Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And last time around, we were looking at a whole bunch of the different ways that people came to faith in the first two chapters of John, how some of them got there, and then there was a whole other level of faith that they encountered. And then after that, there was a whole other level of faith. And just when they thought, that's as much faith as I could ever possibly faith, they believed even harder. Why? Because of a mixture of the signs that Jesus did and how they pointed to things about who Jesus is, but also just how Jesus is. It overwhelmed them. It made an impression on them. And I wrapped up last time, you know, getting a little sappy saying, we're kind of in the same boat, even today. This is the same God we're talking about here 2,000 years later. And there's a deepening process, a journey of faith thing that happens in you and me. And as we were wrapping up last time, I mentioned that there was one more little chunk here at the end of the first two chapters of John that deals with this same question. Some people come in at faith this way, like, yeah, we want a miraculous sign, we want a miracle, prove it this way. And then they're unsatisfied with what Jesus offers. But other people see the miraculous signs that Jesus is doing, and they believe in his name. They trust. So let's pick it up with uh Jesus has just cleansed the temple. He's not getting arrested, but you know, some people who they aren't quite sure what to make of him. They come along and they're like, hey, we are demanding a sign. You've got to do, we're assigning you work. What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this? And Jesus responds with, destroy this temple and I'll raise it again in three days. And the people who don't get it are like, it took a really long time to build this, as we discussed over the last couple of episodes. But the people who do just shut their mouths and think. And they go deeper with it and they reflect on what Jesus couldn't possibly have meant, might have meant, and then eventually they figure out what he clearly meant and must have meant. And this is what it says. You know, the Jews replied, Well, it's taken 46 years to build this temple, and you're going to raise again in three days. But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. Wait a minute. I thought they already believed in Jesus. One anecdote ago, 11 verses ago. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him. But wait a minute, I thought right before that they believed. Then Nathaniel declared, Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel. But wait a minute. I thought before that they had already believed. You know, Andrew and Simon, the first thing that Andrew did was go and tell his brother, we have found the Messiah. All of these things sound like proclamations of belief, but clearly John, the author, wants us to understand that there are levels to this stuff. And the more the people who were present and paying attention saw of Jesus, his character, his teaching, the whole package, the more deeply they believed and the more they kept discovering new depths, new profundity of belief. The people who just wanted cheap tricks, well, uh, they'd heard about that from other stuff. These people probably also believed that pagan sorcerers could do tricks. They probably believed that somebody like Simon the Sorcerer, who we meet in Acts, could do tricks. You know, they believed that Jonas and Jambres, the two dudes in the uh Pharaoh's court who were rivals of Moses, I mean, they could do tricks. It seems like in the ancient world, at least the perception was that people from different religions outside of the Jews could tap into some sort of supernatural force, whether that was real or not, on balance, you know, who can say, but they believed it. So what do they really want from Jesus? Like maybe in the modern post-industrial revolution world, anything would blow our minds in the age of cell phones if it were verifiably a real breaking of the law of time and space, even a small thing. But back then it seems like there's maybe a little more openness to this idea. What Jesus is doing is bigger than that. It's bigger than parlor tricks and cheap magic and curses and incantations and spells that so many people dealt in in their little booths and their little hovels and their little thatched roof cottages. Jesus, in just two chapters, is turning out to be the real deal, and he's calling a gigantic shot that everybody's gonna know either that happened or it didn't. Look, anybody can do sleight of hand and table magic stuff. That's cute, that's great. They're gonna kill me in front of everybody. I'm gonna be raised again in three days. It's very simple. If that happens, well, then you go find the deepest level of faith, you find a whole new level of belief. If it doesn't, well then we're done here. Like you just move on with life. Bummer, that one didn't work out. You know, spoiler alert, it it does work out. So this theme that runs all throughout John is already dramatically taking shape. The people who get it are discovering new depths of faith that go beyond the miracles. They're seeing more of the sign than the miracle part, they're fixating on that. The people who aren't gonna get it are missing the sign part and really are fixated on the miracle, or I would say even like the trick part of it. And chapter two ends with one more treatment of that theme. In case we weren't sure, in case we weren't getting the differentiation between those who see the sign and what it means, and those who just want the trick to