Spirituality Column #728

October 27, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Knowing What Isn’t So

By Bob Walters

“… you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.” – John 7:52, Pharisees rebuking Nicodemus for daring to remind them that their law applies to Jesus, too.

You have to be careful about what you say to whom these days.

Whether politics or pandemics, economics or environment, gender or justice, patriotism or wokeness, religion or the Supreme Court, which lives matter or which lives don’t, public discourse is an endless minefield of truth-or-dare when we open our mouth or hit “send” on a post.  Then as now, it was the same risky idea for Nicodemus.

Unwelcome opinions guarantee a dangerous swim in roiling, unknown waters.

If there is no other lesson from the Bible – although I assure you there are many – it is that as much as humanity has “progressed” in the past 2,000 years, mankind is still basically the same. Technology is amazing; man’s proclivity to deceive is mystifying.

Nicodemus … I just love Nicodemus.  I ache for Nicodemus.  I think he truly “got it” – after a time – that Jesus was exactly who He said He was, acted like He was, and represented what He was – the Son of God, the promised Messiah, the saving Christ.

Nicodemus sensed that perhaps the prevailing Pharisaic narrative on this “Galilean” speaking so much distasteful opinion just might have an “in” on divine truth.

Jesus indeed was the fulfillment of God’s prophetic promise to reign in the whole world, over all people, through the Jewish nation and out into all the earth.  Just like the Pharisees mistakenly thought the Messiah would be a conquering soldier to kill the Romans and make the Jews the world’s most power nation, today we think Jesus came to solve our problems, heal our ills, give us stuff, free-pass our sins, and save us into heaven because by golly, we are that important.  And we ARE that important.

But not like we think. Turns out, in capital-T Truth, God’s glory is that important.

It was to the curious, highly-educated, surprise visitor Nicodemus the Pharisee, in the deep of night, that Jesus privately said the words we now know as John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”  Nicodemus had ears but didn’t hear.

The Pharisees had their narrative on Jesus almost exactly backwards.  It was Jesus’s truth that would truly fulfill the Law and save all who believe.  But it was their own destructive Pharisaical narrative they obeyed.  They were in gravest error.

John 7:52 (top) offers a seemingly minor point about Galilee, but it’s an egregious error similar to the many public narrative lies we are fed today.  In the temple the Pharisees “knew” a narrative that wasn’t so: that Jesus came from Galilee.  In truth, as prophecy said and they should have known, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. 

It was truth they ignored; a detail left unchecked.  The pious Pharisees were so darkened by their self-serving narrative that they missed God’s true light of the world.

Jesus came to initiate God’s Kingdom on earth; to fulfil the God-promised, prophetic purpose to bring the Jewish nation and all humanity back into His glory by the work, obedience, and covering of their sin by Jesus. The Messiah God, it turns out, was a loving, humble, servant of others; not a strong-armed tyrant or marauding earthly king.

The lesson is that the truth may not come from where – or be what – we expect.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) encourages all to vote with discernment.  Amen.