Dear Kate,

We’ve reached the next section in John, chapter 3:16-21, and it is a continuation of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus.  Remember Nicodemus, a member of the Pharisees who came to Jesus under the cover of night to find out His message from God?  Christ explained to him the state of things—that all mankind, with dead souls bequeathed to them from Adam, are hopeless and helpless unless Christ does His saving work of resurrecting them to “newness of life” (Rom. 6:4), a transformation He called being “born again.”  But Nicodemus was having significant trouble processing such information, and so Christ patiently expounded on this theme.  In verses 16-18, Jesus Christ tells Nicodemus how all this had come about:  “‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.  Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.’”  Now we can glean a lot of information about God in these verses, and get a lot of insight into His character.  And since He is our environment, we must know Him.  What is He like?  What kinds of things does He do and why does He do them?  Well, we see right away that God didn’t send Christ to condemn people in the world, Kate.  They were already condemned.  In the same way, He has no desire to condemn you today.  God sent Christ to save people in the world.  That is His disposition toward you—He wants to save you.

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Part of the struggle in my Christian experience, I’ve noticed, is a tendency to react negatively to negative events and positively to positive events.  In other words, I’m up if circumstances are up, and I’m down if circumstances are down.  I am subject to depression and anxiety over contrary circumstances, bad news on TV or by rumor, my own failures or the failures of people around me, or even things as simple as bad weather, winter and darkness.  And I’m equally subject to elation over agreeable circumstances, good news, my own success and the successes of people around me, and comfortable weather, summer and sunshine.  As natural and normal as this phenomenon sounds, I don’t think it’s consistent with my faith.  Just a couple of months ago, well before spring, I was sitting in my bedroom glumly watching darkness fall over a bleak, wintry world, and a verse I know well came to mind.  “Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you” (Psalm 139:12).  Now I know that the central point of that verse in its context is that physical darkness will not serve to hide me from God, because it does not hinder His vision like it does mine.  But the verse’s more abstract implications struck me that evening in the gathering dusk.  The inescapable fact is that darkness and light are described as being “alike” (KJV) to God.  An equally thought-provoking fact is that in certain portions of Scripture, darkness symbolizes adversity and light symbolizes well-being.  And I had to ask myself, “Why?  Why is darkness just like light to Him?  And if I consider the figurative aspect of this truth, why is adversity just like prosperity to Him?  Why is it all the same to Him?”  I have to tell you that the answer didn’t come right away, but only after a prayerful few days of pondering that question.  The conclusion I finally reached, however, is that darkness and light are the same to God because nothing has changed.  He’s good with either one because nothing changes—not really—whether day or night, good times or bad times.

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It’s very difficult to maintain a positive (let alone Biblical) outlook on life when I become embroiled in—and then lose—a political fight over health care.  And the depth of my disappointment over the loss reveals how much my heart was in it and how deeply I cared about the issue.  At church on Wednesday night, my pastor asked a compelling question of the congregation about the whole dilemma.  The question struck a nerve, but ultimately provided the inspiration for this post.  He asked, “What really bothers you about losing this issue?”  Now I know that there are noble and national things at stake here, such as more loss of freedom, further crippling of the free market, and the diminishing of our country’s financial stability.  But what really bothers me most, I believe, goes far deeper and is far more personal than those things—it’s that I don’t want my own life messed up.  I don’t want my freedoms and my advantages violated or revoked.  I don’t want the free market stifled and my prosperity threatened.  And I don’t want my standard of living to be lowered or my access to superior health care curtailed.  It’s really very simple at the root of it all—it’s self.

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Dear Kate,

If you remember, Jesus was in Jerusalem (last time I wrote) because He had attended the Passover commemoration there.  While in Jerusalem, however, He was busy doing “His Father’s business” (Luke 2:49, KJV), and He cleansed the temple of the booming trade going on inside it.  He did many other things in Jerusalem not recorded by John, and a great many people learned of Him and grew curious about Him.  One of those people was “a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews” (John 3:1).  He was one of the Pharisees, the ruling class of the Jewish nation, a religious sect so fiercely opposed to Jesus Christ that they eventually conspired against Him, arrested Him under false charges, and handed Him over to the Roman officials for crucifixion.  Now “this man came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him’” (verse 2).  This was an astonishing confession, Kate.  To admit openly that Jesus Christ was a “teacher from God” was to commit treason within the Pharisee ranks.  And I think that’s why Nicodemus approached Jesus at night, under the cover of darkness, to keep from his colleagues the ugly secret that he was actually inclined to consider Christ an authentic teacher with a message from God.  See the good and bad mixed up in this man, Kate—a man so typical of you and me.  He saw the miracles that Jesus performed, he rightly deduced that Christ must be some kind of messenger from God, and he wanted to know what that message was.  But he seems somewhat ashamed to be caught talking to Jesus, embarrassed in front of his friends to approach Jesus in broad daylight or give Him a fair hearing, and unwilling to flout his party or risk his position within it.

