JOHN072 - How Would You React if a Politician Claimed They Were God?

John 1:29-34

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

This is gonna be weird, real strange opening thought exercise today, but I think it's important and we're gonna do it. And I know this is gonna hit a whole bunch of you differently because we've got a wide variety of friends here hanging out in the room together. I know there are people here who've been around faith for a long time and it's just made sense to you, and it's been a pretty steady thing for you. I know there are others of you for whom it's been a little more up and down, but here you are, for better or for worse, sticking with it, trying to figure it out. You want to know the Bible better. Cool. I know there are others of you who are brand new to this, and every time I talk about things like sacrifices in the Old Testament, you're like, what is going on? This is weird and confusing, but hey, you're still here. Awesome. Thank you, by the way. I know there are others of you who are like, I don't believe in anything supernatural. I'm probably not ever gonna be religious, but I'm really interested in the Bible, and I really like trying to understand the people who do believe in God and who think that the Bible is from God. So a wide variety of people are here in this conversation. I get that in this next question, it's gonna hit you all different, but I kind of suspect you're gonna all have similar answers to this weird scenario I want to put in front of you. Okay, that's enough buildup. Let's let's bounce the scenario off you here. What would you do if your favorite politician came out and did a press conference and announced that they are in fact God? What would you do? It's a laughable scenario. I know it's laughable, but what would you do? Again, this isn't a politician you don't like. This is your favorite one. How would you respond to that? I mean, I I assume you'd be like, well, I like some of your policies, but I don't think you're God, and now you seem kind of dangerous, and you're not my favorite politician anymore. I mean, I I think you'd pretty quickly see through it. I think you'd be able to come up with four or five or ten or a hundred things that would cause you to say, well, that can't possibly be God. That cannot be the originator and maker and sustainer of all things. It just doesn't make sense. I have seen enough stuff from him or her and what she's done publicly. Nah, that ain't God. Okay, but now let's run the same scenario with a politician you don't like. Picture the politician who annoys you the most, who you think is the most corrupt and power hungry. Now imagine that person comes out and is like, well, I wanted to get everybody together to tell you I am God, the maker and sustainer of all things. Well, I think it'd be really easy then for all of us to be like, no, you're not. And further, you are profoundly dangerous and you need to be removed from office. There needs to be a kind, like the some words, some things you just shouldn't say. Now, in that respect, I think we all have some sort of a sense of revulsion at blasphemy. Now, maybe most blasphemy, everybody who I just described from all those different camps who are here in this conversation, thank you again for being here. Maybe for most blasphemy, you'd be able to kind of laugh at it. I mean, Christianity historically hasn't been a religion where, you know, if you rib it too hard, it goes things go kind of nuclear. That kind of hasn't been the vibe of Christianity. I mean, maybe it's because it was a persecuted religion for its first 300 years, and when it tried its hand at being a persecuting religion, it was really ugly, and Christians were the ones who reformed it and pushed back. Maybe it's just because the teachings of Jesus, the founder of the whole thing, are so you know, love your enemy, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, forgive, forgive, forgive. You know, yeah, that can be bastardized and cheapened and weaponized into control and some weird stuff, but it's really hard to get rid of the DNA of that stuff that Jesus taught and then modeled. So my point is that no matter where you're at in your relationship with Christianity, the Bible, God, all of that stuff, I think we all have a certain threshold that can be violated where we're like, nah, that is too much. That is blasphemy. That claim to deity from that dude, from that lady is gross, and that is too much. Point is this it's a very big deal to claim to be God. That isn't the kind of thing that sane people, that socially dialed people just casually throw out. That's a pretty risky claim. It's a pretty easily disproved claim. And any support one might have in any arena is an artist, an athlete, a leader politically or militarily, uh a billionaire who invents things, that support is going to dry up real quick as soon as you start calling yourself God. It doesn't matter how hard you manipulate or what kind of tricks you play, people who aren't God really come off badly when they claim to be God. Okay, why all of this warm-up? Well, because we've been spending time with the stuff in the Gospel of John and the two Johns who were in view at the beginning of John, John the Evangelist, who writes John, and John the Baptist, who is the main human character we encounter in the early going of John. We've been spending all this time with them, and they both are driving toward very big claims about Jesus. However, I would argue that John the Evangelist's claims about Jesus are bigger and more ambitious so far than John the Baptist's claims about Jesus. This is kind of a payoff episode because we've been working on this for a while. You and I have looked at pretty much every word John the Baptist has said up to the baptism of Jesus scene across the Bible. There's a little more John the Baptist stuff we'll get to later on, but up to this point, he's made very bold claims