Amen. You’ll turn with me in your Bibles, please, to the Gospel of John, chapter 7, beginning at verse 43.
So there was division among the people over him. Some of them wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him. The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, ‘Why did you not bring him?’ The officers answered, ‘No one has ever spoke like this man.’ The Pharisees answered them, ‘Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd that does not know the law is a cursed.’ Nicodemus, who had gone to him before and who was one of them, said to them, ‘Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?’ They replied, ‘Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Father, you’ve given us your word; you’ve given us insight and knowledge into the things that went on in the furtherance of your great plan of redemption. Help us to see and know how these things brought about our salvation, and help us to live because of what you have done. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So we know that people have always been divided about Jesus, and we know that their division always translates into some form or kind of action. Because even inaction is a kind of action.
And so the action we get to see here today, to conclude this narrative, we remember that at the temple on this great day, which was the last day of the Feast of Booths, some people were believing that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah. Some people were believing that Jesus is the prophet foretold long ago by Moses. Some people were believing that Jesus is a good teacher and a wise man.
But some other people were believing that Jesus is a fraud. Some other people were believing that Jesus is a social revolutionary, and some other people were believing that Jesus is a social troublemaker.
But in that moment, everyone surrounding him was equally and strangely united in the fact that nobody did anything. Nobody did anything on account of what they were believing about Jesus. Amazingly, nobody arrested him, then, just as no one proclaimed him as king. So Jesus just kept on doing what he was doing, acting according to the Father’s will, because it was not yet the proper time for his passion to happen.
It was not yet the chiros. I mean, to date within John’s Gospel, this was the most perfect moment and opportunity for either side—both those for Jesus and those against Jesus—to do something in advance of their cause.
I mean, the Jews now had a perfect provocation and a theological justification to arrest Jesus for blasphemy since Jesus had just publicly identified himself as the Lord and proclaimed himself as a rightful object of pastor faith. Those of the crowd who may have been more inclined towards social and political revolution could see Jesus’s popularity among the people, and they had the perfect opportunity to try and force Jesus into becoming the leader of what would probably have been a violent movement to overturn the local Roman administration.
But in the Lord’s merciful and perfect wisdom and his providence, both sides allowed the opportunity to pass them by. This fact should remind us that all things are governed by God’s sovereign decree through his good providence.
Because everything that happens and everything that does not happen, everything which we feel or think is good, as well as everything we think or feel is bad, happens by God’s providence. It should always remind us to take comfort knowing that God is in control and that everything goes according to his perfect plan.
There is nothing which sinful humanity or the devil can do to stop, slow, thwart, prevent, or impede the Lord’s will and work. Everything works out the way it must because God wills it first as the primary cause, and then through all the various circumstances of the situation, including our opportunities, our desires and preferences, and even our freedom of will and inclination being secondary causes, prompted us to generate his will effect.
God neither forces us nor prevents us from acting or choosing things according to our own desires and preferences. We do have free will, and it is sin and our remaining sinfulness that restricts us and restrains us from choosing the righteousness that we know we ought to do.
If we’re holding that perspective, everything we can see, everything truly does or does not happen for a reason. And now here John tells us that some of them wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him, showing us how that despite the Jews having the means, motive, and opportunity—I mean, they had the means because they had authority over the temple guards; they had the motive because they had recently been insulted by Jesus; they were feeling threatened by the implication of Jesus’s teachings, and they feared Roman reprisals because of what the Jesus movement might lead to; and they had the opportunity because Jesus was here present in Judea, in Jerusalem, and they, at the temple, would enjoy home-court advantage. Yet nobody did anything about Jesus because it was not yet the chiros.
It was not time according to God’s redemptive will. And so Jesus continued teaching and could leave the area freely and unmolested despite the Jewish teachers having given instructions to the contrary.
We saw back in verse 32 that the chief priests and Pharisees sent officers to arrest him. So since they didn’t do as they were commanded, since they had not performed their duty, the officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, ‘Why did you not bring him?’ The officers answered, ‘No one ever spoke like this man.’
Understandably, the priests and Pharisees were upset because their unjust orders had not been carried out. They were understandably upset that Jesus remained at large, preaching and spreading his message.
Over their interrogation of these subordinates, them asking the officers why, their simple reply betrays far more than we might recognize if we quickly read the text. Although replying, the reply of ‘no one ever spoke like this man’ does not suggest or imply that the officers had faith in Jesus as God or as the Messiah, it does betray their recognition that there was still something different about Jesus.
