Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s, Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 26th September 2021). As always, you can always listen and watch this on our YouTube channel.
ETHOS
Thanks for the feedback on our series on the Beatitudes. It’s been a pleasure and a challenge to spend time grappling with those incredible words. The reason we did so, as I said at the start of that series, was to work on our heart as a church—we want to become Kingdom-orientated people, salt and light. People of humility. People who lament and hope. People who are meek. People who crave God etc.,
As we leave that series, and launch into a new series this morning, our reason remains the same—we’re spending time working on the heart of MCC. The series that follow this will do the same. We are not going to rush through this period, because heart surgery is not something that you rush.
Over the coming weeks, we’re going to look at our ETHOS—we going to spend time looking at our values, our non-negotiables, the things that are important to us as we seek to be people who express the centrality of Jesus: SCRIPTURE, SEEKERS, SPIRIT, SERVICE, SABBATH, SANCTUARY, and STORIES.
This morning, I have the pleasure of starting us of with the “small” topic of Scripture. And, I’ll admit, I’m nervous, because this is no small topic, and I know I’ll be misunderstood. I’ll apologise to you straight away, we’re not going to have a conversation about the history of the Bible and how it came together, or its relationship with history, or about translations, or its multiple genres and its use of language, or the complicated working relationship between Divine inspiration and the Bible’s human authors, or methods of interpretation.
They’re all important topics, but I’m not going there. I’m stupidly, and ineptly, going to a more dangerous place, and talk about why, as Jesus people, we are committed to picking up a particular book.[i]
I don’t know if you have ever thought about it, but it is a peculiar thing to do.
I make no apologies for this. But one of the values of MCC is that we will actively engage the Scriptures, allowing them to wrestle with us as we wrestle with them.
But why?
Well, I could just say something along the lines of what the 16th century reformer, John Calvin said in his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion. He said that the scriptures are like a set of glasses; we look through them to see God. The Scriptures bring all our blurry, fuzzy, and confused ideas about God into focus.[ii]
But what does that mean, exactly? And what happens if we wear the glasses upside-down? And what if the person wearing those glasses, decides to interpret what they are seeing differently? Furthermore, if the Scriptures bring everything into focus, what is that focus?
To help explore this, we’re going to practice what we preach and open up the Scriptures together, and explore a scene recorded in John’s gospel (John 5:31-47).
BED MATS AND BROOMSTICKS
As a bit of context to John 5, Jesus has caused a ruckus, a commotion, a disturbance.
At the start of John 5, Jesus heals a man and commands him to pick up his sleeping mat and walk. It’s a wonderful miracle! But, there is a problem—it takes place on the Sabbath, a day of rest. And as this healed man walks away from Bethesda carrying his sleeping mat, some religious leaders spot him, and tell him off for working on the Sabbath day (they see his carrying of his sleeping mat as work, as breaking the rules).
The man understandably defends himself, and explains that he’s only carrying his mat because, ‘[T]he man who healed me told me “pick up your sleeping mat and walk”’ (John 5:11).
That’s when the ruckus starts. The religious leaders aren’t happy about the idea of someone going around granting “unauthorised” consent for working on a Sabbath day. When they find out that it was Jesus who issued this instruction, they then start harassing and interrogating Jesus over why he broke the Sabbath rules (John 5:17). It is a who-do-you-think-you-are style of interrogation.
Of course, Jesus responds.
Now Jesus could have responded differently—Jesus could have engaged in a conversation about these “Sabbath rules”, and how carrying a sleeping mat is not work, and about what Law of Moses says and doesn’t say about observing the Sabbath (as he does in Mark 3:1-6, Luke 6:1-10 or Luke 14:16, for example).
But Jesus takes another route, and says something that infuriates the religious leaders. He replies, ‘My Father never stops working, so why should I?’ As John writes, ‘So the Jewish leaders tried all the more to kill [Jesus]. In addition to disobeying the Sabbath rules, he had spoken of God as his Father, thereby making himself equal with God’ (John 5:18).
