“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. I do not receive glory from people. But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

The ruling Jews came to Jesus in John 5:16 with an accusation – He was “working” on the Sabbath. What’s more, He encouraged another to “work” on the Sabbath, and so they sought to persecute Him. Having committed no sin and therefore being unrepentant, Jesus doubles down in John 5:17 with one sentence: “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” He is the Son of God, inheritor of what is the Father’s, a co-equal to God. This doesn’t make His accusers take a step back, look at Jesus’s claim, His teaching and His miracle work and question themselves. Instead their hard hearts go from desiring His persecution, to desiring His death. In today’s passage we see the close of Jesus’s explanation to these teachers of the Law. Here again He gives explanation to His position and authority and the blindness of these men that allows their Messiah to stand before them without them truly seeing. Their devotion is to the Law, but not to the God from whom it came.

1. The Law is not Found in Rules

 “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.”

The pursuit of eternal life is something we see expressed more than once in the gospels.

Matthew 19, Mark 10 and Luke 18, all hold the same account of a rich young man who asks Jesus what He must do to receive eternal life. In Luke 10 a lawyer asks Jesus what he should do to inherit eternal life. It makes sense that so long as mankind has known the sting of death, we have desired to avoid it. God openly acknowledged this desire in us in Genesis 3:22-24,

“Then the LORD God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—’ therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”

We know that Jesus is the living water that sates spiritual thirst forever, we know that He is the bread of life, which nourishes and satisfies spiritual hunger. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life, believing in Him is the only path to the Father and eternal life. But this begs the question: Do we seek God, and in Him receive eternal life, or are we in our flesh seeking to live forever and willing to accept God along with this desire? The order is crucial, as the cart doesn’t pull the horse. To prolong life is a desire of the flesh, but Jesus sets our priorities straight in Luke 12:29-31,

“And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.”

During the 400 years between the Old and New Testaments God was silent. There are a number of reasons that this could have been, but it does offer up a question: did God need to speak? If we look back to the book of Judges, we see that after Joshua died there was not a clear leader in Israel, but if we pay attention to the context of the situation, there didn’t need to be one. God had established His people, freed them from Egypt and given them the Law through Moses. He gave them instruction, and brought them into the promised land through Joshua. The people knew what to do, they had a clearly given guide in the Law from God and had the priests to provide a sense of spiritual leadership. But they were disobedient, following the lusts of their hearts, going after false gods and sinking progressively deeper into apostasy. If we look at the intertestamental period, the situation is primed much the same. God’s people have been restored to their promised land after a remnant was delivered through destruction and exile, they have the Mosaic Law and the teachings of the prophets. God has become silent, but there are promises pending, prophecies waiting to be fulfilled, and priestly system still in place. If the Lord isn’t speaking, all that’s needed from His people is to emulate Him and be silent, be still and wait on the promises of God to come to pass in patient obedience – but they didn’t. While some Jews presumably turned aside to follow false gods during the 400 years, the greatest idol to arise among them during that time was the Law itself. Forgetting God, who teaches His people to be loving and compassionate toward their brothers, harsh legalism became the point of obsession for the Jewish rulers. The “law” that they originally accuse the man Jesus healed of violating in John 5:10, isn’t part of the Law at all, but an addition they implemented to force a greater adherence to what they imagined as the letter of the Law. This is an example of what Jesus accuses them of in Matthew 23:4,

“They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”

The Law was always about drawing closer to God, but the teachers in Jesus’s time had made the Law about itself and proving how morally adherent you were. But to take the Law from God, seeking to rigorously adhere to it, while also removing His Spirit from the practice is a complete fallacy. Psalm 14:2–4 says,

“The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one. Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the LORD?”

The moral authority of man is bankrupt without God. This is what many people do today, distilling religion down to a set of moral points that can be naturalized. They cherry pick from the ten commandments, pieces of Jesus’s teachings, or take philosophical ideas from another religion altogether. They abide by the rules (or some of the rules), and in this adherence they’re able to think of themselves as a “good person” by the moral standard they’ve adopted. This is what the Jewish leaders of Jesus’s time had done, clinging to the Law so rigorously that it had supplanted God in their hearts and minds. And so, because of their pursuit and adoration toward legal perfection without the right heart, Jesus, the one who is the key to the very thing they seek, can’t be seen for who and what He is. In a horribly ironic position, they cannot receive Him because despite the Law they hold, they do not know the Father.

2. The Law is not Found in Works

“I do not receive glory from people. But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me.”

It’s important to remember that just because the religious elite are largely in a state of spiritual rebellion before God, and blind to the truth of Jesus as the Son of God, it doesn’t diminish His glory as the Christ. It is right that people see Jesus for who He is and Glorify the Father by glorifying Him, but His glory doesn’t come from men. John 2:23–25 tells us,

“Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.”

In Matthew 26:62-64, during the mock trial before His crucifixion, Jesus declares His position plainly before the entire council of the Sanhedrin,

“And the high priest stood up and said, ‘Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?’ But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, ‘I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.’”

This is the final straw, the words they needed to press forward with their intent to see Jesus crucified. But what we see from both passages is that Jesus’s glory is neither established nor stripped away by men, but is fixed firmly in place by God.

“If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?”

