The Nature of Jesus’ Teaching
John 7:14-18
In our text, Jesus is at the Feast of Booths in Jerusalem, six months before He would be arrested and crucified. Before He showed Himself publicly at this feast, the crowds were debating, with some saying (7:12), “He is good”; but others were saying, “No, on the contrary, He deceives the people.” John wants us to see that neither of those are viable options. Jesus could not have been merely a good man and said the astonishing things that He said.
Just in the Gospel of John so far Jesus has claimed that He came down from heaven (6:51), that He had been sent into the world by the Father . He claimed to be equal with the Father in His nature (5:17-18) and in His works (5:19-20). He claimed the power and authority to give life and to raise people from the dead (5:21, 24-26). He claimed authority to judge all people (5:22, 27-30) and He said that all should honor Him just as they honor the Father (5:23). He claimed to be able to give eternal life. And those are just a small sampling of the shocking things Jesus said about Himself.
At the same time, Jesus was obviously too good of a man to be a deliberate deceiver. He healed the sick and fed the hungry. He was full of love and compassion. John wants us to see Jesus’ glory so that we will believe in Him as Lord and God so that we will have eternal life through Him.
But John knows full well that believing in Jesus isn’t the automatic response to Him. There is always division: some believe, some are indifferent, and others violently reject Him. Here again in chapter 7, John shows us the reaction of the Jewish leaders and the crowds to Jesus when He went into the temple in Jerusalem during the feast of Tabernacles and He began to teach. Although Jesus was sent from God, taught God’s truth, sought God’s glory, and did God’s miraculous works, people rejected Him.
Listen to our text today, John 7:14-24:
14 Now about the middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple and taught.
15 And the Jews marveled, saying, “How does this Man know letters, having never studied?”
16 Jesus answered them and said, “My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me.
17 If anyone wants to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority.
18 He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him.
19 Did not Moses give you the law, yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill Me?”
20 The people answered and said, “You have a demon. Who is seeking to kill You?”
21 Jesus answered and said to them, “I did one work, and you all marvel.
22 Moses therefore gave you circumcision (not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.
23 If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath?
24 Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”
That last verse sums up the reason many could not believe in Jesus. They were judging on appearances, not with righteous judgement. This is what we have found repeatedly in the Gospel of John. People get Jesus wrong because they only look on the surface of things. We saw the crowd following Jesus in chapter 6 because they were simply looking on the surface. They saw bread and wanted more. Jesus’ brothers saw His miracles and just looked on the surface, that’s all they saw. Here these Jews were observing Jesus teach but just looked on the surface and were impressed with His sermon delivery but didn’t hear a word He was saying. In each case these people were judging with wrong judgment. If you judge who Jesus is superficially, you’ll end up rejecting Him as He really is.
So in this passage we are going to see some more reasons that Jesus gives to believe His claims to be God in the flesh. He wants us to consider them seriously, to judge rightly, so that we will believe and be saved. These reasons should compel you to believe in Christ and encourage you in your walk with Christ.
So first we see,
1. The source of His teaching: from God. (7:14-16)
Verse 14, “Now about the middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple and taught.” Jesus did not go up to the feast with His brothers to make a grand entrance. And He does not go to Jerusalem to do more miracles as they advised Him. Rather, sometime in the midst of the feast, He went into the temple and began to teach. John does not tell us the content of Jesus’ teaching in the temple that day, but He does give the reaction of the Jewish authorities and the crowd to His teaching.
His sudden appearance caught the hostile Jewish leaders off guard and made it difficult for them to carry out their deadly intent. As we will see later in the chapter, they wanted to seize Jesus in secret and dispose of Him, but that will be hard to do now that He’s captured the attention of thousands of fascinated worshipers.
Verse 15 gives us their reaction: And the Jews marveled, saying, “How does this Man know letters, having never studied?” They don’t comment on what Jesus taught. They’re intrigued by how He did it, namely, how He could give such a powerful message without having a diploma. When it says, “the Jews marveled,” it does not necessarily mean that they were favorably impressed by Jesus teaching. Instead what we see is that they were amazed at His boldness to teach in the temple without the proper credentials. They ask, “How does this Man know letters, having never studied?” I think they were trying to discredit Jesus by alleging that “this man” makes Himself a teacher, but He has not studied in our schools. Probably, that put-down is coming from the Jewish leaders and addressed to the people listening to Jesus.