I want you to note that they have harassed Jesus and now want to kill Jesus.
We won’t explore, this morning, why Jesus’ words ignite the anger of the religious leaders, or why they understand them the way they do. But following this, Jesus starts to give a defence for who he is, and why he does what he does, and who it is that testifies (gives evidence) on his behalf. And we’re going to jump into the middle of Jesus’ defence, at John 5:31.
READ: JOHN 5:31-47 (NRSV)
MISSING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
‘[T]he Father himself has testified about me. You have never heard his voice or seen him face to face, and you do not have [God’s] message in your hearts, because you do not believe me—the one he sent to you. You search the Scriptures because you believe they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!’ (John 5:37-39, NLT)
What powerful, jolting, table-turning, puzzling, challenging words.
It’s worth noting, that when Jesus speaks these words, the New Testament didn’t exist. Jesus is talking about the Hebrew Bible, what we call the Old Testament. We’ll come to the New Testament later.
If we let the words of John 5 sink in, and let them turn the cogs of our heads, then all sorts of questions start to arise. Jesus’ words would have certainly ignited hundreds of questions in his original audiences brains.
As we read this passage, it is important to remember that Jesus is speaking to people who are devoted to God and to the Scriptures. They are people who love the Bible, they read the Bible, they study and discuss what we know as the Old Testament on a daily basis, seeking to follow it, to apply it and be faithful to its testimony.
But Jesus tells them that they don’t actually have the Word of God (with a capital W), they don’t have God’s message within their hearts (John 5:38). They don’t have God’s message, because he, Jesus, is God’s message—he, Jesus, is the one who is sent to them.
According to Jesus, if they only understood the Scriptures then they would recognise that through the God-breathed words of the Scriptures, God, the Father, has given his witness statement, God has given evidence, about the Son.[iii]
Again, think about that, let it sink in: They have the Bible, but they don’t have God’s message.
How would this go down if someone said this in church today?
They have the right texts, the right God-inspired, God-breathed words, but they’ve read them the wrong way, and Jesus’ charge against them is that they have mistaken the Scriptures for something they are not, and were not intended to be:
‘You search the Scriptures because you believe they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!’
As Eugene Peterson translates it in the Message, ‘You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me!’
That’s a huge claim to make. But if we are to take Jesus seriously, then according to Jesus, Scripture doesn’t point to itself, but points beyond itself to Him. Scripture does not say that it is the source of life, but it exists to point people towards the source of life: Jesus.
In other words, Jesus is their subject matter, he is their focus, their point of reference, he is what the Old Testament is all about, and what it has always been about. If you want to understand the Old Testament, then Jesus is the interpretive key—Jesus reveals its meaning, its shape, its texture. It all hinges on Jesus. All these God-breathed words gravitate towards him and find their fulfilment, their substance in the Word made flesh.
To put it in a way that John’s gospel has already hinted at from its opening paragraphs: Jesus is the Word of God, and the inspired words of Scripture speak about him.
The Scriptures do perfectly exactly what they are intended to do—point us to Jesus. As a theologian called, Greg Boyd puts it, ‘all Scripture is God-breathed for the ultimate purpose of pointing people to Jesus Christ.’[iv]
‘All Scripture is God-breathed for the ultimate purpose of pointing people to Jesus Christ.’ – @greg_boyd, Inspired Imperfection
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And yet, according to Jesus, in his words to these religious leaders, that ultimate purpose can be sidestepped. According to Jesus, it is also possible to read the Bible and to hold the Bible as sacred, but to understand the Scriptures in such a way that their meaning is distorted, their intent is lost, and their authority is misapplied. Apparently, you can be devoted to the Bible, and not be devoted to the Word of God. Further than this, you can be devoted to the God-breathed words of the Bible, and actually be opposed to the Word of God.
