The gospel of John, chapter 8, verse 19, has become a very scary text to me. Why? It is because I preach. What is the purpose of preaching and teaching in the Christian church? When we gather to study God’s Word, we are supposed to learn to know God. That is the purpose of it. But this text involves a public conversation that Jesus had with the leaders of the Jewish church. You could call them the General Conference. Remember who Jesus was. He was the One who had instructed Moses by saying, “Go down to Egypt and bring My people out of there.”
(See Exodus 3:10.) He was the One. He was the One who spoke the Ten Commandments from the top of Mount Sinai. He was the One who appeared and spoke to Moses. He was the One who dwelt in that pillar of cloud and fire that led the children of Israel through the wilderness. He was the One who had inspired the prophets in the Old Testament. He was the One who had appeared to Gideon and Manoah.
The Jews had looked forward to the coming of the Messiah for over a thousand years, and when He came in human flesh, notice what Jesus said to them in John 8:19: “Then they said to Him, ‘Where is Your Father?’ Jesus answered, ‘You know neither Me nor My Father. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also.’ ” Now these were the religious leaders of that time. Do you suppose that they were the last preachers, the last religious leaders of whom Jesus said, “You don’t even know me”?
We are supposed to be teaching and preaching about Him. We are supposed to be helping people learn to know Him and to follow Him. That is what the leaders said they were doing. They said, “God is our Father. We are His people.” (See Verse 41.) But Jesus said, “You do not know Him. You do not know Me.” Why this is scary is that if I am to teach you to know Jesus, can I teach you to know Somebody whom I do not know? That is scary, if you are a preacher. These people were sure that they knew God, but Jesus said, “No, you do not know Him. You do not know Me. You do not know Him.” This is a theme that keeps recurring in the gospel of John.
John 17:25, 26 says, “O righteous Father! The world has not known You, but I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me. And I have declared to them Your name, and will declare [it], that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” You cannot teach somebody about a love that you do not have. You cannot teach somebody else to know Jesus, if you do not know Him. How many were in the crowd surrounding Jesus when He said these words in John 17? Eleven men, that is all, just eleven.
Life Eternal
How important is it whether or not you know God or whether or not I know God? In John 17:2 and 3, Jesus is praying to His Father, and He says, “As You have given Him authority over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as You have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Notice the word and in verse 3. Sometimes little words in the Bible are important. This is eternal life: if they know You, that is the Father, and if they know Jesus Christ whom You have sent. Jesus said that if you know one, you will know the other. He made that very clear on a number of occasions.
In Matthew 11:27, He said, “All things have been delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and [the one] to whom the Son wills to reveal [Him].” This idea, which the Jews had, the Islamic people and some other people have, that you can know the Father and not worry about the Son, is not so. Jesus said you cannot know just the Father; you either know both of us, or you do not know either one of us. How important is this? As we read in John 17:3, this is life eternal. If you know the Father and the Son, that is eternal life. Do you really want to know God?
Do You Know God?
Today, we are living in a world that is very, very dark. We talk about the explosion of knowledge, but the world in which we live is dark because of the misapprehension of God. People do not know God in the world in which we are living. They go to church; they sing about God; they pray to God; they read the Bible; but they do not know God. Do you know Him?
The Jews read the Bible. Probably most of them could quote more scripture than could most of us. They read the Bible, but they did not know the Author of the Bible. The same thing has happened among Christians. There are numerous people who go to a Christian church every week. They hear the Word of God read; they can quote the apostles’ creed and the Lord’s Prayer. Many of them can quote the Ten Commandments. All those things are fine and good. We are not criticizing any of those things, but do they know God? Do they know His Son?
Whatever you may know about theology—history, Greek, Hebrew, the writings of the church fathers, the teachings of the theologians—if you do not know God and His Son, you will not have eternal life. If you do know them, whether or not you can read or write or are knowledgeable about theology or history or Greek or Hebrew or all of those things, you will have eternal life. There will be many people in the kingdom of heaven that in this world did not know how to read or write. You do not want me to turn that around, do you? I am going to, so get ready. There are going to be a great number of people in hell who not only knew how to read and write but had extensive knowledge about theology and history, Greek, Hebrew, and the writings of the fathers and the traditions of the church but did not know God. These people, to whom Jesus was talking in John 8:19, knew theology. They could read Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic. They could read the Old Testament in the original handwriting of the prophets, but they did not know God.
Invest the Time
As I have studied this subject, I have not just studied it for your benefit; I have studied it for my benefit as well. I have been talking to the Lord about this. I said, “Lord, please, I want to know You.” I do not pretend that I could teach you to know Him in a short article.
I hope that you are spending time studying the story of Jesus every day. One of the best ways to start learning to know Him is to begin studying the story of His life when He was here in this world. It is recorded in four different places. It is recorded by two of His disciples, Matthew and John. It is also written in the words of the apostle Peter. A young man by the name of John Mark wrote down the words of the apostle Peter as he preached and explained the life of Christ. You can think of the book of Mark as Peter’s gospel.
Then there was a man who was called “The Beloved Physician.” He was an associate of the apostle Paul, and he worked and traveled with the apostle Paul all over the Roman Empire. Not only did he listen to the apostle Paul preach the gospel to the Gentiles, but he traveled back to Palestine and sought out the eyewitnesses who had seen Jesus work miracles and who had listened to Him, and he asked, “Tell me, what did you see and what did you hear?” Then he wrote it down. He was a historian as well as a physician. You can think of the gospel of Luke, Luke having been an associate of Paul, as being the apostle Paul’s gospel. It was written especially for the Gentile audience, and I have found that this gospel is the favorite of many Gentile Christians.
