If you'll take your scriptures and if you will open them up before you and keep them in your lap I encourage you to Rekeep your copy of the scriptures with you that you might become more and more familiar with it and where Where necessary perhaps jot a note here or there to aid you and your own Bible study and reading and Turn with me to John chapter 12 verses 27 through 30 John 12 27 through 30 as As we come to a verse which at first glance may seem to be troublesome and we will seek to untangle the knot which it might present to us As we study it together John chapter 12 Verses 27 through 30 listen for it is God who speaks to us
Now is my soul troubled and what shall I say father save me from this hour But for this purpose I have come to this hour father glorify your name Then a voice came from heaven. I have glorified it and I will glorify it again The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered others said an angel has spoken to him Jesus answered this voice has come for your sake not mine May the Lord bless the reading of his word and the hearing of his people Reading this morning I kept fairly brief for we have an opportunity To take a look at the complex person of Christ to take a look at the incarnate word who was not merely God and not merely man But God and man he was the God man and that Presence to us a complexity which we are only able to unravel to a point But so much of our understanding of the scriptures so much of our understanding of our own calling and life So much of our understanding of our duty as Christians and certainly of our rendering of worship Depends upon our right view of an understanding of the person of Christ That it's important that we understand the revelation that's given to us as It reflects upon the purpose of Christ and the person of Christ and John We know has particularly been emphasizing the incarnation The word of God which existed in eternity and became flesh and so now at the Approach of the Greeks the Gentiles Jesus has now announced that his hour has arrived and we covered last week The time when Jesus said it was not yet his time, but now his time has arrived and his response to that Revelation is to say now My soul is troubled Perhaps you've taken a vacation at the beach and you've gone down to where as the tide goes out and the sand is wet and you've Created your own castle or you've built some sort of a fortress or or a moat or whatever it might be Maybe took the buckets and filled them up and just turned them upside down my Family friend of my wife's family is an architect and he would go down to the beach I've seen some pictures where he built elaborate castles of works of art I think and those castles as they stood there people would come by marble at them some of them were very large He would spend hours making these sand castles on the beach But then after a period of time you might also remember that the tide rolls back in At first it's just a little bit of foam that begins to touch the edge of your castle and as a child You always think that you can beat that back a little bit by digging your moat a little bit deeper or maybe making a second Moat to catch the water before it even gets to your final moat But ultimately we know that you can't hold back the ocean and it does come and as it comes you watch with dread is That first little bit of water starts to lap at the edge of your sand castle and then Eventually it will consume the whole castle, but it's that first touch at the edge of your creation when you realize What is to come? Jesus is now in the twilight of his earthly Ministry and his human ministry as it were and he is observing like a shadow that comes across Your own lawn as the day begins to come to an end He is observing a shadow that is stretching out and is just now beginning to touch him as he begins to feel the coolness of That shadow of the cross if you will allow me that figurative language It begins to trouble him in some sense and he says now my heart is Troubled that word trouble Is if again if you will allow me to to to rely here upon the tents of that verb and tell you what that is It is the perfect passive indicative now. All that means is that it was not a trouble that he did not know before it is a Mighty disturbance, but it is a disturbance that has long been present and and is now becoming intense It wasn't as if Jesus had never given a thought to the cross We know that all through his ministry he's been telling them where it is that he needs to go where what his mission is What his purpose is for what reason God put him upon in their midst and on the earth that he might suffer death at the cross for their sin He knew that but now at this moment We find that the the awareness of the cross is Becoming intense and creating a great disturbance within him as the cross now is in plain sight Do you hear the pain and the dread and the words of Christ now my heart? Is troubled if we dwell on this very long it probably will trouble us as well That Jesus is now saying now my heart is troubled When we think about his death on the cross and we do think about it and we do talk about it And at our Lord's table when we celebrate communion We certainly are reminded of it and we discuss it But we prefer to think of the cross in the sense of it was his duty and that he had a divine Resolve from God Almighty to go to the cross and do what had to be done We we'd like to think of it in terms of duty We like to think of the suffering of Jesus as somehow be tempered by his divine power that yes We know he suffered but to the extent of which he suffered We like to think that somehow in his divine power as the God man that that suffering was somehow cut a little short or That it was tempered but that somehow it was blunted and the force of the suffering wasn't as extreme as it might appear to be We ought to also focus on the great sense of loss that suffered by God as he gave his only begotten son That whoever would believe should have eternal life certainly God experienced a great sense of loss So when we think of the cross we like to think of it in these terms which are dramatic and which are significant each one of them for Truly God was that Jesus was divine and God did give his only son and Surely Jesus did go to the cross with a great sense of duty and obedience to the command of God So we want to answer Jesus when he says my heart is trouble We want to say somewhere inside. Yes, but you're God But you're God you're at the finish line now. It's almost over the mission is complete Victory is at hand and we want to focus on that but John has According to the will and the counsel of God thought that it was good for us to know That Jesus was troubled at this prospect If we could have but gazed into the eyes of this man Jesus who was God? But yet also man and this man who calmed storms by the power of God Who healed the blind by the power of God who had raised the dead and knew the Father In a way that none other had Who had unquestioning faith and resolve We would have seen at this moment. I'm convinced in the eyes of Christ a great distress A great distress as he uttered now My is my soul troubled Jesus the second person of the Trinity Is complex Again, not merely God Nor is he merely man But he is the God man And John has emphasized