Don’t tell God who He is!
We must get to know God and let Him teach us how we should think about Him and view Him.
May 15
Later Jesus said to them again, "I am going away. You will search for me and die in your sin. You cannot come where I am going."
John 8:21
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Don’t tell God who He is!
The Jewish leaders were regularly harassing Jesus. They would challenge His teaching. They would scoff at His miracles. They would challenge Him to prove that He was who He said that He was. Jesus would usually respond to them but never in the way they expected. In yesterday’s reading these same Jewish leaders had brought a woman who had been caught in the very act of adultery (Where is the man?) to Jesus to have Him determine what should be done to her. Jesus’ response was to confront each of these Jewish leaders with his own sin.
The Jewish leaders are back again, and Jesus makes this proclamation to them in our verse for the day. First, Jesus tells them the He is going to be leaving. That is not news to us; we have read that He has been telling His disciples that for a while. It is news to the Jewish leaders. If Jesus had stopped there, the Jewish leaders could have probably gone away happy thinking the problem was soon going to take care of itself. But Jesus had much more to say to them.
Jesus told them that after He was gone that they would be looking for Him, but they wouldn’t be able to find Him. Understand that Jesus knew that He was going to be going to the cross and it was these Jewish leaders that were going to see that it happened. They would see Jesus die. When Jesus said that they would be looking for Him, He was not referring to the person that He was but what He represented. Jesus was the Messiah that the Jews knew was coming to save them. After Jesus was gone they would still be looking for the Messiah but because they had missed Him while He was there they will die in their sins.
People are still looking for the Messiah. They are looking for someone to save them from the life they are living or the mistakes they have made. People still want to be rescued. But just like the Jewish leaders they will refuse to see the truth as it is laid out before them. The hard reality of life is that there are many people who will go through their entire lives searching for the answers to their life but will reject the truth that is found in Jesus because it doesn’t fit in with their view of how it should go.
The Jewish leaders were waiting for a Messiah to deliver them from the oppression of the Roman government. They were waiting for a king. Jesus didn’t fit the job description that they had developed for the person who would fill this role. We have got to be so careful not to do what the Jewish leaders did; putting God into a box that He must fill so that we will believe. We must get to know God and let Him teach us how we should think about Him and view Him. And then we must teach others to do the same thing. The Jewish leaders were the leaders of the people and many people followed them. The people who follow you will perceive Jesus the way that you lead them. Jesus, teach us to see you as you are and not as we think you are.
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