Recent Musings:
Devotion #2
Thursday, February 2, 2006
March 30th - God Knows Us: No need to make excuses. God knows the depths of the human heart. John 5:31-47
While trying to analyze this text, I was given this understanding:
Humans struggle with accepting concepts and beliefs and realities that they cannot experience through their humanness. God knew this about us and knows us so well that he felt giving us Christ as another human to relate to, although this human was also fully God, would be the way to express himself to and relate with his creation.
God also knows that as humans we are untrusting, that we have misplaced our hope on things other than him and that we cling only to the realities that we can experience with our senses.
When John the Baptist and Moses spoke to the people about God and the Messiah, the people believed them. Jesus even says that the people trusted John and Moses because they were one of them, human. Yet the Jews, the text tells us, clung more to their humanity and the prophets than to the promises of the prophets. Jesus says in verse 39 that the Jews clung to the Scriptures because that was the answer for them – it was something tangible and real and they could perceive it with their humanness. The actual Christ standing before them in the flesh was more than their humanness could handle and they couldn't do it, they couldn't believe.
In verses 45-47 it almost seems as if Jesus tells the Jews that it is not their sins that will condemn them but the finiteness and limitedness of their thinking, their lack of faith in the man God had sent to them in the flesh - that is what condemns them.
The hope lies in the promise of the Christ standing and testifying in these verses. Not only is he fulfilling the promises of the sacred Scriptures, he's also appealing to our humanity by being human. Christ has taken our hopes and our beliefs and made them tangible and real in his flesh. Our hope is that because Christ was fully human, he will know and understand and forgive the depths of our hearts.