Well, good morning, everybody. We missed y'all. Mindy sends her love to everybody as well. She is sad that she couldn't make it today. She also missed seeing everybody and being able to worship with you. Take your Bibles out. Turn to the Gospel of John, Chapter 5. Gospel of John, Chapter 5. will be in verses 18 through 24. I'm going to give you a Puritan title here and then I'll give Cliff the short one later. Today we're going to see the unity of the being of God and the missions of God seen through the work of Christ as the Lord of the Sabbath the judge of all creation and the giver of life. There's your Puritan title. The Shulman can be Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath. Before we read the word, just wanted to also mention as well, being at General Assembly with Paul and Robert, was just struck by the brotherhood and unity among the churches right now. And it, in a sense, kind of mirrors the unity, I believe, that we have in the church as well. So really thankful to to see that and observe and be able to hear from them and know that we have many churches that are praying for us. They were asking about Pastor Cliff and Cheryl and saying they're praying for y'all and seeing them spend time with Robert and Paul and hearing about how they can pray for our elders, how they can pray for these men, how they can pray for you as a church. was quite an encouragement to me. It made me thankful that we do indeed. We have hundreds of people praying for us, which means that we have hundreds of people that we also have a responsibility to pray for. Even more than that, we have The Lord Jesus Christ, seated at the right hand of the Father, praying for us right now. And although we enjoy the prayer of our fellow brothers and sisters and sister churches, Christ right now at this very moment is praying for us. What a comfort that is for us to have confidence to come to Christ, to hear His Word preached, to pray and sing hymns. spiritual songs to him. He cares for us. He promises also to be present with us through the means of grace. So let's read verses 18 through 24 and then we'll pray. The Apostle John writes, for this reason therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him because he not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God his own father, making himself equal with God. Therefore, Jesus answered and was saying to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, the son can do nothing of himself unless it is something he sees the father doing. For whatever the father does, these things the son also does in like manner. For the father loves the son and shows him all things that he himself is doing. The father will show him greater works than these, so that you will marvel. For just as the father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the son also gives life to whom he wishes. For not even the father judges anyone, but he has given all judgment to the son, so that all will honor the son, even as they honor the father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My Word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life, does not come into judgment, but is passed out of death into life." Let's pray. Father, we do indeed come to seek Your your will in this text to seek what it is saying to us, how Father, Son and Spirit, you relate to one another in our salvation, how we receive the words of life from Christ, from you, Father, through Christ to your people. We pray that Your word would be handled in a way that is faithful to the text. Strengthen me to speak with clarity. May your spirit be active through the preaching. May we all not look to the vessel that is carrying the message, but see that the one preaching is simply an instrument in the hands of your spirit to bring about the word that you would have for us this morning. Pray that you would bless it, that it would seep into our minds and hearts, and that knowing these things, it would create faith in Christ and love of neighbor. We pray all these things in Christ's name. Amen. trouble trying to narrow things down. If you've ever had a conversation with me, you know how things can go a little bit and got to get all the details in there. But this is such an important passage that even though verses 18 through 24 are our primary text, chapter five, the entire chapter is in view here. So let's first lay out our context. So we see in our first verse, verse 18, that John writes, for this reason the Jews sought all the more to kill Jesus. It's actually the second time that we hear in three verses where John says, for this reason. The first is in verse 16, where the Jews were persecuting Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. So this healing is a man down at the pool of Bethesda who had been waiting for 38 years to be able to go down into the pool. The event was that those who were infirmed would go to this pool, an angel of the Lord would come and strike the water, the person would come down to the water, and they would be healed of whatever this infirmity was. Well, it says this man had been there for 38 years. I'm 38. My entire life, this man spent sitting at this pool waiting for an angel of the Lord to heal this infirmity that he had. It was a man who couldn't make his way down before others to be healed. And take just a