John chapter 5, from verse 31. If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true. There is another who bears witness about Me, and I know that the testimony that He bears about Me is true. You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved. He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given Me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about Me that the Father has sent Me. And the Father who sent Me has Himself borne witness about Me. His voice you have never heard, His form you have never seen, and you do not have His word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom He has sent. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about Me. Yet you refuse to come to Me that you may have life. I do not receive glory from people, but I know that you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in My Father's name, and you do not receive Me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote of Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words? This is the word of the Lord. A couple of weeks ago, we looked at this same passage, and you may recall that we considered how it was a courtroom scene. As we read it again, you might have heard the word witness come up again and again, and the words accusation, "Moses will accuse you." It's not I who will accuse you. This scene is the scene of a courtroom where the Jews who have seen Jesus and interacted with Jesus are standing in the courtroom being accused and judged, and Jesus is calling witnesses against them. And two weeks ago, we looked at the first two witnesses that Jesus calls: John the Baptist and the works that He does. Today, I'd like to consider with you the third witness that Jesus calls, and we start to see about that witness in verse 37. The witness that Jesus calls here is the scriptures. Now, He starts by talking about how the Father has borne witness, but then if you keep reading, you see that it's His Father's word that Jesus is calling to stand as a witness. In verse 38, "You do not have His word abiding in you, because you search the Scriptures and you do not see Me," is what Jesus says. He then picks up on this same idea of the scriptures further down in verse 45, where He says, "Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. Moses will accuse you because Moses spoke of Me." Now remember, Jesus is speaking to Jews. It's quite different to our culture and our audience. You may or may not have read the Old Testament. You may not be as familiar with it as a Jew would be. But for a Jew, the scriptures were their life. The scriptures were what they engaged with from birth and weekly in the synagogue. And you can hear it in the language that Jesus uses. These Jews that He's speaking to are highly engaged with the scriptures. "You search the Scriptures," He says. And that word's a very active word. You keep searching them. You're engaging with them all the time. But Jesus is speaking to these Jews, saying, "You read all of these scriptures," the whole Old Testament, which is about two-thirds of your Bible, "and you missed the point." You missed it entirely. Because God was speaking to you through the scriptures, and in them, He was revealing Himself to you. And if you had had the eyes to see, you would have seen Me, is what Jesus is saying. He says to them, "The Father's voice you've never heard and His form you've never seen," because you didn't see Me in the scriptures. The implication is if you had seen Me, you would have seen His voice, you would have heard His voice and seen His form. Why? Because Jesus is the word of God. John's made that very clear to us. Jesus speaks to us of the word of God, and He is the one who reveals, who is revealed in the Old Testament. And Jesus is the image of God, the one who shows us the Father. And if we have eyes to see it, we would see that unveiled for us in the Old Testament. You know, what Jesus is saying here is that the scriptures—that the Jews wouldn't have called it the Old Testament, by the way, they would have just called it the scriptures. Jesus never calls it the Old Testament either. What He's saying is the scriptures are a little bit like an Agatha Christie novel. If you ever seen, seen, like a—it's like a murder mystery. If you're not familiar with Agatha Christie, just a murder mystery story. You know these stories where you know something's up from the very beginning. And you see all these different characters interacting, and you're not quite sure what's going on. You're not quite sure who it is that did the crime. But right at the end of the story, and Agatha Christie was so good at this, you would have the veil pulled aside, and all of a sudden you would know who it was that did the murder. And then, all of the events that had occurred through the beginning of the novel suddenly take on fresh meaning. Right? And then you could go back and you could read it again, and you could say, "Oh, I see. Oh, I see what's happening here. What I thought was happening was not really what was happening. The things that were said that seemed incidental to me actually were full of meaning." That's what Jesus is saying the Old Testament is like. When you read the scriptures, you know something is up, He says, and when Jesus comes on the scene, the veil is pulled aside, and the meaning of everything is brought to bear. Now, I want to work through with