John 7:27-29 But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from.” So Jesus proclaimed, as he taught in the temple, “You know me, and you know where I come from? But I have not come of my own accord. He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me.”
John MacArthur, with this indicting message:
Jesus says, “You don’t know anything.” Verse 28, “I didn’t come here of Myself, I’m not riding My own ambition. I’m not operating on My own whims. I’m not in this thing for My own desire for self-glory. That ought to be obvious. There’s a divine uniqueness to My coming that you haven’t even begun to learn.” And then He indicts them with the most conclusive, dynamic, devastating, thunderous indictment that He ever indicted them with, at the end of verse 28. “But He that sent Me is true…go to the next four words…whom ye know not.”
Oh man, these people had spent their life reading the Old Testament. They prided themselves on the knowledge of God. He says, “You don’t even know God.” Didn’t Jesus say, “No man cometh unto the Father…what?…but by Me?” You don’t know Me, you don’t know God.
People say, “Well, what about the heathens all around the world?” Peter said, “Neither is there salvation in any other name than the name of Jesus Christ.” You don’t know Him, you don’t know God.
But people worship God. No they don’t, they don’t know who they’re worshiping. You don’t know Christ, you don’t know God. And the tragedy of this is that they had all the things that could have truly revealed God to them, didn’t they? That’s the…that’s the most tragic thing, to have all the Scripture, all the promise, all the covenants, all the adoption, as Paul says in Romans 9:5 there, all that you have and you don’t know anything. Whew…and they had prided themselves on all their knowledge of the rules and the regulations. You know all the stuff, you just don’t know God. What an indictment.
Now mark it well. To know a few minor external things about God is not to know God. And to know a few minor external things about Jesus is to know nothing. And double disaster if you have all the truth and still don’t know anything. I’m sure God will deal in love and wisdom to those who have never really had the Scriptures, but to those who have it and don’t know it, tremendous judgment because to whom much is given, much is required. In Hosea 4 Hosea qualified the whole problem in Israel in one sentence. “My people are destroyed for lack of…what?…knowledge.” They just don’t know anything.
Boy, we see it today. We live in a culture where Jesus is a byword. Everybody knows Jesus. But nobody knows Him. Bibles all over the place, and nobody knows what’s in them. Churches everywhere, and people don’t know God and they don’t know Jesus. But before you condemn the world, just look at the church. You know what the curse of Christianity is today? One word…ignorance. That is the greatest curse that we face in Christianity, trying to educate ignorant Christians. They can’t reproduce themselves cause they don’t know what they are. They can’t teach the Word of God cause they don’t know what they believe. They can’t give some help to somebody cause they don’t know what the Bible teaches. We presented a series one time at the National Sunday School Convention on why young people drop out of church, and we came to the conclusion that one of the dominant factors is the fact that they get frustrated over the fact of ignorance, where a kid is brought to church all his life by mom and dad, and then a crisis comes in his life and he says, “Help me, dad or mom, what does the Bible say?” And the parents say, “I don’t know, I’ve only been going to church for 25 years. But ask me what’s on page 198 in the hymnal and I’ll tell you it’s ‘Just as I am.'” And that’s tragedy. That is tragedy.
We’re ignorant. That’s why it’s almost a consuming passion with me to communicate the knowledge of the Word of God. The apostle Paul said inRomans 12:2, he said you can be transformed from the world by the renewing of…what?…your mind, just your brain, just learn the things of God. They’ll take care of the emotion and the motivation if you just learn. Paul didn’t say, “Timothy, go out and get excited. Go hear a super-challenging speaker.” Paul said to Timothy, “Study…study…study to show yourself…what?…approved, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth.” Ignorance is the curse of Christianity. I daresay our faith is based on a Trinity view of God, I daresay 90 percent of the people in the church if they were confronted by somebody and they said, “Show me two places in the Bible where the trinity is taught,” couldn’t give them one. Ask yourself. And yet you know when they knock on your door, brother, they know the ones that prove the Trinity doesn’t exist to them. We don’t even know what we believe. That’s why it’s to teach…to teach…to teach…to teach that matters.
Knowing God through His Word ... Day by Day 