I Want to Be in That Thunder: The Gospel as Warfare


Sermon by Russell Moore on January 30, 2011 John 12:27-43

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The Lord’s Day Morning


January 30, 2011



“I Want to Be in That Thunder:
The Gospel as Warfare”


John 12:27-43


The Reverend Dr. Russell D. Moore

Would you please turn in your Bibles to the gospel of John 12.
I’d like for us to look this morning at verses 27 through 43 in John
chapter 12. While you’re turning
there, let me tell you what a joy it is to be in a place that I pray for all the
time, a pulpit that is occupied every week by one of my heroes of the faith,
Ligon Duncan, and a congregation that so faithfully is present here.
I can tell you, apart from the Lord Jesus, His Church, His Gospel, and my
family, there is nothing in the world I love more than Mississippi and it is an
answer to ongoing prayer to know that this congregation is standing here in the
capital city of this great state proclaiming the blood and righteousness and
forgiveness and kingdom and mercy and power of Jesus Christ.
So I thank you for that.

Let’s read in John chapter 12. I’d
like for us to start with verse 17 to set some of the background here.
John chapter 12 beginning with verse 17.
Would you please stand out of reverence for the reading of the Word of
our God?

“The crowd that had
been with Him (with Jesus) when He called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him
from the dead continued to bear witness.
The reason why the crowd went to meet Him was that they heard He had done
this sign. So the Pharisees said to
one another, ‘You see that you are gaining nothing.
Look, the world has gone after Him.’

Now among those who
went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks.
So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked
him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’
Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
And Jesus answered them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be
glorified. Truly, truly, I say to
you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone;
but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world
will keep it for eternal life. If
anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there will My servant be
also. If anyone serves Me, the
Father will honor him.

Now is My soul
troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father,
save Me from this hour’? But for
this purpose I have come to this hour.
Father, glorify Your name.’
Then a voice came from heaven: ‘I
have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’
The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered.
Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to Him.’
Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for Mine.
Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be
cast out. And I, when I am lifted up
from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.’
He said this to show by what kind of death He was going to die.
So the crowd answered Him, ‘We have heard from the Law that the Christ
remains forever. How can you say
that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who
is this Son of Man?’ So Jesus said
to them, ‘The light is among you for a little while longer.
Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.
The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.
While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons
of light.’

When Jesus had said
these things, He departed and hid Himself from them.
Though He had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe
in Him, so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

‘Lord, who has
believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been
revealed?’

Therefore they could
not believe. For again Isaiah said,

‘He has blinded their
eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand
with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.’

Isaiah said these
things because he saw His glory and spoke of Him.
Nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in Him, but for fear
of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of
the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory
that comes from God.”

Let’s pray.

Our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I ask You this morning, would you silence
every spirit that exalts its name over the name of the Lord Jesus Christ?
Father, would You silence the accusations of the accuser?
Would you silence the deceptions of the deceiver?
Would you turn back the destruction of the destroyer?
And Father, may we this morning through Your Word overcome through the
blood of Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ?
Would You speak, ‘Let there be light’?
And we ask this Father, to the glory of our Lord Christ alone and in His
name. Amen.

You may be seated.

I could feel the blood pounding in my temples and my hands were shaking there on
the steering wheel. I had been
driving down the road with a young man that I was talking to about some
spiritual things and some issues in his life and apparently I had, as I
sometimes do, gotten kind of involved in the conversation to the degree that I
wasn’t really paying much attention to where I was going and how I was driving.
And apparently I was not driving fast enough for the guy who was behind
me because he came around in the other lane and kind of lurched over a little
bit toward me so that I had to lurch into the other lane to my other side which
was right there with the oncoming traffic.
The car had veered away just to miss him, hitting me head-on, and I was
so caught up in the fury of the moment that before I knew what was happening and
before I had any time to even think it through or articulate anything at all, I
heard my own voice yelling, screaming, “I’m going to find you and I’m going to
sue you!” And then I looked around
at this young man that I had baptized and discipled and “then I’m going to
witness to you and share Jesus with you.”
(laughter)

That bothered me at the moment because it seemed so dissonant from what I had
just been trying to do — to encourage him what it is to walk in the way of the
Lord Jesus Christ. I’ve got to
confess to you, it also bothered me because it made me feel like a complete
wimp. I thought about my dad back
here in Mississippi and thought, “What would he have done in a similar
situation?” Well, he might have
yelled out, “I’m going to find you and I’m going to knock your teeth out!” but I
had said something different — “I’m going to find you and I’m going to sue you!”
Where did that come from?
I’ve never sued anybody before! And
the more I thought about it, the more I realized that without my even knowing
it, I had been shaped and patterned by the culture around me, and what was
really happening was I had just found what I considered to be a civilized form
of warfare. And because I was
threatened and I was afraid, I lashed out with the only kind of power that I
believed at the time I could have appropriately had because I wanted to be in
the right. I wanted things to be
made right.

