25 Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, “Is not this the man whom they seek to kill? 26 And here he is, speaking openly, and they say nothing to him! Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ? 27 But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from.” 28 So Jesus proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, “You know me, and you know where I come from. But I have not come of my own accord. He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. 29 I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.” 30 So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come. 31 Yet many of the people believed in him. They said, “When the Christ appears, will he do more signs than this man has done?”

32 The Pharisees heard the crowd muttering these things about him, and the chief priests and Pharisees sent officers to arrest him. 33 Jesus then said, “I will be with you a little longer, and then I am going to him who sent me. 34 You will seek me and you will not find me. Where I am you cannot come.” 35 The Jews said to one another, “Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? 36 What does he mean by saying, You will seek me and you will not find me,’ and, ‘Where I am you cannot come’?”

37 On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” 39 Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

40 When they heard these words, some of the people said, “This really is the Prophet.” 41 Others said, “This is the Christ.” But some said, “Is the Christ to come from Galilee? 42 Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” 43 So there was a division among the people over him. 44 Some of them wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him. 45 The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, “Why did you not bring him?” 46 The officers answered, “No one ever spoke like this man!” 47 The Pharisees answered them, “Have you also been deceived? 48 Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? 49 But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed.” 50 Nicodemus, who had gone to him before, and who was one of them, said to them, 51 “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” 52 They replied, “Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.” - John 7:25-52

Confusion

People are terribly confused by Jesus. As we read the passage, we see a swirl of different opinions about who Jesus is precisely. Some people say think Jesus just might be the Messiah due to signs He performs. Others doubt it. Some people are confused about His origins, some people are offended by where He comes from. Some people are just drawn in by the spectacle. Some people think He is a prophet, others think He needs to be silenced.

Two weeks ago, Aaron preached a really killer sermon on the first half of this chapter and showed how if Jesus, the most brilliant teacher and most loving human being who has ever lived, was misunderstood by the crowds, the authorities, even His own family, then we shouldn’t be surprised if people misunderstand us. Here, in the second half of the chapter, we see just how controversial Jesus is due to this confusion. People to His right and people to His left are confused and scandalized by Jesus.

Jesus never scandalizes for the sake of scandal; His commitment is to the Truth—He is Truth. And Truth is messy, and inconvenient, and beautiful. I had a seminary professor who used to say “Let the crooked tree grow where it wills.” Truth is external to us. It is objective, it is concrete; it is not fabricated in our own mind. So, when we submit to truth, we don’t craft it to align with what we would like to be true—it doesn’t fit our ‘narrative.’ It just is true. So, there will be times where Truth will line up neatly with our assumptions. And there will be times where the tree will look “crooked” to us; where it will grow in ways that are inconvenient to our ‘narrative.’

Most of the time, if we follow Jesus, we will live quiet lives of godliness—we will be shock absorbers in a world that loves the spectacle of an earthquake. But, occasionally, like Jesus, our commitment to Truth will lead us into being misunderstood, even scandalous.

But if you are in love with the praise of others, you won’t be able to follow Jesus for long.

“If I profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity. Where the battle rages the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle-field besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point.” (Elizabeth Charles, 19th century Anglican)

Let’s take a controversial example that polarizes people in our culture. Life is more complicated than this, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s take the two main sides in culture wars—conservative and liberal, right and left—and take something that polarizes them. Let’s consider abortion. What does the Bible say about that? Two things: (1) Abortion is the unjust murder of a defenseless human being; it is not reproductive health care or justice, it is treating a human being like they are not a human being, and (2) Those who have participated in abortion—consented to it, paid for it, pressured another into it—can repent and receive full, free, and unqualified forgiveness from Jesus Christ.

Statistically, one in five women in this room have had an abortion. More have been affiliated with it in someway. And if you are one of those individuals, you likely are not shocked by the first point, because we are a fairly conservative church. But the second point you may be more suspicious of. But Jesus is abundantly clear: if we bring our sins to Him and repent of them—meaning, we call them what Jesus calls them, sin, and we turn away from them, we don’t embrace them or defend them or pretend they didn’t happen, but call it sin—and then bring them to Christ and ask Him for His mercy, He will forgive us, and cover us. Meaning, the woman who had an abortion is just as forgiven and just as righteous in God’s eyes as the woman who didn’t.

Jesus cuts against the false errors in traditionalism and progressivism.

And if you are a young woman in here today and you get pregnant, then know that this church is a safe place for you, a place where we want to offer help to you so that you don’t feel like an abortion is the only choice you have. Even if you are confident your family will hate you for what you did, we will not. We will walk with you through this. Not because pre-marital sex isn’t a sin, not because we will not call you to repent and forsake your sin, but because this church is where all of us—whether we wear purity rings or not—recognize that we are sinners who all enter by the same doorway: Jesus Christ. So our church becomes a safe place for sinners, even if it isn’t a safe place for sin.

Jesus doesn’t fit into our cultural boxes. The crooked tree grows where it will.

