Truth For Life

Guest (Male): What's your greatest fear? Ultimately, for many of us, it's death. But today on Truth For Life, Alistair Begg examines the reality of death and shares a message of hope for believers. We're looking at a bold proclamation from Jesus that encourages some but provokes others.

Alistair Begg: "Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death." I wonder: was there ever a promise more bold than that? Was there ever a claim quite as extravagant as this? There in the temple context, in the company of these individuals, Jesus says, "I'm telling you the truth."

Now, in many ways, what he says here in chapter 8 is another way of saying what we already saw back in chapter 6. In the 47th verse of chapter 6, Jesus says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life." So it's the same. To have eternal life is not to see death.

I found myself, as I've been working on the text this week, trying to stand back far enough from it so as not to miss the big picture, if you like—to remind myself of what I'm trying to remind us all about, namely, that the express purpose of John in writing his Gospel is given to us in the 31st verse of 20, where he acknowledges that there were many more signs that Jesus performed, many more things that Jesus said than are actually contained in his Gospel.

But then he goes on to say, "These are written purposefully so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life in his name." Now, we're at the end of chapter 8, but the discourse that we have been following has actually begun back in chapter 7. We read in chapter 7 and in verse 10 that the brothers of Jesus had gone up to the feast. They'd gone up without him. He had come up, not publicly, but in private.

And the buzz of conversation concerning Jesus is quite remarkable. John actually tells us that even his own brothers did not believe in him. It's quite fascinating, isn't it, how close people can be to Jesus, how they can be exposed to the things that he's said and to consider the works that he has done, and yet remain in unbelief. Some of the people were saying, "He is a good man." Others were saying, "No, he's not. He's just trying to lead everybody astray."

In actual fact, the response of people to Jesus is usually quite extreme. The words of Jesus demand a response. It's virtually impossible to simply ignore Jesus. It is too unsettling to pass it off in that way. We've seen this because in chapter 6, after the feeding of 5,000, some of them said, "Why don't we make him a king?" And then within very short order, others are saying, "No, don't let's make him a king; let's kill him."

As I say, I want to make sure that I don't lose sight of the big picture. When you study something like the 51st verse here and the "Truly, truly" statement of Jesus, we have to remember that it comes in a context—not simply the context of the surrounding verses, but the context of entirely that which is going on. And I don't want to miss the drama of the Gospel of John, and I don't want you to miss it either.

Maybe this will be a stimulus for some of us to read the Gospel of John for ourselves. The prologue sets it out. By chapter 2, you have the wedding—the first sign that Jesus did, where water is turned into wine. What a drama that must have been. Then immediately he goes into the temple, and he begins to rearrange the furniture. He drives out these people who are making his Father's house not a house of prayer, but a den of thieves.

We then very quickly find Jesus at a well. At that well, an encounter takes place with a lady who has had five husbands and she's living with a guy. As a result of the conversation, her life is absolutely transformed, and she goes back into the town from which she's come and she sets the place alight. "Come," she says, "and see somebody who told me everything that I ever did." It's drama.

And then you find yourself here in chapter 7 at the feast. Why are you doing this, you're saying to yourself—why this panoramic view? Well, some of you are visiting, and you haven't read John's Gospel. You don't know what's going on. You come to this verse, you say, "Where does this come from?" Well, he's at the feast—the Feast of Tabernacles. It was compulsory for a Jewish man over the age of 20 to show up at that feast as long as he was within 20 miles.

And so, Jesus goes up as well. And there are two particular aspects to that feast. One has to do with water and the bringing of the pitchers and the pouring of the water as a symbol of cleansing—the cleansing that would come through the Messiah when he came. And the other had to do with light—four great candelabras that illuminated not only the precinct there, but spanned out and could be seen from a distance.

And it is in that context that Jesus makes these two statements: "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink." And perhaps when they had extinguished the lights, perhaps when the feast was over, Jesus stands there and he says, "By the way, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness."

The Jewish people knew. The Jewish people were moving by a pillar of light. The Jewish people knew the words of the prophet—that there was one who would come who would be a light for the Gentiles and would be a hope for his people Israel. And yet Jesus stands and makes these claims, and still the reaction is negative. The Pharisees are not pleased at all. And as a result, you read this in the text: they decide to dispatch officers to arrest Jesus. "Go and arrest this man. We've heard enough of this stuff."