They could tell that Jesus was different from all the other wannabe political messiahs or social saviors. He was no ordinary rabble-rouser. He was not seeking any obvious personal benefit. He made no direct or onerous demands upon his followers. He did not act or speak like some addled lunatic. He was lucid and reasonable; he was selfless, kind, and considerate of other people’s needs.
I mean, alone and on their own, these characteristics might otherwise suggest and be convincing that Jesus was mostly harmless, but it was the theological things he said and the miracles he did that escalated the situation.
I mean, these temple guards and officers, they were not ordinary cops. They were Levites, responsible for defending the peace and purity of the Lord’s temple and its surrounding area. Their civil authority was nearly absolute within the temple mount, being derived from and subordinate to the religious hierarchy. And the Levites had been charged with the spiritual and physical defense of the temple ever since the time of Moses.
In order to effectively do their duty safely, they were necessarily theologically trained and educated, since one must first know the law to be able to uphold and preserve the law. Therefore, through their training and knowledge and understanding, they recognized the uniqueness and strangeness of Jesus’s speech. They recognized its radical difference from the exemplary practices and teachings of the other religious leaders, and the Orthodox truth contained within Jesus’s preaching.
So their reply of ‘no one ever spoke like this man’ was not a statement of absolute certainty but more just an acknowledgment of how unusual Jesus is and an expression of their own confusion, uncertainty, and doubt. After hearing about Jesus and then hearing Jesus and seeing the things Jesus did for themselves, anybody who was theologically educated and spiritually discerning would remember that in Scripture, the only people who spoke and acted as Jesus did were the Lord’s prophets.
So if they recognized his strangeness as being like that of the prophets, then their hesitancy was reasonable and understandable, because no serious Jew would want to risk going against a potential prophet of the Lord. No one would want to be remembered like Pashur, the guy who put Jeremiah into the stocks, or the officials who threw him into a cistern.
So it might be more reasonable to permit for a time a potential false prophet, who must necessarily and eventually be proven false, than it was to act against and so reject the Lord’s true prophet. The interpretation that these officers likely held, then, was that the only probable reasons for a person to say and do as Jesus did was if he was truly as he claimed or if he was a lunatic and liar.
So thinking that Jesus must either be a prophet or just a harmless crazy person probably is what gave them the courage to defy the priests and Pharisees’ orders. Again, this shows how God will providentially work through the secondary causes of people. But unfortunately, their response did not satisfy the outraged Pharisees; instead, it infuriated them all the more. The Pharisees answered them, ‘Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him?’
They angrily questioned the understanding and loyalty of these Levitical officers. They appealed to the example of their own self-assured authority as the experts, as if their opinion must be accepted as infallible and perfect, like Scripture. The Pharisees’ question, you see, anticipated a negative answer because none of the Pharisees had yet publicly declared support for Jesus. If they had, then we can expect how they would have been received.
Particularly in light of what they declare next, saying that ‘but this crowd that does not know the law is a cursed.’
Now, there are two very important details hidden here within the Greek beneath the English that offers us greater insight into the character of the Pharisees and their attitude towards Jesus as it was developed. First, their assertion that the people do not know the law was rather presumptive and put their self-righteous attitude prominently on display.
The word translated here as ‘know’ is ‘ginosko,’ a term suggesting the accumulation of factual information or knowledge. And the Pharisees, they knew that the crowd did not know Scripture like they did. I mean, it’s fair to say that we could expect that the average Pharisee would easily trounce the average first-century Jewish person at Bible trivia. They knew their Bible, but most people did not know it to the same degree as the Pharisees, who would have surely memorized the minute details of Torah, including genealogies and histories and even the prophetic oracles.
I mean, most people could not quote large chunks of Scripture, chapter and verse, like the Pharisees could. And ordinarily, that was okay, because people knew how to find out whatever they needed to know, usually by asking questions of someone more knowledgeable who could easily explain things to them, like the scribes or the Pharisees or even their local synagogue leader.
Most people, they did not own or have personal access to complete copies of Scripture because it was time-consuming and very costly for copies to be made and transcribed. Therefore, they really could not know the law as the Pharisees did, because they lacked a similar degree of access—a deficiency which these self-righteous men would wrongly attribute to a sense of plebeian apathy and their lack of commitment to religious devotion.
However, John’s use of ‘ginosko’ does not apply the same way to their knowing in the sense of understanding, because the crowd was beginning to show signs that their understanding of Jesus exceeded that of the Pharisees. But unfortunately, the Pharisees assumed that since they knew better than them, therefore they must also understand better. And again, this all comes from their sense of self-righteous superiority.
