34 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?” 35 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. 36 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. – John 12:34-36
Introduction
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is central to the gospel message and the entire Christian faith. Without the resurrection we have no Christianity. With it, we have invincibility. But so often in the Christian life, we live or think in such a way that we do not take the resurrection into account. So often we talk, pray, and act, as if Jesus didn’t come back from the dead and rise from the grave. Many Christians find themselves living in pessimistic gloomy shades of gray. Yet, this should not be characteristic of the Christian. Even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we have a shepherd who was put in the ground and came back out of it. Even when our calendar is full of pain and suffering, we have a Savior who died and now lives to tell about it. This means that no matter the circumstances there is always reason for belief, faith, and hope. It means that no matter how dark a situation may be, it can be resurrected and made into glorious light, since the light of the world came out of the darkness of death. And chiefly it means that we cannot permanently die. Our sin cannot have the last word, because Jesus did when He triumphed over it. The hardened loved one you’ve been praying for can be resurrected and made a new creation. There is no sin problem resurrection can’t fix. There is no dead person resurrection can’t raise. So when we think about our sin struggles and our trials and daily hardships, we should think about them in light of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. When we discipline our kids and fight our sin, we should take into account the resurrection of the dead. When we think about that relationship that is on life support, or worse, we should think about it in light of the fact that Jesus raises dead things.
What does this have to do with our passage today? Well, I partly just wanted to talk for a minute about the resurrection. But also, we see in the questioning of the crowds, that they misunderstand Jesus because they fail to take into account the resurrection. So often that is the case with us on a different level. As Christians, we can sometimes fail to understand what Jesus is doing in our lives, why we are suffering, why we have a hard providence, why He is sanctifying us the way He is, or why He has given or taken this or that, because we fail to remember and take into account the resurrection. If we remember that the perfect God-man died a tormenting sinners death and then unlocked the chains of death and came back out of it’s clutches, and if we remembered that the resurrected Jesus likes to keep on resurrecting things, like us, we can then begin to understand Him a little bit better.
Our passage begins in verse 34 where the crowds, upon having just been told by Jesus that He would die by Roman crucifixion, are once again confused by Jesus. They begin to question Him out of ignorance, for they had come up with a belief about the Christ that the Christ would not suffer and die, despite the fact that there are many prophecies concerning the death of the Messiah such as Isaiah 53. They say that they have heard from the Law that the Christ is to remain forever, which is true. There are multiple different passages they could have in mind, one being the Davidic Covenant wherein God establishes David’s throne forever, which is fulfilled in Christ. So the crowds are basically saying, “The Christ that we know about is one who will remain forever, so who is this Son of Man you speak of?”
They were right that the Christ remains forever, but that didn’t mean that He didn’t have to die. We can see there own bias and carnal desires here in that, as we’ve seen on several occasions, they don’t want a Messiah who will suffer and die. They want an immediate King and Conquer with no crown of thorns and no Roman crucifix. But they failed to grasp that that cross of suffering and shame was the very glorification and raising up of the Christ.
Finally, after Jesus tells them over and over, they accept that He is going to die, but then question, “well, who is this Son of Man then? He can’t be the Messiah.” They go from folly to folly. Somehow they forget the prophecies of the suffering and dying Messiah and conclude that if the Son of Man dies then He can’t be the Messiah. But you see, they did not account for the resurrection. They did not hear and understand Jesus’ words about His resurrection that He spoke of on several occasions, like when He said, “destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again,” speaking about His body. Or Just a few moments earlier in this conversation when he said that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” They did not account for His death, and then after accepting that, they did not account for His resurrection.
He is Forever
So the crowds on the one hand were right that the Christ remains forever. They may have been thinking of Psalm 110:4, “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.’” Or Psalm 89:3-4, “You have said, ‘I have made a covenant with my chosen one; I have sworn to David my servant: “I will establish your offspring forever, and build your throne for all generations.”’” They were right, the priestly work and messianic Davidic throne would be established forever and would not pass away. The Messiah is the forever Messiah. Never dying as a normal man, never perishing, and never ceasing to be a sufficient Savior. They however were wrong that the Messiah’s death on the Roman cross was the end of the Christ. It was instead the establishment. The crowds did not take into account the entirety of what the law and prophets said about the Christ. We mentioned Isaiah 53 said the Christ would suffer and die as a Lamb before the slaughter. So they failed to account for that, but they also failed to account for the resurrection of this Christ. In Acts chapter 2 in one the best sermon’s ever preached, the Apostle Peter quotes from Psalm 16:9-10 which says, “Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.” And then, after quoting from Psalm 16, Peter says this about it, “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses.” So Peter says in Acts 2, that David, in Psalm 16 foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ! So when Jesus speaks about His resurrection He is not speaking about something brand new that no Jew had ever known about before. He is speaking about what the Prophet King David wrote about in the Psalter, that the Jews would have sung about through the generations. It was the crowds of Jesus’ day, the unbelieving Jews, who failed to account for it, who failed to believe it. This is why they are constantly confused at Jesus. This is why they did not understand His death and why He had to die. This is why they didn’t account for the resurrection. They did not know the Scriptures.
