If you’ll please turn with me in your Bibles to the Gospel of John, Chapter 2, beginning at the 13th verse.
The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple, he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money changers sitting there. Making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen. He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus did not entrust himself to them because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
God, let us pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We ask that you build us up in confidence in it, trusting it, believing it, knowing that it testifies to who you are and to what itself is. Give us courage and faith to live as your people, believing, trusting, and obeying you. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Now, the Gospel of John is sometimes called the signs gospel because it is replete, it’s filled with signs—miraculous signs and prophetic signs. All of Jesus’s works and words pointed beyond himself, the man that they could see, the simple carpenter from Galilee, all pointing towards his divinity.
Those who had the eyes and ears to see and hear it saw it, but during his life, there were few. No one saw it naturally; they all needed to have their hearts and minds opened and illuminated by the Holy Spirit. But they should have been able to see, understand, and recognize Jesus for who he is because they had all of the right tools and training taught them by the law and the prophets. But their sin kept them blind and in darkness, just as it does us until we are born again, regenerated, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
Yet, because of how reality is and who our God is, the God who reveals himself and the God who relates to people through covenant, it is natural and a reasonable thing for us to want and expect signs from the Lord. John gives us three in this second chapter of the Gospel.
Jesus’s first sign was the transformation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana. Jesus’s second sign was shown by his zeal for the Lord’s temple when he drove out the money changers and the sacrifice sellers. But still, it was not enough to convince them. They wanted more and even greater signs, asking what sign do you show us for doing these things.
It was less that these were not enough and more that they did not yet have the eyes to see these signs for what they are or the mind to understand them. They did not see them because they were not looking for them. But now, when they were looking, they asked Jesus for a sign to prove his authority, who he is and why he did what he was doing.
But this is not as unusual as we might think. It was common for a prophet in the Old Testament to say or make a pronouncement in the Lord’s name, telling the people something which would happen in the future and then offer his audience a sign as evidence to prove that his prophecy would come true. An unnamed Judean prophet prophesied against King Jeroboam and his reign, and then proclaimed that the altar that he had built would collapse and spill out its ashes as a sign to prove his prophecy’s reliability, and then it did.
Isaiah prophesied to King Hezekiah that the Lord would heal him by proclaiming that the sign of the sun’s shadow would move back 10 steps upon the dial of Ahaz, a giant clock or staircase. And of course, most famously, we have, “Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.”
So here Jesus replied to their question with, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” He gave them a sign to expect, except they completely misunderstood and misinterpreted what he meant. The Jews then said, “It has taken 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” According to John, this dialogue occurred in the same context and circumstances as Jesus’s encounter with the money changers, immediately after his whip-cracking cattle drive. That’s why they were asking him for a sign to prove that he had a God-given right and the authority to do what he just did.
But the sign he gave was not clear to anyone before the cross. Now, to be fair to his audience, their incorrect assumption was actually quite reasonable considering the time and place. Their incredulity at the natural impossibility of his apparent suggestion is unsurprising. It is certain that even his disciples did not understand it at this point. But after the cross, after the resurrection, they did, and now so may we.
This third sign of Jesus, where he was speaking about the temple of his body, foreshadowed his horrific, gruesome death and his resurrection upon the third day—something which no human person living then could understand or predict. But as with most prophetic foretelling, they are recognized and understood only in hindsight, after the fact. But this prophetic sign would have the greater effect of confirming Jesus’s word and authority as a prophet of the Lord, and it would prove that he is God the Son, the Lord of life, and the sovereign creator of the cosmos.
Now we must concede that all four of the gospel writers chose, under the Holy Spirit’s influence, guidance, and wisdom, the stories about Jesus that they told. We must also concede that not only did all four of the gospel writers write with a broad yet unified agenda to share the good news of Jesus Christ—sharing about our redemption from Satan’s dominion, the forgiveness of our sins through Jesus’s work, and our justification by faith in him and adoption as God’s children—but they also wrote with different emphases and for different primary intended audiences.
Matthew wrote for Jews about the Jewish Messiah. Mark wrote for common Gentiles about the Divine Son of God as opposed to the Roman Emperor. Luke wrote for educated Gentiles, offering an evidentiary case for Jesus as being both Savior and the only living God. And John wrote for people like us, for Christian believers—not new converts, but maturing followers of Christ—in order to encourage us in our hope and faith as we look forward to the day of Jesus’s return in glory.
