In a dramatic story, Jesus raises a young girl from the dead, but it’s a passage where there’s more than meets the eye. It’s ultimately a story about two miracles, not just one. And we see Jesus as the giver of life but also pointing to a restoration that only he can bring.
Category: Commentary
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How does Jesus have a Father? Studying John 5:17
In John 5, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath. This causes a controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees who had an extremely restrictive view of activities which were allowed on the Sabbath.
In John 5:17, Jesus says: “My father is working until now, and I am working.”
That’s a theologically loaded statement.
It’s so much a part of our vernacular. It’s so ingrained in our thinking of God as our heavenly father that it can be easy to lose sight of how radical a statement that Jesus is making to the Pharisees.
Jesus refers to the God of creation as his father.
Jesus is not seeker sensitive with that.
Historical context
In the Old Testament, there were appropriate forms in which to address God and Father was not one of them.
The first Jewish person to refer to God as their “father” was Jesus.
There are a few texts which refer to God as being the father of Israel. But that’s not how individuals addressed God.
It’s fairly uncommon in pagan religions before Jesus.
In fact, it’s uncommon in all of the world’s major religions. It does appear that fatherhood language is sometimes used in Sikhism, although Christianity predates Sikhism by more than 1,400 years.
But Jesus calls God his father.
It’s really pretty personal and intimate language to use in referring to God.
To this point in John, Jesus has made a reference to the temple as his father’s house, in chapter 2.
But this language of fatherhood will start to become commonplace in this gospel. From this point forward, Jesus will make dozens of references to God as his father or God as The Father. Just in this chapter, Jesus will talk of the fatherhood of God 14 more times, and the fatherhood language and showing the relationships between Jesus and God becomes much more theologically dense.
How does Jesus have a father?
But what does that even mean?
That God is Jesus’ father?
Jesus is uncreated and eternal. He’s God and has always been God.
John 1:1 tells us: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
How does Jesus have a father?
Let’s consider several aspects of fatherhood and what that means.
D.A. Carson brings up that when we think of fatherhood, we tend to just think of it biologically. A man and a woman procreate and have an offspring, and the man is the father of the child.
I’m influenced on this subject by Carson, Michael Horton, and Louis Berkhof among others.
The child has his DNA. I think that’s the first place our mind goes when we think of fatherhood.
And certainly, that’s true.
Incarnationally
In one sense, the fatherhood of God and sonship of Christ relates to the incarnation where the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Jesus is eternal and uncreated. But he was not eternally a man.
In the union of Christ’s humanity and divinity, he was born.
Luke 1:31-32, where the angel Gabriel is telling Mary of the son whom she is to bear.
behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David
And Jesus was indeed born, as we learn in Luke 2:7:
unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord
In his humanity, Jesus was born of a virgin, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit through the will of God. In the beginning was the Word. Jesus always was, but he was not always human.
How can an eternal being can be born and fully man is a divine mystery that we cannot fully understand.
But he was born, and in that sense, he is the Son of God.
The word became flesh. That’s not saying Jesus simply took on a human body like he was in the driver’s seat of a vehicle, but that he became flesh. He became a man.
So he’s the son of God, incarnationally. But that’s not the only sense in which Jesus is the Son of God.
Second. He’s the Son of God, from an ethical standpoint.
Ethically
You also have sonship in a moral sense in the Bible.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says:
love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High (Luke 16:35).
In that usage, he’s saying that, in one sense, it is acting like God which makes us like a son.
Follow me for a second.
Again borrowing from Carson. Prior to the industrial revolution, most people went into the same vocation as your parents. If your father was a farmer, you were a farmer. If your father was a fisherman, you were a fisherman. If you father was a blacksmith, you were a blacksmith.
You did what your father did. You were trained by your father.
Some people still go into their parent’s line of work now, and that’s all well and good, but it’s not culturally assumed today that everyone will just follow in their father’s and mother’s footsteps.
But our heavenly father is perfect and righteous. We are not.
But Jesus ties acting like our father in heaven to sonship.
He does the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:9: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called Sons of God.
And that goes both ways. In Acts 13:10, Paul calls a magician named Elymas a “son of the devil.”
Now Jesus is the one who truly is perfect. In his ministry in the world, he truly lived as God because he is himself divine. Fully man, fully divine, and without sin and he is morally the Son of God.
Royalty
Jesus is the royal Son of God.
In the Old Testament, the kings of Israel in the Davidic dynasty are sometimes referred to as God’s son.
The king didn’t refer to God as his father. But he is proclaimed to be God’s Son.
We see that in Psalm 2. Psalm 2 talks of the kings of the earth and their opposition to God. But then talks of a king whom God has called his son.
Psalm 2:7:
7 I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
In the Old Testament, this is applied to the Davidic kings.
We see this language in 2 Samuel 7 when the temple is dedicated.
2 Samuel 7:13-14.
13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14 I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.
But the kings are still ultimately sinful in their leading of the people.
In Jesus, he is the true royal son who came into the world and preached of the kingdom of God.
Israel
Israel collectively is referred to as God’s son.