about Jesus. I mean, he's gone so far to say that his entire purpose, the whole point of him, everything he's doing, this whole giant movement. I mean, he might be the most famous man in the Roman province of Judea at this point in his life. And he's saying all of that is about Jesus, who we haven't even seen on screen yet. Dang, that's very, very ambitious. I mean, let's just review it. What all has John the Baptist said about Jesus? Okay, first, he said that John baptizes with water, but Jesus will baptize, or the one who is coming, will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. That's in Matthew 3.11, but it appears other places as well. Mark and Luke cover a lot of the same stuff. Okay, so he baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fired. John the Baptist also says that Jesus is going to take away the sin of the world. Now, as kind of the last Old Testament prophet, John the Baptist, I mean, this is a big bold claim about Jesus. This demonstrates that this is the pivotal moment where all of the interaction between God and humanity pretty much runs through Abraham's descendants, and all of the conversation between God and the prophets in humanity about sin and repentance and worshiping God alone, that's pretty much been between God and Israel. But now all of a sudden, Jesus apparently is the character, according to John the Baptist, who's going to take the thing global. Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The Old Testament has been hinting all along, all these prophets from the Old Testament who come before John the Baptist have been hinting that it was always going to go global, and that all the people from all the lands would see the interaction between the one true God and his chosen people, and whether the chosen people did well or did poorly, whatever, they were still going to get it, and they were eventually, they were going to be led to the throne of the one true God, and they would abandon their idols, people from every tongue, tribe, and nation. Well, now the last prophet of the Old Testament, John the Baptist, is saying Jesus is the guy who takes away the sin, not just of Israel, but of the world. Okay, wow, these are giant claims from John the Baptist, but not quite deity. I mean, look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Um, if you're an original audience member, I don't think you'd take either of these remarks so far the way you would take it in the hypothetical I threw out at the beginning of our conversation. Like you wouldn't hear these claims about Jesus and be like, well, you know, probably got to burn him at the stake. Probably got to, like, there you go. You just blew it. Now you no longer have any support because you're, you know, you're so egotistical and you've got this guy hyping you up, but you know, nobody is God gross. No, we're not, we're not there. John the Baptist hasn't said anything like that at this point. Okay, well, what else does John the Baptist say about Jesus that you and I have encountered? He says that Jesus is more powerful than I in Mark 1. Well, John the Baptist is regarded as very authoritative. Toward the end of Matthew, even the religious leaders who don't like Jesus and who don't like John the Baptist still acknowledge in a question they try to trap Jesus with, that John the Baptist baptized with authority, that he had real authority. Where did that authority come from? So even his enemies regarded John the Baptist as being very powerful. Maybe even acknowledged that the Spirit of God was upon him. Maybe they agreed that John the Baptist was that voice of one calling out in the desert, prophesied by Isaiah. Maybe some of the religious leadership agreed that he was the Elijah who was promised at the end of the Old Testament, if they could accept it. But there's still a lot of real estate between a very powerful prophet and God. So when John says that Jesus is more powerful than John, I don't think that comment from John the Baptist would have sent people scrambling for kindling to burn Jesus at the stake because it's just too dangerous. It isn't a claim to deity. Okay, what claims do we have so far from John the Baptist? One, Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, not a claim to deity, but very significant. Two, Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Not a claim to deity, but a very significant claim. Three, Jesus is more powerful than the most significant religious leader of the day, John the Baptist. Very impressive claim, but not a claim to deity. Number four, John the Baptist says that Jesus predates him. Whoo, that's a big deal because we know Jesus is younger than John the Baptist. But in John 1.15, it says John the Baptist testifies concerning him, Jesus. He cries out saying, This was he of whom I said, he who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me. Okay, so now we got John the Baptist messing with time and the order of things, and he is intoning that somehow, even though he was born after John the Baptist, that Jesus predates John the Baptist. Well, how far does that predating go? A month, a year, ten years, five hundred years, a thousand years, eternity? Well, it's a very big claim, but again, not a decisive claim to deity at this early point in the game when people, you know, in the original audience, in the moment that we're looking at here, we're figuring out what to make of Jesus. And with that, I have got too many things on my list that we now know that John the Baptist has said about Jesus for me to get them all into this episode. So we're just gonna split it in half, and I'll remind you of what we covered on the list tomorrow, and then we'll just get right into it and I'll finish out my list of things that John the Baptist has said about Jesus. And one really notable thing that he hasn't quite said about Jesus yet. Okay, that'll be fun. See you tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.