The officers return, but without Jesus. And the Pharisees say, "Why didn't you bring him?" And they say, "No one ever spoke like this man." No one ever spoke like this man. Out of the mouth of Jesus came the very words of God. Jesus elsewhere says, "The words that I speak are the words that my Father has given me to speak. The will that I do is the will of my Father for me. I do what my Father is asking me to do."

And that's what makes this so complex, isn't it? Because they want to say, "Oh no, God is our Father," and Jesus says, "Well, God is my Father. If I were to say that God is not my Father, then I'd be telling lies," he says, "just in the way that you folks continue to do." Remember: these things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ and that by believing you might have life in his name. They are opposing him.

The well-worn statement of C.S. Lewis in *Mere Christianity* I have alluded to from time to time—I only get to quote it once every few months, and so today is the day. In *Mere Christianity*, Lewis writes, "I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people say about Jesus: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say.

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on the level of a man who says he's a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

And here Jesus stands and makes this amazing statement: "If anyone keeps my word, he will never see death." Now, he has rattled the cage of his listeners previously, as we saw last time, by saying to them, "Your notion of being free because you are the offspring of Abraham just doesn't cut it." And he points out to them in a very clever way, but in a very sincere way, a necessary way, that freedom which they need—which we all need—is found only in Jesus.

You remember he says to them, "And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." Freedom. Everybody longs for freedom in one way or another. And Jesus is speaking about a freedom that only he can provide—a freedom from meaninglessness. If people are gut-wrenchingly honest about things every so often, they find themselves saying, either on a pleasant afternoon or on a rainy Tuesday, "What am I doing? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Where am I going? And what happens when this breath of life finally leaves me?"

Who gives freedom? Jesus gives freedom. Freedom to know liberation from pain and from decay and from death itself. Freedom from guilt and freedom from a guilty conscience. But instead of those amazing pleas on Jesus's part, instead of it arousing the curiosity of the people to whom he spoke, they decide we'll have nothing of it, and so it descends into name-calling. "Oh, you're just a Samaritan. You're a crazy person. You have a demon."

I mean, think about this for just a moment. They don't realize who they're talking to. They don't realize this—that the one to whom they speak is the one who created them. The prologue: "In him was life, and the life was the light of men. There was nothing made but that which was made, and that was made by the Word." And so they're looking this fellow in the face and they're saying, "You know what? You're just a Samaritan. You're not even a full, proper Jew. You are crazy."

I wish I could have been there to hear this conversation. But if you'd heard this conversation, imagine that you'd been on the bus and you heard a conversation like this. And it started because you just heard somebody say, "You know, if you would keep my word, you would never see death." That'd make you turn around on the bus, wouldn't it? You'd turn around and say, "Who said that?" It's that guy over there.

And then the response of the people: "You know what? You are a crazy person. You're a Samaritan," and so on. And then the response of the one who said, "You will never see death." And he says, "I'm not crazy. I'm simply honoring my Father. What I'm doing is not about me. And if you do what I'm telling you, if you listen to what I'm saying, you will never have to look death in the face." That's actually what he's saying.

Now, remember that the tone, if you like, of Jesus's declarations is the tone of one who has come from the glory of heaven, has left the freedom of the reality of that eternal relationship with the Father and the Spirit and has stepped down into time. I don't think that we ought to imagine that if we could hear him speak that he would have a kind of posh London accent: "I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks it, and he's the judge. Truly, truly I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death." No, I don't think—no.

I think you see, he came to his own. These are his own. He's not talking down to them. Jesus doesn't talk down to people. He gets down to where we are, and then he speaks to us. His own did not receive him. That's obvious. He is looking these characters in the eye and saying, "You know, if you would pay attention to what I'm saying, you will never see death."

He's come on a mission from the Father so that men and women would not perish but have eternal life. We saw it in chapter 6: "This is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes on him—what are we to do? Look on him, consider his identity, and believe in him—everyone who looks and believes should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day."