moment to consider what a thing it is to suffer for 38 years that prevented his ability to make it down to the pool before others could. These others would pass him as he's trying to make his way down. That's got to be a desperate condition and almost hopeless this man is in that he can see it so close to him, but another would come and receive the blessing before he did. Yet here we see the mercy of our Lord in seeing this man's helpless condition and he acts. It's a grace that we see in the simple question to point out this man's inability to get himself to a state where he can be healed. Jesus said, do you wish to get well? I think it's a bit of a rhetorical question. I think the Lord knows what's happening with this man. He's just asking a leading question to help this man respond appropriately. And what does our Lord do? He gives a simple command to the man. Get up, pick up your bed and walk. We see the proclamation of the word of Christ that brought this man the ability to get up, that healed this man. This man didn't add anything to the word of Christ. Christ is the one who did the work through the word. Jesus also didn't tell the man to get up and go down to the water to receive the healing. Take your pallet and go. That despair is gone. You don't have to deal with that anymore. So Christ is the true angel of the Lord who goes down to trouble the water. But He did give the man an admonition afterward not to sin anymore so that nothing worse would happen. This could be a hint that his infirmity was due to sin, we're not sure, but we do know that many of the difficulties in life are due primarily to the curse brought about by our first parents. And sometimes our own sins do lead to trouble in our lives. So here the Lord tells him, sin no more so that nothing worse would happen. It just reminds me of the relation between faith and obedience, and I hope that the lectures from this weekend at family camp make it to sermon audio, because I want to commend those to you as well, understanding conversion and faith and obedience. But we're also reminded of Proverbs 26 11, where the fool is likened to a dog that returns to his vomit. The dog is sick. He eats grass. He throws up. He goes back. He eats the grass. And there's this cycle where he's trying to heal his guts. Well, that's what Proverbs says is the fool who goes back to his vomit. It's the sinner returning to his sin. And so our Lord is giving him the wisdom. Don't be like the fool. Turn from your sins. You receive this. grace from Christ, and it would be worse for him if he did not follow in true repentance. He would be trampling underfoot the Son of God. And our Lord gives him a solemn warning to live a life in accordance with the grace he's been given. So time doesn't permit us to deal in depth with this, but it is related to our text as I hope you'll see as we move along. But because of this, we have the conflict and the reason the Jews were persecuting Christ coming into fuller focus for us. It was on the Sabbath day and you weren't supposed to move your home. That was the rub here. They saw this man taking his house and carrying it away on the Sabbath day. So they went about trying to figure out who told the man to break God's law, the mosaic aspect of the law. And after they found out it was Jesus, they persecuted him. And notice Jesus doesn't respond with a dismissal of their zeal for the law of God, nor does he discount the Sabbath day as something temporal. He doesn't say, well, there's no more Sabbath, it's no big deal. He points out their understanding of the Sabbath was misplaced. But Jesus says something here that needs to draw our attention because of the anger that drew, the anger that the Lord drew from the Jews. What was this claim? Well, in verse 17, Jesus says, my father is working until now, I myself am working. Essentially, he's saying, I and the Father work together as one. So why would this draw their anger? Well, it's clear because in verse 18, we see that the Jews understood what Jesus was saying was a claim to being God. So they didn't miss this. They understood what Jesus was clearly saying to them. that to say that I am working until now as God is working on the Sabbath day, I am the Lord of the Sabbath. And we know this isn't an isolated incident because we have multiple other accounts in the other Gospels of Jesus disputing with leaders over the Sabbath, and he picked grain on the Sabbath, he healed others on the Sabbath, and that was a no-no. Now, I don't want to obscure the text by getting into a discourse on the Sabbath, but we do confess its abiding role in the life of the new covenant believer as an abiding moral command. So I only want to point out that this is not a contentious debate. This has been raging for 2000 years, even between the religious leaders and Christ himself. There is much consternation over Jesus breaking the ceremonial and civil aspects of the Sabbath. to fulfill its moral obligation. And here Jesus is responding to the first reason, the healing on the Sabbath. To their persecution by answering them, I and the Father work together. By saying, in essence, this God works on the Sabbath, upholding and preserving all of creation. And part of this is also restoration and refreshment from the other six days of common labor. There's a communion that