John 7: 16
” Jesus answered, ‘My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me.’”
Are you a teacher?
In fairness, I think it is safe to say that everyone is a teacher at some point in their life. Some of us take up the trade as a profession, and some teach out of necessity.
If we teach someone a skill, that is a way of passing on knowledge. I remember my dad teaching me how to hold a metal file when I was very young. He had been a machinist before he went to college and so when it came to files, he knew what he was talking about.
Likewise, Jesus shared with others what his Father had shown to Him. Oddly, this sharing of the Father’s will came into conflict with the Jewish leaders who also claimed to be teaching what God wanted people to know.
The people of Jesus’ day were confronted by two different truth claims. On one side were the people who had been teachers of the Law for generations. They were set apart by their knowledge of the scriptures, their clothes, and their authority over the people.
On the other side was Jesus. He was a man of no wealth or standing in the temple, but he was a man of knowledge and of deeds. He explained the things of God with an authority that people marveled at, and the miracles he did clearly spoke of a power that exceeded that of mere mortals.
Both the Teachers of the Law and Jesus taught about God’s will for the people, but their stories did not match up. In fact, they could not have been more different. No matter how good or impressive the teacher is, it is still up to the student to decide who he or she will believe.
Q: Today we face a similar choice. Why do some choose Jesus while others do not?
Some are blessed to have been chosen by Jesus to be set apart from this world. It’s what he does, not us.
Simple Answer – Sin (pride, selfishness, etc…)
Ah the sovereignty/choice question : )
I think people reject Jesus because of our sin. God chooses to save some of us despite ourselves and we choose to follow him in response to the Gospel. We repent from sin and He saves us in His grace.
There is a lot to this question. There is the calling of God. Some would say that Jesus chooses us rather than us choose Him. There is our sin problem and rebellion. There are probably a myriad of specific reasons someone might give to why they do not believe in Jesus, and then there are the real reasons. The bottom line is that, whatever the reason, Jesus remains the only good choice for any of us.
Thank you all for your comments today. For some reason I have found myself wrestling with some variant of this question a lot lately. In the end I find myself being drawn to Psalm 139:
“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.”
This is where I ultimately land as well. I do think it is clear that God chooses us by His grace and at the same time we make the real choice to repent. These two are too clear to me in scripture to diminish, but how they work out in the ‘mind of God’ or as philosophical maxims – only the Lord knows 🙂