Jeremiah 31:9, God calls them his firstborn:
for I am a father to Israel,
and Ephraim is my firstborn.
Reminder that Ephraim refers to Northern Israel.
Exodus 4:22-23, Moses has been sent by God to command Pharoah to free the Israelites.
Moses is told:
you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the LORD, Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you, “Let my son go that he may serve me.
With Israel, they had the law and failed to keep it. Jesus kept it perfectly.
Moses gave them the law on a mountain. Jesus gave the new law in the Sermon on the Mount.
They were in the wilderness and sinned. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and did not sin.
The Book of Hosea refers to Israel when it says “out of Egypt, I called my son.” That same verse will be applied to Christ in the Gospel of Matthew.
He is the greater Israel.
Image of God
Jesus is the Son of God in the sense that he is the image of God.
The image of God goes back to creation.
Genesis 1:26:
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
Goes on to say in verse 27:
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
It’s not until the New Testament that Adam is referred to as a son of God. We see that in the genealogy of Christ in Luke 3:38.
Man is created in the image of God. But humanity is also sinful and fallen.
Romans 5:10 says:
if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
We don’t have time to quote the whole passage, but Paul is building an argument.
In verse 12, he says:
just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned
Then he says in verse 17:
because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.
So what Paul is saying is that sin entered the world through Adam and that Jesus is a new Adam who is without sin and comes bringing grace.
Jesus is the greater Adam and the truest example of the image of God.
Colossians 1:15 says: 15 He is the image of the invisible God.
Hebrew 1:2-3 says:
in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. 3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature
In that sense, Jesus is the true son.
I’m giving all of these examples, because Jesus as the Son of God means something.
It’s not a haphazardly chosen title.
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A good and busy October!
This is a post for people who are regular readers. First, thank you. I haven’t been posting as much the last couple weeks. Everything is great, just a super busy time. My birthday, my son’s birthday, and my wedding anniversary are all in October, plus we’ve had a lot of other activity going on.
I’ve still been posting sermons and plan to get into a more regular schedule in November, but for those who frequently check-in on my blog, I wanted to give this update.
Thanks so much!
Blessings,
Josh -
Rescued from the present evil age. Galatians 1:3-5
On a January afternoon in 2003, a father and his son walked through a local park in the city of Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. Twin Lakes sits on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin. As you’d expect for a day in the middle of January, it was cold. The temperatures were well below freezing.
To that point in the season, there had been relatively little snowfall and so the nearby sledding hill, which was often frequented by local children, sat empty. That fact perhaps made it all the more unlikely that a father and his son would be in the right place at the right time.
As they were walking, they came to an outdoor porta potty where they felt like they heard something. It was a whimpering or whining sound. To what must have been their absolute shock, when they opened the door, wrapped in a canvas bag, they found a baby boy.
All alone in that bathroom, exposed to the cold, there was no way the child would have survived if he hadn’t been found.
Because of sin, the whole world is in a desperate situation which will bring death and from which we cannot save ourselves. And just like that baby boy who was found in that Wisconsin bathroom, we too can only know salvation through the intervention of a father. And a son.
In Galatians 1:3-5, the Apostle Paul will talk of how Jesus has rescued a sinful world from the present evil age.
Verse 3:
3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,
The mention of grace and peace is standard in Paul’s opening greetings. He mentions grace and peace at the beginning of all of his letters.
Those two words are packed with theological meaning.
Grace is the unmerited favor of God that he grants to us because of the gospel. Grace is a gift. It’s something that we cannot earn or deserve.
And because of grace, there is peace made with God. The ordering matters. It is grace and then, because of grace, there is peace.
That grace and peace does not come from ourselves, but as Paul says, the source of it is from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
In three verses, Paul has pointed both to the resurrection from the dead of Jesus and now he points to the Lordship of Jesus. For Christians reading this letter today, it can be easy to take these facts for granted, to read over them pretty quickly. But Paul is making important statements about Jesus, especially when we remember that people were undermining the gospel to these Galatian churches. But really, it’s just as important for us to remember what Paul is saying here because there are people in our own time and in our own society who undermine and distort the gospel.
Today, people so often will acknowledge that Jesus really existed but then totally disregard the reality of who he is. So many people love a few moral teachings of Jesus here or there but get real quiet when the exclusivity of Christ gets mentioned.
It’s really easy to be a cultural Christian. But are you a Christ-centered Christian?
And Paul will say much more about Jesus in verse 4.
Now before we look at this verse, I want you to ask yourself this question: “Is this what I truly believe?” Because Paul is pointing to the gospel.
Talking about Jesus, he says:
4 who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father,
There are three significant things which Paul reveals in this verse.
Jesus gives himself for our sins.
This is something that Jesus himself talks about during his ministry.
Mark 10:45:
the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
That is sacrificial language. Sacrifice points to a cost of forgiveness. In the Old Testament, you couldn’t just sacrifice any old thing. It had to be animals without blemish. It was literally costly. It was also an act of faith to trust that the Lord would still provide, even when you had made the sacrifice.
