DAY #167: John 12:37-50

We are having a great time at the COV Summer camp. God is working in kids hearts. Already six kids have given their lives to Christ. Keep praying for safety and protection. Keep praying that god will use the staff to break through the barriers that kids have built up between them and God.

Now to the passage today. Jesus had performed enough miraculous signs to cause people to believe in him. The greatest of all signs—raising Lazarus from the dead—should have been enough to elicit faith from all those who saw it and even heard about it. Yet most of the people still did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah.

This unbelief had been predicted by Isaiah. In the opening of his chapter on the suffering Savior, Isaiah asked, “Who has believed our message? To whom will the Lord reveal his saving power?” (Isaiah 53:1). It took revelation from God to know that Jesus was the one through whom God demonstrated his saving power. But the Jews lacked this understanding. Why? Because it was prophesied. Isaiah wrote: “The Lord has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts.”

The entire quotation,taken from Isaiah 6:9-10 appears quite often in the New Testament because it provides a prophetic explanation for why the Jews did not perceive Jesus’ message nor receive him as their Messiah. And because they would not believe, they eventually could not believe. As a result, the Jews remained unenlightened and hardened.

At these words, some of the Jewish leaders believed in Jesus, but they wouldn’t admit it, afraid the Pharisees would expel them from the synagogue. John made the point that their faith was weak, and he described the reason: They were still subject to the lure of human praise. But John primarily warned his readers that secret faith does not ultimately please God.

John closes this section in his Gospel about Jesus’ public ministry with a summary of Jesus’ entire testimony. The shared Passover meal will take up the next several chapters. But John leaves his readers with the cry of Jesus’ final public speech ringing in their ears. It is an ultimatum set before the crowds: Believe in Jesus, the Light of the World, or live in darkness under God’s judgment.

Jesus left the crowds temporarily, but in one final public appearance he appealed to his hearers to believe in him and thereby walk in his light. In this appeal, he affirmed his union with the Father: “If you trust me, you are really trusting God who sent me. For when you see me, you are seeing the one who sent me.”

Those who believe in Jesus have left Satan’s dark kingdom and influence in the world, and they have entered the light of God’s Kingdom. Some people in the church act as though they still remain in the darkness. Jesus died so that we might be transformed. If our life is not changing, we may not have begun to really follow the light.

Jesus’ mission was to faithfully convey the words of God to all who would truly listen. He knew that those who rejected those words would be rejecting life. God himself gave Jesus instructions as to what he should say. Jesus did not change that message. Some, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have used verses like this to say that Jesus was not God because he was subordinate to the Father. But Jesus’ essential, divine being was not subordinate to the Father—in all things he was equal with God; rather, Jesus coordinated his will to fully comply with the Father’s will. Thus, to respond to Jesus is to respond to God. To believe in Jesus is to believe in God. To reject Jesus is to reject God. To hear Jesus’ words makes each person responsible before God for what he or she does with them.


SO WHAT? (what will I do with what I have read today?)

Lord, as I read this passage this morning, I think of all the kids on this trip and all the kids we need to reach who do not know You. Lord, help us build a youth ministry that reaches every kid, everywhere in every way possible. Lord, every day break my heart with the dire degradation that kids face. The impossible odds of living a life of purpose with knowing You. Everyday, remind me that people, especially young people who have so much hope and potential, are doomed to a life of quiet desperation - stuck in the circumstances they are born into - without you. Lord, use this week to reach hearts of kids and staff who will have a burden to reach others.