And the more I thought about that and how capable I was at an instinctual level
of fighting, I realized that the real problem is not that I was too much of a
fighter. The problem is that I’m not
nearly enough of a fighter. The
warfare that the Lord Jesus had called me to, the very kind of warfare that I
had just been talking about with this young, new Christian is a warfare that the
Scripture says over and over and over again is entirely different from the way
that we want to engage in our little warfares all the time.
Now there’s probably not many of you who have threatened a lawsuit this
week, probably not many of you who have been in a fight or in a brawl, but most
of you in this room have had the experience of responding to something that
scares you or threatens you with whatever kind of power you can find in a way to
prop up and to maintain your own rightness, your own glory.
For some of you, that takes place in your household.
Some of you will erupt in a fury in your home.
Some of you will have a very cool kind of warfare – “Well if you don’t
know what’s wrong, I am certainly not going to tell you.”
For some of you there is a temptation in your workplace to seethe in fury
at a coworker or a supervisor, to maintain your own position with an almost
instinctively primal kind of force.
Jesus shows us consistently in the Scripture that the fight and the scrimmage He
has called us to is a fight and a scrimmage that is far more ancient and far
more primal than any of the sinful strivings that we try to engage in.

Notice what the apostle John tells us in this text.
He tells us that the crowds are coming after Jesus.
As a matter of fact, it’s not just the crowds of Jewish people there but
you also have Greeks who are coming in from afar.
There’s attention, interest in Jesus and in His preaching.
As a matter of fact, John tells us that much of this interest has
happened because Jesus has just done something extraordinary.
He has raised His friend Lazarus from the dead and that word starts to
ripple through everywhere. Here He
is, He is present, and as John tells us, this is the last time that he gives us
this picture of the crowds coming around in this very same way because the text
is about to get very, very lonely.
Jesus is headed toward execution. He
is headed toward that “place of the skull,” that Golgotha hill on which He is
going to be crucified. And as the
drumbeat starts moving toward the cross, John shows us that there are those who
are declaring war of Jesus and on what Jesus represents.
But the interesting thing is that Jesus does not declare war on them.
Jesus instead points to another war, a war that is not obvious, a war
that is invisible, but a war in which the stakes could not be higher.
And they did not want to hear it.

Notice first of all that John tells us here that this way of the cross, the way
that Jesus is going, calls us to a crucified fear
.
All in the background here there is a sense of fear.
John says that the religious leaders, that the Pharisees are very fearful
of Jesus – “Look at Him, He’s getting all of these crowds.
The people are going after Him.
As a matter of fact, they say the whole world is wanting to follow after
Him. We’re going to lose our
position. We’re going to lose our
power. We’re going to lose
everything that is meaningful to us.”
They’re afraid. He says that even
the authorities who believe what Jesus is saying, they will not confess Him
because they are afraid of being put out of the synagogues.
They are afraid of the Pharisees.
The fear is pointing them away from Jesus and from the kingdom that He is
preaching.

Right now, you and I are sitting in this room with a sign out front announcing
that we are here. There is no fear
of authorities; there is no fear of being driven away from here.
Our brothers and sisters right now in China and in Sudan are gathered
together, many of them, waiting for the sounds of boots outside.
I wonder what it will look like if, God forbid, fifty, sixty, seventy
years from now the children who are now in the nursery here at First
Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi have to worship in a culture that
regards them as a dangerous cult?
What will fear do to the proclamation of the Gospel and to following after
Jesus? The people are afraid and the
fear drives them away from Jesus Himself.

