IS JOHN 3:16 THE GOSPEL? by PAWSON David

Author:PAWSON, David [PAWSON, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HRA: Religion:General
Publisher: Terra Nova Publications
Published: 2011-03-13T17:00:00+00:00

4

TEACHER IN THE DARK

Remember that Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, an Old Testament scholar, and he is telling him that what Moses did to that snake will one day happen to himself, and he would be stuck up on a pole, on a hill, for all to see. Nicodemus was already an old man. Do we know if he lived to see that? Yes we do. Though you may not have noticed it, when Jesus was actually nailed to the cross and strung up like that snake on a stake, Nicodemus saw it. They took Jesus’ body down. The body of a criminal crucified was normally thrown into the Valley of Gehenna, south of Jerusalem, with all the rubbish and the sewage, outside the ‘dung gate’ on the south side, and they would have thrown Jesus’ body there, but Joseph of Arimathea came, and he said, ‘He can have my tomb.’ Nicodemus said, ‘I’ll help you bury him.’ So it was that three years after hearing Jesus’ words, Nicodemus is taking the body of Jesus down from the stake and laying it in the tomb. He and Joseph did it together. Had you noticed that? You see, Nicodemus knew the Old Testament backwards. He knew all about this story of the snake in the wilderness, and here is Jesus using that Old Testament picture, which means that God already had it all in his mind – what he was going to do to his son Jesus – and was giving the children of Israel a picture to remember. The tragedy is, of course, that the snake on a pole was kept for years after the event. They took it with them into the Promised Land; they set it up as an idol in that land, and they burned incense to it and prayed to it, this snake on a stick, until finally one of the good kings of Israel said, ‘I’m putting a stop to that’, and he took the snake and the pole and smashed it to smithereens, telling the people they were no longer going to venerate that symbol because its day was done.

John chapter 3 is about a private conversation with Nicodemus, and again, if we are going to approach verse 16 in the right way, we need to go through this conversation, because that is where it all came up. Three of the Gospels are about the public discourses of Jesus, but in John’s, which is very intimate, there are a good many private conversations: with Nathanael, the woman at the well, and here Nicodemus. He came by night. But why? Out of sheer self-protection. He is called ‘the teacher in Israel’, not a teacher in Israel. He was the man who was the top theologian in the nation, the one who was supposed to have answers for everybody else, the one thought to be the wisest man. He was coming by night because he did not want it known publicly that he had a lot to learn himself.

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