one has with God that's distinct from the other six days. And so Christ is trying to point this out. But even though there's rest, God doesn't stop working to uphold all of creation. He's still active and upholding all things. And so that's what Jesus is saying. I am still upholding all things. I share the divine essence because the Father does this. I do this. Brings us further along in our text today. Verse 18. Let's consider for this reason a little bit more. Excuse me. I've got a piece of sawdust somewhere in my chest. Here we see the Jews elevate their response from persecution to desire to kill Jesus. As I already mentioned, they didn't miss what Jesus was claiming in His answer. And I want to defend that even more by looking at Jesus' claims at the end of the chapter. You can just kind of look at it. We're not going to spend a lot of time, but we're going to look at the four witnesses that we see from verse 33 to the end of the chapter. Just briefly, Christ uses four witnesses to show their right understanding, yet their wrong rejection of what Christ is claiming. So we have the witness of John the Baptist in verses 33 through 35. John came to testify about the light. He wasn't the light, but he testified about the light. In verse 36, we have the works of Christ himself. In verses 37 through 38, we have the witness of the Father. And then in verses 39 to 47, we have the witness of Moses or the Scriptures. And as we're learning in Sunday school, it's the Holy Spirit that is working through the Scriptures themselves to point to the work of Father, Son and Spirit. So here we can see the triune witness of God himself pointing to the works of Christ and pointing out the Jews rejection of the God that they confess that they are serving. They think they have the scriptures, and that's what gives them eternal life. But it is what the scriptures are testifying about is what gives them eternal life. And they missed that. They missed it. So they knew what Jesus was claiming. They rejected it with such great zeal. They sought to kill Jesus for making himself equal with God. They didn't miss what he said. They just didn't believe him due to their hard heart and spiritual blindness. Again, they confessed the Lord our God, the Lord is one. This is in Deuteronomy when there's the recapitulation of the law to the second generation of Israelites. This is their confession. But they misunderstood that that was pointing to Christ. Jesus is saying he is the creator, not a creature. that He was present at the creation of the world, and He Himself acts in unity with the Father. For a man to be standing there claiming deity, it would be right for people to reject that if it were not for what was being witnessed, if it were not for Christ Himself being the true God and true man. These witnesses pointed to Christ and the works he came to do. We will call them the divine mission of the son. The works of Christ are also called the divine missions of the son. As we move along in verses 19 through 21, Jesus builds on this defense of himself, having unity of being with the father. And here we see that Jesus answered verse 17. It says he answered. And the escalation, it escalated their conflict and he answered again. This is going to be important because this is the same word for judgment that's used in verse 22, verse 27, where it says, The father gave authority to the son to execute judgment and verse 30. As I hear I judge my judgment is just. That word answer has the same root as judge. Creno is that root word to judge. Apocrenomize to give an answer. What the connotation is here is a decisive response, an answer. Not necessarily an apologetic, a defense. He's not defending himself. He's passing judgment. He's not the lawyer standing before the judge giving a defense for his case. He is the judge adjudicating. He's sitting on his throne adjudicating the case he hears in his courtroom. So he's answering their persecution and desire to kill him with an adjudicated response and excluding any idea of himself as merely a man, as nothing more than a man. He's more than that. He's fully God and fully man. He shares the fullness of the deity with the father. Notice in his second answer, verse 19, he builds on the first. Jesus says that he can do nothing unless the father does it and that he does what the father does in the same manner. So some would say that the son is subordinate to the father and that the father has authority over the son. And I hope to show that this is an incorrect understanding of what Jesus is saying. Jesus is not subordinating himself to the father. He's saying, I and the father act in unity in the same divine being. We have the same authority. The Father doesn't possess authority over the Son, and the Son submits. They have one will. This is saying that the Father has being in and of Himself, does not derive His being or personhood from another. The Father is not from the Son. The Son is from the Father. The Son doesn't act according to His own volition, but in unity with and from the Father. So again, the Father is of or from himself, and the Son is of or from the Father. And one could say that the Holy Spirit is now of or from the Father and the Son. He also has unity of being. He's not in submission to the will of the Father and the Son. They have one