John 5:41-47

⁴¹"I do not accept praise from men, ⁴²but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. ⁴³I have come in My Father's name, and you do not accept Me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. ⁴⁴How can you believe if you accept praise from one another, yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God? ⁴⁵"But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. ⁴⁶If you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. ⁴⁷But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?"

Jesus continues to admonish the Jews. When Jesus says, “I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts,” He is giving additional reason for the Jews’ refusal to accept the testimony about Him. He is also accusing them of failing to keep the command of Moses to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). No one can love God without admiring and submitting to His authority. On the other hand, when the love of God does not act within a person, there can be no desire on their part to obey Him. For an audience who is persecuting Jesus to the point of seeking His death, this reprimand is enraging. They believed that their love for God was such that they were upholding the glory of His name by silencing folks like Jesus. But they failed to appraise Jesus correctly. And Jesus was separating the sheep from the goats. This was His purpose in telling parables. He came to divide the insiders and the outsiders, and then to unite the insiders as one body.

When Jesus says that He came in His Father’s name, He is testifying both that He is the Son of God and also that He is completing perfectly the work that the Father has given Him. This teaches us that we ought to reject all teachers who exalt themselves, and claim authority over souls in their own name – consider Catholicism, which claims the authority to forgive sin and transfer souls from purgatory to heaven through prayer. Jesus continues, saying that the Jews do not accept the One who comes in the name of the Lord, but that they do accept false teachers and prophets who come in their own names. This is proof that the love of God is not in their hearts. Moses himself explained this test to the Jewish people (Deuteronomy 13:3 “You must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love Him with all your heart and with all your soul”). And we must watch for this as well. How often have the commands of God fallen on our deaf ears while the temptations of Satan sink right in? Hearts that love and fear God are inclined to produce obedience.

V44 begins with Jesus’ question to the Jews, “How can you believe?” Calvin comments rightly:

As it might be thought harsh to say that those who were from their childhood the trained disciples of the Law and the Prophets, should be charged with such gross ignorance and declared to be enemies of the truth, and as this might even be thought to be incredible, Christ shows what it is that hinders them from believing. It is because ambition has deprived them of sound judgment; for He speaks, in a peculiar manner, to the priests and scribes, who, swelled with pride, could not obey God. This is a remarkable passage, which teaches that the gate of faith is shut against all whose hearts are preoccupied by a vain desire of earthly glory. For he who wishes to be somebody in the world must become wandering and unsteady, so that he will have no inclination towards God. Never is a man prepared to obey the heavenly doctrine, until he is convinced that his principal object, throughout his whole life, ought to be, that he may be approved by God. But it may be thought that the wicked confidence, by which hypocrites exalt themselves in the presence of God, is a greater obstacle than worldly ambition; and we know that this was also a disease with which the scribes were deeply infected. Christ intended to tear from them the false mask of sanctity, by which they deceived the ignorant multitude. He therefore points, as with the finger, to the grosser vice, by which it may be made manifest to all that nothing is farther from their true character than what they wished to be reckoned. Besides, though hypocrisy exalts itself against God, still, in the world and before men, it is always ambitious; nay, more, it is this vanity alone that swells us with false presumption, when we rely more on our own judgment, and that of others, than on the judgment of God. He who in reality presents himself before God as his Judge, must, of necessity, fall down humbled and dismayed, and finding nothing in himself on which he can place reliance. There is no other way in which men can be prepared for receiving the Gospel than by withdrawing all their senses from the world and turning them to God alone. We need not wonder why, then, that the Gospel in the present day finds so few persons willing to be taught, since all are carried away by ambition.

To summarize, the Jews, contrary to Jesus (v41), are enslaved by a desire to receive the praise of men. They delight in receiving glory from men, who admire their sharp precision in understanding the law. They are not even averse to giving glory to other men who are equally discerning. But they refuse to accept God’s own testimony about Christ, and hence will not believe in Him. Even the scholars who had studied the Scriptures all their lives, when they were confronted with the One who fulfilled the Scriptures, did not believe, but “stumbled over the stumbling Stone” (Isaiah 8:14; 1 Peter 2:6-8).

We would do well to learn from this example: if even the Pharisees, who devoted their lives to studying the Scriptures, were condemned for their blindness in failing to see Jesus at the center of those Scriptures; then how much greater will our condemnation be, when we have the whole New Testament in which the disciples preached Christ from the Old Testament, having been taught by Christ Himself (Luke 24:44-48), and inspired by the Holy Spirit (2 Timothy 3:16) – if we are in so may ways better off than they, how much more indicting will Christ’s accusation be against us, if we fail to see Christ at the center of all the Old Testament Scriptures?

Despite the Jews’ failure to come to Him, despite their sinful desires and corrupted wills, Jesus will not condemn them. Instead He says that Moses does. Scripture does. Scripture condemns them. It points to Jesus, and they deny it. Jesus does not have to condemn them – Moses has already condemned them, for they had read what Moses wrote of Christ, and still did not believe. And it is quite natural that, if they did not listen to Moses, who wrote of Christ, then neither would they listen to Christ himself, who spoke the same things as Moses, only more clearly and authoritatively. Jesus did not have to condemn the Jews. He just exposed their true, evil natures, and showed that they were condemned already. Their hopes were set on Moses in the sense that he was their hero. But Christ needs to be the hero. He is the King of kings and Lord or lords. And He reminds them of the Day of Judgment. This is the way in which we ought to deal with obstinate and hardened persons, when they learn nothing by instruction and friendly warnings. They must be summoned to the judgment-seat of God. Yet notice the pain-laden question at the end. How sure are you of your stance, knowing that judgment is around the corner? Will you stand on your own righteousness before God? Or will you rest on Christ’s?

They did not believe because they could not believe. Sin had so enslaved them, so brought their hearts and their wills to bondage, that they weren’t at liberty to believe. That’s how serious sin is. That’s how serious a thing it is to be an unbeliever. To be an unbeliever means that you cannot believe, unless God in His sovereign grace and mercy does something extraordinarily powerful to change our hearts and minds and wills to enable us to believe and respond. And if you didn’t see that here in chapter 5, you’ll see it with more force in chapter 6, and again in chapter 8, and again in chapter 10. The sign of a good teacher – the apostle John recording the Words of Jesus by the Spirit’s inspiration – is repetition. And we’ll get this message repeated so we can understand that true saving faith comes only by the grace of God to the elect. It’s a hard message, but a message that brings us to our knees before the God of salvation. “Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” The great question in this chapter is, “Who is Jesus?” He is the one at whose feet you bow with Thomas and exclaim, “My Lord and My God.” That, John in saying, is the only real issue.