you for most of our time today just some of the ways that Jesus is revealed to us in the Old Testament. And my hope is twofold. My hope is that you will, if you struggle to read the Old Testament, you might pick up on a few ideas as to how to read it and see Jesus. But my other hope is that if you are not a believer in Jesus Christ, you would see something of the mastery of God in weaving together a history of the entire world that all points to Jesus and is all fulfilled in Him. Let's start with some easy ways. The scriptures are full of direct prophecies. You see this right from the very beginning. In Genesis, we have Adam and Eve in the garden. They fall into sin, and the whole world comes under a curse. And in Genesis 3, verse 15, God says to the serpent, Satan, that He will raise up a seed from the woman who will kill the serpent, and while the serpent will bruise his heel. That's a prophecy. God is saying, "I'm going to do something in the future. I'm going to do something to overthrow the serpent, Satan." And the Old Testament scriptures are full of these kinds of prophecies. And as you read them, you'll find more and more, and the amount of what God is promising will become so huge. For instance, even this morning, we heard from Deuteronomy chapter 18, where God has sent Moses to this, to His people to deliver them out of Egypt. Moses, this the most incredible prophet of God, in the sense that he was someone who went up on the mountain and spoke face to face with God, came down from the mountain with his face radiant and shining, gave the law of God, the most detailed explanation of the heart of God and God's character that anyone had received to to this point, delivered His people, brought them out of Egypt, performed great signs and wonders. And God's people were looking at Moses, and you can imagine what they're thinking, "What happens when you die?" And Moses says to them, "Don't worry, here's a prophecy. God will raise up a prophet from among you who is like Me, who's better than Me. Listen to Him. He will speak to you the very words of God." That is a prophecy about Jesus. And it comes true in Jesus, as we see His words and His works revealing to us the Father. And there are hundreds of these, and the detail of them is quite remarkable. Go and read Isaiah 53 and compare it to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. I won't go through it now for the sake of time, but God knew what He was doing. He was sending a savior, a prophet. He was sending a king. Go and read Psalm 2 and read of the anointed of God, the king who would sit on God's holy hill and rule the nations. Never came true in Israel's history, but comes true in Jesus. There were direct prophecies. Other places you see Jesus in the Old Testament are theophanies. These are ways that God showed Himself to His people throughout the Old Testament. You can think of the burning bush with Moses, or the pillar of cloud and fire with where the Israelites followed around the wilderness, or you can think of the angel of God who came down and ate and drank with Abraham. There are these appearances of God. And when you see that, what you're seeing is Jesus because Jesus is the revelation of God. Jesus is the image of God. Jesus is who you see when you see God. But let's go a bit deeper. The entire storyline of the Bible, in both the big and the small, points us to Jesus. There's a narrative that God is building throughout the history of the scriptures where He is directing our attention to our need and to what He's going to do. Let me try and give you the very brief overview. There's heaps of books you can read on this, but we begin in the garden of Eden where man is walking with God. That's clearly, as we read, we can feel our hearts drawn towards this. This is what we want. We want this perfect place. And then we see the fall, and God then starts to seek to repair humanity. He promises the seed, as we saw in Genesis 3:15, the seed who would come and restore all things. But that's clearly not enough, because very quickly, mankind falls into the worst kinds of evil, and so God has to judge them all with a great flood where He destroys all of humanity except for eight people. And there we see His judgment on display, the fact that the wickedness that we have in ourselves needs to be dealt with and deserves deserving of death. But God wants to provide a way of escape. And He does that through Noah. But even that is insufficient because just after Noah, we have the tower of Babel, and everyone is divided. Again, something that breaks our heart as we read it. We read and we see that as God's building this narrative, this is not the way things should be. Man seeking to ascend and be like God and being judged by God and scattered over the face of the earth. But then God calls Abraham and says, "I'm going to restore it, and I'm going to do this through Abraham. I'm going to bless the whole world through him and his descendants are going to believe in Me and trust in Me, and they're going to be more than the stars of heaven." He then makes it more clear to us in in how He's going to deal with this issue of sin and our and the fact that this world is broken as He sends Moses and unveils the law of Moses, which not only shows us the moral code that is good, but also shows us how it is that God will live with man through sacrifices and washings, through the