John 5:37 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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John 5:37

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And then the second kind of witness from the Father – ‘And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me.’ Then a strange phrase. ‘Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape.’ Well, that is true. They had not heard the voice of God. They had not seen any appearance of him, apart from his being represented and seen in Christ. But the Lord is not referring to that. In the context of the passage what he means is they had never seen God in the Scriptures. They had not seen it. They read the Scriptures, but they did not get it, they did not understand them.He is talking about the word. When they have read the Scriptures, the Old Testament Scriptures, they have not actually heard the voice of God; they have not understood them enough; they have never grasped what God was saying. ‘Nor seen his shape.’ Of course, they had not seen his shape literally. But even when they read the Scriptures, they had not seen what we might call the shape of God, that he is a holy God, and a God of great mercy, and ready to pardon and forgive and reconcile. He is far too holy to receive them as they are, and they had never sought forgiveness of sin from their heart. They had never received new lives from him. They had never seen the shape of the message, where it was all heading, what it all meant, what it all amounted to.

Application

Is this true of you as it was the Jews of old? You don’t understand about grace because you don’t want Christ. ‘Oh, I do. I want Christ, and I love to sing the hymns, and I love to worship.’ But you don’t really want him. You don’t want a Christ who demands that you repent. You don’t want a Christ who says you need an entirely new life. You don’t want a Christ who tells you, you must scrap your opinions, and your selfish ambitions, and your sins, and your old ways. You don’t want that sort of a Christ. You want a blurred Christ. You can’t hear him saying those things, or see those things, in the Bible. Unbelief and prejudice mean that you want something else. I like to go to church – maybe – because my friends are there, because it gives me some security, it makes me somehow feel one day I will go to heaven. But that is not enough. You have got to need him, and desire him, and see him, and hear his voice, and respond to him.

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John 5:37 Commentary and Bible Study