Trust & Obey, Week 1: John 3 & John 14, Part 1
I’m back from sabbatical, and for the next few weeks, the blog series will be “Trust and Obey,” which is the name of a song I learned when I was a kid in Sunday school. During sabbatical I thought about how those two words help us understand what it means to be followers of Jesus together as a church in our contemporary American culture, and in particularly right here in our community.
My goal in this week’s posts is to lay a foundation for the next two weeks. For that foundation let’s start with what is arguably the most famous verse in the New Testament, maybe the most famous verse in the whole Bible? What do you think it is?
John 3:16. Perhaps you don’t need to turn there because you can quote it. Anybody want to put themselves out there and try to quote it in front of us???
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Did you hear the word “believe” in the verse? That is very much related to the first word in the title of the sermon series, “Trust.” And the other word in the title of the sermon series is missing, “Obey”. If the words “trust” and “obey” are both vital for followers of Jesus and the church, but John 3:16 only has the word “believe”, then maybe John 3:16 is not the only verse Christians and churches should be relying on. Yet many have relied almost exclusively on that one verse. Is it possible that many Christians and churches have so emphasized John 3:16, so emphasized the concept of believing, they are missing the other equally important “obey”?
I think we need to study John 3:16 a bit closer.
Let’s take a look at John 3:16 in the context of its whole chapter.
Open your Bible, and if you scan up to the beginning of the chapter, we learn that this chapter features Jesus’ conversation with a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. Pharisees were religious leaders. At the time of Jesus, there were about 6000 of them. They were not located at HQ, aka the Temple, in Jerusalem. Instead, the Pharisees were kind of like a religious FBI stationed throughout the towns in Judea and Galilee. They were keeping an eye on things, with the express purpose of making sure the people kept the law. Not the Roman law, as that was the Roman soldiers’ job, because at the time, Palestine was occupied territory. The Pharisees made sure the people kept the Old Testament Law.
We tend to think of the Pharisees as awful, hypocritical people who were power hungry, lovers of money, and hated Jesus. They were that, sometimes, but they were also motivated by their understanding of faithfulness to God. Yes, many of them would become greedy and controlling, and ultimately they were the ones pushing hard for Jesus to be killed.
But Pharisees were also passionate about Israel being a people who keeps God law. Their national history told a very sad tale about what happened when Israel stopped following God’s law (see 1 & 2 Kings). Israel was so rebellious, idolatrous, and unjust, that they eventually lost their land and were exiled. During exile, they desperately wanted to return to Palestine and Jerusalem, Judea and Galilee, and their exile motivated many of them to change their ways and get serious about following the Law. And eventually God brought them back to the land.
It was in the era after the exile that the Pharisees began, with the purpose of helping the people of Israel to faithfully follow the Law of Moses, and thus to be in the best possible position to receive blessing from God. So the Pharisees were started for a good purpose.
In Jesus’ day, not all Pharisees were consumed with greed and hypocrisy. Nicodemus was one of the good Pharisees. John 3 tells the story of how Nicodemus met with Jesus under cover of night, because he didn’t want to risk being seen. He was genuinely curious about Jesus. The two of them start talking about the Kingdom of God.
Notice that Jesus brings up the Kingdom of God in verse 3, with his famous “you must be born again” line. To enter the Kingdom Jesus repeats in verse 5, you must be born of water and Spirit. Water birth is natural human birth. A baby is ready to be born when its mother’s water breaks. But a person also needs to be born of the Spirit if they want to enter the Kingdom of God. Jesus is being intentionally mysterious here, and Nicodemus is confused. Look at verse 9. “Born again? By the Spirit? How???”
We find out in the next post.
Photo by Patricia Prudente on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 