priesthood. But even there, we see this is insufficient. How can the blood of goats and bulls deal with our sin? We might kill an animal, but then we keep on sinning, and we know in ourselves that this is not enough. How can a priest who fails, and you read of all the priests who fail? How can priests who fail and then die adequately represent me to God? We need better. And then God introduces the idea of a king as He sends David and Solomon, a king who will rule with righteousness and justice, who will defeat the enemies of God and save His people. But even there, we see it's insufficient, right? David falls. David dies. Solomon falls. Solomon dies. The kingdom is split up. It all falls to pieces. We need a better king. And God keeps telling us and indicating in the storyline and in the promises themselves, "I will send a better king." Then God's people are sent away into exile, and we see that we need to be recovered again, not just to Eden but to the land of Canaan, to Israel itself. He's building a picture. He's building a storyline. He's indicating to us what we need. He's indicating to us what we desire, and He's showing us that no one but Jesus can deliver this. You can have the greatest king, you can have the wisest king, you can have the wealthiest king, the strongest king. You can have the greatest prophets. It all makes no difference because they are mere men. We need God incarnate to come and fulfill these things for us. And so if you read the entire storyline of the scriptures, what the Jews should have been thinking, and what some of the faithful Jews were thinking, is, "I know what I need, and I'm not going to get it from men. God needs to give me these things." And God is building that storyline. But God also tells lots of little micro-stories all the way through the scriptures that again, are training His people, teaching His people about what they need and the sort of deliverance He's going to give. We just happened upon one last night in our family devotions in 2 Samuel chapter 15. In 2 Samuel chapter 15, David is the rightful king to the throne, but his son Absalom betrays him. And what happens in chapter 15 is that David, because of this betrayal, has to leave Jerusalem. And he gives up his throne. He doesn't grab at it. He doesn't fight for it. He walks out of the city. And the writer of of 2 Samuel is is very careful to make us make sure we know that David has a whole bunch of friends with him as he leaves this city. And as he leaves the city, he crosses the valley of Kidron and ascends the Mount of Olives. Would you believe it? And he weeps on the Mount of Olives with his friends over the fact that he has just been betrayed by someone close to him and has had to give up his kingdom. Does that ring any bells? And then, Elijah pointed out to me afterwards, and then guess what happens to his betrayer just after this? He gets hung in a tree. And David gets returned to the throne because God delivered him. Can you hear it? And you will find these micro-stories all over the place. You might remember a sermon I preached some time ago on the brotherhood of of Christ. And I talked to you about Moses and Joseph and their stories of how they received their brothers even though they were rejected by them. These are stories that that God wants us to see. He is working these stories out. These are the storylines of Jesus. And He plays them over again and again and again, and He puts little twists in them and little differences, and He wants you to observe, because what did you notice about 2 Samuel 15? David had friends with him. And so when you get to Jesus walking out of Jerusalem over to the Mount of Olives, and all his friends abandon him, you should think, "Well, this is a greater king." He was willing to give up so much more. He was willing to go through so much more betrayal and difficulty and abandonment than David was. And God therefore has placed Him higher than David, overall. There are these stories that have differences and changes, but they're all building to the story of Jesus. Josh mentioned before, the blood of Abel. God is so clever. Just in one, I think the story of Cain and Abel is like five or 10 verses or something. It's tiny. And in that one thing, God is seeding an idea that blood speaks, and it can either speak judgment or it can speak mercy. And the reason God does this time and time again is so that by the time you get to the story of Jesus, you know who He is. That's the point of John 5, right? You should know, because you should know the stories, and you should see them all coming true in Jesus in a far greater and better way than you've seen them play out before. You'll find these ideas running all through the New Testament and some in surprising ways. I mean, in in Hebrews chapter 7, you can read about the writer to the Hebrews comparing Jesus to Melchizedek. Melchizedek turns up in like three verses in in the Old Testament and then in a Psalm. And the writer to the Hebrews says to you, "You need to pay attention to the detail. Melchizedek has no genealogy. Melchizedek means king of righteousness, and he's the king of Salem, which means king of peace." That's the translation of those things. And the writer of Hebrews says, "God is telling you something in those details. Pay attention." He's telling you about Jesus. But Jesus is also in, I really struggled to find a word for