Merely Jesus?

John 8:21 (ESV)  So he said to them again, “I am going away, and you will seek me, and you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.”

This is an interesting passage because I thought a central truth of the gospel was Jesus would save us from our sins if we seek Him.  This seems to say the exact opposite.

I now understand it to mean this: The Jewish leaders were looking for a very different Messiah than Jesus seemed to be.  He was a teacher, a philosopher, a Rabbi, a sage.  The Jews of Jesus’ day expected a Messiah like David as Jeremiah prophesied:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” (Jeremiah 23:5, ESV).

He wasn’t the Messiah they were expecting.  Because they had an incorrect view of Jesus, they were mistaken in their search.  So, I think Jesus was saying if they were seeking the Messiah, and He wasn’t a conquering King, then He was not the one they were looking for.  Looking for the wrong Messiah, the wrong Jesus, meant they would die in their sins.

We can have a wrong view of Jesus and be lost.  We can have a simple view of Him and be saved.  There are lots of people who have a fully incorrect view of Jesus.  Some think He is the Archangel Michael, some think He is the spirit brother of Lucifer, some think He was just a great moral teacher, and some think He was a false prophet.  A belief in any of these would be as mistaken as the belief of the Pharisees.

2 Cor. 11:4 (ESV)  For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.

There are other Jesus’, other spirits, and other gospels.  The Pharisees in our text had a wrong Jesus, the wrong Messiah.

Through the rest of the chapter, Jesus tries to convince the Pharisees that He is indeed the Messiah but that the Messiah is not who they think.  He is God incarnate, God in flesh (John 1:14).  He has been trying to explain this to the Jewish leaders since the first, and they understood what He was saying, but just wouldn’t accept it as true.  In fact, they saw it as heresy:

John 10:33 (ESV)  The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.”

They were right.  Jesus is God.  In Exodus 3:14, as we saw a few weeks ago, the God of the burning bush identifies Himself by the name “I AM.”  In  Genesis chapters 18 and 19, we see three “men” who visited Abraham.  Two of these were angels.  As Abraham and this third man walk together, the writer, Moses, identifies the third man as God Himself.

God then destroys Sodom:  Gen. 19:24 (ESV)  Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven.

Jesus said this in answering the Pharisees:

John 8:56-58 (ESV)  Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” ⁵⁷ So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” ⁵⁸ Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”

Here, Jesus points to Himself as the I AM in Exodus 3:14 and the God who destroyed Sodom in Genesis 19:24.  The Jews understood exactly what He was claiming and took up stones to kill Him for blasphemy.

Why is this important?

I was convicted by this passage in John.  Is my Jesus merely Jesus?  Is He merely the man who died on the cross to pay for my sins?  We can fall into this idea so easily when we read the gospels.  So much of the New Testament is about the man, Jesus and not God the Son, yet they are the same Person. 

While Jesus is not the only Person of the trinity, He is the God of the burning bush, the God who called down fire from heaven to destroy Sodom.  I think we are influenced to see Him as less than this due to our readings of the gospels.  We see Jesus so much as a man who has the power given Him by the Father that we lose the majesty of His omnipotence, His omniscience, His greatness.  We get lost in His omnibenovelance and forget the rest of Who and What He is.  In other words, our Jesus is too small.  To us He may well be merely Jesus.

Who is our Jesus then?  Is He merely Jesus: just a man empowered by His Father, or is He the God who met Abraham on the plains of Mamre?  Is He the God of the burning bush? 

The great eleventh century theologian and philosopher, Anselm, said “God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.” That is Jesus, God the Son, second Person of the Trinity. Is that our Jesus?