Jesus starts teaching in the temple midway through the feast and the Jews are asking for His credentials much as we would ask for a Dr. to present his credentials. Jesus responds indicating His doctrine was not His invention, but that it came from another source. Dr. Sproul discusses what Jesus knew and did not know both as a baby and as an adult explaining about Christ's dual nature.

This morning, we will be reading from John 7:14–31. Hear then the Word of God:

Now about the middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple and taught. And the Jews marveled, saying, “How does this Man know letters, having never studied?”

Jesus answered them and said, “My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority. He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him. Did not Moses give you the law, yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill Me?”

The people answered and said, “You have a demon. Who is seeking to kill You?”

Jesus answered and said to them, “I did one work, and you all marvel. Moses therefore gave you circumcision (not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath? Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”

Now some of them from Jerusalem said, “Is this not He whom they seek to kill? But look! He speaks boldly, and they say nothing to Him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is truly the Christ? However, we know where this Man is from; but when the Christ comes, no one knows where He is from.”

Then Jesus cried out, as He taught in the temple, saying, “You both know Me, and you know where I am from; and I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know. But I know Him, for I am from Him, and He sent Me.”

Therefore they sought to take Him; but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come. And many of the people believed in Him, and said, “When the Christ comes, will He do more signs than these which this Man has done?”

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Let us pray.

Now, O Lord, as we continue our study of this gospel, which in its riches reveals to us so much of the person and work of Your dear Son, we pray that every Sabbath day that we hear the reading of this gospel, our understanding of Him will increase, and our love for Him will be magnified. For we ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Credentials Challenged

When I was a child in elementary school, my favorite grade was the third grade. A lot of that had to do with Mrs. MacGraw, because she was the most fantastic teacher I had in those days. Third grade was fun. But when we were in third grade, a little cloud of fear hung over us when we would hear the testimony of the fourth graders. They would say to us: “Just wait until fourth grade. In fourth grade, school really gets hard, because you’re going to have to learn geography, history, and much more difficult multiplication tables.” I remember trembling as I entered the fourth grade, but somehow, through the grace of God, I made it through the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth grades.

Then we heard, with fear and trembling, of the huge leap in difficulty when moving from junior high school to senior high school, where the homework assignments would be much more plentiful, and we would have to study arcane sciences such as physics and chemistry. Again, through the grace of God—and I can bear witness this morning, only through the grace of God—I made it through high school and actually got into college.

When we had the first convocation chapel at our college, the president stood up. He said: “Look at the person to your right. Now look at the person on your left. One of those two people will not be here next semester.” That was in the days when it was customary for colleges to flunk out 50 percent of their freshman class. Fortunately, I was converted that semester and made an A in Bible, which kept me from flunking out.

Each of these different experiences in school came with greater fear about the level of difficulty that they involved. Then I remember, after college, going to seminary and making another adjustment. But the biggest academic adjustment in my life was when I enrolled in doctoral studies in the Netherlands. I had no idea how rigorous the academic discipline at that level would be, and I believe only people who have been through that experience know what I am talking about. But as I finished, I also realized that there were many of us who had been educated well beyond our intelligence.

That is a problem with the upper levels of education. Once we go through it, we have a tendency to think that we actually know far more than we do. We have a tendency to tilt our noses and look down on those who have not gone through such rigorous training. We wonder where people’s degrees are from and whether their credentials are really credible.

We are not unusual in that regard, because no man’s credentials were ever seriously challenged by the established academic community more than the credentials of Jesus of Nazareth. We read in the text about the people’s response as He was teaching during the Feast of the Tabernacles: “And the Jews marveled, saying, ‘How does this Man know letters, having never studied?’”

The Pharisees and the scribes, the doctors of the law, who had studied under Gamaliel, in the school of Hillel, or the schools of other rabbinic traditions, looked askance at Jesus, asking where His sheepskin could be found. “Who did you study under, Mr. Jesus? How many credit hours in theology do You have? As far as we know, You don’t even have a baccalaureate degree, and You come into the temple and have the audacity to teach us?”

This was the question brought to Jesus. This was the same Jesus who, when He was only twelve years old, was a prodigy who absolutely amazed the scholars in the temple with His depth of understanding of theology. So, the question is, Where did He get His education?

Limits on Jesus’ Knowledge?

Jesus answers the question of where His education originated. He says: “My doctrine is not Mine,”—that is, it is not of My invention, not of My origin—“but His who sent Me. If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority. He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him.”

I think there is a lot of confusion about this topic. If we were to have a pop quiz this morning, and I asked you, “Where did Jesus get all the knowledge He was displaying?” I suspect that many of you would give the answer that is prevalent: “He’s God. If He’s God, then He must have all knowledge. He must be omniscient, and certainly One who is omniscient has no need to go to school or study under anyone else because He is the source and fountain of all truth.”

