John Chapter 5 Jesus' Authority and Divine Identity Revealed [Daily "Live" Bible Study]

Alexa, what's the weather? Alexa, what's today's date? All right, well, good morning everyone. Tuesday today, and, um, if this is your first time with me, I started a new Bible study in the Book of John. Which for the foreseeable future I'll be doing every day until we complete one chapter at a time. We're going to go verse by verse, and today I'll be reading out of the English Standard Version. So, um, the way we're going to do Bible study, if you haven't been with me for a minute is we're going to go verse by verse, and we're going to try to use, uh, the best contextual criticism that we can. Uh, and we're gonna pray in the Holy Spirit to help us with this. We're not going to really use any third-party material. We're going to do sola scriptura, uh, which is the way I've, I've learned it. And, um, I will from time to time reference my study Bible notes that I have in my Bible. As you know, some Bibles have study notes, and I might— you know, most likely use those for historical definitions and things like that. All right, so get out your Bibles if you have one, follow along, feel free to leave a comment or question. I pray, Lord, that, um, I pray that I'll be faithful to the text as best I can. Um, and, uh, and this live is a little different than the previous lives because I think in the previous lives I was doing it only to my friends list. Feel free to become a friend if this is content that interests you. It's 30 degrees here in sunny Atlanta. I'm in my backyard. This is where I'm doing these for now. I get some fresh air, cold air. You know, some people do ice plunges. I do Atlanta morning weather, 9 o'clock over here. Okay, I'm just gonna pull up my little iPad here in case I need it for something. Give me one sec, we'll get started soon. So today we're doing, uh, John chapter 5. We'll do the whole Bible, the whole chapter. It'll probably take us close to an hour. That's what we've been kind of pacing at. Um, and, uh, and we'll get started. First, let's pray, and then we'll get going. Father, we thank you for this time in your word. We have learned that, uh, your word is also known as the sword of the Spirit. We know that your word divides thought narrow. It gives us clarity on life. And that's why we do this Bible study, Lord, is because you said, and it's true, and we agree, that man can't live on bread alone but from every word that comes from God. So that's why we read the Bible is because it's our daily bread. And devotions are good, and motivational speeches are good, and preaching is good, but when we get into a habit of actually just reading your word, that is us getting our spiritual nourishment. So I pray, Lord, that today just the very reading of the word is gonna feed us all and edify us all. Lord, I pray that if I speak in error, that you strike it from the minds of the hearer. My intention is to always speak in truth, and to always speak in a biblical way. Um, so Lord, I just ask for your favor and your help on that. All right everyone, so, uh, Paul Woodley, and, uh, let's get going. Let me get a little sip here real quick. All right, so today we're in John chapter 5. The last few days we went over the previous chapters. Um, just as a, a quick recap, uh, in the Book of John, um, we know that, um, that John, uh, the author of it is, um, uh, the Apostle John. And we also see that in the book, in chapter 1, um, the high— the, the biggest theme, um, is in that very, very beginning, one of my favorites, right? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. Verse 4: In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And so we are introduced to this God, the second person of the Trinity according to Christian theology, that the Godhead is Trinitarian in nature. But we see here Jesus introduced as the Word. And so as we go through chapter 1, we see the testimony of John the Baptist in verse 119. And this is the testimony of John: When the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, 'Who are you?' he confessed and did not deny, but confessed, 'I am not the Christ.' And they asked him, 'What then? Are you Elijah?' He said, 'I am not.' 'Are you the Prophet?' And he answered, 'No.' So they said to him, 'Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us.' 'What do you say about yourself?' He said, 'I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord,' as the prophet Isaiah said. We see, skipping over to 1:29, the next day, Jesus, he's coming on the scene of John the Baptist's ministry, and John the Baptist says in 29, 'Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,' right? We see that Jesus calls his first disciples in 1:35. The next day, John again was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said again, behold the Lamb of God. And the two disciples, verse 37, heard him say this, and they followed Jesus, right? And then we go on to see that Jesus calls some more disciples. Let's skip to verse 40. This is 1:40. One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. Right? He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, "We have found the Messiah," which means Christ. And then we see that on the next day, so verse 43, "The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee, and there he found Philip and said to him, 'Follow me.'" All right? And then verse 44, "Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Excuse me. All right, so we, we see in chapter 1 the, uh, John the Baptist, the introduction. We see, um, we see Jesus calling his disciples. Then we saw our first miracle in John in chapter 2, the wedding at Cana. That's where, uh, Jesus turns the water into wine, right? And that's where the master, the head servant of the feast, says to— goes up to the bridegroom and says, "Wow, you know, you've served— you've waited to serve the best wine." Verse 10, 2:10, he says, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now." And verse 11, 2:11, "This, the first of His signs, Jesus did, at Cana in Galilee and manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him. So now we see that it was the turning of the water into wine that caused the disciples to believe in Him. And after this, verse 12, He went down into Capernaum with His mother and His brothers and His disciples, and they stayed there for a few days. We see the passion of Jesus in the temple in verse 13. We see that he goes up, he went up to Jerusalem. He found those selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, money changers there. In verse 15, he makes a whip of cords, he drives them all out, and people are like, "Who are you?" And Jesus says, verse 17, "Zeal for the house will consume me," right? And so what's interesting is in verse 2:17, and we'll come back on this later as we go through the book of John, it says his disciples remember that it was written, quote unquote, "Zeal for your house will consume me." house will consume me. But, um, and they'll remember that later down the road. So, um, and then we see the, the, the, the Jews say to him— and when we say the word Jews, we're really talking about the religious, um, leaders, uh, at that time. They said to him, uh, quote unquote, what sign do you show us, uh, for doing these things? Jesus answered them, destroy this temple, and in 3 days I will raise it up. Verse 20, the Jews then said, it has taken 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in 3 days? But he was speaking about the temple of his body. And then again, another remembrance, right? So as we go through our Bible study, I want us to take note of these, um, these hints, these foreshadowings. So we see another foreshadowing in verse 22. It says, when therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. Chapter 3, we see Nicodemus is introduced to the story. Fantastic chapter. We all know 3:16, right, where Jesus says, you know, he says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only 'His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.' And verse 18, 'Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.' And then Jesus says in 3:19, we kind of gloss over it many times 'cause we all love 3:16, We may not even like 3:18 because it talks about condemnation, but 3:19 says— Jesus continues and he says, and this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and people love the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light lest his work should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out by God, carried out in God. All right, so we'll skip a little bit. We're just doing a review to get to chapter 5 where we will be today. Today I will skip over to chapter 3:36, another good verse for us to, um, to consider, to meditate on. 3:36 says, whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. Just by way of reminder, that is our condition today, right? So what is he saying to us? What is he saying to them, Jesus? He says two things here. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. So Jesus came and he's talking about this thing called eternal life. He's basically coming to humanity to either introduce this concept or remind them of the concept that there is a thing, there is a reality, that there is eternal life, that life is eternal, right? That eternal life is a positive. You want to have eternal life. You should want to have eternal life. And he says that whoever, right, which means that all tribes, all tongues, whoever believes in the Son, has eternal life. So there needs to be— you need to believe in the Son. He's talking about himself to have this eternal life. It's not hard, it's not academic, it's not a test you got to pass. It's faith, right? But he says he— there's a con— there's the, the opposite of that is whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him, which means that we all have this condition called, quote unquote, the wrath of God that remains on us. We don't know it because we're ignorant human beings. We go through life and we're taught this thing or that, but in reality, the wrath of God is on us. And it seems like strong language, wrath, because we're thinking about, you know, straight-up wrath, but there is this supernatural force that is pressing down on humanity from God himself, and basically this wrath of God originated from the beginning, from the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the curse, and so the point is here is that when we talk about hell, for example, as difficult as that subject matter is for some people, is we have to remember that a few things about the nature of God. First off, that God is holy, right? And we don't understand what holiness even means. You know, we may understand what righteousness means a little bit, but holiness is, is, is pure. It's pure light. There's no shadow. In Him, right? We also know the nature of God is that He can never lie, right? And that's what's great about God is that we can trust God because He can never lie. And if He says something, it's gonna happen. So if He's making promises through Scripture to us, the reader, then you can take that to the bank. And so really, that's a good way of living life, in my opinion, is because if you know what God is promising and you believe it, then you will live a straight, a straight path. But when we talk about hell, right, so remember, Jesus came to Earth. You may or may not know this, agree this, or believe this, but he basically came on a rescue mission, right? So here we have the second person of the Trinity. We have Jesus Christ who lived in heaven with God in the Godhead. Book of Hebrews says that everything that was spoken was spoken through him. John 1 talks about how he is the Word, right? So he is, and that everything that has been made has been made by him. He upholds everything by by his word, by his power, right? So we have this person, how he humbles himself and he is born a man and subjects himself as a human under the law, under humans, under parents, makes himself lesser or lower in rank than where he came from, which is king. And so we see the humility of Jesus that the Son of God, you see his humility, that he's coming here and he's subjecting himself to our universe, to our law, to our, you know, our rules. And the fact of the matter is he's on a rescue mission. He's coming here. He has to grow up. He has to be born, right? So he's born, baby Jesus. He has to grow in wisdom. He has to know what life is like as human beings. He, he, he, he, he, and, and that's what makes him extremely unique. So he gets to point where, you know, he's now 30 and he starts this public ministry. And now we pick it up in the Gospels at that age. But, and he already knows through, you know, he, he knows, you know, um, because he is the Son of God, he knows what he has to do. He knows that he has to go to the cross. So what we're going to do— so, so he's on a rescue mission, and part of this rescue mission is instruction. He's telling us