feel better about taking the risk of following Jesus, we see how Jesus reacts to this stuff. It says in verse 23, now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. Well, that's great, right? We want people to believe. I have to think that this is real, or in large part it's real, because it's using the same language right here as gets used at the end of John in that verse that I was reading, yeah. Maybe, yeah, is that yesterday that I was reading you this? Yeah, Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. Okay, believe, and by believing you may have life in his name. Let's go back to John 2. Now, while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. I think it's real. I think John is saying that a whole bunch of people put their faith in Jesus. Now, how deep did it go? Did they discover more depths of trust in Jesus' character and power that they didn't know existed? I don't know, but what I do know is this. Jesus was bulky about some of it. Because here's how it follows up, verse 24. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man's testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man. Wow, that last verse is potent. Okay, you'd think Jesus would be like, Well, I came to seek and save the lost, and here's some people coming out of this whole temple cleansing thing who saw some of the miraculous stuff I did, and uh they have been sought and they have been saved. Right on, high five gentlemen, way to be disciples. Let's go back up north. This is a huge win. But instead, that impulse to pull back and kind of stay small in terms of his public profile crops back up again, right here. He doesn't trust them, he doesn't trust men because, like we were talking about a couple days ago, he's always reading the room, he knows all men. And Jesus always is as much as this is his house or his father's house, the temple, he does always seem kind of like an outsider to the social crowd in Jerusalem as we read through it. It seems like there's a whole unspoken set of rules or whatever going on there. And Jesus isn't in on the rules, he is playing a different game. And what we see in the end that you know, so much of what the quote-unquote religious rules that are being played here really are, they expose themselves for being frauds. I still believe that a lot of these people who responded and believed, because John uses the same language he uses later on for the what the ideal belief looks like, I believe a bunch of these people became Christians. However, they're also still swimming in the dirty water of Jerusalem. And it was clearly not Jesus' time to be enthroned, to be celebrated, to be fawned over, worshipped at this point in a big public way. And I would guess that there was an effort at this point in the story to be like, you know, Jesus, reveal your glory now. The thing you did that I saw, do that for my mom. I want her to see it too. I have to imagine that this that kind of thing was everywhere, that there was a little outbreak of Jesus fever here. The kind of thing that uh as I'm recording this, you were finding out has captured the mind of some public officials that we would hope would be kind of above that kind of thing. You know, we find out when we look at diaries and conversations that a lot of the people whose job it is to just serve the public secretly really, really like the fame. Hey, guess what? It's alluring. I get it. I think everybody, I think everybody gets it. Yeah, fame, money, power, uh, romance, sex. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that's always been sort of the, you know, the the alluring stuff that can lead people off the the road and cause them to forget their character. Jesus isn't looking for cheap social media points. He's not looking for cheap clicks, he's not looking for cheap followers. He knows where this thing is headed, and he's looking, he's calling people into his life and his death and his resurrection. He's calling people into the life of the church, guided by the Holy Spirit. It's it's just a bigger thing. So I think it's a nice start that people saw the miraculous signs and there was probably some real belief here, but there's still a lot of unfolding that needs to happen in the book of John. What I will say is that after two chapters, we are seeing a little bit about how Jesus is going to go about this and how different people are going to respond. And in the same way that we've all probably known love and thought that's as much as I could ever know how to love, and then discovered there were deeper levels of that. And as much as we've all learned how to friend and thought that's about as much as we could ever possibly friend, and then found deeper levels to that. So what we're seeing in just two chapters is that there are different levels of faith. There, there's different intensity, different flavors, different texture of faith, different ways that people get to it on display already in the first two chapters. And as we get into chapter three, we're going to see uh maybe the most unique testimony that we've seen so far as a Pharisee named Nicodemus, who's a part of the Jewish ruling council, is gonna sneak in to talk to Jesus at night so nobody knows what he's doing, and he's gonna feel out this faith thing for himself. I think I got a couple more little housekeeping deals that we need to do here at the end of John chapter two, maybe just one more day. Uh we'll see. And then we're on to John chapter three. Wow, look at this. We're getting close to turning the page on another chapter. It's been a minute. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon, I'm not sure.