Jesus' thoughts on the Bible - God Speaks, Part 1

Jesus argued. He often picked debates. I think He had to do this because Jesus said, in a sense, that we do not have a category in our heads for Him and so it would not have worked if He had just said “Think about this”. That is the reason why He argued. We need to look at the hard sayings because we are not perfect, we need to be shaped by the weighty things of God. It is time for me to pay serious attention to this truth myself (I feel a bit foolish that I have had a CS Lewis quote that speaks to this very topic on this blog since day 1 but yet have hardly scratched the surface).

Jesus is arguing about the Scripture here. It is surprising here because He is going after diligent Bible students. I am sure at least thousands of people are meeting in “Bible studies” in our country today. They are diligently studying the Bible. That’s good, right??

Jesus comes here to possibly the most diligent Bible students in the history of the world and He says that, ‘You are as dead wrong as people who don’t even believe in the Bible at all.’ He faces down people here who have a high orthodox view of scripture. That shows us that we have listen to this argument of Jesus’ very carefully because He is speaking to all of us, and more emphatically to those that assume that they have the very view of God... He is zeroing in on "bible-studying, God-believing Christians"...

I think Jesus is telling us in John 5: 31-47four things about God speaking to us: (1) God does speak to us, (2) How does God speak to us, (3) Why we don’t hear what God speaks to us and (4) how we can hear God speaking to us.

(1) The passage here speaks to the fact that God speaks to us.

At the beginning of Chapter 5 Jesus healed a paralyzed man, but He does it on the Sabbath. The Pharisees confront Jesus about His work on the Sabbath and Jesus responds with claims about Himself that must have been absolutely shocking to them. In 5:20 they say horrified to Jesus saying, ‘You are claiming to be equal with God!’.

In our passage Jesus agrees and continues that He does not want them to believe the claim just because He said so. He says He wants to point to testimony or evidence for the claim that He is God, which in turn tells us three ways in which God speaks to us. It is interesting because these three things are evidences that any American has access to today.

I think Jesus is also saying that Faith in Him is more than thinking, but it is certainly not less. It is more than examining the evidence, but it is not less. If you cannot believe in Jesus you have to ask yourself, ‘Have I looked at the evidence?’ Or if you say ‘I don’t hear God speaking to me’ you need to ask yourself, ‘Have I gone to the places where Jesus has said that God speaks? Have I exposed myself to the testimony that God [supposedly] has sent?’

Jesus says here don’t believe just because I am asserting it. Look at the evidence:
1. The first evidence He gives is human. Jesus points to John the Baptist. John was a ‘burning and shining light.’ He is looking to John as, not the prophet, but a radiant human being and a great man who was a burning and shining light. The first way God speaks to us is through personal relationships, through His work through another human - people who point to Christ and whose lives are radiant. There is integrity, an unaccountable radiance there. Unless you have known people like that you have not heard one of the main ways how God gives evidence that He is there.
2. The second is empirical. Jesus says that God has given Him works to do. He is talking about His life, His claims, His miracles, His resurrection.
3. The third is scriptural.

You have not put yourself in the places where God speaks if you have not exposed yourself to these three areas.