Second, these Pharisees declaring the crowd to be accursed is different from all the times that Paul proclaims someone or something accursed. The Greek term used by Paul for ‘accursed’ is ‘anathema,’ a term describing something that is devoted to the Lord by means of destruction—specifically, as in the sense of the Israelite conquest of Canaan. To be accursed in this sense was to be condemned to utter destruction as the object of divine judgment and just wrath.
To be called ‘anathema’ was a statement of unchangeable fact because they had already been judged according to the divine righteous standard of God’s holy word. Whereas the term which the Pharisees use here to call the crowd accursed is ‘epit,’ an imprecatory expression asking for the imposition of a divine curse upon the guilty. Effectively, it was a negative prayer, much like Psalm 5:35, 59:69, or 109.
And this same term was used in Genesis 3:14 when God cursed the serpent and again in 3:17 when he cursed the ground on account of Adam’s sin. It was used later in Deuteronomy chapter 27 and 28, repeatedly calling God’s curse down upon any and all who would transgress God’s commandments. It was used by Joshua as the divine threat and promise against anyone that would seek to rebuild the city of Jericho—a curse fulfilled in 1 Kings 16.
Now, although the difference between the two terms might seem like a matter of subtle semantics, their character differs greatly. The accursed that Paul declares is absolute—it’s an absolute, just divine punishment that purifies and destructs, which is total and complete. Whereas the Pharisees’ implication of a cursedness subjectively seeks to invoke a divine punishment without any obvious end—a punishment like the eternal punishment of damnation and the damned’s effective separation from the love, mercy, and favor of God.
The judgment that every human person already deserves for our sins—one of these was certain and absolute, the other subjective and uncertain. One was total annihilation, and the other was eternally lasting.
So the Pharisees’ use of this imprecation upon the crowd betrays either the greatest degree of contempt for their fellow, less-privileged Jews, or is terrible flippancy, showing the greatest disregard for the true extremity and horror contained within divine judgment and wrath. Either way, the character and attitude of the Pharisees here was being shown as that of the worst kind.
But then Nicodemus stands up and asks his colleagues, ‘Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?’ But before we can consider what Nicodemus just said, we ought to refresh ourselves on what we actually know about him.
At this point, we know that Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews. Early on during Jesus’s ministry, after Jesus performed certain signs at the temple during Passover, Nicodemus visited Jesus at night, confessing, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.’
Yet why night? The generally accepted rationale has always been for him to avoid being seen by the Jews. This was a secret visit, and although he comes across as lacking understanding during their conversation, Nicodemus’s initial confession admits to a personal and suggests a corporate belief in Jesus, at least as a prophet.
If you’ve watched the TV show ‘The Chosen,’ something that I do not suggest and would actively discourage you from doing for several reasons, you might think that Nicodemus had been sent to go see Jesus, that he was on a mission for others, perhaps a Roman official, the Sanhedrin, the chief priests. But Scripture never says that, nor does it imply that he was acting on behalf of anyone except himself.
Therefore, we conclude that at this moment, at the conclusion of this Festival of Booths, Nicodemus was a Pharisee who was minimally secretly sympathetic towards Jesus and his teachings, or at most, a believer yet one who had not publicly professed his faith because he feared reprisal from the Jewish leaders.
So unwilling to presently publicly align himself with Jesus, Nicodemus presents a solution that should have been considered fair, reasonable, and just to everyone. He appealed to the law of Moses, to Moses’s command that they sit in judgment.
Deuteronomy 1:16 says, ‘Hear the cases between your brothers and judge righteously between a man and his brother or the alien who is with him. You shall not be partial in judgment; you shall hear the small and the great alike; you shall not be intimidated by anyone, for the judgment is God’s.’
But their response to Nicodemus and his suggestion betrays their negative attitude, asking him, ‘Are you from Galilee too?’ See, these Pharisees, they did not want a proper public trial before the whole Sanhedrin as was commanded by Moses.
Since they knew Scripture as well as they did, they knew the rules by which a trial must take place. Moses had declared that a single witness shall not suffice against the person for any crime or for any wrong in connection with any offense that he has committed. Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a charge be established.
So they needed multiple witnesses before they could accuse Jesus of wrongdoing—witnesses that were not themselves. And they were not yet certain that they could get enough credible witnesses. Furthermore, they knew that they could not stand as witnesses against Jesus, even if their obvious bias was not a concern because Moses continued on, saying more about those potential witnesses.