John recorded many signs performed by Jesus, and each one builds upon and strengthens us so that we can endure the evil days that remain. John presents these particular three signs together for that purpose, as an apologetic, as a convincing case to prove who and what Jesus of Nazareth is—the Logos who is Theos and also Andros, also man, the God who is man.
So what case is it that John makes with these three signs? He seeks to convince us through them why the apostles and all the early church believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken and why we should as well. According to Jewish law, charges against a person could only be levied upon the testimony of two or three witnesses—a principle affirmed repeatedly and preserved by the New Testament Church.
Throughout the first chapter of John’s gospel, John charges that Jesus is the eternal Lord made flesh, the light of life, and the means of our adoption as the children of God. To them, though, this was a charge of blasphemy if untrue, and it was one of the excuses used to condemn Christ. Therefore, John makes his case to demonstrate that Jesus is true.
See, each sign given is a witness that testifies against Jesus being some mere mortal man. Each sign testifies to the fact that Jesus is God. Transforming water into wine demonstrated his supernatural power over the natural elements. This evidence signified that he was a prophet of the Lord, that he is imbued and empowered with the power of God, like Elijah when he commanded the widow’s flour and oil to not run out for the whole duration of the famine. It demonstrated that God was working through him.
Furthermore, this sign suggests that Jesus is something more than just a prophet because of what the transformation itself signified—transforming the water’s requirement into the wine of gladness, symbolizing a transition from the old covenant of works to the new covenant of grace. This miraculous sign can also be compared with Moses’s transformation of the Nile and the other Egyptian waters into blood. But Jesus’s superiority to Moses is proven by his transforming the water into something life-giving and joyful, whereas Moses transformed the water into something that was life-taking and deadly.
See, Jesus’s changing of something from one thing into another proves, by redefining the substance and being of it, that he is the creator, that he’s also able to bring about the recreation. The second sign—driving the money changers and sellers from the temple courts—demonstrated his divine judicial authority over worshippers. In our worship, Jesus functioned here as a prophet by this action, acting out God’s word like Jeremiah did after he visited the potter’s house and broke a clay vessel, symbolizing the forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. A prophetic action that resulted in him, Jeremiah, being put in the stocks by the priestly establishment.
This prophetic sign of Jesus happened within the temple complex here in Jerusalem, where the Lord caused his name to dwell, where the authority of God’s representatives—his ordained kings, priests, and prophets—was considered absolute and inviolable. Yet Jesus acted and spoke with authority here in the temple, contravening the permissions and allowances of its human caretakers because he did not suffer sanction, whether legal or divine, for his impertinence or for unrighteously usurping a priest’s divinely appointed position—a role that a simple Galilean carpenter from the tribe of Judah would never possess a reasonable right to.
This proves that he possesses an authority within God, his Father’s house, that is different and greater than the Levites and priests, proving that his word carried divine authority, that he had permission to speak for God, and that they all knew it. Not only was Jesus’s sign a call to purify the temple courts and to worship the Lord rightly, but it also upset the religious establishment since it eventually led to their response of conspiracy and murder. They were offended because, through this sign, Jesus, in his role as a prophet, publicly claimed to be something more and greater—God’s Son—by commanding them, “Do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”
But it was the third and final sign that caused the most confusion because, from the perspective of his hearers, what Jesus claimed was absurd and impossible, and not even really in the realm of miracles. It also claimed earthly power and authority, claiming the kingship of Herod who constructed the temple. By this comparison, because the temple that he meant was that of his body, he was really declaring his kingship over the entire universe since he was the one who created man in the beginning. He must also be the one who can restore his body, and since he is the one who authored life in the beginning, he must also be the one that can restore life to the body of a man and give them eternal life.
Now why should we believe John’s testimony concerning these signs? Why should we believe them? Why are they trustworthy and reliable? What if they were just stories that John made up to support his case? While there can be some debate and discussion regarding all that the signs themselves mean, there was never any historical dispute that they actually happened.
There were so many witnesses to the signs themselves that the truth of them must stand. The servants that drew the water in Cana knew the truth about what happened. The driven out money changers and sellers knew the truth about what happened. And the people here in the temple courts who challenged and interrogated Jesus about his authority knew that they did. They even remembered his response because they used the corrupted and twisted form of the conversation as false testimony against him in Matthew’s gospel, where now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus so that they might put him to death.
