Are we really better without Jesus?

John 13-16 is a confusing section of scripture because of the mix of emotions. I can just see the disciples excited for the Passover meal with Christ. He has recently been heralded by the public in a triumphant entry to Jerusalem, and things seem to be making a turn for the better as far as his popularity is concerned. Then when they go to share this most precious meal with each other, he washes their feet in a strange moment that John recalls as the full extent of his love. He washes their feet as the beginning of the last lesson he will give to these men whom he deeply loves, and then proceeds to give bad news... a lot of bad news. First he tells them he is going to be betrayed by Judas in what has to be one of the most awkward dinner conversations in the history of the world. Then he tells Peter he is going to deny him that very night three times. Then he lets them know he is going to a place they cannot follow, leaving them bewildered. I cannot imagine the abandonment the disciples must have been feeling at this time.

But Jesus knew his disciples' hearts, just as he knows ours. He knew the feeling of abandonment they must have had at that time, and being the comforting Christ that he was, he offers them comfort in the form of promising the Holy Spirit. Imagine the step of faith that Jesus is asking his disciples to take at this point. "I am going to be killed tomorrow. You're going to be alone, in danger. But I'm sending someone else to step in and take my place, so don't worry." I mean, if I were in a disciple's place at that time, I am going to be freaking out inside. "Who? Who are you sending? A Spirit!? What Counselor are you talking about? You are supposed to be the Christ, the Messiah. You aren't supposed to be killable. There isn't supposed to be another after you. We sold out to this. We gave up everything for this, and now you're going to let yourself be murdered? Let's go back to the countryside. We can hide. We don't have to do this..."

And then Jesus takes it a step further. He says something which I think we often overlook in 16:7- "But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you." So Jesus says it is better for us that the Holy Spirit comes than he himself remain in bodily form. I have to stop and and ask myself, do I really believe this? Now in the eternal perspective, we will get to be with Jesus again, and that will be the best situation we could ever imagine. But that is still yet to come. We are living in the inbetween, in the age of the Church, and our guide at that time is that Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus tells us is better than if he were still walking in the flesh on earth today. Are we really better off without Jesus right now? This passage challenges my thinking on the Trinity to the core.

As I asked myself this question, I was convicted by my own low understanding of the Holy Spirit, as I think many in the church have today. When "Holy Spirit" is mentioned in many evangelical circles, thoughts of speaking in tongues and convulsing come to mind. For that reason, many, like myself, lack a full understanding of what Jesus teaches about the Trinity's third person. He is not flesh and blood like Christ was. He is more. He lives with us, just as Christ lived with the disciples, but he takes it a step further in that he lives in us. He is the presence of Christ in us today. "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." How does Christ remain in us? It is the Holy Spirit that causes us to abide. He is God. Plain and simple. In the same way that we view God the Father powerfully creating the universe with his Words, and passing through a cut up heifer in the form of a smoking pot in making a covenant with Abraham; in the same way we view God the Son as walking on this earth and now sitting at the right hand of the Father expanding his dominion on Earth; so should we view God the Holy Spirit active in the lives of each believer, guiding, counseling, and building his Church, preparing the bride. Too many times we read the book of Acts as the "Acts of the Apostles." I wish it could have been retitled "The Acts of the Holy Spirit" because the focus is on him throughout the whole book. Seriously, go through and read the book of Acts and underline everywhere the Holy Spirit is mentioned. The thing that I so easily forget, is that the same God that moved Peter to go to Cornelius' house, that told Paul to turn away from Russia and take the Gospel into Europe is the same God who lives in us and offers us that same power today. He is the Church builder. So many times I view the redemptive plan as pre-Christ, post-Christ, reincarnated Christ, but I leave out the fact that Christ is building his kingdom right now through the Holy Spirit, and he is using sinners like me to do it. I recently read in a book by Paul David Tripp that our whole lives are premarital counseling, preparing for the great wedding to Christ, to whom we are engaged. That is our sanctification. And who is the pre-marital counselor? The great Counselor. Do we really believe we have this power? Do we live in recognition of the fact that he is God. Are we really better off now that Christ ascended back to Heaven and no longer walks here in bodily form? Do we take this Scripture as Truth? When I reflect in my own heart, I realize I don't. If I believed what Christ said, I would live as if I had the very presence of God living in me.

I pray that I would view God rightly. That is, all three persons of the Trinity. As I view him rightly, I will live in the power that is available to those free children of God who have his presence inside of them. And who will be the one increasing this knowledge and sanctifying me through it? Who else but the Holy Spirit.

Thoughts on John

A few months back, I began to study in depth the John's Gospel. I have studied this book a few times before, but as I was thinking through what the Lord might want to show me for my life, verses from John kept coming to mind, so I decided to slowly study the book in depth. I recently heard that the Bible is best studied as a blank page, each time you open the book, no matter how many times you have read the particular verses before, you read it as if you had never read it, and you let the Word speak to you. I have been trying to read John that way, and as I have read it, I have seen John's primary purpose in writing his gospel. Now, his purpose is stated pretty clearly within the gospel itself: "Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." (20:30-31) You don't have to search long and hard to discover the purpose of John's writing.