Saying, ‘If a malicious witness arises to accuse a person of wrongdoing, then both parties to the dispute shall appear before the Lord, before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days. The judges shall inquire diligently, and if the witness is a false witness and is accused of his brother falsely, then you shall do to him as he meant to do to his brother. So shall you purge the evil from your midst.’
Not only was bearing false witness a violation of the ninth commandment, the prescribed penalty for their perjury would be the penalty for whatever they falsely accuse their victim of. And since the Pharisees wanted to charge Jesus with blasphemy, a religious crime punishable by death, if they falsely accuse Jesus themselves, then they’d risk their own execution.
This debate foreshadows their future willingness to forgo justice and dispense with due process during their eventual illegal trial of Jesus. And their asking Nicodemus, ‘Are you from Galilee too?’ was just a deflection on their part because even his neutral and fair position was considered a threat in opposition to their anti-Jesus party line.
Their response was an attempt to impute and suggest bias on his part to silence him by portraying Nicodemus as sympathetic and favorably minded towards Jesus without knowing that he actually was.
So what does all this show us and teach? What should we do with this? First off, John is laying the groundwork to help us better understand the circumstances involved in Jesus’s ultimate betrayal. With the help of this testimony from Nicodemus, whom we know will become a public follower of Jesus, a leader of the early church, and someone that we may reasonably conclude was not complicit in the plot or condemnation of Christ, he demonstrates the depth of the Pharisees’ hatred and fear of Jesus by showing us the lengths that they were willing to go to remove him.
This also shows a bit of the origin of the cultural divide and animosity between Jews and Christians, especially rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, demonstrating why the Christian religion could not long be considered just another breakaway Jewish sect on account of the Pharisees’ contempt for anybody that followed Jesus’s teachings instead of theirs.
Second, despite trying to take a stand against them, Nicodemus did demonstrate himself as being unreliable to their wicked cause and faithful to the cause of righteousness and justice. This is why the Pharisees would not include him in their plot, and we can also see some of his growth in faith and the spiritual journey of Nicodemus between John 3, here in John 7, and finally in John 19.
Because through his example, we are shown how a person really can only become a seeker of Christ as a response to the Holy Spirit’s work and effectual call, rather than just their own reason, understanding, and preferences.
Third, through the testimony of these Levitical officers, we see how even to neutral and unbiased parties, the things which Jesus said and did were evidence enough to show that something was different about Jesus, even when one did not understand the totality or full implication of what that difference was.
Fourth and finally, we are reminded that God is always in control. Everything that happens or does not happen, including the Ws and Wares, happens according to his divine plan, and especially that God is in control over everything related to our redemption and regeneration.
He controls things in such a way that our freedom of will and our freely made choices will always align with his plan for his purposes as the secondary causes. God’s plan did not allow for Jesus’s arrest or trial at this moment. And although the Pharisees and the priests desired it, the understanding of the officers caused them to disobey those possessing earthly authority over them rather than risk disobeying God.
So their free choice was driven by what they considered to be in their own best interest. Ultimately, although the Jews wanted Jesus to be removed, since it was not yet the chiros and their wicked efforts were not in accord with God’s plan, Jesus’s ministry was allowed to continue unimpeded.
The examples presented within this whole narrative help to encourage us to trust God’s plan, even when things seem to be the most discouraging, reminding us that these are the processes that we must always trust God’s plan to redeem his elect and God’s work of sanctification within them and their lives.
And although things might look or feel like a setback to us, they’re never a setback in God’s eyes. They’re part of the plan. We can be confident in our faith that somehow they will work for our good benefit, even the worst of things, which is very good news and encouraging.
That’s why we trust the hope—by trusting God’s plan and process, we are so able to keep our eyes focused ahead and beyond our immediate circumstances and struggles. Trusting God’s plan and processes, we become better able to be like the saints who’ve gone on before us, who did not receive the fullness of his promises in their lifetimes, yet who were preserved in their faith so that we all may be made perfect together on the day of resurrection at Christ’s return.
Before we can trust God’s plan and process, because our hope for the eternal future is so much better than and so much more desirable than any other hope in this present life.
So do not fear the judgment or condemnation of men. Do not fear the expressions of their anger that are generated by your faith and your faithful obedience to Christ Jesus. Do not worry over the things that you have no control or influence over. Always stand and say and do that which is right and good and honorable.
Stand firm and confident in your eternal hope and know that all things will work out for the good of those who love the Lord because God is in control, and the world’s anger cannot thwart his will. Amen.