By Elder Jewel Love
(Ed. – Jewel Love and his wife, Leila, have been members of WCG/GCI for more than 40 years. He served 10 years in the U.S. Air Force as a communications officer reaching the rank of Captain where his duties included boarding Air Force One.)
Most of us have been called to jury duty and some of us have actually served. Hopefully we haven’t been involved in cases where people have been innocently condemned. But it happens.
The First Century Jewish people also had a criminal justice system and a lot of it was based on the law in Deuteronomy that only in the mouth of two or three witnesses could a person be condemned.
This is what makes Jesus’ encounter with the leaders of his nation recorded in John 5 so interesting. Jesus had just healed a man who was infirm and he ordered him to take up his mat and walk away whole (John 5:1-15).
Jesus got in trouble with the Pharisees for that. They had a law about carrying things on the Sabbath day. The leaders were angry enough to speak of killing him (5:18). So Jesus launched into a long discourse on the subject of judgment and life. At the end he concluded with four forms of witness to who he was and what he was about. The leaders hated him for claiming to make himself equal with God (5:18) but Jesus cites his reasons knowing that “If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true” (5:31).
What were his witnesses?
First he refers back to John the Baptizer. “You have sent to John and he has borne witness to the truth…he was a bright and shining light and you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light” (5:32-35). Jesus and the crowds around Jordan knew that John had said of him, “You are the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). And John was the prophet all men respected. The enemies of Jesus knew that. So he silenced them on that count.
Second, Jesus asserted another important witness – the mighty works he had been doing, healings and other miracles that people could see. The lame man was one in a long line of witnesses to the fact that Jesus could heal by the power of his Father (5:30). (Even the Qur’an admits to the miracles that Jesus was able to do).
Third, the witness of his Father in heaven to whom he was. You remember that at Jesus’ baptism the heavens opened and a Voice said, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.” Some scholars think that while this is relevant Jesus is actually referring to the internal testimony of the Father’s word in people who heard Jesus speak or to us when we read the Scriptures, a reverberation of the Father inside us that causes us to respond to him. But the Jewish leaders did not respond. Anyone reading the Scriptures as they did and resisting the testimony in there is missing the meaning: Jesus is the point of Scripture.
The fourth line of testimony continues on from this. Jesus takes his critics back to the words of Moses who predicted the Messiah who would come (5:45-47). On the road to Emmaus Jesus met two distraught disciples after his own death and resurrection and encouraged them to reconsider the many mentions in the Law but also the prophets and the writings about Himself (Luke 24). Today twenty centuries later the written testimony in the prophets about Jesus as Messiah is one of our great testimonies to others and ourselves about who Jesus was.
So how about it. After hearing his fourfold witness is Jesus guilty? Guilty of being God…or not?