You can pick which gospel you want to study, but if you want to get to know Him, you are going to have to invest some time.
For those who have married, when you were getting acquainted with your spouse, did you say to him or her, “Look, I am too busy for you; we will spend time together for one or two hours a week, but that is all the time I have for you”? You recognize that if you are going to enter a human relationship like marriage, you are going to have to invest some time in somebody. Everybody knows that. If you want to know Him, you are going to have to invest some time in Him, also.
It is not going to be enough for you to simply attend church once a week for a couple of hours. The preachers in the sacred desk can preach their hearts out, but you need more time with Him than that. You need to be studying His life everyday.
I am so glad that I made the decision, before I turned 20 years of age, that I was going to study something from the life of Christ every day. It has been my practice for many years to attempt to do a detailed study of one chapter from either the gospel of Matthew or the gospel of John every single day. It used to be that I could accomplish it in less than an hour. It has recently become much more difficult, so much more difficult that sometimes it takes two days to cover a chapter. One day, not too long ago, I said, “Today I am not as busy as I sometimes am. I am just going to take the time to study a whole chapter.” I did complete the chapter, but it took most of the morning. So I do not always cover a chapter anymore, because even though I have read those chapters and quoted those chapters hundreds of times, I am finding more and more depth of meaning each time I study them.
Jesus Christ is the One that is described in the Bible as the One who is altogether lovely. (See Song of Solomon 5:16.) If you are not spending time with Him every day, you are missing one of life’s greatest pleasures. You are missing out. I invite you to begin, if you have not yet done so. Decide you are going to get to know Him; you are going to spend time studying His life every day.
Prejudice
“Now it came to pass, when the time had come for Him to be received up,” that is to be crucified, “that He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem.” Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem for the last time. He knew that, when He arrived there, He was going to be crucified. “And sent messengers before His face. And as they went, they entered a village of the Samaritans, to prepare for Him. But they did not receive Him, because His face was [set] for the journey to Jerusalem. And when His disciples James and John saw [this], they said, ‘Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them, just as Elijah did?’ But He turned and rebuked them, and said, ‘You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save [them].’ And they went to another village.” Luke 9:51–56.
Jesus was on His way to the cross. He knew it; He was tired, and He was looking for a place to stay for the night. He sent messengers ahead of Him to the village to find a place for Him to stay the night. But the villagers were prejudiced.
Have you ever had to deal with somebody who is prejudiced? How do you deal with human prejudice? How do you deal with human annoyance? How do you deal with personal resentment? Rising above personal resentment and annoyance is one of the marks of a great person, and Jesus surpassed all the great men of history in this regard.
Abraham Lincoln
Perhaps some of you have heard the story of Abraham Lincoln. During the initial stages of the Civil War, things were very discouraging for the Union forces. The Secretary of War (today we call that position the Secretary of Defense) was Edwin M. Stanton. One day, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to Stanton and sent it by a messenger. When Stanton read this letter from Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, he tore it up and told the messenger that the President was a fool. He repeated it, evidently, at least twice. The messenger was so outraged he could hardly speak. Imagine talking about the President of the United States in that way when you are just an underling. You are the person who is supposed to be receiving the orders.
The messenger went back to President Lincoln so outraged he could hardly speak because of the insulting behavior of this member of the President’s cabinet. Abraham Lincoln inquired as to what had happened, and the messenger told him. He said, “He tore your letter up and said that you were a fool.” Then he waited to see what the President would say.
President Lincoln said, “Did he call me that?”
He said, “Yes,” and he repeated it.
Abraham Lincoln laughed and said, “Well then, it must be true; he is usually right.”
How do you React?
How do you react to personal resentment? How do you react to annoying comments? When people do not understand, when they are prejudiced against you and angry with you, and think you are a fool, how do you react?
The people in this Samaritan village were treating Jesus in these ways. They would not even give Him a place to stay for the night. James and John were just like Abraham Lincoln’s messenger. They knew Jesus was the Son of God. They became angry and said, “This is totally inappropriate. Do you want us to call fire down from heaven and burn these people up and get rid of them?”
Jesus said, “No, you do not know what spirit you are of.” They did not know Him yet. Do you know Him?
One of the ways that you know whether or not you know Him is the way you react. Do you react the same way Christ reacted when there is prejudice against you, when there is personal annoyance or resentment or even hatred? Someone may say things about you that are cutting; they may spread rumors about you, and talk against you, trying to destroy your influence. How do you react then?
I receive many letters from people who are angry and upset about various things. I will not give you a list of the things people are angry and upset about because I have learned that even repeating the list of things makes them more angry and more upset. People are upset about something that was said in a sermon or something that was printed in a magazine or something that was said or done by a missionary worker. We have had people write letters to Steps to Life and call on the phone about things. Maybe they saw a picture in our magazine about something that happened in Africa and have become upset as to how things were done there.
Do you know that it says in 1 Corinthians 13 that love does not become irritated? In the King James Version it uses the word provoked. That word means irritated. Love does not become irritated. How much can go wrong—with your husband or your wife or your children or your parents or somebody else where you work— before you become irritated? How you react gives you an indication of whether or not you are getting to know Him.
One of the most amazing things about Jesus’ life is that nothing ever made Him irritated. It is an amazing thing, when you see what happened to Abraham Lincoln, in that he could just laugh about it and go back to work. That is amazing. There are not very many men like that. But Jesus surpasses them all.
Pastor Grosboll is Director of Steps to Life Ministry and pastor of the Prairie Meadows Church in Wichita, Kansas. He may be contacted by e-mail at: historic@stepstolife.org, or by telephone at: 316-788-5559.