Amen. If you would turn with me in your Bibles, please, to the Gospel of John, chapter 7. We’ll begin at verse 33.
Jesus then said, ‘I will be with you a little longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. You will seek me, and you will not find me; where I am, you cannot come.’ The Jews said to one another, ‘Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? What does he mean by saying, ‘You will seek me and will not find me, and where I am you cannot come’?’
From there, we turn to Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 10, beginning at verse 5.
‘For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. But the righteousness based on faith says, ‘Do not say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven?’—that is, to bring Christ down—or ‘who will descend into the abyss?’—that is, to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart’—that is, the word of faith that we proclaim.
Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’ But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?’
So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed, they have, for their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world. But I ask, did Israel not understand? First, Moses says, ‘I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation; with a foolish nation, I will make you angry.’ Then Isaiah is so bold as to say, ‘I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.’ But of Israel he says, ‘All day long, I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.”
And from there, we shall see what it was that Isaiah wrote. Turning to Isaiah, chapter 65, Isaiah writes, ‘I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me; I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am,’ to a nation that was not called by my name. I spread out my hands all the day to a rebellious people, people who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices; a people who provoke me to my face continually, sacrificing in gardens and making offerings on bricks; who sit in tombs and spend the night in secret places; who eat pig’s flesh and broth of tainted meat is in their vessels; who say, ‘Keep to yourself; do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.’ These are a smoke in my nostrils, a fire that burns all the day.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for revealing yourself to us, for saying, ‘Here I am,’ and for allowing us to see you and to respond to you. Protect us and preserve us, and keep us from our own self-righteousness. Keep us from becoming a disobedient people who are less concerned with you and more concerned with ourselves. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So, after having examined the seeming public silence and inaction of the Jews as it concerned Jesus and his teachings—most specifically, their inability to publicly arrest him—we next see Jesus inform the whole crowd of his hearers, ‘I will be with you a little longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. You will seek me, and you will not find me; where I am, you cannot come.’
But understanding what he means here is both easy and hard for us.
It’s easy because we know the rest of the story, just as John’s original readers did. We understand here that Jesus is alluding to his upcoming passion, his death, resurrection, and ascension, and his return to heaven where even now he presently reigns and is presently interceding for us in the Father’s presence.
But it is hard because in order to understand Jesus’s words in context, we need to consider what his hearers likely thought there was within John’s narrative based upon what they could have or should have known at that moment within Jesus’s story.
So what is it that they could have known and understood at that moment? What prompted or encouraged this questioning response from the Jews? Because they asked one another, ‘Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him?’ This suggests that they wondered if perhaps Jesus might try and disappear, go into hiding somewhere.
But they knew full well that Jesus really could not entirely disappear and still remain a devout and religious Jew. Despite the apparent strangeness of the many things that Jesus said and did, he gave no indication of being willing to abandon and cease his Orthodox faith and practice. Therefore, would he not be expected to completely abandon Temple worship or his membership in a synagogue community? Then they wondered, ‘Does he intend to go to the dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?’
Perhaps they were wondering whether Jesus might flee Judea and live among the Hellenistic Jews instead, to live somewhere out there in the wider Roman Empire. But although he would be geographically distant, he could still be found and reached by the offended and indignant Jewish authorities if they wanted to. Or perhaps they were wondering whether Jesus might just give it all up and seek employment as a wise man or a philosopher among the Pagan Gentiles, or even more specifically, among the Greeks.
I mean, doing so would enable him to teach his moral philosophy and the accumulation of Jewish wisdom, but doing so would certainly require that he abandon his Jewishness both so that he could be acceptable to the Gentiles and as the natural consequence of being in such close engagement with them. Such a decision would be punishment enough in itself, because by doing so, he would become cut off from his people, which is the true ultimate sanction for blasphemy, divine disobedience, or covenant transgression.
So after first imagining Jesus’s possible options, they asked the next and most important question: ‘What does he mean by saying, ‘You will seek me and you will not find me, and where I am you cannot come?”
These questions of what does Jesus mean, or more appropriately, what does the Bible teach, are the most important questions for every one of us to ask because they are the first step towards the understanding and application of biblical truth.
The question here of what does Jesus mean remains very important to us because by Jesus saying, ‘You will seek me and you will not find me; where I am, you cannot come,’ he refutes, rejects, and expressly denies one of the most common and most incorrect assumptions made by Evangelical Christians in general: the false assumption that people—whether we mean everyone or just anybody at all—that people are actually looking for God. They assume that people want God. They assume that everyone is on a quest to find and know the Divine, when the truth is really precisely the opposite.