Apparently, you can be devoted to the Bible, and not be devoted to the Word of God. Further than this, you can be devoted to the God-breathed words of the Bible, and actually be opposed to the Word of God.
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Remember, these specific religious leaders want to kill Jesus—they not only refuse God’s message, but they are actively out to kill the Word of God, and their premise for doing so in based on their understanding of the Scriptures. Now that’s messed up![v]
To rephrase something I said a moment ago: The Scriptures can do perfectly exactly what they are intended to do. Everything depends on how you read Scripture.
This is why, many years ago, the very wise C. S. Lewis, the famous author of the Chronicles of Narnia, once wrote, ‘It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.’[vi]
It sounds like Lewis is saying something radical there—and I supposed he is. But he is only paraphrasing Jesus’ own radical statement in John 5:39. If we are going to read the Bible, we do so knowing that Jesus is its focus.
We start with Him, because if we don’t then it is possible to take the Bible and to bend it out of shape, to use its authorised voice in an unauthorised way, and to use it to form and shape something that does not bear any true resemblance to its point of reference, which is Jesus.
THE INVISIBLE MAN
Of course, all this generates questions. What am I saying? Or, more to the point, what am I not saying? How are we to understand this relationship between Jesus and the Bible? And what does this mean whenever we come to read the texts?
Also, why has Tristan been playing with a bandage whilst he’s been talking? (Reader note: As I was speaking, I was wrapping a bandage around my arm)
Well, I love my analogies. And so, as I’ve pondered this topic over the past few weeks, I’ve been searching for an illustration to help explain it and to help us grasp it. I think I have one. Although, like all analogies, all pictures, it has its limits—and, if I’m honest, it may not be any good at all.
My mind went to a story written by H. G. Wells called, The Invisible Man. To be more precise, my mind actually went to the films based on that book—especially the original 1933 black and white version, and the 1951 comedy classic, Abbot and Costello meet the Invisible Man.
If you’ve seen either of those films, then you will know that the Invisible Man is always wrapped in bandages (he also normally wears clothes and a pair of sunglasses). Whilst he’s wrapped in the bandages, he can be seen. But the moment he removes the bandages, the clothes, and the sunglasses you can’t see him anymore—all you would have would be a pile of bandages.
Now if you were to come into a room and happen to find loads of unravelled bandages on the floor, they would not make sense—without the form of the Invisible Man inside of them, you wouldn’t say they look like anything particular. Actually, you could pick those bandages up and wrap them around numerous things, and shape them as you see fit, making them look like anything you please. But the only way those bandages make any real sense, the only way they achieve the shape they were intended for, is when they are wrapped around the form of the Invisible Man.
At the same time, if, whilst you were messing around with these unworn bandages, someone came into the room and claimed to see the Invisible Man, they would be lying. He’s invisible! Without the bandages, they too could make the Invisible Man take whatever form they want. They could say he’s 6 foot 3 inches, really broad, size 34 waist, amazing biceps… but without the bandages being wrapped around the actual form of the Invisible Man there’s no real basis for anything they say.
I did warn you that this may not be a good analogy!
But, I would understand the relationship between Jesus (who is revealed in the New Testament) and the Scriptures of the Old Testament being akin to the Invisible Man and his bandages.
Sadly, in the past, there have been, at one extreme, those who have worshipped the bandages. They find a single verse, or a particular narrative and theme, and they craft the bandages into the shape of whatever they see fit—they allow their understanding of the bandages to dictate the form instead of bringing those God-breathed bandages to the shape of Jesus, and allowing the shape of Jesus to determine the meaning of the text.