Now, before we consider the reaction to this statement, we need to understand not only what is meant by Jesus's words, but also we need to pause and say something about the nature of death itself. Let us first of all acknowledge what the Bible says enables us to understand about death. All of us know certain things about death. We know, for example, that death is inevitable. Death is unavoidable. It is actually inescapable. To deny that is to deny the reality that is before us. Our world is full of cemeteries. One out of one dies.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge, especially in light of the Bible, that death itself is unnatural, it is unpleasant, and it is undignified. Unnatural, unpleasant, undignified. No matter what the funeral home tries to do with your body, it's still not really good. The journey of life is the journey of life. It's conception, it's birth, it's growth, and then the parabola goes the other way: decline, decay, death—the dissolution of the body.

Writing to an American lady, again, C.S. Lewis in his writings says to this lady to try and help her think about death in a metaphorical sense: "We're like old cars. We're constantly in need of repairs. We need replacement parts. We can look forward to the fine new resurrection models which are waiting for us in the divine garage." Well, it's a picture. He was good at that.

But perhaps you're sitting there and you're saying, "But I think you're wrong on one thing, Alistair. I think you're wrong to say that death is unnatural." Why is it that people think it is natural? It's largely because in the context in which most of us have lived our lives in the 20th century and into the 21st century, we've been fed a diet from a perspective that is certainly not biblical. To help us somehow navigate the inevitability of things by suggesting that it's really nothing at all to worry about. It's just natural.

Quote from a palliative care doctor: "Death is just a calm fall into a cosmic sleep." No, it's not. We weren't made to die. Death is an intrusion. It's an alien intrusion into the good world that God has made for the well-being of humanity. So what does the Bible actually say? Well, to the Bible we can look. You know the end of chapter 6 of Romans, I'm sure. If you know only one verse in Romans 6, it's probably the 23rd verse, which reads, "For the wages of sin is death."

Sin pays wages. What does it pay? It pays out in death. "But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Death is the dreadful penalty for sin. But if you're going to your local psychiatrist who believes that sin is a Christian neurosis, then it's no surprise that his attempt to figure out how you navigate this eventuality doesn't come anywhere close to consideration of this. How could sin be the cause of death if sin is just a neurosis?

Adam and Eve disobeyed God and condemnation came to us all. Paul writes in chapter 5 of Romans about the way in which this has happened: "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. As one trespass led to the condemnation of all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous."

The great thing about the Bible is it takes it head-on. It helps us to understand that we can think of death in three ways. First of all, obviously, physically. Physical death is when our souls are separated from our bodies. Spiritual death is the separation of our soul from God—our souls are separated from God—which is how we are. And eternal death, when both our body and our soul will be separated from God forever.

So what Jesus is doing here is addressing the spiritually dead while they are not yet physically dead, so that by keeping, believing, trusting his word, they might never taste or see death. In other words, he's making a huge appeal. I ask you: who else—who else can make such an appeal? Who else can make such a claim?

What's your response to this? Do you dismiss Jesus as a crazy person—some half-breed, religious, Samaritan kind of person? A megalomaniac? A guy who's just out for himself? No, examine him. He's not out for himself. He dies on a cross because he's not out for himself. In fact, it's his death that makes possible our life. But that's for later on.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Truth For Life with Alistair Begg. We hope you're enjoying these messages from the "Truly, Truly I Say to You" series. Alistair is exploring important truths that Jesus proclaims in John's Gospel, and we want to encourage you to share these lessons with your children. The current book we're recommending will help get you started. It's called *How to Teach Kids Theology: Deep Truths for Growing Faith*.

This isn't a book that simply retells stories from the Bible. Rather, it provides a practical framework for teaching children how to read and understand Scripture so they're able to apply what the Bible teaches throughout their lives. There are sample lesson plans and activities included to help you start important conversations and answer curious questions about God's Word.

Ask for your copy of *How to Teach Kids Theology* today. It's yours for a donation to Truth For Life, and you can give online at truthforlife.org/donate or you can call us at 888-588-7884. Thanks for joining us. Hope you have a wonderful weekend and you're able to worship with your local church. On Monday, we'll take a closer look at Jesus's promise: how is it possible to never see death? Explore the answer with us next week. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth For Life, where the learning is for living.