Jonathan Edwards, the greatest American theologian of the eighteenth century, once said that there are truths in the scriptures that are sweet as honey. These truth are easy to embrace because they conform to our understanding of life. On the other hand he also stated that there are truths that are like vinegar. These ideas are fully as true, but hard to grasp and even harder to accept as divine. These truth run in opposition to our worldview and our nature.
In this passage today, Jesus makes a series of statements that are perhaps the most controversial in the scriptures. They center in man's weakness, blindness, and deadness of spirit. These spiritual impediments began at the fall, are imputed at conception, cripple the heart and can be overcome only by God's grace through a faith infused into the very center of the reprobate, lost, dead heart. We believe in our mind that we are saved by grace, but just how desperately we need to be saved is often minimized to a state of sickness that God can help us to remedy. But the reality is far more dire. And the remedy is not simply doing better, or getting better. This is the reason Christ "must be raised up” - for without His sacrifice on the cross and his suffering in death and his resurrection from the grave, none would be saved or could believe.
Today we will look through the lens of the divine, the otherness of God. Jesus shows us to a deeper level who He really is and what He has come to accomplish, for us, and, even in spite of us. He magnifies the grace of God to an even more remarkable level. Truly this text is about His wonderful, marvelous, extraordinary, amazing grace.
October 19, 2014 | Pastor John Bayles | Marching to the Cross: Overcoming the Great Blindness | John 12:34-43
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