Let me ask another question: Did the Jesus who lay in the manger at the nativity know that the world was round? What do you think? If someone asked me that question, “Did Jesus know that the world was round when He was a baby in the manger?” I would want to make some distinctions, but basically, the answer would be no—at least touching His human nature.

The human Jesus had to grow in His knowledge and understanding of the things of God. The human nature of Jesus did not come equipped with the divine attribute of omniscience. When we think that the human nature of Christ possessed these divine characteristics, we slip into a very serious and ancient heresy in which the divine nature swallows up the human nature, and we fail to recognize the limits of Jesus’ knowledge.

This has been a very controversial matter historically. For example, when the disciples ask Jesus, as recorded in Mark’s gospel, about the day and the hour of His return, what does He say? He says, “Of the day and the hour knows no man, not even the Son, but only the Father knows it.” In that response to His disciples, Jesus Himself clearly puts a limit on His own knowledge about the future.

That has puzzled the greatest minds in church history. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, who was arguably the most brilliant theologian of all time, stumbled over that question. Thomas scratched his head and said: “Jesus had to know the day and the hour. He was God incarnate. There was a perfect unity between His human nature and His divine nature, so how is it possible that Jesus didn’t know something?”

Aquinas developed what he called his “accommodation theory.” He said, essentially: “Jesus really did know, but the knowledge was too holy. It was too high; it was too wonderful. So, He didn’t want to go into a lengthy explanation about why He couldn’t reveal the day and the hour at that point, but He cut the Gordian knot, gave shorthand by accommodation, and simply told them He doesn’t know.”

That is a nice way out, except that what Jesus said would be false. It would be a lie—maybe a little one, just a fib—but just enough to tarnish His perfection and make Him a lamb with a blemish, incapable of being our Savior. I would prefer not to go into gymnastics to explain why Jesus said there was something He did not know, and simply take our Lord at His word and believe that there was something He did not know.

One Person, Two Natures

When Jesus says there is something He does not know, He is speaking of His human nature. Lest anyone think for a minute that I am a Nestorian, let me take a moment to explain this.

In church history, the church has fully embraced the dual nature of Christ. He is vere homo, vere Deus, truly man and truly God, one person, two natures. The reason for that formula is so that we do not obscure the fact that, at the same time, we have two distinct natures coexisting within this one person. If we are to have a correct understanding of Jesus, we have to understand that the divine nature has all the attributes of deity, and the human nature has all the limitations of humanity.

We distinguish the two natures, but we do not separate them. Let me explain. If I say that you, as a human being, are made up of a body and a soul, I can distinguish your two natures—your physical side and your non-physical side—without doing you any damage. But if I separate your body from your soul, I have just killed you. There is a big difference between distinction and separation.

When Jesus is hungry, that is a manifestation of His human nature, not His divine nature. When He sweats, that is a manifestation of His human nature, not His divine nature. Likewise, when He says, “There’s something I don’t know,” that is a manifestation of His human nature, not His divine nature.

You may say: “Wait a minute, preacher. How is it that throughout the Bible, and even as we’ve been reading in John’s gospel, we see Jesus regularly manifesting supernatural knowledge? Way back at the beginning of His public ministry, when He saw Nathaniel, Jesus told him everything about himself, and they had never even met. He reads people’s minds, He knows what they’re going to say before they say it, and He gives evidence of supernatural knowledge. Where does that come from?”

It comes from the communication of the divine nature to the human nature. There were things that Jesus did not know, but whatever He taught was impeccable because He never taught on the basis of His own human insight. The Christian church has understood for centuries that concerning His human nature, Jesus is not omniscient, but He is infallible because if He teaches something that is not true, then He is held accountable.

Let me give an example. The biggest argument for the integrity of sacred Scripture is that the Bible is the Word of God simply because Jesus says it was. The critics will say: “Wait a minute. He wasn’t omniscient, so it’s okay if He made a mistake when He taught His disciples that the Bible was the Word of God, that Moses wrote of Him in the Pentateuch, and so on. We can’t hold Him responsible for knowing things that He couldn’t possibly know.” Oh yes, we can.

Imagine that a teacher walks into your classroom and says, before class begins: “Let’s get a couple of things straight. First of all, I’m not going to say anything by my own authority, because everything that I teach comes from God Himself.” If I said that to you, and then you found me making an error, what would you think about my claim of teaching only what God gives me?

Not only that, suppose I came into this pulpit, and I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, when you listen to me preach this morning, I want you to be aware that what you will hear is the plain, unadulterated, unvarnished truth, because I am the truth.” If you do not call for the men with the white suits and the nets, then there is something wrong with you. We are warned in Scripture that those who teach face a greater judgment, and those who teach are never to claim more knowledge than they actually have.