Power

Jesus is like a sheep amidst wolves in this passage. The powers at large have set plans to apprehend Jesus and here He is, right under their nose, at a large festival taking place in Jerusalem, standing up in the middle of the temple teaching (John 7:14). And apparently, it is common knowledge that Jesus is to be arrested. As people are listening to Jesus teach, they point and say to one another: Isn’t this the guy whose face is on all the ‘Wanted’ posters? The outlaw stands at the footsteps of the courthouse and teaches like He is in a Sunday school classroom, unworried and undisturbed. No one touches Jesus.

Why? It isn’t because the authorities have had a change of heart. Verse 32 tells us that the chief priests and Pharisees send officers to arrest Jesus, yet at the end of the chapter they come back empty handed. “The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, “Why did you not bring him?” 46 The officers answered, “No one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7:45-46). As the officers are pushing their way through the crowds to slap cuffs on Jesus, they can’t help but hear His teaching. And like an ice cube before the sun, their resolve melts. They stop moving towards Jesus to hurt Him, and make a different kind of move towards Him. They are now drawn in. They have never heard teaching like this.

What is happening?

We are told earlier: “So they were seeking to arrest him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come,” (John 7:30). The head honchos of the temple are trying to take Jesus down, but they can’t—the bullets they shoot turn into harmless balls of smoke, the shark teeth they try to sink in turn into gummy bears: they can’t get Him. There is a kind of force field around Jesus preventing evil from ripping Him apart. **His “hour” had not yet come. Time is in God’s hands. Jesus knows that no matter how big and bad the bad guys are, they are still under God’s control. They don’t get their “hour” until God permits it.

In John’s gospel this ominous “hour” refers to the period of time from Judas’ betrayal of Jesus till His death. Jesus is aware that until that hour arrives, the bad guys can’t touch Him. And even when that dark ‘hour’ arrives, the hour when they will arrest Jesus, and mock Him, and beat Him, and crown Him with thorns, and nail Him to a cross—when the bullets and teeth tear His flesh—Jesus knows that all that evil, real terrible evil, is still a part of God’s plan. Through it, He will actually defeat evil, and sin, and Satan! And three days later, He will resurrect to a new glorious life. So, even when evil bites, it still remains toothless.

Notice how calmly Jesus explains in verses 32-36 that He will soon be leaving everyone—that is, He will be crucified, buried, resurrected, and then will ascend back up to the Father. His impending death—which is a real evil—doesn’t stop Him in His tracks, doesn’t make Him break down in anxiety, doesn’t crush Him. Because He knows that His very death—that hour—is in His Father’s hands and the Father won’t abandon Him.

This same calm permeates God’s people. The apostle Paul, towards the end of his life, tells us: “The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen,” (2 Tim 4:18). Paul is confident that a similar force field surrounds him. God will rescue him from every evil deed. That’s a strange confidence for a man who is writing while in prison, who has been whipped, shipwrecked, stoned. Nevertheless, he is confident that the Father will bring him “safely” into his heavenly kingdom. Do you know how you enter God’s “heavenly kingdom”? You die. Paul has a very different definition of “safety” than we do. Which is important for us to hear, because we love “safety.” And by “safe” we mean that we are exempted from danger, risk, or harm. And for Paul, “safe” means something more eternal and lasting than bodily safety.

Evil cannot finally hurt you, Christian, even if it kills you. If you die, you rise again.

So you too can have the calm of Christ, of Paul. Paul, the man who told us: be anxious about nothing but in everything pray. Which is hard for us to believe, because it feels like there is so much danger, so much for us to be worried about.

The Millennial Mom to Saint Paul by Blessed Endurance (Substack)

You say, “Be anxious for nothing,” But, surely, you did not mean Nothing? St Paul, my brother, let me tell you The things for which anxiety is true: Pesticides, rising tides, A child’s tears Which he will recount in twenty years To a godless clinician who will blame it on me. You’ve seen shipwrecks and murderous threats, But it’s nothing to being Unheard, unseen, Failure to reach my full potential, Being named less than prudential, Can’t you see, That’s not nothing for which to worry? You seem to have gone extreme, And virtue lies in the mean, In nuance and understanding, In equivocating carefully, Be anxious for nothing Seems a bit dismissive Of my struggles and situation; see, While you are held in Roman chains I fret in my air-conditioned domain Over micronutrients‘ impact on the brain, And now that we know so much, St Paul, It changes the way We ought to behave. The stakes are higher, The straits are dire, Brother Paul — We could die of cancer! Leave some questions unanswered! Live in discomfort! Be anxious for nothing Must have been easy for you to write By candlelight, With armed guard Standing beyond doors barred. You don’t know the privilege you hold; Having been whipped and stoned, Hunted down and left for dead, Is nothing to my millennial dread That you should so naively say, To pray.

Experience

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” 39 Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (John 7:37-39)

All throughout this chapter, Jesus has been teaching in the temple, speaking with other people. Here, he cries out. He yells. John makes sure we know that this happens on the final day of the feast of booths, the great day. This was eight days after the beginning of the feast, when there was a massive, solemn assembly of worship.