Jesus responds to their challenge by asserting (7:16), “My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me.” Jesus is saying, “I don’t need your education and humanly-conferred degrees because I am speaking truth directly from the living and true God who sent Me here to teach.” Jesus didn’t claim originality. He again claims that He has been sent to earth by His Father, something He points out throughout John’s Gospel (4:34; 5:24, 30, 36, 37; 6:38-39, 44, 57; 8:16, 18, 26; 9:4; 11:42, etc). That’s where I got my message, says Jesus, from the One who sent Me.
By the way, that ought to be able to be said about anyone who teaches or preaches God’s word. “My teaching is not mine, it is God’s teaching.” If I am just teaching my own thoughts or ideas, or even the thoughts and ideas of other learned men, I have not real authority. But if I teach the word of God in the power of His Holy Spirit, the teaching is from God, not man.
Wiersbe says it well, “No teacher or preacher can take credit for what only can come from God.” Even God’s Son Himself insisted that the source of His teaching was God, not Himself.
2. The initiative of His teaching: God’s will. (7:17)
Verse 17, “If anyone wants to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority.”
Doesn’t that sound odd to you? Jesus says in order to know whether the source of His teaching is truly God, you must first want to do God’s will. That seems backward. We tend to think, “Prove it to me first, prove that Jesus is truly from God, and then I’ll do what He says.” But Jesus says, “No, you must first desire to do what God wants, and then you’ll have the capacity to discern whether what you are hearing is truly from God.”
The reason that people do not recognize Jesus for who He is does not hinge on having enough evidence, but rather on having enough obedience. If a person is willing to obey God, he will know that Jesus was sent by God and speaks God’s truth.
You say, “I’ve got questions about the Bible. How can I be sure this Book really God’s Word?” Let me ask you this. Are you willing to do whatever God says in your life, no matter how difficult? If the answer is no, then you’ll never get a satisfactory answer to your question for the truth is, because you don’t really want one.
The 1949 tent revival in Los Angeles that catapulted Billy Graham onto the national scene might not have happened if he hadn’t boldly confronted a brief crisis of faith with prayer.
Just a couple of months before the eight-week revival, Graham—then president of Northwestern College—spoke at a California college retreat. Also on the platform was Charles Templeton, another evangelist who happened to be a good friend of Graham’s. Templeton’s trust in the authority of Scripture had been waning.
He challenged Graham with his relatively newfound approach to the Bible, saying Graham’s approach was outdated. People no longer accept the infallibility of the Scriptures, claimed Templeton.
After the challenge, Graham was prompted to grapple with his own beliefs.
Could a Bible college-trained preacher and former Youth for Christ evangelist question his own faith? Yes, apparently.
“I had no doubt concerning the deity of Jesus Christ or the validity of the gospel,” he wrote decades later in his biography, Just As I Am. “But was the Bible completely true? With the Los Angeles campaign galloping toward me, I had to have an answer. If I could not trust the Bible, I could not go on. … I would have to leave pulpit evangelism.”
After the weight of Templeton’s challenge stirred him, he went for a stroll on the grounds of Forest Home retreat center—where he was scheduled to preach the gospel the next day—and stopped at a tree stump.
During his Florida Bible College days, he was known for standing on tree stumps and practicing his sermons at least 25 times before he delivered them.
Now, he found himself kneeling at one, Bible open, praying through doubt—something that was foreign and uncomfortable for him.
“O God!” he recalled praying. “There are many things in this Book I do not understand … There are some areas in it that do not seem to correlate with modern science.”
Moments later, he said he felt the Holy Spirit began to move in a clear way.
Graham then prayed, “Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.”
After his prayer, he recalls his eyes brimming with tears.
“I sensed the presence and power of God as I had not sensed it in months. Not all my questions were answered, but … I knew a spiritual battle in my soul had been fought and won.”
