How amazing! Here the officers
sent by the Jewish authority to arrest Jesus, were instead arrested by Him. The
difference between them and the Jewish leadership was the fact that they did
not have any ulterior motive. They came to do a job and were enthralled by the
words of Jesus. So they came back to the chief priests and the Pharisees without
arresting Him. When asked why didn’t they arrest Jesus and bring Him to them, the
offices could have given any excuse but they did not. Their assessment of Jesus
was plain and true, “Never has a man spoken
the way this man (Jesus) speaks.”
This is true in many life
situations too. When we come to the Lord without any preconceived expectation
that He should work in a certain way, we will find Him speaking to us in the most
amazing way. But if we come expecting to have our answer in a certain way that He
must do so, we will often go away disappointed. Remember God’s ways are not ours.
As the heaven is higher than the earth so are His ways and thoughts higher than
ours. We are in for a divine surprise every time we come to Him with confidence
and expectation. He will do exceedingly abundantly above all that we can ever
ask or think.
In response to what the
officers had said, the Pharisees then insinuated that the officers were hook-winked
and brainwashed by Jesus. Their implication: they could understand the people’s
fascination with Jesus, but they couldn’t understand how the officers could be
mesmerised by His words. Pointing to themselves, they insisted that none of them,
the elites, believed in
Jesus. They even went on to sneer at the commoners, they insisted that the
crowd was untrained and know nothing of the Law. In other words, their
estimation of the crowd was that they were spiritually and theologically ignorant.
They harshly judged them as accursed for believing in Jesus. How sad to know that
people could be hindered from truly knowing Jesus because they hold on to some preconceived
theological position. The best way to go about our spiritual life is not to be
led by dogmatic conviction but to search for the clear instruction of the Word
of God. Like the Pharisees, many today still think they have a corner with God.
They also conclude that when a person is not among the elite, they can never
understand the deeper things of God. How deluded!
Here we see Nicodemus again. He was the
one who came to Jesus by night and had a lengthy discussion with Him on the born
again experience. With great insight and wisdom, he asked a very good question.
“Our Law does not judge a man unless it first hears from him and knows what he
is doing, does it?” But he was scorned by the Pharisees. They told him
that no prophet ever hail from Galilee. In saying that they had shown how ignorant
they themselves were. That’s because the prophet Jonah came from Galilee. In showed
how ignorant they were about their own national history.
How sad to know that
there are people who profess to know God yet could miss Him so widely. We
cannot help but be brought back to what Jesus had said in John 7:37-38, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and
drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said,
‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’”
We need to come to Him with sincerity and openness. Only in Him do we have an ever flowing refreshing
stream of living water. Outside of Christ, there is nothing in us that will
commend us to God. We must bring our heart to Him, like vessels to an
ever-flowing stream. And resting in Him, we will find the inner gush of living
water. Oh how precious is that stream!
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