Faithless Faith

John 2:23-25 Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. 24 But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people 25 and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man. INTRODUCTION We’re able to see in these few verses that there’s a way to believe in Jesus that is of no benefit at all. There is a kind of faithless faith. More tragically still, this passage suggests that many can have benefitless belief without realizing it. I hope you remember that the overall purpose for which John wrote his Gospel is to convince his readers that Jesus is the Christ, in order that we might believe in Him as the Christ, and therein find everlasting life. To those ends, as we continue to move further into John’s Gospel we’ll see that John often forces us to ask why some people see Jesus, hear His teaching, or witness His signs and have their whole lives changed, while others are indifferent, angry, or even entertained for a moment before walking away unmoved. That is, as a means of bringing his readers to genuine belief in Jesus Christ he continually includes passages like this to make us wonder where genuine belief comes from. While John’s Gospel has already raised some of these types of questions, it hasn’t provided much in the way of answers. Beginning with our passage for this morning, that begins to change. In this brief commentary, John plainly states the answer that will show up in Jesus teaching over and over again throughout the Gospel. The big ideas of this passage are that (1) only genuine trust in Jesus connects us with the saving grace of God and (2) that genuine trust in Jesus comes only from Jesus entrusting Himself to us. In addition, we also catch a glimpse of the interplay between Jesus’ human and divine natures. And the main takeaways from all of this are (1) a fresh reminder of our dependence on God and (2) a fresh call to be people of unceasing prayer. Let’s pray that God would help us see and apply this text in every way He means us to. FAITHLESS FAITH (23-24) Our passage for this morning is interesting on a number of levels. One interesting aspect is in the fact that for these three verses John steps away from his narration of Jesus’ life and provides a bit of commentary. He briefly moves from telling the story of Jesus to explaining the implications of the story. As you probably remember, the previous passage in the Gospel told of Jesus going to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. Tragically, He arrived to find the Temple polluted with people attempting to make money by exploiting others. Worse still, they did so with the approval of the religious leaders. Consumed with zeal for God’s honor, Jesus cleared the temple of all of the swindlers who were making a mockery of God and one of Israel’s most important celebrations. In v.23 we find out that in addition to all of that, during His time in Jerusalem, Jesus also performed a number of unrecorded miraculous signs. And the key to all of this is the fact that the crowds who witnessed all of this would have been forced to decide what to do about it and what to do about Him. You can’t see the kinds of things done by Jesus and hear the kinds of claims made by Jesus and not make a decision about Him. If you were to walk through Forest Lake and hear a man claiming to be the prince of Egypt while levitating above ground, you’d quickly need to decide what to make of that. Is he a crazy illusionist, telling the truth, or something else entirely. You can’t just ignore that kind of thing. You have to decide what to make of him and what you decide makes a big difference. In many ways, John 2:23-25 really is as simple as that. In it John provided a bit of 10,000′ commentary on what happened as a result of J