking about. What He was saying was basically that we would not perceive or enter into the experience of the death of the future age or what we usually refer to as eternal death. In the Bible this death is carefully distinguished from the kind of death most of us think about when a person quites breathing and returns to the ground and that Jesus called sleep. This worse kind of death in this verse is referred to in Revelation and is called the second death. (Rev. 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8)

This is the interpretation that I have been given all of my life, but it is not because people were trying to force this text to fit their preconceived beliefs. But if the translators had understood these concepts and had allowed the original language to be expressed in English the way it stands in Greek this understanding would have been much more obvious to those reading it today.

But even the Jews listening to Him when Jesus spoke these words originally chose to misinterpret what He was actually saying and to apply His reference to death to mean the first death we are familiar with. This may have been because they were not so familiar with the concept of the second death themselves. This would not be a big surprise because no one had at that point ever even experienced or had even talked much about this mysterious idea of a 'second death'. Shortly after Jesus' discourse with these men they were able to carry out their diabolical desires to kill Him and in the process Jesus ended up experiencing both types of death, both the first death and the horrors of the second death that He was referring to in this verse. And while humans were able to impose the first death on His body with all the sadistic torture they could invent to make Him suffer the most, that pain was nearly unnoticed compared to the inner pain and horror from the mental and emotional anguish Jesus experienced as He took upon His conscience the guilt and shame and condemnation for every person who had ever sinned and allowed all of that guilt to crush out His life on the cross.

Sadly most people assume that it was God who inflicted the second death experience on Jesus, that it was the Father who was unleashing His rage and anger against sinners at the cross and that Jesus was stepping in to take the blame for them and receive the arbitrary punishments meant for lost sinners. But viewing it in this way causes us to miss the real truth of what happened on the cross and paints God in a very distorted light. This view reinforces some of the worst lies of Satan about God's character and personality. Satan has done everything possible to convince us that God harbors many of the attributes of the devil. Satan shifts as much blame as possible off of himself to God for many of the bad things that happen in this world. But Christians should be very careful not to join Satan in his false accusations against God by giving credence to his falsehoods.

Satan is the instigator of all evil and does everything possible to destroy, bring pain and suffering and to exterminate life. It is not God who imposes suffering and death upon sinners. Satan seeks to deceive, to destroy and to kill. It is high time that we begin to get this straight and to place the blame where it really belongs, squarely on the head of the devil who is behind all of this mess. Additionally Jesus did not come to run interference between sinners and a vengeful, arbitrary God bent on punishing sinners; Jesus came for the purpose of revealing the truth about His Father's love and forgiveness and the truth that it is Satan who hates us, not the Father. To accomplish this revelation Jesus allowed sinners as well as demons to display their true animosity toward God and to inflict all the pain and suffering they could conjure up on the Son of God made human. In addition He also took upon Himself the mental anguish that results from being separated from the only Source of life that all will experience who find they are lost on the day of Judgment. Thus Jesus experienced on the cross the horrors of the second death while providing the only way of escape for everyone who will believe the truth about God. And that truth is what Jesus came to reveal in His life and His teachings.

When viewed from this perspective this verse makes much more sense. Jesus is saying here most emphatically that the truth about God that He wanted to convey to humanity would itself be the very factor that will deliver us from the throes of the second death. Properly understood, the second death results from resisting the truth about God which destroys our own capacity to respond to His love. Then as we come into the presence of the most passionate, powerful love in the universe, because we lack capacity to endure the intensity of that exposure we will face most horrific internal agonies as our hearts self-destruct from all the resistance we have built into them against God's love for us. It is just like a resistor overheating in a circuit because it is resisting energy of the electricity flowing through the circuit that is far beyond its capacity to survive.

But Jesus is saying here that there is no reason for anyone to have to suffer that second death horror. If we will accept His teachings, embrace the truth about God that Jesus revealed in His life and His words and allow those truths to transform and prepare us for His presence, we can be transformed into His likeness, we will take on His character and will be prepared to be glorified in that same exposure to infinite love that has the opposite effect on those who have resisted it.