So Jesus is right up front with His audience about what needs to happen. He knows they’ve got questions about who He is, but He tells them flat out that to get those questions answered they must first choose to do God’s will, no holding back. And keep in mind who is in this audience. Jesus is saying this to Bible believing people. They are convinced they are okay with God. They don’t see themselves as needing a heart transformation, but Jesus is helping them see they most certainly do. So He says the source of His teaching is God, not Himself. And the initiative for His teaching is God’s will, not His own.
3. The motivation of His teaching: God’s glory. (7:18)
Verse 18, “He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him.”
Break that apart. He who speaks from himself. We do that all the time. I speak on my own when my wife gives me a piece of loving and constructive criticism, and I become defensive and try to turn the conversation to the flaws in her life. That doesn’t come from God.
He who speaks on his own seeks his own glory. That’s something Jesus said He did not do. Hear Him in John 8:50, “And I do not seek My own glory; there is One who seeks and judges.” So Jesus didn’t seek personal glory, even though He deserves it and will receive it, since His Father is seeking it for Him. When He was on earth, Jesus’ aim was to glorify the Father. He states that this, not rabbinic credentials from the accredited schools, is the test of a true teacher. Again this applies to all who claim to teach God’s truth: If a man glories in himself and his academic degrees, he is not a true teacher of God’s truth. God’s truth will always cause us to humble ourselves and exalt Christ. Psalm 115:1 gives the heart of a true teacher of God’s word. “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, But to Your name give glory, Because of Your mercy, Because of Your truth.”
So Jesus says, “but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true.” Jesus is claiming to be absolutely true, with no hint of deception (7:12) or sin in Him. The only other places in the Gospel of John where a person is said to be “true,” it is used of God (3:33; 8:26).
That’s critical. Do you want to be a man or woman of truth? Jesus says that unless a person is living and working for God’s honor, he will not be a man of truth. Here’s why. The time will come when, in order to maintain his own honor, or even something noble like the honor of his family, or company, or church, he will hold back the truth, or twist the truth, or leave out part of the truth because he fears the consequences to himself or his family or his company or his church. Only when God’s honor is supreme will a person do the hard thing and speak the truth in love in every situation.
Verse 18 ends, “and no unrighteousness is in Him.” Jesus is claiming to be absolutely true with no deception and no sin in Him. The person who is committed to honor the one who sent him is concerned only with accurately communicating what he has been sent to say. He does not use his words to gain a personal following, but rather to urge men to follow the one he serves. He has no need to deceive, and thus he speaks with integrity. His speech is righteous.
Conclusion
Let me just stop there today and apply what we have learned. If you have not yet believed in Jesus Christ to save you from sin and give you eternal life, consider His teaching here. First you must recognize that it is God Himself teaching you in Jesus Christ. In the previous chapter Jesus said it (6:45), “Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.”
Second, you must have a desire to do God’s will. Coming to Christ is not motivated by your desire to get what you want. It is motivated by your desire to do what God commands. This is where salvation begins. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin and righteousness is judgment. The sinner is weary of his sin and his fallenness and his wretchedness, of nature of it and the consequence of it; he becomes a seeker. And he’s not looking for personal fulfillment. He’s not looking for personal benefits and blessings. What he wants is to do the will of God. What draws people to the gospel, what draws people to Christ is a desire to do the will of God.
So if you want to know if Christ is who He claims to be, here’s the test. Are you crying out for a new master? Do you desire the One and only Savior? Do you really want to do the will of God in your life?
Third, you must long for the glory of God. Jesus said in John 5:44, “How can you believe, who receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?” Until you get to the point where your honor isn’t what drives you, but God’s honor is, you won’t believe. You won’t be saved.
And Christians, these three principles apply to you as well. If you want to understand Jesus’ teaching, if you want to grow in your walk with Him:
- Recognize that God Himself is teaching you in Jesus Christ. Believe His words are the words of God and you will grow in your walk of faith.
- Seek to do God’s will. Knowledge of God comes from obedience to God’s word. James 1:22 says it, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” You will know God’s word to be true when you start doing it.
- Long for the Glory of God. You grow in your understanding of God’s word and in your walk with Christ in proportion to your desire for the glory of God. He is worthy of all honor and all worship.
