JOHN172 - Jesus Ravels It All Together

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Do you remember the Blue Album by Weezer from the 90s? I don't think it was actually called the Blue Album. I think it had a name, but everybody just calls it the Blue Album because it's blue on the cover. And people knew what albums looked like back then.

There's a bunch of songs on there, even if you don't know anything about rock or 90s music or any of that. There's a bunch of songs on there that you've heard before because it's a super well-produced, catchy, famous album that set the tone for you know years of you know, certain style of rock. It was produced, by the way, by Rico Kasich, the lead singer of the Cars, produced for Weezer.

I think that's crazy. Uh Buddy Holly is the song that most people, oh, just like Buddy Holly. Uh-oh, and you're married. Everybody knows that one, right? But there's another one on there called the sweater song. No, I've done it again. I don't think it's actually called the sweater song. I think it's called Undone, but just everybody calls it the sweater song because it has a line in there about a sweater.

It's if you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away. And there's some other stuff in there as well. But I mean, it's it's a catchy simple song with a very simple metaphor. Then I think that's part of why the song works. It's just everybody knows the metaphor, right? A sweater is it's a lovely thing, it's a work of art, but it's just one thread of yarn carefully assembled together to make the whole thing work.

But the very thing that makes it work and makes it beautiful, it makes it vulnerable as well. I mean, if you, I don't know, sweaters have some kind of like fail-safe where this doesn't actually happen. But the idea is that if you get on a thread of a sweater and you start pulling, it goes, it just the whole thing collapses, it falls apart.

And of course, this is a metaphor for ideas as well, or a sense of self, if you will, that things can look pretty put together, but if you get just the right thread and you start pulling on that thread, uh-oh, the whole thing unravels and then you just got a pile of yarn to sit in there. So Weezer is tapping into this well-worn metaphor about unraveling.

But if unraveling is a metaphor, then shouldn't there be an equal and opposite metaphor that is raveling? See, if my wife, Camilla Whitman, were to encounter the pile of thread left behind by the incident described in Weezer's The Sweater song, and she grabbed a pair of knitting needles, she could turn that into a better sweater than it was before.

She could easily take the chaos of that unraveled, scattered thread, and she could ravel it back together better than it ever was into something that will not later unravel. And she could make order out of that chaos. I think there's a double metaphor here, and the latter half of that double metaphor is what we're seeing at the end of the double prologue here in the first three chapters of the Gospel of John.

There is a raveling metaphor occurring that happens in the following verses. Let me just read it to you. The one who comes from above is above all. The one who is from the earth belongs to the earth and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony.

The man who has accepted it has certified that God is truthful. And what we're getting here is a raveling passage. Before John chapter 3, you got a lot of Bible. Listen to the weight of just the stuff before John 3. Listen. That's a lot of Bible. It makes a louder thump if I drop the remaining part of the Bible, too, but it's still a tremendous amount of Bible before the part that we're at here in John chapter 3.

There's a lot of stuff that happens in there, a lot of crazy miracles, a lot of wild moments with the God of all things showing up and straightening stuff out and revealing truth, capital T truth, that is, which is alien to this world, as we discussed yesterday. And it's uh some of it's intuitive. Some of it, your average reader, you know, you could go through the Old Testament and be like, yeah, it's squares, that makes sense.

It sounds like kind of what I see in the world, my experience. Other stuff defies normal logic or the normal rules of the physical universe, but yet it's there. Some of it is easy to know what to do with it, some it's hard to know what to do with it. But what we're getting in this little passage right here is well, something that has a raveling, a knitting together effect, because John the Evangelist's point is that it's a package deal.

That if Jesus is the revealer of capital T truth, if he brings that alien resource, capital T truth, down into the muck of our world where we don't really do truth and we're often even offended and put off by it when we get exposed to it, when he brings that here, testifying from that 10 billion foot heavenly view, then what he's doing, what he's setting up, is something that knits together all of the stories of redemptive history, the easy stuff, the hard stuff, the confusing stuff, the miraculous stuff, all of it.

So then the raveling force here is the character of God. It's the character of Jesus. And what causes the giant heap of strewn confusing thread or yarn to come together into this beautifully tightly knitted whole understanding of history and faith of God is the testimony of Christ. It's him being lifted up, brought to the forefront, pointed to, and it it simplifies everything.

You can just look at Jesus and say, all right, well, is he credible? All right, well, all right, does he wield the power of God? All right, well, does he get out foxed and outsmarted by learned mortals? Okay, he doesn't. All right, well, what about the hard rules of time and space and life and death?