They assume that everyone is desiring God because of some felt need that is intrinsic to our human nature. They’re wrong but almost right. Sinful humanity wants nothing more and nothing better than to remain as far removed from the righteous holiness of the Lord as possible, which is what leads us so quickly and so easily to fall into the trap of idolatry—where we exchange the truth about God for a lie, worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator.
Yes, every one of us feels like something is missing in our lives; there is a hole that we need to fill, and this emptiness is due to our lack of original righteousness and the corruption of our whole nature, namely our sin. Therefore, each of us sets out on a quest to find what we are missing, yet we try to fill the void with anything and everything except God, except for Jesus Christ, except for the only true, holy Sovereign and Creator Lord that is revealed in the Bible.
It’s this quest that often drives people deeper into their sins, chasing after the false and unattainable promises of Satan—whether it be our various addictions, adultery, pornography, false religions, astrology and divination, social or political authority and influence, popularity, or even just the praise of others. Although the absolute, ultimate, and only correct answer that we’re questing for is God, we cannot actually know who it is that we are seeking until and unless he first calls us to himself.
That’s the whole inherent problem with the whole church growth movement that’s influenced American evangelicalism since the 1970s. That’s the problem with the idea of seeker sensitivity, which is really more rightly called a seeker-driven church. This is the core problem with those people who have worked to change the church and try to make it more attractive to the world—attractive to worldly people.
The true work of the Holy Spirit upon individuals and the work of the church in cooperation with the Spirit is to transform the world and make it look more like the Church of Christ. See, Scripture firmly refutes the assumption that unregenerate, reprobate, and wicked sinners—people who wrongly think and believe that they are happy, that they’re satisfied and fulfilled with their lives—that they are looking for the church, that they are looking for Jesus.
The psalmist King David wrote and was quoted by the Apostle Paul: ‘The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt; they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good.’ The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.
No one, not one sinful, unregenerate human person ever decides to seek the Lord God. They do not care about God, and they do not want him. The testimony of Scripture and the plain evidence that surrounds us clearly testifies to the fact that the world, the cosmos, and everyone who belongs to it does not want Jesus, nor does it want anything that God has to offer.
So, the conclusion is there is no such thing as a seeker because no one seeks God on their own initiative or desire. The church cannot and will never attract the world because the world isn’t looking for the church. Any particular expression of the church that tries to attract the world by looking and acting and appealing to the world’s preferences and desires will quickly stop looking like, acting like, and being the church.
Therefore, something greater is required before any person can begin looking for God, and there is a logical priority to what that is. The Apostle Paul explains this throughout his letter to the Romans, beginning at Romans 8:28. He says, ‘And we know for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.’
See, Paul equates those who love God with those who are called according to his purpose, implying that before a person can love God, they first must be called by God. Then he describes what’s commonly called the Golden Chain of Salvation, saying that ‘For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.’
Where Paul describes a necessary logical order for every individual’s salvation: they must first be foreknown, next predestined, and then called, justified, before finally being glorified.
Then that begs the question: where does our faith fit into this order? Scripture teaches us to believe that regeneration precedes faith because the Holy Spirit must first act upon us to make us anathan, to make us born again or born from above before we can and may believe. However, we also believe that it is during our regeneration that the righteousness of Christ is imputed and applied to us, which then causes us to be justified.
And so, therefore, it is more broadly understood as being the practical consequential effect of our salvation. So faith, including our assenting act of believing, must logically follow our having been called but before our justification, since faith is justification’s prerequisite.
So we more rightly consider faith and justification as sharing the same position within this list. Then, in Romans chapter 10, after affirming the prophetic teaching of Joel declaring, ‘It shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved,’ and understanding that logically only those who know the name of the Lord—only those who know and are known by the Lord—can be included in this potential everyone, Paul explains how a person may come to know the Lord in order to call upon him.
‘How then will they call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they’ve never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?’
So before a person can call upon God, they need to know that he is. They need to know who he is and why they can and should call upon him. So, logically, a person cannot believe—they can’t have pistō in Christ Jesus and call upon the name of the Lord in order to be saved—unless they first know who he is, unless he has first been found by them.
Because no one can reasonably search for something if they do not know what they are looking for. ‘Because you’ll know it when you see it’ really doesn’t work.
This makes the external call absolutely necessary, which makes evangelism the functional priority of every Christian. But since there have been and are so many evangelists, and since most everyone has easy access to a Bible, and since most everyone today knows about Jesus or has heard something about him, why then does everyone not believe? Why does not everyone believe? Why do they not respond with faith?
Not everyone believes because not everyone who hears the external evangelistic call also receives an internal call by God’s Holy Spirit. That internal call is the specific kind of call that Paul meant there in Romans 8:29—an effectual call, a call which is only heard by those who have been given the ears to hear.
