Encounter with Skeptics

Salé & Pelletier. You can’t get away from them, not even in church! But believe it or not, what happened to Jamie and David in Salt Lake City this week has a tie-in to what we want to look at in the Bible today.

When the pairs figure skating event was held at the Olympics last Monday night, the results stunned and polarized everyone into one of two camps. Most people thought that the Canadian duo had clearly won the competition. But the judges, for reasons we have yet to understand, awarded the gold medal to the Russians. An international uproar ensued.

One fascinating aspect of the controversy has been the reaction of Russians in general. Interviews with the common people on the streets of Moscow revealed that they believe that their skaters won fair and square, and that the Canadians are just a bunch of sore losers.

Valentin Piseyev, president of the Russian Skating Federation, said the organization had not pressured any judges. “That’s absolutely silly,” Piseyev told the Russian daily Trud. “You have to be able to honorably accept defeat. And if you haven’t learned it yet, then learn it.”

In Moscow, Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko called the controversy “a disgraceful fuss,” and said she was going to Salt Lake City to support the Russian team.

Different people can witness the same set of events and come to totally different conclusions. And often, those conclusions are the result of an underlying bias that colors their perception. That bias skews their interpretation of reality. It prevents them from being impartial, objective, and fair.

We are all prone, as sinful human beings, to such bias. And we need to be careful about it because…

Bias often determines belief, and belief always determines behavior.

The same thing happened in the Bible around Jesus. Jesus ran into all sorts of different people – people from all walks of life – some rich, some poor, healthy people, sick people, sinners and saints.

Some of these people accepted Jesus and his message without any reservations at all. Others were hesitant; they were interested, they were attracted to him, but they had many questions and reservations that they had to work through before they could believe in him.

But others were hostile toward Jesus from the very start. It seemed that nothing he ever did or nothing he ever said could reach them, or persuade them that he was genuine. They had a built-in bias against him that skewed their perception of everything he did. With these people, Jesus was in a “no-win” situation.

And oddly enough, it was the most religious people of his day who treated Jesus this way.

John 1 – Seekers – men who were honestly looking for answers – they became his followers

John 4 – Sinner – a woman who was looking for love and acceptance

John 9 – Sufferer – a man who was born blind

John 3 – Saint – a man who had risen as high as his religion could take him, but still felt empty inside

John 10 – we come to a group of people I am calling the Skeptics

They were a group of people known as the Pharisees. They were very religious. They were scrupulous about observing the Law of Moses, Over the previous 200 years, they had developed and intricate system of interpretation around that Law. And the more sophisticated their system became, the more completely committed to it they became, because this for them represented the way that a person related to God. They began to believe that your adherence to this system of legalism determined

1. your spirituality

2. your acceptance in the eyes of God

3. your worth as a human being

Now when Jesus came along, he didn’t show any inclination at all to “buy in” to the Pharisees’ worldview. In fact, he said many things that were openly critical of what they believed. And so most of them rejected him from the very outset. They couldn’t hear what he was saying with objective ears because of their inner bias – the inner commitment that they had made to their particular worldview.

Jesus encountered these people frequently throughout the Gospels. They dogged his footsteps. They stayed up late at night trying to devise ways that they could trip Jesus up and discredit his ministry. They frequently confronted him in public with trick questions designed to ambush him into contradicting something that the Bible said.

There are many of these encounters we could have looked at in the Gospels, but let’s turn today to John 10. This chapter is best known for being the chapter of the Good Shepherd – the place where Jesus speaks of himself and his relationship with his people in terms of being a shepherd to his sheep. And it’s a beautiful chapter, rich and full of spiritual truth.

But that teaching about the shepherd and the sheep comprises only the first part of John 10. The last part contains another one of these confrontations with the Pharisees and the religious leaders. It is tense, prickly, unpleasant. Let’s pick it up at verse 22.

John 10:22 Then came the Feast of Dedication at Jerusalem. It was winter,

John 10:23 and Jesus was in the temple area walking in Solomon’s Colonnade.

John 10:24 The Jews gathered around him, saying, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”

• Feast of Dedication – Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights, commemorating the purification of the Temple in Jerusalem, which had been desecrated by a Syrian ruler named Antiochus Epiphanes in the year 167 BC. He had set up an altar to the Greek god Zeus, and had sacrificed a pig on it. His actions, which the Jews called the Abomination of Desolation, were an anticipation of what the Antichrist will do to the Jews in the end times. Three years after that happened, the Jews, led by Judas Maccabeus, overthrew the Syrians and purified the Temple.

• “the Jews” (v. 24) – collective term for the Jewish leaders, who included the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the teachers of the Law. They were the religious elite who were hostile toward Jesus.

Their question is: “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” This sounds, on the surface of it, like an honest question. But look at what Jesus says in reply:

John 10:25 Jesus answered, “I did tell you, but you do not believe. The miracles I do in my Father’s name speak for me,

John 10:26 but you do not believe because you are not my sheep.