In His human nature, Jesus does not have omniscience. But when Jesus declares that the Scriptures are the Word of God, if He is wrong about that, He has transgressed His own principles for teaching and thereby would disqualify Himself as our Savior.

Academic Ignorance

In Jesus’ debate with the Jewish authorities, they ask, “Where did You get Your degree?” Jesus answers, in essence: “I brought it with Me from heaven. I don’t teach anything on My own, but My doctrine comes from the Father. If you people really wanted the truth, if you really wanted knowledge, and if you really cared about theology, you would believe every word that I tell you, because the only words I give you are from Him. If you wanted to do the will of God, you would hear My voice, and you would listen to Me.”

Remember one of the times God spoke audibly to the crowds about His Son: “This is my beloved Son. Hear Him!” (Luke 9:35). God Himself attests to the authority of the teaching of Jesus, that His doctrine is true, and as He claims here, there is no mixture of unrighteousness in it.

Then Jesus turns the tables on His enemies. “You question My credentials, and you hide behind the law of Moses. You keep telling Me that you are disciples of Moses and students of the law. Where did circumcision come from? It didn’t come from Moses; it came from the patriarchs before Moses. It came from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses didn’t invent circumcision.”

Why is Jesus bringing this up? He says, in essence: “Under the law of Moses, every infant boy is required to be circumcised exactly so many days after birth, right? What if the day of circumcision falls on the Sabbath? Does Moses require that you postpone it? No, not only does the law of Moses allow circumcision on the Sabbath day, but it requires circumcision on the Sabbath day. If the law requires that the sign of a person’s wellness be given on the Sabbath day, how can you object when I heal a man completely on the Sabbath day?”

This is classic ad hominem argumentation, not in the abusive sense but in the logical sense. Jesus takes the foolishness of His critics to its logical conclusion and shows that He is not the One violating Moses, but they are. In so doing, He exposes that despite their great knowledge and their academic credentials, they remain fools and ignorant of the things of God.

The church is in tough times. We have seen the seminaries adopt radical liberalism, denying the central tenets of the Christian faith. We have seen Christian colleges, one after another, deny Christianity altogether after a period of time. Why does that happen? I once read an essay by an Anglican scholar, and it was titled, fittingly, “The Treason of the Intellectual.” Many Christians, unfortunately, have fled from serious study of the things of God because they cannot trust their teachers anymore. It is the intellectual leadership of the body of Christ that has committed treason.

Is there anything new about that? It was the intellectual community of Jesus’ day that was the most antagonistic toward Him. When perfect knowledge manifests itself, when perfect truth comes in the door, that which is muddled and blemished is exposed for what it is. No wonder these men sought to kill Him.

Hear the One God Sent

Jesus said: “Did not Moses give you the law, yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill Me?” The people answered, “You have a demon.” What does that mean? They were saying: “You must be crazy. You must be out of Your mind. You’re demon-possessed. No one is trying to kill You.”

Jesus said, in essence: “I did one work, and you all marveled. Moses, therefore, gave you circumcision, but I made the man completely well. Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.” Then in verse 28, He said: “You both know Me, and you know where I am from; and I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know. But I know Him, for I am from Him, and He sent Me.”

I said to Vesta last night, “I don’t know about the long-term value of preaching every week from one book of the Bible because it takes so long to get through it, and maybe I should be jumping all over John’s gospel to get it finished.” But I said: “I don’t want to do that because each little passage that we look at in this gospel sheds more light on our understanding of who Jesus is. I would hate for us to miss any of that.”

Let me finish with these last few statements that Jesus says. “I know Him, for I am from Him, and He sent Me.” In essence: “I know the Father. I know My stuff. Do you want to give Me a doctoral examination in theology—the most rigorous test Gamaliel has ever thought of? Give Me the test. I know God; I don’t know Him from a distance, but I’m from Him, and the reason I’m here is because He sent Me.”

Do you hear the warning? “If you won’t hear the One whom God sends, who in the world will you hear?” That is what Jesus is saying today: “You think you hear Moses, but your ears are deaf to Moses. You claim Abraham; you have nothing to do with Abraham. You think that you’re committed to God, but yet you reject the very One who comes from God, whom God sends into your midst.” When we hear Jesus teach, like Samuel in centuries past, our response should be, “Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears” (1 Sam. 3:9). Let us pray.

Father, how easily impressed we are with earthly honors, with earthly diplomas, and yet we will not even respond to the truth when we hear it. Father, anything that we say is true is not from ourselves, but we live on borrowed capital. There is nothing true that we have ever learned that does not come from somewhere else, and ultimately from You. Teach us to have Jesus as our rabbi and as our master, for He alone has the words of eternal life. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.