will. They are united. But they do relate to one another because we see here that the father has works that he does and the son has works that he does. And later on, we'll see there is a distinction of what those works are. So they relate to one another based on who they are as father, son and spirit. And this determines their works. The Son is begotten. He can do nothing of Himself. The Son does what the Father does in like manner. The Father creates. The Son creates. The Spirit creates. The Father gives life. The Son gives life. The Spirit gives life. There may be an objection here, as the text tells us, that the son has to see what the father's doing in order for him to do that. That's a valid objection. Well, I should say that's a logical objection. I wouldn't say it's a valid objection. This is one of the things that the Arians and the Orthodox were arguing over in the fourth century. This is the first doctrine that churches needed to hammer out. And John 5 was a major part of that. So the objection here is that the son has to see the father doing something and that he must learn the father. There's two things we need to hold together. So remember that the Jews thought that Christ was just a mere man claiming to be God. He has humanity. Something else we need to hold together is, as we've already said, the Son and the Father share the divine essence. As Christ is already saying, Father works, I work. What the Father does, I do. They share the divine essence. So we have to hold those two together. That Christ is the only begotten of the Father operates together. with the Father, and that Christ also is born of a virgin. So in his humanity, he is, in a sense, learning from the Father. So we have to take that as language that is expressing something true about Christ's humanity, but not making an equivocal, one-to-one language that he's using, saying that when I see, in my humanity I see, but in my deity, I don't have any part of me that is seeing the Father and reacting to that. We have to hold that together. So in the mission of the Son's incarnation, the human Jesus sees and learns from the Father through the Son, and works the works of the Father. So the Father speaks, the Son is the Word that is spoken, The Spirit illumines what the Father speaks through the Son. John 1.18 Jesus has exegeted God. He has made God known. He has helped us understand who God is. Colossians 1.15-20 He's the image of the invisible God and the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in him bodily. So the Son shares in the same being as the Father, and through Christ, the Word made flesh, as He dwelt among men, He has manifested God in His mission. The Father sins, the Son goes, the Spirit applies. Another way to say this is what the Father and Son have in common, the Godhead, and how they have it as Father and Son. Additionally, father and son have distinct modes of acting. So even though they share in the Godhead, they have distinct modes of acting. So it's not the father who died on a tree, it's the son who died on a tree. This is a difficult doctrine, and I think it's got to be understood and defended in every generation. So even after the first several centuries of Christianity spilled much ink and unfortunately blood as well, arguing over this doctrine, we have in the post-reformation era the need to work through this again. The Sosinians are the ones who rise up. They're Unitarians. They don't believe in a triune God. They reject that the Son shares in the same being as the Father. He's of a similar being. They're functional Arians. They don't believe that the Son has the same essence as the Father. Turretin brings up the Socinians as well as the Remonstrants, and the Remonstrants are just the Armenians, the Dutch Armenians. He sees something in Armenian doctrine that is denying the fullness of who the Trinity is. And then later, as mentioned, the Unitarians. And the Unitarians are kind of your modern liberals. If you go to a church, usually in the Northeast they're still around, you usually see Unitarian church and then like a rainbow. That's what you have with the Unitarians now. A liberalizing and if you reject the Trinity, you're going to end up as a heretic eventually. So again, we're rediscovering this in our time and with that comes growing pains. So we want to be careful in our understanding of the Scriptures, which alone reveal God as triune. Nothing else will reveal triune God as triune. They subsist as Father, Son, and Spirit, one will and being, having distinction of mission. And this occurs because we see in verse 20, the Father loves the Son. This is an eternal love. And it's an eternal love because He's the only begotten Son. from the Father. And here I think we have a foreshadowing of the work of resurrection of Christ from the dead as that marvelous thing that Jesus refers to in verse 20. Because He goes on to say, just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes. He didn't raise the dead in this encounter here. But he is pointing out an even greater work that they will marvel at is resurrection from the dead. We get that later in John with Lazarus. We've seen that in other places, but I believe he's referring to his own resurrection. The father will raise the son through the son by the spirit out of the grave. So as we move