On the opposite extreme, there have been those who have disregarded the bandages—they want to just throw them away, or cut them down to size. Their reasons for doing so may be because they’ve imagined their own shape to Jesus. Or, understandably, they hear a text like John 5, and they wrongly think Jesus is saying you don’t need the Scriptures, because Jesus has now come. As such, Jesus gets unplugged from the Jewish story, the narrative of the Old Testament, the hopes and promises of God, and instead becomes plugged into anything we feel like. He gets wrapped in Greek ideas and dualistic theology instead of Hebrew ideas; or wrapped in our political ideologies instead of the Kingdom of God; or bound up in our consumer wants instead of the cross; or shaped to suit our theological slants.
But we need the bandages, and we are not granted another set of bandages use—the bandages of the Scriptures are the bandages God has decided to breathe through, it’s these bandages which are shaped around Jesus.
Admittedly, some people are right to say that we don’t have a physical Jesus with us, so how can we ever get this right? How can we wrap these bandages around someone we can’t see. But that’s actually why we have the writings of the New Testament. Jesus’ disciples, his earliest followers, wrote down their experiences, their encounters, so that we could know who Jesus was. Not only that, but if you read the New Testament closely enough, with a knowledge of the Old Testament, you will see Jesus, and those who write about him, taking the bandages of the Old Testament and wrapping them around the form of Jesus Christ.
As Tom Wright puts it, ‘[T]he Bible is the God-given means through which we know who Jesus is. Take the Bible away, diminish it or water it down, and you are free to invent a Jesus just a little bit different from the Jesus who is hidden in the Old Testament and revealed in the New.’[vii]
We can’t cutely dismiss the Bible. At the same time, we can’t just take the Bible and read it without Jesus as the key to it all. We need the bandages, and we need those bandages wrapped about the form of Jesus.
In many ways, these words only speak with their intended authority as God-breathed words when they are wrapped around the Word of God.
In many ways, the words of Scripture only speak with their intended authority as God-breathed words when they are wrapped around the Word of God.
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Now what I’ve said may or may not make sense. That’s OK. I can tell you now, it certainly does not settle all the debates—there are many who take the stance I have shared with you that still come out with different conclusions. But it is the right starting point.
And that’s why we are going to, without apology, value Scripture, and actively engage with it when we meet together, and allow it to wrestle with us as we wrestle with it. If we want to know Jesus, if we want to work out from the centrality of Jesus in our lives then, aided by the Spirit of God, and in the context of community, we are going to grapple with the Bible.
To be clear, we don’t worship a book—we worship the One this book speaks of.
We don’t seek to just read, recite and remember some verses—but through them, with Jesus as our key, we seek to understand the Scriptures and be formed by God, through the power of his Spirit, into the image-bearing likeness of the Son.[viii]
We love the Word of God, and so we actively engage in the Scriptures because they point us to Him.
‘Open my eyes, so that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.
Psalm 119:18 (NRSV)
‘Simon Peter replied, “Lord, to whom would we go? You alone have the words that give eternal life. We believe them, and we know that you are the Holy One of God.’