But it’s not only the fear here of the people and of the leaders, John also
points us to Jesus Himself. Notice
what Jesus says in verse 27. He
says, “Now is My soul troubled.”
Literally, “in anguish” or “tossed about.” Now that’s the very same kind of
language that you see Jesus using right before He is arrested in which He is
praying out there in that olive garden in Gethsemane.
Jesus says, “I am in anguish.”
Why would Jesus, the very one who said to us, “Be troubled for nothing,”
now say, “I am troubled”? Why would
the one who said, “Take no care for tomorrow; don’t worry about tomorrow” now
speak about worry, about being tossed about, about being troubled?
Is Jesus afraid of death? No.
When Jesus confronts these religious leaders He does not back down at
all. He has no fear of them.
When Jesus goes before the Sanhedrin later on, He has no fear of them.
When Pilate brings Jesus before him, Jesus has no fear of him at all.
As a matter of fact, He says that “there is not one thing that you can do
to Me that hasn’t been given to you by My Father.”

Jesus has no fear of all of these things, but when He looks toward the purpose
for which He came, the cross, He says, “I am in great distress.”
Why? Because Jesus never told
us, “Do not fear.” “A fool is one
who does not fear,” the Proverbs tell us.
Jesus says, “Do not fear what cannot hurt you.
Do not fear the one who can kill the body,” Jesus says — Pilate, Herod,
the Sanhedrin, the crowds — He says, “Fear the one who can cast both body and
soul into hell.” And Jesus knows as
He looks toward the heavens that where He is walking is toward hell.
He is walking toward the crossbeams in which He will have laid upon
Himself all of the sins of His people, all of the curse that is directed toward
them that is on its way at the cross.
And Jesus says, “When I think about the judgment of God, I am in great
distress and troubled, but what am I going to do, Father, say, ‘Save me from
this hour’? No.
I came for this hour. Father,
do what You will, not what I will.”

John is writing this, the best friend of our Lord, the one who, as he is writing
this would have known what it looked like to see those muscles twitching in
torture. He would have known what it
sounded like to hear that northern-Galilean accent screaming, “My God, My God,
why have You forsaken Me?” He would
have known what it felt like to feel that warm blood spattering against his face
as he held the collapsing figure of our Lord Jesus’ mother.
He understood something of the horror of what Jesus is facing but Jesus’
troubled mind here isn’t about pain.
It’s about knowing the terror of the Lord.
The people here are afraid of all kinds of things but what they are not
afraid of is the only thing there is to fear, which is the judgment of a holy
God. He calls us to another fear.

But the way of the cross also calls us to a crucified power.

All in the background here is a
discussion of power, of what it means to have power.
The crowds are coming around Jesus because of the signs that they want to
see Jesus doing something. They want
to see something extraordinary. They
are hoping that He might be the King that He is talking about as though He is.
Why? Because they want His
power to do something for them. They
want to drive out the Romans. They
want to drive out that puppet government.
They want to do away with all of the troubles and the travails that they
have. And Jesus indeed does speak
about power here, but it’s a very different kind of power.
He says, “Father, I want You to glorify Your name.”
If I were standing there I am sure that what I would have wanted is what
Jesus’ disciples so often want —shock and awe.
Bring down the fire from heaven!
Drive out these wicked people who are all around us!

But the voice comes back from heaven and says, “I have glorified it, I will
glorify it again.” And the people
there, hearing this voice, don’t even recognize the power behind the voice.
They turn around and say to each other, “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah, umm, it might have been an angel.
That is thunder; it was just thunder.
They’ve been talking about thunderstorms.
When you haven’t slept in a while you just start imagining things.
It’s just thunder. That’s all
it is.” They reassure themselves.
This surely can’t really be God because if it is God they have to deal
with what God is saying and God is dealing with the kind of power that is very
different from the kind of power that they want because Jesus says, “I’ll show
you the power. Now is the judgment
of this world.” They want the
judgment on Rome. They want the
judgment on their enemies. He said,
“Now is the ruler of this world cast out.” And people must have said to
themselves, “Great! Caesar is
finally about to be deposed!”