this, what I'll call institutions. Things that God sets up, not people, not stories, but things like the Tabernacle, the Temple, the place where God lives with His people. You might remember a sermon in John 2, where we looked at how the Temple and the Tabernacle are fulfilled for us in Jesus Christ. And the beauty of what God does as He sets up these things is He infuses them with meaning and with, and builds the concept in our minds before He reveals it to us. Because we know what it's meant to be like for God to live with man because we've seen it happen in Eden and in the Tabernacle and in the Temple. We've seen God come down. We know how hard it is because we've seen the fire flash out and consume those who did not approach Him appropriately. We've seen the sacrifices, the constant bloodshed that's required to pay for the sins of His people as God seeks to dwell in their midst. We've seen the Ark of the Covenant and the glory, the mercy seat, where God speaks from between the cherubim and rules His people through His law. We've seen the lampstand and the table of bread where God sheds His light and feeds His people. And the writer to Hebrews picks up on all of these things. It's one of my favorite lines in in Hebrews actually, where he starts explaining this for us. It's in Hebrews 9. Listen to this. Now, even the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly place of holiness. For a tent was prepared, the first section in which were the lampstand and the table and the bread of the presence. It's called the holy place. Behind the second curtain was a second section called the most holy place, having the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant covered on all sides with gold, in which was a golden urn holding the manna and Aaron's staff that budded, and the tablets of the covenant. Above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat. And then the most depressing line in the Bible, "Of these things, we cannot now speak in detail." Do you see what he's saying? He's saying, "If you pay attention to the detail in the Tabernacle, there's riches of Christ hidden in there. Unfortunately, I don't have the time. You'll have to go and look into that yourself." But the point is that in things like the Tabernacle, in things like the Passover, in things like the sacrificial system, in things like the washings in Leviticus, in things like the prophetic role, the role of the priest, the role of the king, and all the detail of those various things, even in the way that God builds out the idea of things like marriage, as we see good marriages and bad marriages, and as we see God say that He is married to His people, and as we see Hosea act out what it is to be betrayed and to love anyway, then when Jesus comes and is revealed to us as the bridegroom of His people, we go, "Ah, I see. I see what you were doing, God." All those glorious marriages that I wish I was a part of, all those terrible marriages that I think this is just a disaster, and all those ways in which you acted towards your people as a husband, come true in Jesus Christ. These are institutions in which God reveals to us Jesus. The last one I want to tell you about is images. God loves images. And John loves images too. But God builds for us concepts and ideas around different images throughout the scriptures, and then wants us to think about them when we find them true in Jesus Christ. Let me give you a real quick list, and then I might try and explain one of them for you a little bit just so you get an idea. Light and darkness. God builds that idea through the scriptures and then unveils it in Jesus Christ. Water. What God does with water and how he uses it as a symbol, the wind, bread, fire, waves and judgment, dragons even. God builds out a lot of these different images, and more, and then unveils for us in Christ how they were all pointing to Him. This is why Jesus, when He comes, can say, "I am the bread of life." And He's not and He is speaking about the fact that you know, you know every day what bread is like, but He's also, as we'll see in a couple of weeks, maybe once we get to John chapter 6, He's also calling to mind all that God has done with bread throughout the scriptures and saying, "I am that to you. I am the manna in the wilderness. I am the holy bread that's in the Temple. I am what you should feast on. I am God's provision. I am your sustenance." It's why Jesus when He says, "I am the light of the world," is not just appealing to what we naturally know about light. He's speaking to all that God has done with light. He's speaking to the fact that in the beginning, there was darkness and then God shone light. He's speaking to the fact that the Old Testament scriptures and the old covenant was shadowy, but in Him, it is bright and radiant. He's speaking to the fact that naturally, we are blind and cannot see because we are ignorant, and we need God to speak to us. He's speaking about the fact that naturally, sinfully, we run from the light, but He comes and pierces our hearts and shines as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, that He rises like the sun in our hearts so that we might see Jesus Christ and behold the Lord God. All of that concept is built up, and then when Jesus says, "I'm the light of the world," we're meant to go, "Oh, wow. Jesus, you're the fulfillment of light naturally and all that God