Peter, John 6:68-69 (NLT)
[i] There is obviously going to be more to this conversation, and the tangents it prompts, than what I can (and will) say here. But it is not wrong, as Christians (even Spirit-filled Christians, for those who use such labels), to say that we are people of a book—we stand in a long line of descent when claiming this. As the excellent Pentecostal theologian, C. E. W. Green, spells out, ‘The [Church] Fathers understood our relation to God as centrally, essentially, literary and interpretative. Knowing God, they believed, comes in knowing Jesus, the Word of God; and knowing Jesus comes in knowing the Scriptures, the words of God. Consequently, everything depends on how the Bible is read.’ https://www.cewgreen.com/post/the-lord-is-about-to-pass-by-the-movement-of-god-in-the-movements-of-scripture
[ii] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.6.1 (and also I.14.1). John Calvin makes this comparison in the context of a conversation about general/natural revelation. According to Calvin, without having our eyes opened or aided by some specific revelation, natural revelation is not enough, due to our ‘blurred vision’, to enable correct knowledge of God. A little further on from this, in I.6.1, Calvin also adopts the analogy of Scripture acting like a thread through the ‘inaccessible’ ‘Divine countenance’—without this ‘thread to guide our path’, this labyrinth would be inextricable (I.6.3, also I.13.21). Of course, Calvin, throughout his Institutes, more than understands that these ‘glasses’ can be misused and misunderstood. With regards to the relationship of Scripture (the word of God) to Jesus (the eternal Word of God, as Calvin dubs), Calvin, in the context of understanding the Trinity, writes the following: ‘But the clearest explanation is given by John, when he states that the Word—which was from the beginning, God and with God, was, together with God the Father, the maker of all things. For he both attributes a substantial and permanent essence to the Word, assigning to it a certain peculiarity, and distinctly showing how God spoke the world into being. Therefore, as all revelations from heaven are duly designated by the title of the Word of God, so the highest place must be assigned to that substantial Word, the source of all inspiration, which, as being liable to no variation, remains for ever one and the same with God, and is God’ (Institutes, I.13.7)
[iii] Additionally, just before this, John 5 records Jesus telling them that they have never seen God nor heard God (verse 37), and records Jesus going on to tell them (in verse 43) that he, Jesus, is there to represent, to show God to them. As John writes in his opening chapter of this Gospel, no one has even seen God, but we do see God when we look at Jesus—who is the Word of God, God in flesh, and who has shown the Father to us. All other words find their reference point in him. (cf. John 12:45)
[iv] The full quote, in which Greg Boyd emphasises the importance of maintaining the traditional understanding of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, is as follows: ‘The plenary inspiration of Scripture has always been understood to require adherents to consider every passage of Scripture to be God-breathed and to therefore contribute something to the revelatory content of Scripture. Indeed, Jesus himself taught, and the church has always confessed, that all Scripture is God-breathed for the ultimate purpose of pointing people to Jesus Christ.’ (Gregory A. Boyd, Inspired Imperfection: How the Bible’s Problems Enhance Its Divine Authority, p. xvi).
[v] A further example of this would be the Apostle Paul. As a zealous devotee to an understanding of the scriptures, Paul persecuted the Word of God (Acts 9:1-6, Galatians 1:12-16, Philippians 3:4-8).
[vi] C. S. Lewis in a letter, 8 November, 1952, in W.H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C.S. Lewis, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), p. 247, as cited by Martindale and Root, The Quotable Lewis, p. 72.
[vii] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture, p.28. The full quote is: ‘In the Bible all authority belongs to God and is then delegated to Jesus. The risen Jesus doesn’t say, “All authority in heaven and earth is given to . . . the books you chaps are going to go and write.” He says, “All authority has been given to me.” The phrase authority of scripture can only, at its best, be a shorthand for the authority of God in Jesus, mediated through scripture. … [T]he Bible is the God-given means through which we know who Jesus is. Take the Bible away, diminish it or water it down, and you are free to invent a Jesus just a little bit different from the Jesus who is hidden in the Old Testament and revealed in the New. We live under scripture because that is the way we live under the authority of God that has been vested in Jesus the Messiah, the Lord.’
[viii] For those who may be wondering about my view of the Godhead, I am fully Trinitarian and in the Chalcedonian sense. I do not see Jesus as an aspect or attribute of God, a lapse in the Divine nature, nor a mere refraction of God—but fully God, of the same essence, eternal with the Father and the Spirit, but distinct in the person of the Son. When we look at Jesus, we see God. Some may feel that placing Jesus as central in interpretation and revelation diminishes the Father and the Spirit, or exaggerates the revelation of the Son. But, as per the Jesus Collective, ‘Placing Jesus at the centre doesn’t compromise the Trinity — it celebrates the Trinity and brings it into focus. The Holy Spirit points us to Jesus, and when we look at Jesus, we see the exact image of God the Father.’ (from the @Jesuscollective Instagram account, dated March 2nd 2021)
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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