Can he beat those? What about death itself? Can he beat that? And if the truth is that, yeah, he has integrity, he has wisdom, he has power beyond anything that makes sense in this world. If the conclusion is, well, that's God in the flesh, well, then that simplifies all the other stuff. It ravels together, it knits tightly together, all of the other things floating around from what might be kind of an overwhelming chunk of Bible and redemptive history into one reliable, tightly knitted thing.

In other words, if Jesus is credible, as John is John is saying, you know, he's credible. You can believe in him here in the first three chapters in this double prologue. If he is credible, then there's a whole bunch of other stuff that Jesus attests to that we don't totally have to solve. We can just say Jesus is credible and he attests to it.

What kind of stuff am I talking about? Well, an example here, Matthew 19, 3 through 6 or something like that. This is a scene where Jesus is being questioned about divorce, and in the process of that, Jesus affirms creation. Jesus says, Haven't you read that at the beginning the creator made them male and female and said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

So they're no longer two, but one. Therefore, what God has joined together, let man not separate. And of course, the part that we think about a lot there is the stuff that gets said at weddings and things like that. But look what Jesus did. He just affirmed that God is the maker of humanity, male and female, and just that there it is.

So how did things start? I don't know. It's very hard for me to picture the origin of things and how God did that and what mechanisms he used, if any, just summoning things out of non-existence, I guess, is creation. But I don't know what it looked like. I can't picture that kind of stuff, okay. But I can picture Jesus and his credibility, and I get a close look at that.

And if he affirms that this is the beginning of things, that God did it, okay, great. Here's another one that's hard for me to picture is the flood. Yet in Luke chapter 17, Jesus affirms it. What exactly happened with the flood? Like what were the physics of it? Where did the water come from? I don't know.

People have theories about that, but Jesus affirms that it happened. Luke 17, 26, just as it was written in the days of Noah, this is Jesus talking, so also it will be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying, and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark.

Then the flood came and destroyed them all. Again, I don't know how that happened. The Bible doesn't seem to try to answer that question, but Jesus affirms that it happened. In the very next verse, there's another story from Genesis that is a head scratcher. It's very hard to picture, but Jesus affirms it too.

This is the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Luke 17, 28. It was the same in the days of Lot, Jesus says. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. What else does Jesus affirm that ravels together the entire Bible and the story of redemptive history into one tightly knit package deal sweater?

Mark 12, 26. Now about the dead rising. Have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He's not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken. Okay, so how exactly does the burning bush work?

Like according to a physicist? How do you have a bush that's on fire, but it isn't consumed by the fire? I don't know. I don't have to know, though, because John is giving me language in John 3 to just say, accept the testimony of Christ. He's setting it up so that this certification of the testimony of Christ ravels together everything else in a way that makes sense.

What else we got? Well, Jesus affirmed the bronze serpent in John 3:14. You and I have been talking about that, just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up. That's a wild story from Numbers. Okay, but we get clarity on it right there. How about Jonah, Matthew 12?

It's funny. This has got to be like the 15th time that this passage has come up for you and I over the course of the history of the seven seasons of this podcast. But in verse 39, Jesus affirms one of the most difficult to understand or comprehend, you know, physical miracles of the Old Testament, but he affirms it right here.

Jesus answered, A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be there three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

There are more examples of Jesus affirming miraculous stuff and the stories from the Old Testament. But the bigger picture is that he just affirms the Old Testament, part and parcel, the prophets and the law and the wisdom literature, like even by name, he affirms all of it. So look, if you go and read through the Old Testament, and if you haven't done it, I hope you'll do it at some point.

I wrote a book that's meant to help with that, by the way. Really, if you get bogged down in the Old Testament, my book is for you. It is meant to help with that kind of thing. But if you go and read through the Old Testament, with help or without, you're probably gonna get a little bit overwhelmed by some of this.

And there, you know, there's gonna be stuff that our modern, very scientific, orderly, naturalistic minds are gonna see and go, I just don't get it. I don't know how that happened. I don't understand what God did there. But here in John chapter 3, we get this wonderful raveling passage that just very simply says the man who has accepted it, that is the testimony of Jesus from heaven, has certified that God is truthful.

It's a package deal. The reliability and authority and credibility of Jesus, God in the flesh, knits together the pile of seemingly chaotic stuff into something that is tight-knit, credible, and understandable. To accept Christ is to accept the testimony of Christ, and the testimony of Christ affirms the work of God that we see all throughout the Bible.

Cool. That's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.

JOHN172 - Jesus Ravels It All Together

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