But they found none, though many false witnesses came forward. At last, two came forward and said, “This man said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God and to rebuild it in three days.’” There’s also no doubt that Jesus died a very public death. His Roman executioners were very good at their job; they were known to be exceedingly efficient. There were too many unimpeachable witnesses to the fact that Jesus was dead to suggest that it was fake or that he merely fainted.
Roman officers saw Jesus die; Roman soldiers pierced his side to verify that he was dead. The Pharisee Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, they buried the dead Jesus in a tomb, while Roman soldiers, who were sent by the chief priests and other Pharisees, guarded it. Yet the Apostle Paul also recounts an exhaustive list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’s resurrection, writing, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, being Jesus’s brother, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me, for I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the Church of God.”
See, all of these people were able and willing to testify to the truth that in this third sign, this third sign was fulfilled by Jesus rising from the dead. No one in ancient history denied these facts. Countless people died because they believed them to be true. They were the first Christian martyrs. This sign of confirmation—Jesus’s bodily resurrection on the third day—proves the trustworthiness and reliability of everything that Jesus taught and said.
It is because Jesus rose from the dead, and only because the resurrection is true, that we can, should, and must trust or believe what Jesus said. These two and three witnesses convict Jesus as being God. The life of Jesus proves the reliability and trustworthiness of the Hebrew scriptures, especially the Messianic prophecies, and confirmed the many covenant promises of God for us.
But it is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which is the final proof for us to know that he is himself God, and that we have eternal life through our faith in him. It is the evidence that we must cling to, to be strengthened and encouraged in life, believing that someday, things will be better—far better than we can even imagine—because he is making all things new, and that Jesus will comfort us and wipe away every tear.
So if we believe that scripture points to Jesus, and we believe that Jesus fulfilled everything that scripture said concerning him, and if through his life, death, and by his resurrection, Jesus proved himself to be the most trustworthy, reliable, and dependable person ever—like C. S. Lewis said, Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord—then we should trust him. We must trust him; we must trust in him because Jesus is God.
Then we must also believe the Bible and everything it says and commands, not only about Jesus, but we must also believe it concerning what it says about our lives, our relationships with one another, and with God. We must believe what it says about creation and the new creation, and about heaven and hell. Then we must believe and trust that Jesus is the Lord, believing that one day he will return and set everything right, that although everyone will be judged, his chosen people—his adopted brothers and sisters—those who place their whole and only hope for salvation by his grace alone will be able to stand justified before the Divine Throne because we are covered by his righteous robes, because we have been washed by his blood.
However, before we can believe it, we must first know what scripture says and means. We must know God’s word. We must read it, we must ingest it and digest it because it has been given for us, breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproach, correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
The psalmist also says of scripture, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through your precepts, I get understanding; therefore, I hate every false way. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Yet knowing it is not the end because if we know it, and if we believe it, then we must obey it and live according to it.
I mean, if we believe that the laws of our country carry weight and are true—that they have authority—if we believe that we will suffer consequences for transgressing human laws and for going against the popular social norms and customs, then how much greater will the consequences be if we go against God’s word? If knowing it and believing it teaches us to live by it, then living it will cause us to love it. We must love it if we live it because we believe it, and we know it.
But we can only believe it if the Holy Spirit helps us first, only if he gives us the faith to believe—first by renewing our heart and mind, through conforming us to the image of Jesus. Otherwise, it all seems like lunacy or utter nonsense, doesn’t it? For some demand signs, and others seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to some and folly to others. But to those who are called, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.
See, all the evidence that we need to believe is contained right here within the text of scripture. Everything we need to believe and every reason for us to believe it once the lock of our heart is opened by the Holy Spirit’s keys. Therefore, we want to know God, to know Jesus better, and to grow in faith for action. Then we need to pick it up and read, to share our thoughts and understandings with each other in Bible studies, to come to church, to listen and heed, because this scripture is the only sign we now need and the only sign we should be wanting.
The Lord God has given it to us; it’s been confirmed and affirmed as his holy word throughout history and has been given to us. So, believe the scripture and the word that Jesus has spoken. Believe it and believe Jesus. Trust him, call upon his name, and be saved. Amen.