One of the things that made Jesus’s teaching so powerful and refreshing to those He preached to was that He taught straight from the Law. An unfortunate quality that developed in the additional rules that were layered on top of the law during the intertestamental period, was that the people would be taught from other rabbinical teachings instead of from the Law itself. With so many extra rules heaped up on the Law, different schools of thought developed around how best to adhere to these rules. We see examples of the teachers and lawyers attempting to trap Jesus into one school or another. In Matthew 19:1-9, a Pharisee asks Him about lawful divorce, which depending on His answer could have put Him in line with either the teaching of the more liberal Hillel or the more conservative Shammai. But rather than operate off of the teaching of another, Jesus gave His answer directly from the Law, and in His response, removed the problems with the teaching of each school. In Matthew 22:23-33, some of the Sadducees come to Him with a question about marriage in the resurrection. This too is a question intended as a trap, as the Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection and are trying to trip Jesus up. In this too, Jesus doesn’t pull from the ideas or teachings of another, but references the Old Testament directly. After His discourse with the Sadducees as well as in His conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7, we see that the crowds that heard Him were “astonished at His teaching.” Matthew 7:28–29 tells us,

“And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.”

So much of the teaching that the people received during Jesus’s time wasn’t from the Law, but from teachings about the Law. In a sort of telephone game, through teaching from teachings instead of the original source, the Law was distorted. To go back to the matter of divorce from Mathew 19, Shammai taught that divorce was acceptable for any unchastity, which could be stretched to apply to something as simple as not wearing a head covering. Hillel, going even further, taught that you could divorce your wife for essentially anything you found displeasing, the most commonly used example being burning dinner. But despite the fact that these teachings were wrong, they were highly popular and revered, with the religious leaders splitting into factions over them. These are the same people that Jesus warns of in Matthew 23:1-3,

“Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, ‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice.”

These are the hypocrites He references in Matthew 6:5,

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.”

What we see is that these teachers had set aside the spirit of the Law and used it as a tool for their own gain. They became enamored with their own works, bickering over who was right, glorifying themselves for who they found to be the most moral and legally correct. Obsessed with their own interpretations on the Law, they forsook God and were blind to the Christ when He came.

3. The Law is Found in God

“Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

Exodus 4:10–12,

“But Moses said to the LORD, ‘Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.’ Then the LORD said to him, ‘Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.’”

Moses is revered. In Christianity, Judaism and even in some of the theologically vague beliefs of the world, the prophet who is known as the giver of the Law holds a position of respect. The religious elite in Jesus’s time prided themselves on the ancestry and ceremony of their station, taking validity from being “sons of Abraham” and enjoying the authority of ruling from Moses’s seat. Their power and their hope were placed in harsh legalism that missed the spirit behind the Law they were so obsessive over. What this loses sight of is that the Law did not come from Moses, it came from God. Moses should be held in high esteem, as he was obedient and used to great purpose by God. But he was only significant because of the light of God that shone through him. Before the Lord spoke to him, he had fled Egypt and was living as a fugitive, tending sheep in a foreign land. It was entirely by God’s hand that he was raised to be one of the greatest prophets in history. You can’t praise the works of Moses without praising the God that blessed and enabled him to perform the works. But the teachers who oppose Jesus reveal how misguided their practices are in that they don’t understand the very Law they teach. They cannot properly prize the teachings and Law given by Moses and not understand that they came from God, and if they understood the nature and Spirit of the Law, then they would have seen the truth around Jesus’s testimony. But then, if you twist and pervert the words of a messenger, how could you hope to know the intent of the Master who sent the message? In John 5:19-46, Jesus eloquently lays out a case, validating His position and revealing the hypocrisy of these teachers. This helps us see why their response to Jesus’s declaration that He is the Son of God was to seek to murder Him. In John 8:44 Jesus tells a group of ruling Jews,

“You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Their morality is a lie and their response to the truth of Jesus’s words is murder. And so their hypocrisy is revealed and put on display, and they serve now as they served then: a pillar of wrong practices and a prime example of who not to be, both toward our fellow man and in our relationship with the Holy, Living God.

** I know I talked a lot about things pertaining to the Jewish teachers in this outline, and I wanted to give a quick rundown to help people navigate this, as I’ve been told it can get a little confusing. This may not be the best approach, but it’s as simple as I can think to put it. The Pharisees and Sadducees: You could almost think of them as Republicans and Democrats. These are the two groups that make up the Jewish council of the Sanhedrin, which you could think of sort of like congress or the senate. The Pharisees are very showy – long robes, loud public prayers, good deeds done for people to see. They’re well respected by the people in general, but are mainly puffed up and empty. They are the more frequent public opponents of Jesus. The Sadducees hold a greater position of power, but are more lowkey in their appearance and expression. Where the Pharisees are mainly focused on being thought legally moral by the people, the Sadducees are more focused on rubbing elbows with the Roman government and staying in their good graces.

The schools of Hillel and Shammai: Going back to the US political system, this would be like holding fast to the ideals of a former government official. The United States has a collection of founding documents, but in the course of our history, different leaders have had different interpretations of how these documents should be implemented. It would be like saying that you’re a Regan Republican or a Kennedy Democrat. Hillel and Shammai were extremely popular teachers whose interpretation and expansion on the Law was widely accepted – not necessarily because they were right, but because of the behavior they permitted while still allowing people to believe that they were under the Law. **

Pastor Chris’s sermon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuW9uoHRbEU