Are You Listening to God? Probably not, Few Ever Have

I wonder what would happen if we actually believed the word of God.

Hard to say, not sure we’ve done that.

Oh, we think we are believing His word. We even say we follow Sola Scriptura, that the Bible is our sole authority for life and doctrine.

But I’ve attended church for 50 years, and I’ve read the Bible many times, and well, there’s not a whole lot of listening to God going on.

John 5 has some words we don’t believe. John 5:24 we believe, “whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.”

But by the time we read John 5:29 we’ve checked out. “those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.” Nope, we’re not going to believe that one.

Why not? Because our tradition has told us works have nothing to do with salvation. All our Sola Scriptura noise has been canceled by our Sola Fide tradition. The Sola Scriptura never teaches Sola Fide (James 2:24).

Yet in my years of experience in the church, the one pointing this out is the heretic.

It’s an astounding thing.

If you listen to the greater context of John 5, Jesus is talking to the religious folk of His day, those who “search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39).

Most times I’ve heard this verse brought up it’s to warn people not to study the Bible too much, which is totally not His point. His point is that they twist the Scriptures, look for things that prove they have eternal life instead of simply believing what God is saying. They were focused so much on justifying themselves from Scripture, they missed the whole part about the One who would come and justify them!

For instance, their Scriptures of the day were the Old Testament, primarily focused on the books of Moses. Were they studying Moses too much? Were they so studious in reading Moses that they were lost? Hardly.

“For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me” (John 5:46).

They read Moses for justifications, for proof texts, for confirmation bias. They read the Bible like we do: not to understand it and conform to it, but to find verses that back up what we already believe, which is mostly about how we are fine, get off our back.

This is the word of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in John 5. Every quote above is His words. Words we claim to believe. Words we claim Sola Scriptura to.

Instead of listening to God’s word, we’re busy justifying ourselves and our kids and our grandparents and whoever else. We’re trying to convince ourselves everyone is saved and the only way we can do that is by not listening to the Bible, because if we did that we’d know hardly anyone is saved, which is what the Bible says incidentally.

You know you’re not the judge though, right? Who is the judge? John 5:22 lets you know who the judge is: “the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son.”

John 5 is the word of the Son, the Judge, the Judge of your soul and everyone else’s.

What would it look like if we actually thought these words were true and binding?