It points to God’s requirement for holiness and necessity of atonement. Most significantly, the sacrifices in the Old Testament pointed to a greater sacrifice that is fulfilled in Christ.
Hebrews 10:12-14 says:
when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, 13 waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. 14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
I could not pay the cost for my sins. You could not pay the cost for your sins. We could not make it right. But Jesus could. On the cross.
Some hear that message and are offended by it. They don’t think that they need Jesus. They think “I never asked him to die for me,” why is that necessary? Why couldn’t a gracious God just forgive us?
Because in a righteous savior going to the cross, being sacrificed for our sins, Jesus is showing us just how costly our sin is.
And this is a point to which Paul will build up in Galatians. Chapter 3, verse 13, Paul says:
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”
Now again, some will be repulsed by that message.But even among those who believe that Jesus died to forgive sinners, people have different views of how to respond to that.
Some treat that as a justification or license to sin. “We’re forgiven. Love, love, love. Jesus is love. He loves you.”
The problem is that too many people want salvation without the savior.
To deliver us from the present evil age
The text continues:
To deliver us from the present evil age.
The Greek word that translated as “deliver” here can also mean “rescue.” I think that’s perhaps a more helpful way of reading this verse. English Bible translations are somewhat evenly split on “deliver” vs “rescue” here.
At the cross, Jesus has rescued us. We were helpless and dead in sin.
Roller Coaster
I read a story this about a rollercoaster that got stuck at an amusement park in California in 2016. 21 riders were trapped 148 feet up in the air.
The ride could not be lowered. Fire Crews were called and got a ladder.
Guess what?
The ladder wasn’t tall enough!
Rescue crews had to go into the ride with a harness. One by one, they took out each passenger and had to manually lower them the 148 feet to the ground.
They rescued them. Those people were not saving themselves. They weren’t getting down by themselves. Without a rescuer, they were hopeless.
We were hopeless at the height of our sins when Jesus came to our rescue.
But as I said, many want the salvation without the savior.
Present evil age
Now there are many things which Jesus rescues us from. The wrath of God, the penalty of our sins, but he also has rescued us, as the text says, from the present evil age.
The present evil age is the state of the fallen world.
Jewish theology had the idea of two ages where there would be a new age that would be greater than the present age. This idea gets picked up in the New Testament. Jesus makes several references to a distinction between ages.
In one sense, that new age has already been realized because of the cross. In Christ, we are forgiven, we have Spiritual blessings, we have an inheritance through Jesus. What’s more, we have a reason for hope. And we have a citizenship which is in heaven.
But we still live in a world where there is still sin as people who have a dual citizenship.
Illustration: Pregnancy
I think about when my wife was pregnant. In one sense, you’re already preparing for parenthood. Especially for the mother. You’re already having to make different lifestyle choices for the health of the baby. You’re making different decisions on spending, you’re thinking about the future.
It’s a time between two ages. There’s the period where you have no kids and the period where you have one, but in the pregnancy, there’s some overlap between the two times.
In Christ, we live in a period of overlap between the old and the new.
Where we are in a world that is fallen but with a new identity in Christ. Where we live in a world where there is sin, but where we have the hope of the gospel. Where we live in a world where there is still death but where we’ve been given the Holy Spirit. Where we still struggle with our own sins but where we have grace and peace.
When we want the salvation without the savior, we cheapen what Jesus has done. It’s not merely a matter of forgiveness so that we can just keep on sinning, but it’s a rescue from a world of sin.
Do you look at the gospel as a rescue mission? For the people trapped in the roller coaster, the rescue crew did not go up there to save them so they could stay on the ride. It was so that they could get out.
The world is dead in sin but the gospel promises us another world.
Jesus has given himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, the last part of verse 4 says:
according to the will of our God and Father
It was the divine plan from all of eternity.
It was the divine rescue that was the only way to rescue a sinful world from the present evil age.
It had to be a divine plan because sinful people could not create our own perfect future. We could not create a new age where we overcome disease and death, let alone sin. Because we continue to sin and the world is fallen, but we have a savior who has overcome the world. And he did that by giving himself for our sins.
The world is dead in sin but the gospel promises us another world.
The response to the gospel
Verse 5. After Paul has talked about Jesus rescuing us according to the will of God the Father, Paul says:
5 to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
To know the gospel, to know the forgiveness which is found in Christ is meant to cause a response of praise.
Now if you don’t believe in the gospel. If you don’t believe that Jesus has died for your sins. If you are not born again in Christ, then there is no reason for you to join in this response of praise.
Praise and giving glory to God follows from knowing you’re forgiven.
And the more we’re aware of our sin, the more heartfelt the praise. And the more we look to the cross, the more we can praise. And the more that we appreciate that we had been in need of rescue, the greater our praise.
to whom be the glory forever and ever.
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Sermon: Not man’s gospel – Galatians 1:11-17
Paul continues to defend the gospel that he’s preaching. In this passage, he points to his own testimony and we’re reminded that the great missionary and evangelist had once been a great opponent and persecutor of the gospel and its believers. Few things point to the power of the saving work of Christ like the inward transformation that Jesus works.