But Jesus is pointing to something that is deeper, something that is worse than
Caesar. He says, “There is a ruler
of this age who is holding humanity captive.
And how is he holding humanity captive?
By accusation. Every single
man and every single woman is scrutinized by these principalities and powers who
bring the accusation — ‘You belong with us in the lake of fire devoted to us
from before the world was. You share
a nature with us. You are guilty.
You are guilty. You are
guilty.’” And every single human
conscience knows that they are right and we slink back into hiddenness, every
single human conscience but one.
Jesus says elsewhere, “The ruler of this world is coming.
He has nothing on Me.” And He
said, “The power that I am going to show you is a power that comes when I am
lifted up.” John says this indicates
how it is that He is going to die.
The power comes in the death. He
says, “When I am lifted up, when the blood has silenced that accusation by
fulfilling the righteous law of God is fulfilling the condemnation that comes
against sin, I will draw all people to Myself.”

The Pharisees were worried about Jesus’ power and they said, “Let us show you
where His power is. We can’t do
anything because the whole world is following after Him.”
Jesus said, “No, no, no, no, no — this is
nothing. But when I am lifted up,
when the Gospel goes forward, then you will see the power of God unto salvation
to everyone who believes.” So that
every time that woman in Haiti walks away from Santeria and confesses Jesus as
Lord, every time that that Chinese person walks away from materialistic
communism and confesses Jesus as Lord, every time that that self-righteous
southern Presbyterian or southern Baptist walks away from his own righteousness
and confesses Jesus as Lord, every time that happens, rippling out through the
centuries and all over the world, Jesus is demonstrating the power of the cross.
It is a power that is different than the power they want but it pierces
through. And to be honest with you, often it is different than the power you and
I want.

We look at our neighbors. We see
those Darwin fish bumper stickers. Have you ever seen those, in which they take
the Jesus fish and they put Darwin in the middle of it and they put the little
legs coming out of it like it’s an evolving fish?
That makes us mad. We see our
neighbors with those Darwin fish and we get aggravated with them.
They’re picking an argument with us.
So what do we do? We go have
our own bumper stickers made with the Jesus fish eating the Darwin fish!
(laughter) So we’re going to
have even more Darwinism than what you have!
And Jesus wins the survival of the fittest!
We become angry at our neighbors rather than understanding they are just
like we were – captives to the blindness that Jesus says comes upon people who
cannot see the truth because they fear that the truth is true.
You and I were in exactly the same situation.
And what is the power that breaks through that?
It is not our rage, it is not our arguments, it is not our
sophistication, it is not our programs.
Is it the simple proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus says brings light,
it dispels the darkness, it enables us to walk in the light that is being given
to us by grace.

Some of you feel very powerless right now because you have maybe a mother or
maybe a son or maybe a friend who doesn’t know Christ and you’re concerned
about. And you say, “I don’t even
know what else to do. This person
already knows the Gospel. I try to
talk about the Gospel but he already knows it all or she already knows it all.
There’s nothing else for me to say.”
And what we want is some type of an argument that will tear them down,
some type of a strategy that is foolproof to get through to them.
And yet none of us came to Christ that way.
I wonder how many of you in this room were saved the very first time you
heard the Gospel. Most of us heard
the Gospel over and over and over again and then one day something happened that
was different than when we had ever heard the Gospel before.
There was a power there that was not there before.
And what was the power? Was
the power another argument? Wait a
minute — so there’re five hundred witnesses to the resurrection?
You see, I didn’t know that.
Just as I am without one plea. That’s not
what happened with most of us. For
most of us it was exactly what Jesus is talking about.
There is a flooding in of this light so that the blindness that came upon
us, the veil that was over our face, is released.
The power of God to salvation but it is a crucified power.
Your lost son and daughter, your lost mother or father, your lost husband
or wife, your lost friend doesn’t need any other power than the Gospel.
It’s crucified power.

And you’ll notice finally that this way of the cross calls us to a crucified
glory
.
See, everybody here on this page is seeking after some kind of glory.
They’re seeking after some kind of way to be applauded and some way to be
made to be seen to be in the right.
And Jesus says, “No, no, no, I’m not concerned about that.
I’m concerned about the Father glorifying His own name.
I’m concerned about the glory that Isaiah saw when he saw the Lord high
and lifted up in the temple, the very same glory Jesus says will soon be
crucified on wood, high and lifted up.”
“The crowds,” the Scripture says, “are not willing to follow after
Jesus.” Verse 43 — and why?
“Because they love the glory that came from man more than the glory that
came from God.” They loved their own
glory so much that they could not see the glory that was right in front of them.
They could not see the weightiness that is right there in front of them.
They were blinded just as the prophet had announced.
They were deaf just as the prophet had foreseen.
And they could not see and embrace what is glorious — the Gospel.