on, verses 21 through 23, Christ further exegetes his mission from the Father. Here we begin to piece together even more of how serious it was for the Jews, and anyone for that matter, to reject Christ as God. Just as the Father has power to raise the dead according to his own will, so the Son does the same. This is one will. They both are willing to raise the dead. So this is how God works and through whom God works. Here we begin to see Christ explain his mediatorial work, prophet, priest, king. This is his work to intercede on behalf of his people. And this is the distinction of the mission. Verse 22, let me back up. Verse 21, they both have great works that they will work together. In verse 21, they both give life. But in verse 22, it says that the father doesn't judge, the son judges. So we have a distinction of the father and the son, their missions, what they came to do. Christ came to be the mediator of the elect. So just as the father raises the dead and gives them life, in the same way, the son also gives life to whom he wishes. They work together with common outcome, distinction of mission. I want to commend some writings to you here. See me afterwards. I'm going to give you some good reading if you want to read more about this. The son's will is one with the father's in the salvation of the elect. So we could we commonly call this either the eternal decree of God, predestination, or more specifically, the covenant of redemption. We've already heard it in Hebrews 13, the eternal covenant transaction. We also see it from 2 Timothy 1.9 and Titus 1.2 as we confess in our own confession that the covenant of grace, the salvation of the elect, is founded in that eternal covenant transaction that was between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect. The Word was with God and the Word was God. This is why the incarnation matters, because the mission of the Son of God was to save the elect people that from eternity past they agreed to save. It reminds us of Ephesians. The Father, through the Son, has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, the eternal covenant transaction. that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, the natural Son, to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved." That was an eternity past, and they enacted that in their mission in the fullness of time in creation, in providence, and in redemption. Nothing compelled Him to work salvation for us other than His eternal love for the Son and the Son's eternal love for the Father and the procession of the Spirit out of that eternal love from one another. So at this point, Jesus goes on to explain one of the ways they work salvation is judgment is given to the Son. So what should be understood by this is the reiteration that the Father works from Himself. So it's not that the Father doesn't judge. The Father judges through the Son who judges. They both act together. We're talking about the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Blaspheming the Holy Spirit is blaspheming the Father and the Son. That's why it's so heinous because He's the one who comes to apply that work. That's why it's so heinous. There's no separation of them. There's still a blasphemy of the three. So here, what should be understood is that the Father gives His Son a kingdom to rule in righteousness. So let me commend to you Psalm 110, Psalm 8, Isaiah 42. We don't have the time to go there, but please visit those psalms in the prophet Isaiah, speaking of the suffering servant, where a bruised reed he will not break and a wick he's not going to put out. That's his work as a suffering servant, as king, to rule in righteousness. Primarily, I want to deal with Psalm 2, where God sets His Son on Zion by His eternal decree to give Him a kingdom because of his eternal sonship. He has those rights naturally from the father as the son, and he will judge the nations. That word, apokrinomai, render a decision in his courts. That's what is in mind in Psalm 2. The son will act as judge over the nations as the father has given him the right to judge. And what culminates is to kiss the sun, do homage to the sun, worship the sun, serve the sun, lest you be destroyed in anger. And that's the Jews. This is what Jesus is doing here. He's pointing the Jews to Psalm 2. They knew that psalm very well. He was telling them to kiss the sun, do homage to the sun, believe in the sun, stop their obstinate rejection of the sun. This is the Son from the Father. He is making that claim. In verse 24, Jesus is saying to reject Him and to dishonor Him, I'm sorry, in verse 23, to reject Christ and dishonor Christ is not just to reject the Son, it's to reject the Father and dishonor the Father as well because of their unity of being. Just a brief summary of verses 25 through 32 to try to connect everything together. Because the Son has judgment and does the works the Father sent Him to do, He will raise the quick and the dead. As we confess in the Apostles' Creed, Jesus will come to judge the quick and the dead. Christ will sit on His throne and give life to some and death to others. How does Christ judge? Well, He does this by tying His unity with the Father and the Godhead in His mission given by the Father together in this way. How does He judge? Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and does not come into judgment. but is passed out of death into life. That's how Christ judges. He judges against Himself, by Himself. He is the standard as the natural Son of the Father by which we are judged. So we have no hope unless we are found in Christ. And the judgment rendered is that we are in Christ by faith, believing His words, coming to the Father through the Son by the Spirit. You and I are that man at the pool. We had no hope of going down in our own strength to that water for healing. Maybe we thought that even if we had someone to help us, In the presence of many counselors, there is wisdom. You have two and three links on the chain and that gives strength. If we could just have somebody get a little help from my friends, right? That would help us get what we need in life. It doesn't. We can't make it down. Our Lord in His mercy gives us instruction to do what? To hear His Word. to believe in Him and to do what He commands that it would go well with us. We would still be in our hopeless estate had the King of glory not come to us to lift our heads and see His glory. Thank you for that reminder, Ben, the other day. Thank you. You didn't even know that this was going to be in the sermon, but thank you. What glory? The glory of the only begotten Son of the Father full of grace and truth. So the Trinity is important for us to hold fast and understand. Our salvation comes from the Triune God. We must get it right for salvation. He saves us through his singular eternal will and through his works, his acts, his divine mission that flows out of the covenant of redemption. We see Genesis 315 unfolded and this kingdom and covenant being enacted through that promise seed that would crush the serpent's head. And he crushed the serpent's head through his death, his heel was bruised. Yet he who has life in himself from the Father, by the Spirit, raised himself, and conquered death, that those who believe in him will pass from judgment, death, into life. So dear believer, think of this when you are struggling with your sins. Don't look at your sins. You take your sins and you go to the cross. You look at the work of Christ. if you're struggling with sins. Put them off and remember that we're judged by Christ and we pass out of judgment when we trust Him. Dear believer, think of this when you are discontent with the events of life. All of us go through this. We look at our circumstances and the things that are happening around us And we tend to kind of despair. Some of us maybe a little bit more than others, depending on, as we've heard in Jeremiah Burroughs' work, sometimes our disposition is given a little more to this, right? But if the events of life really are causing discontent, think of this. Christ was persecuted. They were seeking to kill him during his ministry. They succeeded. They killed the Lord of glory. But, because He's God, He rose again from the dead. So we don't look to our present circumstances. We look to, well first, what Christ has done and that future hope when He comes to judge the quick and the dead. Dear believer, think of this when your circumstances are such that you have contentment. And don't look at your circumstances that are bringing you contentment. Look to Christ who has given you that mercy. He's adopted you as a son or a daughter. You by nature don't have the rights of a child, but you've been adopted through Christ who has those natural rights as God. And He gives them freely to His church. Dear believer, think of this when your circumstances are difficult in life, when you are disappointed with God's providences, when you're despairing of life around you, when your body is wasting away, as all of ours one day will. God has ordained these things that you would lift up your head and peer at the King of Glory. Who can ascend Zion's Hill? The Lord of Glory can. Lift up your heads, O ancient gates, and see the King of Glory go up. Dear unbeliever, you will be judged by Christ and against Christ. He is the standard of righteousness. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the day of rebellion. Look to the eternal Son of God who has exegeted the Father to us. Dear professing Christian, don't trample underfoot the Son of God. Don't return to the vomit as the fool does. Again, don't harden your hearts as in the day of rebellion. Look to Christ, ask for the supply of his spirit. As we saw, there is a false conversion. And don't assume that because today you're professing Christ, events in your life won't come up and you reject that. Don't do it. Don't harden your hearts. Do the work right now. Pursue Christ right now. Nothing besides Christ will earn you righteousness in God's sight apart from faith and repentance. Your children who are growing up in a Christian home, don't assume you will receive the grace of God because your parents or your family are Christians. They don't receive the authority to pass that on to you. They have received everything, again, by adoption and not by right. Don't think you will receive it by right. You have no rights. The Son has all the rights in this world. He alone is who you must be found in. to receive judgment unto life. Dear Church, we must hold fast this doctrine of the Trinity, for it is, as we confess, the foundation of all our comfort and communion with God.