John 7:14-18 (NIV)
Not until halfway through the Feast did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. The Jews were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having studied?”
Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me. If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.
The call finally came from God to go up to the temple to teach about mid-way through the seven-day-long Feast of Tabernacles. So, Jesus immediately went up and began to teach. John notes that the Jewish leadership, some of whom hadn’t heard Jesus before, were stunned at his teaching. Even though Jesus had no credentials, He had never studied at their seminaries, he came across as very learned in all the Scriptures, teaching what they said accurately, even in the finer and more subtle points.
Jesus’ response was simple and clear: His teaching was superbly well-informed and precisely accurate because it didn’t originate with Him; it came directly from God the Father, the original author of the Scriptures.
A big problem with many of the rabbis’ teachings was not that the rabbis were ill-intentioned, but simply that their teachings originated in human reasoning about things that cannot be truly understood based on human reasoning. They tried to explain things that they themselves could not fully understand, because they dealt with infinities and other-word realities beyond the ability of the human mind to fully grasp. So, they simplified, they generalized, and, in some places, they got it absolutely wrong.
Jesus had no such limitations. Not only did Jesus know the Scriptures backward and forward in exquisite detail since He was intimately united with the Author of those Scriptures, He had personal experience with the heavenly realities that lay behind them. Thus, He could not only explain those realities clearly, He could do it simply, and in such a straightforward way that even those without a degree in theology and hermeneutics could begin to see the truth.
Jesus made it clear that the key to His clarity was that He was simply acting as a faithful messenger of the one who had sent Him to teach: God. He had no agenda of His own that He was pushing, no reputation that he was trying to establish or build for His own glory. His focus was simply on faithfully carrying out the divine mission that He had been given. And a big chunk of that mission was to reteach the people of God the Scriptures accurately, freed up from the haze of interpretations and additions that had grown up around them over the ages.
The criteria that Jesus set for those who wanted to test Him to see if what He was teaching was truly from God, is in verse 17. Only those who, like Jesus, aim simply to do God’s will are in a position to experience the truth of Jesus’ teachings. Others, like many of the Jewish leaders, whose desire to know and serve God were contaminated by self-interest were blind to the truths of the kingdom by their own intellectualism and their tendency to overcomplicate what, at their roots, were designed to be simple truths for simple people.
Father, thank You that You have made the necessary truths of your kingdom simple and accessible, even to those who don’t have a degree in theology. Your heart’s desire is for Your people to know You, and to know what You require of us. And so, You gave us Your word; as You say, “simple truths for simple people”, as well as giving us Your Holy Spirit to enable those truths to take root in our hearts. Help us to sweep away the cobwebs of complicated “interpretations”, and simply read Your word in Your presence, with Your Spirit guiding and teaching, so that we can know You better. Amen.