Most of us, when we think glory, think of fame and celebrity and for some people
that is what glory is. The glory
that you could be seeking could just as much be – the stability of your family
apart from Christ, your faithfulness to your job apart from Christ, your service
to the church apart from Christ. You
can be seeking glory as a homeschooling mom or as a salt-of-the-earth plumber
just as much as these Pharisees were and just as much as someone who is craving
after power is. But what does Jesus
say? The glory must be crucified in
order to be seen. The glory comes
through the way of the cross.

There’re some of you here this morning who may still be strangers to the grace
of the Lord Jesus Christ. You may
still have a conscience that speaks to you and indicts you with the certainty
that you will one day stand in judgment if you will stand alone.
The voice of warfare speaks to you and the voice of warfare that Jesus
speaks, the declaration that Jesus makes of war is not against you, it’s against
those principalities and powers who are holding you captive right
now through your own desires and through the fact that they are able to
bring against you that bill of indictment and because they are right Jesus says
to you, “If you will acknowledge God’s rightness in His judgment against you, if
you will cry out for mercy, if you will count the blood of Jesus as enough to
pay for your sins, and if you will count the resurrection life of Jesus as
enough to send you into the future of rightness before God, you will be
delivered, you will be freed, you will be liberated from the very thing that
perhaps you’ve never even known is holding you in captivity.”

And for the rest of us in the room, those of us who have come to know Jesus, are
we as confused as the people who were around Jesus all the time, who saw Him
washing His beard out in the morning, who knew the color of His eyes?
Are we as confused as they can be?
Are we too afraid to fear what Jesus feared?
Some of you in this room fear exposure of your sin more than you fear
God. Repent.
Are we too powerful to see the power of the cross?
Are we seeking some way to make our own way in life rather than being
willing for the sake of the Gospel for God to crush all of our own dreams if He
will be faithful to Himself and to conform us to the image of Christ?
Are we too glorious to see the glory of Christ?
Do we, instead of looking toward what it is that God has accomplished in
defeating our enemy through the Gospel, are we too concerned about our own
reputation and our own privilege and our own standing?
In the middle of all that confusion a voice cries out.
The voice that cried out from the heavens — “I have glorified My name and
I will glorify it again” yells out again in the Word He has breathed out to us.
“Come unto Me, all you who are weary and heaven laden, and I will give
you rest. But to the serpent who
stands to accuse you, I will crush his head.”
That’s just thunder. It’s
just thunder, isn’t it?

Let’s pray.

Father we pray and ask this morning that if there are those in this room who are
at war with You rather than at war
with You, Father I pray and ask that
You might stir their consciences to see that.
Father I pray for those this morning who are too prideful to admit a need
for the Gospel. And Father I pray
for those who are too despairing to think that the Gospel can save them.
Father we know right now that in this room are idolaters and fornicators
and thieves, murderers. Father we
know that right now in this room there may be women who have had abortions, men
who have paid for abortions, people who have broken up marriages, ruining the
lives of children. Father, there are
things that we could list on and on and on and on and we know that the demonic
spirits would love nothing more than for the people who are guilty of such awful
things to shrink back in fear of You rather than to see what You have done in
the cross of Jesus. And Father I
pray that every single one of those people in that situation will know that if
they are in Christ there is no condemnation, judgment has been handed down
already and is over. Father, for
those of us who know what it is to walk with You, would You remind us that we
are not in peacetime, we’re in war.
And Father, would you help us not to war against each other and certainly not to
war against You, but help us to wrestle with principalities and powers in the
heavenly places and with ourselves that we might see the cross.
We ask this in Jesus’ name.
Amen.

(Dr. Duncan) We’ve been called from
peace to a fight, from the wrong war to the right war, from dependence upon
ourselves to the crucified power, so let’s sing a song for the fight.
Would you turn with me to number 570 and we’ll sing the first, third, and
fourth stanzas of Faith of Our Fathers.

(Dr. Moore) In the beginning was the
Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God and all things were made through Him and
without Him was not anything made that was made.
In Him was light and the light was the light of men and the light shines
in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, the
glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
Go in His grace and go in His truth.
Amen.

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