A Contemporary Statement
Jesus responds to their questioning in verse 35-36. As Jesus so often does, He doesn’t give a direct answer to satisfy their questioning. This is not shady or cowardly or incompetent by Jesus. Jesus knows what it is in the heart of men. He knows their insincerity and their corrupt motives. Jesus has higher divine prerogatives for answering the way that He does. And in one sense the answers to these questions are given in the Old Testament as we just looked at prophecies concerning the everlasting Messiah who dies and rises again.
In Jesus’ response He makes what is a contemporary statement, but which has great application for us today. Jesus is the light as we have seen previously in John. He is the light of the world. So Jesus is talking about Himself here. He is saying that “right now,” when He is speaking with them, they have the light with them. He is with them. So walk with Him now, because very soon Jesus will no longer be with them, for His hour of death is upon them. He will soon die, then rise on the third day, and ascend to heaven after a short time. That is what Jesus is talking about here: His physical presence with them. He is not saying that when He lives there will be no light and the world will be swallowed in darkness – nothing like that. He is simply speaking about His physical presence on the earth with them in terms of light and darkness.
Lest Darkness Overtake You
Jesus says, “Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.” I believe this is a spiritual darkness in which Jesus is saying, “I am here with you right now. If you reject me now, you will be overtaken by spiritual darkness.” And so it is often the case for people today that when you reject the light and turn from the opportunities you have been given to follow and obey Jesus, you will be given over to and overtaken by darkness and sin. When you reject opportunities that Christ is presented to you, or when you reject opportunities to repent from a sin you are living in, you are hardening yourself against the truth and against the light. And the more you do so, there will, pretty soon, come a time when there will be no more opportunity for repentance and no more opportunity to come to Christ. Sin has a way of deceiving us into thinking that there will always be more time or another time. Our flesh will assure us we are not hardening ourselves and that darkness will not consume us. And that is the moment that you are in such grave and urgent danger of being forever hardened against Christ. Our job is always to believe right now, to obey right now. You can sort the rest out later. Turning from the light is turning toward the darkness. And man is no match for the darkness. It will consume and overtake us unless the light comes to us. And when the light comes to us and we reject it, we are in serious danger. So if you have been thinking about believing in Jesus or contemplating these things, right now is the opportunity that God has given you to believe in Him. You don’t know if you will have another opportunity. But you know you have this one. And that’s all you know. Today is the day of salvation. Not after the sermon. Not later tonight. But right now, believe in Jesus Christ.
Maybe you profess to be a Christian but there is unrepentant sin you are living in. If you continue to reject opportunities to repent, you will pretty soon have none left, and be lost for eternity. Repentance must be now. That secret sin that you refuse to repent of will harden you to unbelief. The principle is that we are to act on the light we have. If we know we are sinning, we are to repent right away. If we know we need to believe in Christ, we are to believe right away. If we know that we must obey Jesus in a certain area of our life, we are to obey right away. We are to obey with what is right in front of us. Maybe you have these grand visions of a productive household when you have a house of five teenagers, but right now the snot nosed and whiny toddlers are getting in the way of that, and so you are tempted to not discipline, to ignore them, to not raise them up with good effort. If you do that too much you will not achieve your vision. Right now, you have whiny snot nosed toddlers. Obey Jesus with them right now, not 10 years into the future. You can’t obey there yet. If you don’t obey here right now, you won’t have the opportunity to obey there in 10 years. Or maybe it’s something with your spouse or your finances or this or that. We are to obey with what is right in front of us. Because if we don’t, darkness could overtake us. I love how John Calvin puts it, “But all ought to walk cautiously, because contempt of the light is followed by darkness.”