Because they are anathan. The external call is universal and freely offered to all, to everyone, but the internal call is only given to and received by God’s elect.
So, if, as Paul and the psalmist tell us that no one seeks for God, and if both the evidence that God is being the ordered world around us and the evidence of who God is—the Bible—is readily available and always present and at hand, but if we cannot recognize it for what it is on account of our sinful nature, then a person could seek after a God all that they want.
Seeking after the Divine or some higher power, or even a power within themselves, but they will never be able to find the truth unless and until that God who gives that eternal call reveals himself personally to them.
So when Jesus told the Jews, ‘You will seek me and you will not find me,’ what he meant in part, at least if not the whole, was that they knew enough to know that they should be looking. They had the special revelation of God, having the law of Moses and the prophets, but since they did not understand who and what they were supposed to be looking for, they would not find him. They would not find and recognize the Christ because they weren’t actually looking for him.
Because Jesus was not the Messiah they wanted. Instead, they were looking for some other Messiah—a warrior and king—or they were looking for some other savior to save themselves in their own righteousness.
Then when Jesus told them, ‘Where I am, you cannot come,’ after having earlier said that he was going to him who sent me—the him whom he had just accused them of not knowing—telling them while teaching in the temple, ‘You know me, and you know where I come from, but I have not come of my own accord. He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. I know him for I come from him, and he sent me.’
So, clearly, Jesus meant that he was going to return from whence he came, namely heaven. Jesus was speaking ahead; this is prophetic speech. He was both forthtelling and foretelling what will be when his hour comes. They could not come to where he will go because he will have been translated alive and bodily, having ascended into heaven.
He will have passed through the heavens and entered into the holiest of holies to enter the Father’s presence and intercede on behalf of all whom the Father had given him. He will be seated beside the Father, reigning over both heaven and the earth below until the time comes for his return in glory. He will be where only the elect, the beloved adopted, and within children of God are invited and welcomed to.
Interpreting this, there are two ways we need to consider Jesus’s pronouncement of, ‘You will seek me and you will not find me,’ in order to better understand his intended meaning. We need to look at it from a mundane and literal perspective, and we need to consider it with a more spiritual view.
Considering it mundanely and literally is simple and straightforward because we realize that, logically, the Jews would not be able to physically find Jesus since obviously they cannot physically enter heaven.
Considering it spiritual and from our perspective on this side of the cross, we understand that they would not recognize Jesus as the Christ and they would not find him because they were looking for a different kind of Christ.
We understand that they cannot come to where Jesus is, not because they’ve been disinvited or were simply not permitted, but because they lacked the ability—they lacked the power to follow him where he was going because they lacked the necessary righteousness, the righteousness of Christ.
They were sinful and unregenerate; they were not yet born again; they lacked faith in Jesus.
Now, in all fairness to history and charitableness, we should also recognize that Jesus’s declaration of their inability and lack was not an absolute statement. It was more rightly concerned with their immediate present and does not preclude the possibility for each individual hearer’s future faith and regeneration.
Meanwhile, the oddity of these four verses and their placement within John’s narrative suggests that there’s still something deeper going on within, something that becomes more evident with a better and broader degree of knowledge and understanding of the Old Testament Scriptures, like the understanding of Paul.
Because after having explained the necessity of hearing the gospel preached before someone can trust Christ in faith—explaining that faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ—Paul rhetorically asks, ‘Did Israel not understand?’
Whereby Israel, he refers to those that John here is calling the Jews, and his expected answer is that the Jews really didn’t understand. And then he invokes the words of the prophet Isaiah against them, saying, ‘I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.’
But of Israel he says, ‘All day long, I’ve held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.’
Paul understood that Isaiah meant the Gentiles when he said, ‘I’ve been found by those who did not seek me.’ He remembered that even further back that includes the patriarch Abraham, who was a Gentile before God revealed himself to him and whom Scripture in no way suggests was seeking the Lord God beforehand.
The Gentiles did not seek God because they did not know they needed to seek him, but they did, and they do find him once he calls them and reveals himself to them.
The Jews, on the other hand, those who knew that they needed to be seeking the Lord—the ones whom Jesus had just told that they would not find him—are the ones who will never find God, despite him holding his hands out to a disobedient and contrary people.
But why is it that they would not find him? Isaiah tells us that they wouldn’t find the Lord because they were walking in a way that was not good. They were following their own devices; they were a people who provoke the Lord to his face continually. They were doing all manner of forbidden and unclean things, like sacrificing in gardens and making offerings on bricks, who sit in tombs and spend the night in secret places, who eat pig’s flesh and broth of tainted meat in their vessels, because they would say, ‘Keep to yourself; do not come near me, for I am too holy for you.’