has done with light throughout the scriptures." It's why Jesus, when He says, "I am the vine," is not just appealing to natural vines, he's speaking about how God has called Israel a vine all through the scriptures. When Jesus says, "I am the true shepherd," He's not just speaking about shepherds, he's speaking about all that God has done calling His leaders shepherds and bad shepherds and how we need a better shepherd who won't eat the sheep. These are not random images. God has woven them into creation and into the scriptures. Can you see what sort of God we have? This is not just a book. This is history. This is a story God is writing. This is interwoven with this creation that we're in where God is unveiling for us in Jesus all that He is doing and all that He has done and all that He is. Now, you read that history through those eyes and tell me Jesus isn't the son of God, the savior of the world, the hope of the nations, the king of glory. Now, the sad thing about John chapter 5 is that you can. You can read the scriptures, and you can search them out diligently and pay attention to all the detail and still miss the point. How can that be? And this is vitally important as we consider how we should study the scriptures. Because the Jews did this. The Jews studied and missed the point. And Jesus points to three reasons why they missed the point. The first is that they had the wrong idea of glory. In verse 44 of John chapter 5, Jesus says, "How can you believe when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?" These Jews wanted to be seen as the knowledgeable ones, as the ones who had discovered the secrets, as the ones who knew the scriptures. We see this all through the interactions that Jesus has with the Pharisees and with the Jews. They were puffed up. And so they studied, Jesus is implying, partially in order so that people would look up to them and go, "Oh, Rabbi, teach us, please. You are so knowledgeable." That is the wrong motive. A disastrous motive, and it leads to blindness. And we can be like this. We can study and read and regurgitate so that others would think highly of us. The other, the second reason that they couldn't see Jesus is because they didn't have the love of God, or the love for God. You see this in verse 42. "But I know that you do not have the love of God within you." And this is all in the context of why they don't see Him. It's a similar idea. If you, if you're not approaching the scriptures so that you would, if you are approaching the scriptures so that you would receive glory from others, well, you're not approaching it out of a love for God. Delight for God was not their motive. Love for God was not their motive. I think C.S. Lewis speaks about how we read a love letter differently to how we read an essay. When you read a love letter, you're seeking all the meaning that's coming from it because you want to know the person. You're not seeking it for the sake of the information itself. You're seeking it to connect with the one whom you love who wrote you this letter. And so he talks about how that makes us read it so carefully. We read between the lines, and we read the pauses, and we read the nuances and the history. You know, when they mentioned that thing that happened 10 years ago, we know. We're paying attention. Why? Not because we're being all technical about it, but because we care so much about hearing from the one whom we love. This was not the Jews. That's not how they approached the scriptures. They saw it as a text, as a rule book, as a puzzle to be solved. Let's not view it that way. And really, all this is wrapped up in the third reason, which is they did not seek Christ. See this in verse 40, "You refuse to come to Me," He says. "You're searching the Scriptures," and He doesn't tell them off for it. You should search the Scriptures, but you should search them to find Jesus, to engage with Jesus, to discover riches about Jesus, as the one whom we love so that we might come to Him, knowing Him in in a greater glory and splendor than we had before. You know, when you love someone, it's not enough to just know bits and pieces about them. You want to know more. You want to know the depths of their heart. You want to know what they care about, what they love, what they've done. You want to know how their day was. You want to know all this detail about them, because the richer your knowledge is of that person, the greater your love. And when it comes to Jesus and the way that God has revealed Him and His work to us throughout the entire scriptures, I'm telling you, there's a lot to glory in. And every additional aspect that we look into just adds more and more glory so that at the end, we become those who say, "Lord Jesus, how wonderful you are. How mysterious is your love. How incredible is your power. How glorious is your salvation." Our heart should be drawn out towards Jesus as we read, as we study, as we pay attention to the detail, as we see Him revealed to us in the scriptures, we come to Him because of it, because we find in Him the resolution to all of our hopes, to all of these storylines, to all of these images, to all of these institutions, a greater sacrifice, a greater priest, a greater prophet, a greater king, a greater light, a greater God and savior, Jesus Christ. So, will you come? Will you come to Him and find Him in the sacred page? Let's pray.