On the seven days of the Feast, a golden flagon was filled with water from the pool of Siloam and was carried in a procession led by the High Priest back to the temple…The water was offered to God at the time of the morning sacrifice, along with the daily drink-offering (of wine). The wine and the water were poured into their respective silver bowls, and then poured out before the Lord. - Carson, PNTC

“Moreover, these ceremonies of the Feast of Tabernacles were related in Jewish thought both to the Lord’s provision of water in the desert and to the Lord’s pouring out of the Spirit in the last days. Pouring at the Feast of Tabernacles refers symbolically to the messianic age in which a stream from the sacred rock would flow over the whole earth.” (J. Jeremias, TDNT)

If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

Notice that Jesus does not say, “If anyone thirsts for God…if anyone thirsts for righteousness…if anyone thirsts for what they ought to thirst for, let him come to me.” He doesn’t qualify it. He just says, “Are you thirsty?” You can’t not think of Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well in John 4, where He offered her living water. In that conversation Jesus identified that the woman had been using her relationships with men to try to satisfy her thirsts.

Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly…Everyone concealed that little hell in himself, while publicly pretending it did not exist—and when he was caught up in it he was completely helpless. - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

What leaves you “completely helpless” when you are caught in it? Jesus isn’t criticizing you for being thirsty, He isn’t looking down on you for wanting to be happy, to feel loved, to experience pleasure and comfort and satisfaction and joy. If your life feels dry, if your soul feels like a withered husk, and the attractive, sympathetic co-worker who wants to meet for drinks after the conference, sounds like it might just be the thing to bring a thrill back into your life…or maybe it is just one more Amazon purchase to stave off the feeling of dreary boredom…or one more ‘atta boy’ from work…then know that Jesus isn’t disappointed that you feel thirst, He just wants you to bring that thirst to Him! The affair, the package, the promotion won’t give you what you think it will give you. And you know it won’t. You know it can’t. But you have this thirst and you can’t pretend that you don’t.

You are hungry for God. You are thirsty for living water! Heave your thirsts upon God! Submerge your dry and dehydrated heart in the fountains of living water!

And so much of the battle we have in the Christian life is the battle of our imagination, which somehow makes the sand of sin look like water, and the water of Christ look like sand.

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstacy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm. - Simone Weil

And so, Jesus invites us to come and bring our thirsts to Him. The NASB has a little translation note next to this verse that tells us that we could translate this passage as: “let him keep coming to Me and let him keep drinking.” We are intended to drink and keep drinking; to come and keep coming. Never fearing that we will exhaust Jesus. Every other water source may run dry, but the more deeply we drink of Jesus, the deeper the well becomes. We will never run the river of God dry.

How do you drink? Vs. 38 tells you, by believing, by trusting in Jesus.

1. Your sins have rightly separated you from God and, unless something changes, you will remain separated Him from all eternity.
2. Through His life, death, and resurrection, Jesus has provided the way for sinners to be reconciled with God.
3. You can experience that, today, but yielding and submitting to Jesus as the King of your life and Savior of your soul. He loves you, He will not forsake you, so collapse into Him, push all your chips onto His square, and bank entirely on Him to save you…and you will be saved!

And not only will you be saved…you will be changed.

God will pour His very presence upon you. His Holy Spirit will be given to you and you will experience the satisfaction your soul was made for, what you thirst for, what you are looking for in drink, and sex, and winning.

Jesus tells us that what He is offering is “according to the Scriptures”—the tricky thing is that we cannot find one place in the Old Testament that has this precise wording. Jesus appears to be taking a major theme in the Scriptures and interpreting it for us here.

• God’s people while wandering the wilderness are dying of thirst. And God has Moses strike a Rock, and water gushes forth, and saves the people. The Apostle Paul, in 1 Cor 10:4 believes that Rock to be a picture of Christ Himself. In John’s gospel, when Jesus is crucified, a soldier pierces His side with a spear, and we are told that blood and water pour out. Jesus is the Rock of Ages, cleft for us, smitten that the living water of the Spirit could be given to thirsty sinners like us.
• This image of God’s Spirit being poured out like water is replete throughout the Bible. But perhaps the closest to Jesus’ verbiage here is the prophecy of Ezekiel, where Ezekiel peers into the New Creation and sees a new temple that has been built. And from the doors of the temple, a small trickle of water pours out to the east. And as the stream goes, it gets wider, and deeper. Eventually it is a powerful river, crystalline and clear, causing these seemingly magical trees to grow on its banks whose leaves can heal the nations. Finally, dramatically, it cascades into the Dead Sea—and so overwhelms it with Life, that the salty sea because fresh, transforms from Death to Life.
• Remember, Jesus says these words at the very foot of the temple.
•  

Jesus is the new temple that Ezekiel saw. And if you are united with Him by faith, you are too. The body of Christ is the new temple of God. And from us flows rivers of living water that renew and refresh a dry, and weary land. Jesus isn’t just offering you a chance to be refreshed and satisfied: you can become a means of restoration and renewal for the world. You can bring living water to others. You can minister, you can serve, you can find new strength to step in the breach and offer real hope, and not wither away yourself.

if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.

And the LORD will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.

• Isa 58:10-11