More powerful than unbelief...

The Hour Has Come – Three Sermons

Part 2: “An Hour of Unbelief…”

(John 12:37-41, Preaching: Pastor Stephen Magee, August 9, 2009)

John 12:37-41 37 Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him, 38 so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: "Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?" 39 Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said, 40 "He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them." 41 Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.

Could it be that an Old Testament prophet saw the Son of God?

A: “Isaiah saw his glory and spoke of him.” (John 12:41)

The hour…

In John 12:23, Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” The decisive hour has come for Jesus Christ. It is also the decisive hour for God’s entire work of salvation. The story of that final hour continues for several chapters in John’s gospel. We are trying to understand what kind of hour it was. We have seen that it was an hour of darkness, meaning a day of ignorance concerning the true plan of God. Even among those who agreed that Jesus was the Messiah King of Israel, there was an overwhelming ignorance of the suffering that the Christ would face to be our King. That betrayed a tremendous ignorance of the Scriptures and of the things that Jesus had taught His disciples. Yet that hour of darkness would eventually have to give way to an eternity of light.

Despite the signs… (12:37)

Not only was this hour an hour of darkness or ignorance. It was also an hour of unbelief. Unbelief goes beyond ignorance. Unbelief knows, and still rejects the Word of God and the signs of the Messiah. Unbelief is a sad fact in the lives of many people.

We often imagine that belief is just a matter of clear evidence clearly presented; that the weight of evidence offered up by a competent communicator will overwhelm the objections of a person that has up to this point rejected the person and message of Jesus Christ. That is not the case. Jesus Himself says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father draws Him” (John 6:44), and again “No one can come to Me unless it is granted him by the Father” (John 6:65). Paul says that faith is a gift from God, “so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:9).

This teaching of the supremacy of God in the gift of belief and the work of conversion is actually deeply offensive to the proud heart. We want to cling to the false doctrine that we are the key figures in any decision to believe, and we too easily reject a God as unworthy who insists that “in love He predestined us” (Ephesians 1:4-5). At root, this rejection of electing love is a determination to place ourselves above God, as a moral judge over Him. The Scripture teaches that God is sovereign in salvation. We don’t necessarily like that, and we imagine that our dislike of a doctrine is more important than whether the doctrine is clearly taught in the Bible. In this way we place our private limited judgment at the very top of the pyramid of our belief system. We will not believe in a god who offends our sensibilities or whose way are impossible for us to comprehend, even if He is the God of the Scriptures.

The fact is that God’s sovereignty in salvation is absolutely necessary. There is no amount of evidence that has its own inherent power to break the back of unbelief. Only God can make us willing to believe Him on His terms, and thus to surrender to Him, morally, intellectually, and spiritually. We somehow imagine our private interpretation as the beginning of all things. It is not. The facts and words of God must be above us. Our opinions, inclinations, and sensory observations must bow before the Word.

Even with miraculous signs, no number of signs and no magnitude of any one sign that Jesus could have performed would have been enough to make people believe in Him. He had already performed very many signs. Each of them should have been persuasive. The six public signs recorded so far in John’s gospel were increasingly weighty, culminating in the calling of Lazarus from the dead after four days in the tomb. We are told in John 20:31 that these six signs and the final seventh sign of the resurrection of Christ Himself were written that we might believe. Yet it is the power of God alone that can grant the supernatural gift of faith. Only that divine gift enables a person to receive the obvious fact of any sign. There was nothing lacking in Jesus’ signs. But many did not yet have faith.

