“Does not scripture say that the Christ will be of David’s family and come from Bethlehem…?” John 7:42

16 March 2024   John 7:40-53     

Why wasn’t anyone asking the right questions?

Jesus had given people plenty of reasons to wonder about him – where He was from, where He was born, who His parents were. Why didn’t anyone ask him? If they had, they would have known that He was born in Bethlehem, that His parents were of the Davidic line, and that therefore he satisfied the requirements laid down in the Bible about the Messiah. There were, of course, people who knew the answer to all these questions, viz., the people from Jesus’ hometown. Why didn’t they connect Jesus’ teaching and mighty acts to what they knew about Jesus’ birth and family, to what they knew about the Messiah?

The answer may be that they had never been taught the basics of good thinking, and they didn’t really know what the Bible said about the Messiah.

People will almost always miss important connections if they don’t know the basics of good thinking, and they don’t have all the relevant information.

What are we doing when we are thinking? Thinking is making sentences, and presenting them to yourself. There is a reason why the Latin word for “knowledge” is sententia, the same word that gives us the word “sentence.” If someone says the word “dog,” it is impossible to say what he means. He could be talking about a four-footed family pet. He could be dyslexic and trying to make a theological observation.  You only know what he means if he puts the word in a sentence, and the sentence makes sense. Sentences have, at a minimum, a subject and a verb. Often they have direct objects, prepositional phrases, and various modifiers. The more, therefore, that you know about making sentences, the more you can know. “Jesus has performed very many works of healing and exorcism, and He satisfies the scriptural requirements for being the Messiah” is the kind of sentence that can lead to a reasonable conclusion. It is also a complex sentence that requires some skill to make, a skill that can only be taught.

It is very likely that the people in the crowd didn’t know the basics of good thinking, because no one had ever taught them. No one had ever taught them because the people who could teach them despised them: “This crowd, which does not know the Law, they are accursed!” said the people who could teach them (John 7:49).

It turned out as well that even the people who could teach them didn’t have all the relevant information. When Nicodemus made the modest claim of basic justice that no one should be condemned without a hearing, the teachers snapped back, “Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee” (7:52). Had they read their Bibles as carefully as they claimed, they would have known that Jonah, Micah, Nahum and Hosea (all prophets and books of the Bible even then), and most spectacularly the greatest of the prophets himself, Elijah, were all from Galilee. It is impossible to be righteous or just if you don’t have all the relevant information. You can make disastrous mistakes that way – like not recognizing your Savior.

The teachers were also committing a basic error of logic called the Genetic Fallacy: a truth claim cannot be false based on how the claim originated. “A habitual liar told me the sky is blue; therefore, the sky is not blue” is bad thinking. “This prophet came from Galilee; therefore, what he says is false” is equally bad.

Basic justice requires good thinking, and possession of all the relevant information.

Basic evangelism does, too.

If we want people to know Jesus, then we have to teach them. That is what He did. That is why the first thing they called Him was “Teacher.”