Because of their self-righteousness and self-confidence, that’s why the Lord describes them as being ‘a smoke in my nostrils, a fire that burns all the day.’
Because their sins and their sinfulness had made them become offensive to the Lord, their continual willful disobedience had made them obnoxious and odious to the Lord.
And so, by rejecting God’s commandments, they also rejected the Lord. All of their extra practices and traditions, which were meant to preserve and help them to keep God’s law, instead caused them to trust in themselves and their own works of righteousness instead of Jesus, by faith alone.
They were looking for their own Messiah, not God’s. They were looking to be their own savior when the dead cannot possibly save themselves.
Their inability to find Christ and to go where he would go was not because God was hiding himself from them, or God somehow preventing them or stopping them from finding him. Remember, God actually wants to be found.
Instead, Isaiah wrote and explained why, saying, ‘Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save, or his ear dull that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.’
Understand this, please: God does not hide himself from man. Instead, God is hidden from man because of our sin.
Think of it whenever we see a solar eclipse, like we did last year. There is no substantive change to the sun; instead, it is the moon which moves between the Earth and the sun, obscuring the light.
So, our sin is like the moon, and God is like the sun. He remains present and unchanged, but our sin comes between us and hides his light from us. We cannot find God no matter how hard we try because our sin and sinfulness is in the way, and we cannot remove it any more than we can move the moon.
That is why we need God and His Holy Spirit to clear the path for us, to remove the obstacle of our sin before we can hear his call and seek his face.
But until he does that, a person can seek all they might want; they will never find him because they do not know who and what they are seeking.
So how does this apply to us today? We cannot help but view this passage in John except in light of John 14, where Jesus explained to the disciples that he would be leaving to prepare a place for them, telling them the exact opposite of what he just told the crowd, saying, ‘And you know the way to where I’m going.’
Therefore, we know and we’re confident that the critical difference between them and us is the object of our faith—whether it is in Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life, or in a person’s own self-righteousness.
And so, while many in that crowd may have been believing or beginning to believe that Jesus was a Messiah, they were not believing in him as their Messiah, as their spiritual Savior.
And once again, we see how our present cultural moment closely echoes theirs. Their general populace was beginning to believe and accept the idea of Jesus as a Messiah, as a political Messiah potentially, but they were not ready or willing to accept him as the Son of God, as the divine Savior and Redeemer of Israel.
Just like our culture, including adherents of other religions, will readily accept the idea of Jesus as being a good man, a good moral teacher and example, but adamantly deny the fact of his divinity.
Therefore, we must each take care to examine ourselves to be certain and sure to know that it is in Jesus and his righteousness that we are trusting for eternal security, rather than our own self-righteousness, our self-justifying works.
Knowing Jesus, knowing and believing who he is and what he has done for us, we must be certain that since we know the way to where he is, that we’re following that path and not wandering off onto any other.
That’s why the two questions used in evangelism explosion are so helpful and important as a diagnostic tool. Because not only do they help us to find out what others honestly believe, so that we may then present and explain the gospel to them, but they’re also useful to help us correct ourselves.
Those two questions are: If you were to die right now, are you certain that you would go to heaven? And if you died right now and suddenly found yourself at the Gates of Heaven and were asked, ‘Why should you be let into heaven?’ how would you answer?
We would expect that few people, certainly among everyone who claims the title of Christian or those who just consider themselves to be religious, will answer that first question with an affirmative ‘yes.’
But it’s the second question where the rubber meets the road, because that question is what reveals the heart’s truth.
So how would you answer? Answering quickly without taking any time to think about it, just as an immediate response, if your immediate reactionary answer includes anything along the lines of ‘I’m a good person,’ or ‘I haven’t really done anything bad,’ or ‘I attend church every Sunday,’ or ‘I try to help people,’ and ‘I often give to charity,’ or ‘because I’m a pastor, an elder, a deacon, pastor’s wife, pastor’s kid,’ or just ‘because I’m a Christian,’ then you need to stop and reexamine your priorities and think about your hope for salvation.
But if your immediate reactionary answer is more like, ‘Because Jesus said I could,’ or ‘Because I’m covered by the blood of Jesus,’ or ‘Because I am clothed in the righteousness of Christ,’ or ‘Because Jesus gave his life for me,’ or really any answer that relies upon ‘because Jesus,’ then you may be confident that you know you have been saved and that your faith is in Christ as your Savior.
Then you may be confident that at the most important moment of all, you will call upon the name of the Lord, and then you may be confident that if and when you seek after Jesus Christ, that you will find him because you have heard his call and because you know where he is to be found and because you are able to come to him through your faith and trust your pistō in him alone.
Amen. If that’s where your faith is, if your faith is in Christ alone for salvation.