Contempt of the light is followed by darkness. How often is this the case with moral light and darkness. We see it all around us. You have a professing Christian who has contempt for God’s moral order of hierarchy between men and women in the church and so they become egalitarians. But because egalitarians have contempt for light in that one area, darkness in all other areas is soon to follow. Before too long those egalitarians will end up denying biblical sexuality, then they will deny the exclusivity of the gospel, then they will deny the gospel, then they will deny the deity of Christ, and then they will deny the resurrection of Christ. If you have contempt for the light in one area, you are in danger of being overtaken by the darkness in every other area.
Ignorance in Darkness
In the next breath out of Jesus’ mouth he says “The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.” So, when you neglect the light and are overtaken by darkness, you then have no idea where you are going. In other words there is a great ignorance that comes in darkness. The Bible teaches that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge. It teaches that Christ is the foundation of all knowledge and that He is the light of the world. So when you don’t start with the proper foundation of knowledge, you can know some things, but you will be very ignorant in many ways, as darkness makes a man ignorant in terms of what he can and cannot see. Sometimes rejecting Christ looks like an atheist rejecting Christ. Other times rejecting Christ looks like women becoming pastors and men not saying anything about it. And when there is such contempt for the light, the heavy ignorance of darkness is sure to follow. You will find that those who have rejected the basic moral standards of the Bible talk an awful lot about doubt and how there is so much that we just can’t know about God and the Bible. It is not a coincidence.
Urgency of Belief
There is a great urgency that we believe in Jesus Christ today. Not only is there a danger of being overtaken by darkness in rejecting the light. But for the Jews, they had just a short while before Christ would no longer walk the earth. Indeed as a display of that Jesus departs and hides himself from them at the end of verse 36. Rejecting Christ could result in Him hiding Himself from us. But there will also come a time when we will die. None of us knows when that time will come. It could happen all in a sudden so that we have no time to think. This is why we have such great urgency to believe and obey Jesus right now.
One day the darkness of the grave will overtake us. No one can escape it. This is why there is such panic over a virus with a 98 percent survival rate. Because we have a society that has rejected Christ that hasn’t had to think about death. Our society has insulated itself from seeing or thinking about death. And so when people who reject Christ are reminded that there is a chance they will die from a virus, panic sets in. Because rejection of Christ means you have no idea what happens in or after death. Thus death is incredibly dark. And that is frightening. But there is a way out of darkness. There is a way out of death.
Becoming Sons of Light
That way is believing the light while you have the light, and thus becoming sons of light. Since we have Christ who resurrected from the dead, and unlocked it on His way out for all who follow Him, we don’t have to be ignorant about death. We don’t have to fear death. Through belief in Jesus, we are made sons of light. When we go into the grave as sons of light, it is not all dark. The door of death is open and Christ is there.
It is true that man is no match for the dark. The dark is more powerful than we are and it will overtake us apart from Christ. We don’t stand a chance. But while man is no match for the dark, it is also even more so true that the dark is no match for the light. John 1:5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The darkness is no match for the light. Therefore, when we become sons of light, the darkness is now no match for us, because in Christ we are more than conquerors.
Walking in the light gives us new powers. When we walk in Christ; when we walk in obedience to Jesus, we have power there that we did not have before. We have power over the darkness. For when we walk in the light, that means that there is no place for darkness. Darkness flees at the light. When we walk in the light, there is no place for sin to hide. It will be exposed, run off, and have no power over us. People who walk in the light are powerful people, and those who slink around in darkness are very afraid of them. This is why they want us to sin and why they want to spread their darkness over us. When we walk in darkness we lose the power of courage. When they have sin over us, we are weakened. But the fact is that we are sinners. There are numerous charges to be made against us. So what do we do? We have to account for the resurrection. We have to account for the fact that Christ died for our sin, cancelling the legal record of debt against us and setting us free. Yes we have sinned in darkness. But the darkness has not overcome the light. The darkness is no match for the light. Our sin has been forgiven. Our debt has been paid. We are set free. We are sons of light. And if we too will conquer the darkness of sin and the grave through Christ our Lord, we are more than conquerors to conquer sin, strongholds, and devils in this world, in this life, on this earth. The grave can’t stop us, so nothing can. Those who do not walk in the light are overtaken by darkness, but those who walk in the light overtake the darkness, because we do so in Christ, He is the light. He is the overcomer. He is the conqueror.
So, right now, if you believe in the light, and walk in it, you too can be made a Son of Light and darkness will not overtake you.
If you have believed in the light, let us walk in it. This means we continue walking in Christ. We keep believing in Christ. One moment at a time. Each step of the way. Believe Him and obey Him with what is right in front of you. And right now, very soon we will have the opportunity to confess our sins and so believe Jesus by taking the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper together. So let us believe and obey Jesus together right now.
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