Jesus said “I have given you ample evidence of who I am. What more could you possibly need? My actions speak louder than my words. My credentials are underlined by the miracles that I have been doing in my Father’s name.

“But you still don’t believe. And the reason you don’t is that you are not my sheep.” And in saying that, Jesus hearkens back to what he has said in the beginning of this chapter. Look at verse 2…

John 10:2 The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep.

John 10:3 The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.

John 10:4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.

John 10:5 But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.”

And down in verse 14, he says “I know my sheep, and my sheep know me.”

In those days, several shepherds would often keep their sheep together for the night in a sheep fold. The fold was just an enclosure with a low wall made of stones.It prevented the sheep from wandering away and provided some protection from predators. So you would have one big sheep fold with several different flocks in it, and a watchman (usually one of the shepherds themselves) guarding the sheepfold overnight.

When a shepherd would come to the sheepfold, he would call to his sheep, and they would recognize his voice and they would come to him, and follow him out to pasture. But they would never respond that way for a stranger because they would not recognize his voice.

What Jesus is saying here to the religious leaders is: “You do not believe me because you do not regard yourselves as sheep, and particularly as my sheep.”

The religious leaders didn’t see themselves as sheep, they saw themselves as shepherds. They saw themselves in the role of spiritual leaders. They saw themselves as having the answers, as being the experts.

That’s why, when John the Baptist came, they didn’t go out to him to be baptized because they didn’t see themselves as needing it. They weren’t sheep like the common people, like the sinners. You hear this superiority complex coming out in their remarks to the blind man in John 9, as they excommunicate him from the synagogue – they say “You were steeped in sin at birth. How dare you lecture us.”

These men were skeptics because they had assumed they had assumed an air of superiority. But you cannot come to Jesus unless you are willing to be a sheep. Sheep aren’t very intelligent animals. They don’t know much, but they do know their place. They know that they are sheep and that they are dependent upon a shepherd to lead them, and feed them, and protect them.

When Nicodemus came to Jesus – the most mature, educated, sophisticated religious man of his generation – Jesus said to him “Nicodemus, you have to become a baby. You have to be born all over again.”

Jesus said on another occasion “Unless you become as little children, you cannot see the kingdom of God.”

This cuts to the very root of our perception of ourselves. We all like to think of ourselves as having it somewhat together – as having a handle on things, as having life somewhat figured out.

And this is particularly true if we are religious. Religion can do a lot of things for you. It can give you a program of activity. It can give you an agenda. It can give you a project to work on, namely your own self-improvement. Specifically, it can give you the feeling that you are on the right track.

But, as we saw last week, while religion can point you to heaven, it can’t get you there. Only Jesus can. And in order to come to Jesus, you have to become a baby, you have to become a child, you have to become a sheep.

That idea ran totally counter to how the Pharisees thought of themselves. They thought of themselves as having arrived, as having the answers. And so they couldn’t believe what Jesus was telling them because it didn’t “fit” into their nice, neat little worldview.

Jesus goes on to say that there are some definite benefits to being his sheep.

John 10:28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.

John 10:29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.

John 10:30 I and the Father are one.”

You want to understand what the Bible says about eternal security? Look no further. If you place your trust in Jesus, if you become his sheep, Jesus guarantees that you are secure for all eternity. You can never lose your salvation. Your eternal destiny is never again in question. Why? Because you are holding on tight to him? No. Because he is holding on tight to you.

No one can snatch you out of his hand. And no one can snatch you out of the Father’s hand, because Jesus and the Father are one.

What an amazing declaration of the deity of Jesus Christ. If anyone suggests to you that Jesus was just a great man, or a great moral teacher, you better show him verse 30, where he claims in no uncertain terms to be God.

How do the Jewish leaders receive this statement? Their bias determined their beliefs. And their beliefs determined their behaviour. Look at what they did in verse 31…

John 10:31 Again the Jews picked up stones to stone him,

John 10:32 but Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many great miracles from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?”

John 10:33 “We are not stoning you for any of these,” replied the Jews, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”

Their action was predicated on the assumption that Jesus was only a man. But was Jesus a mere man? No – he was a man who was also God. Their assumption was wrong. Dead wrong. But they couldn’t see that because their bias determined their belief and their belief determined their behavior.

So they attempted to stone God. The very men who claimed to be the only true followers of God tried to kill him.

What can we learn about ourselves in all of this?

1. Proof isn’t the issue; pride is.

2. We can be very religious and very lost

   1. religious people often do the devil’s work for him – e.g. Israel, N. Ireland, etc.

   2. religious fervor can keep us from seeing the truth

   3. religion itself can make us hostile to God

3. Knowing Jesus is about being a sheep

   1. spiritually speaking, I can do nothing for myself

If I cannot come to grips with these things, I will remain a skeptic in relation to Jesus – one who habitually, instinctively doubts the truth about him, because it doesn’t fit with my preconceived ideas. A skeptic is one who cherishes his/her own ideas over against all others – and that is tragic when the others turn out to be the truth.