Reversing the Lie

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me... an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.” (John 4:21-23)

Many more believed because of His word; and they were saying to the woman, "It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One is indeed the Savior of the world." (John 4:41-42)

Jesus said to him, "Go; your son lives." The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started off. (John 4:50)

So the father knew that it was at that hour in which Jesus said to him, "Your son lives"; and he himself believed and his whole household. (John 4:53)

I am getting a clearer view of this bright thread that John is weaving into the fabric of his writing. And like a thread in fabric it keeps showing up on the surface at regular intervals. It is this thread of believing in the word of Jesus which is a parallel to believing in Jesus Himself.

This is in contrast to a believing that is based on what Jesus does and the signs and miracles He performs. That thread is something like a counterpart thread that shows up alternatively to this thread of believing in His word. The effects of each kind of belief in various stories are also corresponding threads that show us what is important and what may be misleading.

As I look at the bigger picture and John's emphasis on the effective kind of belief, it begins to dawn on me a little more clearly what the true purpose of Jesus' coming was in relation to what these verses are telling me. Jesus came primarily to undo the false assertions about God that Satan convinced Eve and Adam to believe that got us into this giant mess to start with. It was not really the fruit that they ate that was the real problem and that allowed sin to enter into the human race. It was embracing lies about God, about how God wanted to relate to them, about how much God's heart could be trusted – these are the views of God, our basic assumptions that are our legacy today, that blind us and fill our hearts with so much unbelief and fear that we focus on external issues while ignoring the deeper issues of the heart.

But it is our hearts that are most affected by the lies that we have inherited from our earthly Adam and Eve parents. It is not just better information or more exhibitions of power that is needed to deliver us from the bondage and fear and shame that sin has wrapped around our lives. It is a transformation of our whole way of perceiving God and how He feels about us that is vitally necessary before the fruits of salvation can begin to really take root and have effects in our lives.

As I traced back this line of repeated references about believing the word of Jesus, I came across one of them that explicitly shows that God's reputation is really the issue at stake. Jesus came to reverse the lies about God that Satan has immersed our hearts in and Jesus is all about restoring the credibility of the Father.

He who has received His testimony has set his seal to this, that God is true. (John 3:33)

The problem ever since the fall is that we don't really believe from our hearts that God is true. We may spout off all the religious jargon that we have been taught to say and that may even be correct, but deep in our hearts we have seldom come to the place where we really believed what He has been trying to say to us all along. Instead we believe that God is more like our own parents or the government or our abusers or any number of other distorted images that has displaced the truth about God from our hearts and affections.

Jesus came to reveal the real truth about how God feels about us but we still struggle to accept His testimony. We hear His words about the Father and we think we believe them, but again it is often more of an intellectual acknowledgment of them than a genuine embracing of the true meaning and implications of what Jesus is trying to share with us. We learn to parrot all the correct answers and yet we continue to see many of the symptoms of unbelief still present in our lives – symptoms like our desires to depend on external signs and exhibitions of supernatural power or interventions in our lives in order to prop up our “belief” in God's love for us.

Even in the life of this man here at the end of John four we see that he transitioned through at least two stages of belief if not three. He initially came to Jesus because he must have had some flicker of hope that Jesus might be willing and able to heal his son. We could call that belief, although it is such a sorry sort of belief that Jesus had to prime it and expose its weakness to invite this man to embrace a much healthier version of belief.

Next the man chose to accept Jesus' challenge and believed the words that Jesus spoke to him about his son to the point of acting in faith on those words. That level of belief was significantly superior to the first stage of belief that he started out with, but evidently there was still room for a lot more.

Finally, as far as this story goes anyway, the man is noted once again as believing along with his whole household this time, when he verified the details of the healing of his son and the timing involved that confirmed in his mind that it really was Jesus' word that had accomplished the healing. Interestingly though, this external-based sort of belief or faith, coming after he had chosen to believe based solely on Jesus' words instead of on hard evidence – this external-based sort of faith now tended to deepen the more saving kind of faith that he had already entered into instead of undermining it as may have happened if he had insisted on getting it first.

This sequence of deepening faith seems to be reinforced over and over throughout the Bible as a need to believe in the word and the heart of God first and then to have that faith deepened and strengthened by external confirmation. Sometimes however faith has to remain firm when the hoped for confirmation does not appear or may delay for a long time. That is when true faith or belief has to hang on even tighter because it has nothing to defend its assertions but the word of God Himself. It is then that faith can be extremely tested. Yet in the list of heroes presented as examples of faith in Hebrews eleven it is explicitly stated that some of them received evidence and some of them failed to enjoy the external benefits of their faith. Their reward is said to have been deferred, but not absent altogether.

All faith that roots firmly in the real truth about God is going to have its great reward sooner or later. God wants us to learn to trust His heart more than any other lesson we need to learn. It is this kind of belief that John is seeking to impart to everyone willing to read and listen and open their heart to embrace it. I want much more of that kind of faith which is why I am here immersing myself in these passages.