24 April 2024 John 12:44-50
These are the last words of Jesus public teaching.
He would have a few things still to say to His disciples, to Pilate, to the thief on the cross. But these are His last public words.
What Jesus wanted to get through more than anything else was that in Him people are confronted with God Almighty. The words Jesus speaks, every one of them, come straight from the Lord and Creator of the universe, the One who is Being itself. If you have been aware of that, and have felt the intense gravitational pull of those words, that is salvation. Even if it isn’t pulled you very far, even if you have a long way to go, that is salvation. If, on the other hand, you have felt that pull and pulled away, and left those words hanging there in the air, or worse, if you have shrugged the wordsinto the oblivion of the noise around you, that is condemnation.
But the condemnation didn’t come from Jesus. He didn’t come to condemn, but to save.
The condemnation came from you. You put the distance between the words and you. You brushed them off into the ambient noise. You became the ambient noise.
That was all you.
The attitude we have toward Jesus, the choices we make about Jesus, all show what we really are. It is one of the reasons why we are taught from the very earliest point of our walk with God never to use His name in vain. If we use the name of Jesus, or God the Father, simply to express anger, or surprise, or frustration, or simply because we can’t think of anything else to say, we habituate ourselves to thinking that God is just a word that is part of the undifferentiated chatter one hears in a crowd. You hear the many voices, and know that you must be hearing words, but you cannot tell what any of the words are, and the name of God and the name of Jesus disappear into that. It is the name above all names (Philippians 2:9), the only name given among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12), and it vanishes into the inarticulate roar. If that is all the name of Jesus means to us, that becomes our destiny – disappearance into the roar.
If, on the other hand, the name of Jesus is the one we strain to hear and use only with the deepest respect, if the voice of Jesus is the one we learn to pick out amid the noise, if the accent of Jesus is the one we make our own, then the face of Jesus is the one we see on the last day. There are no words quite to express the contentment we have in the gaze of the Beloved on that great and glorious day, “but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). Peace at the last.
The attitude we have toward Jesus, the choices we make about Jesus, all show what we really are.
There are very good reasons to believe that there is a God who has created the universe. Many billions of people testify that there is good reason to believe that the Creator of the universe loves you, comes to you, confronts you with Himself, to tell you how much He loves you, how He wants to share his infinite love with you forever. God Almighty is speaking now. What we do next shows what we really are.
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