A rejected Messiah (12:38)

There is always unbelief among people, but there is more here. This hour of the generation of Jesus’ ministry and of His last week prior to the cross was an hour of particular unbelief. This is communicated to us by John through the quotation of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Looking forward to the coming day of the death of the Messiah hundreds of years after his own day of difficulty, Isaiah writes of the day of Jesus. He says, in the words of Isaiah 53:1-3,

Who has believed what they heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Shortly after the resurrection, when the Spirit was poured out upon the church in Jerusalem, there would be an unusual moment, not of unbelief, but of belief. Thousands would embrace the message of Jesus as Messiah. This movement of belief would spread throughout the Mediterranean world. We read about it in Acts. That day is not the day of John 12, and it is not the day that Isaiah wrote about in Isaiah 53:1-3. That day was a day of special unbelief. In the days just prior to the death of our Lord, it seemed like almost no one believed in the cross. Almost everyone who heard the plain story of a Savior who would atone for sin by His own death rejected the message and put it aside. Furthermore, no one at all seemed to believe in the swift resurrection of Jesus from the dead, though He had told them that He would rise in three days. Even the women going to anoint the body of Jesus on that Sunday morning were only expecting to find His dead body in the grave.

Jesus was despised and rejected by men, and so was His true message of His own death and resurrection as the end of the Old Covenant age of the Law and the beginning of the resurrection age. Particularly in the last days of His life, despite the great signs that He had performed and the crowds that were keenly interested in what He was doing, a wave of foul unbelief spread over Jerusalem. Suddenly people would want to hide their faces from His exposed and brutalized body, and it would be an undeniable and surprising fact that people would not esteem Him as worthy. Remember that those who wanted to kill Jesus thought for sure that they had to capture Him away from the view of the crowds, for they were sure that the people would come to His defense. They need not have concerned themselves. He was a rejected Messiah, and His critical hour was an hour of striking unbelief.

The ministry of a rejected servant (12:39-40)

Where did this come from, this unusual hour of unbelief? The answer is hard to fathom, bringing us back to the teaching of the Scriptures that God is sovereign in the granting of faith. John quotes again from the prophet Isaiah, this time from Isaiah 6, when God was calling the prophet to a ministry that would largely be rejected.

Isaiah 6:8-13 8 And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Then I said, "Here am I! Send me." 9 And he said, "Go, and say to this people: "' Keep on hearing,1 but do not understand; keep on seeing,2 but do not perceive.' 10 Make the heart of this people dull,1 and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed." 11 Then I said, "How long, O Lord?" And he said: "Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste, 12 and the LORD removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. 13 And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled." The holy seed is its stump.

This was a word for Isaiah’s own rejected ministry coming toward the end of an era, as Judah would soon be sent into exile, but it was also a vision for a later day when the entire Old Covenant would come to an end in the cross of the final Prophet, Jesus. God would blind their eyes and harden their hearts, because the Lord had determined not to heal Old Testament Israel as Old Testament Israel. He had a better plan that required that a Day of Judgment come upon them in their temporary rejection of the Jewish Messiah. It was His sovereign will to bring that day of unbelief, just as it was His sovereign will that Jesus His Son would die for us. It was not that God delighted in unbelief any more than He delighted in the suffering of His Son. It was a critical and necessary component in His greater work of salvation. It is not for us to judge Him on this point, but to receive His Word, and to wonder at His greatness and the glory of His coming kingdom that would justify the decree of an hour of such unbelief.

Isaiah saw (12:41)

We are also given some indication by the Apostle Paul that the end of the gospel age will come with a great hour of apostasy and unbelief. We see throughout the history of the church that God’s distribution of the grace of faith comes in surprising movements of faith that seem to come for a season and then go. How does God sustain His people during an hour when unbelief seems to be everywhere? John directs us again to Isaiah. (Read the earlier verses in Isaiah 6.) He tells us that when Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up in the heavenly sanctuary, he actually saw Jesus, the eternal Son of God, and he was strengthened for what was a difficult life. We need to see the Lord today with the eyes of faith as we read and believe the Word of God. Do what Isaiah did in an hour of unbelief. See Jesus in His heavenly glory, speak of Him, and live for Him. (Read Jude 17-25.)

Questions for meditation and discussion:

1. What was the reaction of the people to the signs that Jesus did?

2. In what sense could it be said that a rejected Messiah could have been anticipated?

3. What was God doing with the Old Covenant and New Covenant through Jesus?

4. What did Isaiah see, and how does that relate to Jesus?