Church tradition holds that John penned his Gospel sometime between AD85-95. Just imagine all he had been through to this point in his life. He was the son of Zebedee called by Christ to be a disciple, but not just any disciple, one of the 3 in Christ's inner-circle along with Peter and James. He saw Christ's miracles, he learned his teaching, he gave up all to follow him. He was there when Jesus was transfigured, and he recalls Christ washing his feet on the night of his arrest. He was standing at the foot of the Cross when Jesus, using the last of his energy, told him that Mary was now his mother and he her son. This meant that Jesus was entrusting Mary to his care. He was the first in the empty tomb, and he watched Jesus ascend to heaven. He was there when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, and he was a founding father of the first church at Jerusalem. He served Jesus faithfully there, suffering persecution, and when Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 and the church moved its home base to Ephesus, he went with it. At this point in his life Mary is long gone, the apostles have all been dead for some 25-plus years, and he is the last of those who walked with Jesus face to face. He was there for the whole thing up to this point. Jesus has so affected his life that he would have gladly joined the others in martyrdom, but in God's sovereignty he was left still, waiting patiently for Christ's promised return. So some 50-60 years after Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, he sits to write his memory of these 3 years that changed his life forever. And what does he choose to write? John writes an apologetic.

When you read the book of John as an apologetic, it makes much more sense. First off, John concludes the whole book by telling us that what we have just read is a select few memories of all that Jesus did, which should lead us to ask as we read John, why did he put this story in there? They aren't randomly selected memories, they serve a purpose. Today many of our apologetics seek to prove that there is a God who actually does exist. In this time (and all of history until the Enlightenment period), no one needed to try to prove that a god, or gods existed. Atheism was not an option, everyone believed in some god or multiple gods, so John was not writing to prove that God existed, he was writing to prove who God was. That is, that Jesus of Nazareth was God, and that in his name we can have eternal life. This is the purpose behind each verse of John's Gospel. This is why the stories and miracles that are included were chosen from the endless list that John could have written about.

I fear today that too many in the church view apologetics in one of two wrong ways. The first view is that apologetics are for Bible geeks in seminaries, and not for the lay-person. I fear that too many Christians today when asked to give an account for what they believe would answer "It's just what I believe." or "It's the right thing to believe!" They have never explored their belief in Christ, questioned it, and because of that, they could not tell anyone why they believe what they believe. The truth is that there needs to be a "why." If there is no "why," then there is no more compelling reason to believe that Jesus is God than there is your goldfish in a bowl in your living room. The problem is that Jesus is more compelling than your goldfish. He is more compelling than anything in your living room, more compelling than your whole house, or your job, or any other false god that this world has to offer. Jesus is the most compelling thing in the world. So to leave apologetics to the seminarians and to present Christ as something that you just believe in because you want to believe in it is to give a false account of who Jesus is.

The other view of apologetics that several Christians hold today is that they are arguments that are great for debate. I ran across this too many times in college. I graduated from the University of North Carolina. Don't allow this university's location right in the heart of the Bible Belt fool you, it is a very liberal thinking university. Our New Testament teacher is one of the foremost Atheist thinkers in the nation! My college days were filled with several students and faculty who hated Christians, and let it be known. So, many of my well meaning Christian friends studied hard on apologetics for the sole purpose of being able to make these liberals look as dumb as possible, and to prove to everyone once and for all that they were right. They used apologetics as a tool for being ready for debate, like some kind of modern day Stoic philosophers. The only problem with this is that while many of the liberal population in the school hated Christians, they didn't hate Jesus. Only the Pharisees met Jesus and hated him, and these people are quite the opposite of the Pharisees. They had met a lot of Christians through the media, or churches that burned them, or parents that abused them, but they had never encountered Jesus himself. So why as believers in Christ would we use apologetics to pose ourselves against them even further, to widen the gap? If one view of Jesus is an ignorant false picture of Jesus to the world, the other is a Pharasaical false picture of Jesus to the world. Both are equal terrible views of apologetics.

John starts his book with: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Pretty mysterious talk. What is he saying? He is saying Jesus is God. John starts this apologetic with a statement of Christ's deity, exactly his purpose in writing the book. Except there is something more to his purpose. "But these were written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."John is not just writing an apologetic to write an apologetic. He is writing an apologetic to offer life to those who read it. This is why he continues in his opening statement "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." Because if Jesus is just God, so what? How does that make him any different than any number of false gods of that day? Why believe Jesus is God? It does no more good than to believe that Caesar is God, or that Zeus, or any number of the gods of that day were god. But there is more, because Jesus is more compelling. He stepped into our world, became flesh, and took on our sin, struggle, and suffering in a way that could give life, in the only way that could give life as a matter of fact. Jesus is God because he can do what no other god can do, he can give life. All other gods give based on how much they take. You do do do, they decide whether or not to give. Jesus gave without us doing a thing. That is John's apologetic. This opening statement concludes by ending the mysterious talk about the Word and revealing who the Word is: "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only who is at the Father's side, has made him known." There you have it, Jesus Christ brings grace and truth, something no other god can bring. And he brings it to us as God the One and Only who was with God from the beginning, and who was God from the beginning. I can just hear John as he is finishing this last sentence saying under his breath in Aramaic "Who would you rather worship?"

Apologetics are important. We have to be able to tell others what we believe, and why we believe it. To not be able to do this is to present a Jesus who is no different than any other god, which is a false Jesus. However, to use this kind of knowledge to place yourself on a pedestal above those who don't have it is equally as bad of a use. John teaches us through his Gospel that we need an apologetic, but our apologetics should be used to give life. We need to study the Bible, to study theology, to know all that we can possibly know about Jesus so we can give life. John's life was one given to expanding the kingdom in service to the same King who he walked countless steps beside on dusty roads, sandle in sandle. He knew the Truth, and that Truth had set him free, and thus he had to use that Truth to help set others free. We should do the same.