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Dear Kate,

We find in the next section of John 2 that the Jews in Jerusalem who witnessed Christ’s cleansing of the temple (that I wrote you about in my last letter) hated to see their booming trade come to an end.  And so in verses 18-22, they demanded from Him a “sign” to prove that He had the legal right and authority to determine and enforce temple rules.  These Jews wanted to see a miracle to prove that Jesus had the right to change their temple practices.  It seems they were being petulant—they hadn’t gotten their own way and so they were going to debate, haggle, and argue Him into gratifying their lust for a “sign”—preferably something spectacular, to amaze and astound them.

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Dear Kate,

We’ve now arrived at the account of Christ’s cleansing of the temple, an often-misunderstood and yet fascinating glimpse into Christ’s anger against sin.  It all began when the “Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem” (John 2:13).  You remember the Passover, don’t you?  Every year, devout Jews celebrated the anniversary of it at Jerusalem with special sacrifices in the temple there.  So Christ went up with His disciples to join the commemoration of it.  But “in the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there” (verse 14).  So here was a huge marketplace, complete with all the animals approved for sacrifice (on sale today!), conveniently located near the temple—actually in the temple.  And to change the shoppers’ money from one nation’s currency to another, the money-changers were there as well, happy to help out in the Passover celebration—for a fee, of course.  It was unbelievable—commercialism had hijacked a religious holiday!  Does that sound familiar, Kate?  Christmas was not that long ago.

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Dear Kate,

We need to congratulate ourselves!  We’ve actually made it to chapter 2 in John!  And we come at the beginning of this chapter to a very well-known account in Scripture, the record of Jesus Christ’s first “sign” (a miracle done to prove that He was indeed God Himself), in which He turned water into wine.  The first two verses set the scene for us:  “on the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.  Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples.”  Notice, Kate, that Jesus attended this wedding.  Though He was God, He did not think that He was too important, too busy, or too inconvenienced to be a part of the lives of His family and friends, even if it were just to be a guest at an ordinary social function.

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Dear Kate,

This is the sixth or seventh letter I have written to you so far, and we’ve only just reached the end of chapter 1 in the book of John.  Isn’t it great how much truth you can get out of just one chapter of the Bible?  I think of what Boaz told Ruth in the book of Ruth in the Old Testament.  Ruth is a type, or representative (a symbol) of an unsaved person coming to Israel, to the true God, and becoming a believer.  When she arrived in Israel, she supported herself and Naomi by gleaning wheat (picking up wheat that had been inadvertently dropped during harvest) from a field belonging to Boaz (who is a type or symbol of Jesus Christ).  Boaz came to Ruth and welcomed her, offered her protection, and told her, “Don’t glean anywhere else.  I’ll tell my harvesters to drop extra wheat for you to pick up.”  And that is still Christ’s advice to us today:  “Don’t glean anywhere else.”  Always go to the Bible and to its Author, Kate, for answers to your questions and solutions to your problems.  God will drop extra help throughout its pages for you.  Don’t glean anywhere else.

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Dear Kate,

If you remember my last letter, we had begun talking about the accounts of Christ’s life recorded for us in the book of John.  The way Christ behaved and the way He spoke to the people around Him tells us a great deal about how God behaves toward us and what His disposition toward us is.  And we’ve begun to see that He really is full of grace—good will and favor.  He wants us, He came to us, He took on flesh (so He would be like us) and He dwelt among us, side-by-side with us, to show us in person, on our level, His great love for us.  And we saw this attitude of His clearly in how He acted towards the two disciples who first followed Him.

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Dear Kate,

Remember that my previous letters to you explained that our environment or habitat is God, Kate, and we need to know Him if we are to be happy, well-adjusted members of His world.  And the first thing we established about Him is that He is full of grace—good will and favor towards us.  He came to us out of pure good will, because He wants us near to Him.  And that good will is permanent—nothing bad you can do will ever change it—and it’s overflowing—He is full of grace.  And that good will prompts Him to do good work for us and in us.  Do you remember that His job is to take away the sin of the world?  In this way, He is our Mediator; He settled the sin issue that stood between us and God by dying to pay for it.

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