Hey, you know, uh, there's a place that we all will go. There are actually two places that when you first— that when you die, you're going to go to. First off, um, he's, he's telling us that, that, you know, life is, um, human life in the flesh has an expiration date. We all don't know when our last breath is going to be. We're all going to die, right? But then when we die, that's not the end-all be-all. There's going to be a judgment, and, you know, and, and we're going to go of one of two places: heaven or hell. We can go even deeper and even talk about hell even deeper in the sense of how it's described, right? So for you theologians out there, we know that the word, the English word hell is broken down into Greek and Hebrew. So the English word hell can mean Hades and it can mean Sheol, which is the Hebrew version. Or it can be Gehenna. So there really is two types of hell. So we see here that hell in the Old Testament is described as Sheol, or in Greek it's described as Hades. Basically, in English vernacular, it's the land of the dead. And so here, you know, it's saying that people, when they die, they're going to go to this place called Sheol, or this place called Hades, right? And they're there until the final judgment after the millennial kingdom. And there, according to the Book of Revelation, Hades will be thrown into Gehenna. And when we talk about— when you hear about the whole fire and brimstone thing and that final judgment, the fire stuff, well, really, that's going to happen at the end of the 1,000-year kingdom. Right? But in the meantime, people are going to this other place, this other hell per se, this holding cell if you will. This is where we talk about, uh, Absalom's bosom and whatnot. So, um, Abraham's bosom within hell back in the Old Testament, right, where the Old Testament saints were. I don't want to digress too much, but the fact of the matter is, is that in either case, uh, you don't want to go to hell. And so Jesus is basically saying, hey, team, humans. You don't want to go there. You want to go to heaven. And, you know, a lot of people say that God sends you to hell. Well, no, God doesn't send you to hell. All we know is that the wrath of God remains on a person, so he's not sending anyone to anywhere. The people who are actually in hell are people who have unforgiven sin. So that is Jesus' message, the only way a person is in hell is because their sins are not forgiven. Point blank, end of story, exclamation point. So let's clarify that for our study here. Just knowing this, we'll hit on this theme more and more and more because I think it's important that people understand that there are— that heaven and hell are actual locations. And if you or wanting to have this eternal life that Jesus talks about, well, the only way you can have eternal life is to have your sins forgiven by definition, right? Which should lead us to think, okay, well, if that is the way to have my sins forgiven, then who can forgive my sins? Who has the authority to forgive my sins? And this is the very message that got Jesus killed. This is the very message that the religious people, the Jews back then, hated because they said only God can forgive sins, which is facts. So, and this is what gets Jesus into trouble. And we're going to see this in today's Bible lesson as we go into chapter 5, is we're going to see that this message, this narrow message, that, hey, you have to believe in me, Jesus is saying, for you to have your sins forgiven. And only when your sins are forgiven do you have access to heaven, to eternal life. But in the meantime, the wrath of God remains on him according to John 3:36. So that's a little recap of the first 3 chapters. Now yesterday we did chapter 4. We see Jesus and the woman of Samaria. We talked about how Samaria was a place near Jerusalem that, you know, you have a mixed breed of Jewish people there. It's all coming back from the deportation back, you know, when the Assyrians took them away from captivity, Babylon, and they come back and they intermarry with the Gentiles and so forth. But anyways, you have, these are religious, folks. They do believe in the Pentateuch, and they do— but their challenge is that they feel like that worship should be, you know, on a different mountain than where the Jews say worship can be. So it's semantics in that regard. But they do believe in Christ, and they do believe in Messiah, and they do believe that the Messiah is coming back. And that's where we see Jesus, um, going into, uh, Samaria. And I didn't hit on it yesterday, but I do want to just kind of like ask you something. It says here that, um, that, um, in verse— chapter 4, verse 3, it says, uh, verse 3 and 4, it says he left Judea. Now let me just go to 4. I'll back up a little bit because now we're going to see the development of Jesus' ministry, right? So here we have, and I wanna juxtapose that with John the Baptist, first couple chapters. Now in the meantime, right, John the Baptist is alive and well. John the Baptist is baptizing people in the Jordan River. But now even John's disciples are starting to follow Jesus and Jesus is becoming known. Actually, John the Baptist himself has introduced Jesus as the Lamb of God. So now Jesus is official. In chapter 4, verse 1, it says, now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John— parentheses, verse 2— although Jesus himself did not baptize but only his disciples, he left Judea and departed again for Galilee, right? And it says in verse 4, he had to pass through Samaria, right? So, um, I didn't talk about this yesterday, but I was just reflecting about it after the fact, is that this whole, why did He have to pass through Samaria? Well, the part I didn't really hit on, but I do want to hit on, He did go there because He wanted to preach to Samaria, number one, obviously. And He met this woman, and though this woman benefited at the well, the Samaritan woman, the woman who had 5 husbands and even the one that she was with, It's not her husband. Even though a lot of commenters make a big deal about the woman and, "Amen, it's a blessing for the woman," and the woman says, "Oh, sir, I perceive you're a prophet," and she was the one that went into town, and they believed on what she said, and then they implored Jesus to stay another 2 days, and Jesus stays another 2 days, and then they believed in Jesus again. That's really what I wanted to also just highlight as the reason why Jesus went into Samaria, because Jesus is