Commentary - John 7:14-24

Bird's-eye view

In this section of John's gospel, Jesus makes His move from the shadows into the full glare of public controversy. After arriving in Jerusalem secretly, He now goes right into the temple, the very headquarters of the opposition, and begins to teach. The conflict that erupts is not over a minor point of order; it goes to the very heart of authority, truth, and righteousness. The Jews are astonished at His learning, knowing He lacks the official credentials from their rabbinic schools. Jesus uses this opportunity to declare that His teaching authority comes directly from the Father, not from men. He then lays down a crucial principle: spiritual discernment is a moral issue, not a merely intellectual one. A willingness to do God's will is the prerequisite for recognizing God's doctrine. He contrasts His own motive, which is to glorify the Father, with the self-glorifying motives of false teachers. Then, pivoting from the source of His teaching to the substance of their unbelief, He confronts their murderous hearts directly. They, the supposed champions of the Mosaic Law, are in fact its greatest violators. The crowd's feigned ignorance ("You have a demon!") is brushed aside as Jesus addresses the root of their anger: His healing of the paralytic on the Sabbath. With devastating logic, He exposes their hypocritical application of the law, showing how their tradition of circumcising on the Sabbath should have taught them to approve of making a man entirely whole on the Sabbath. The passage concludes with a command that summarizes the entire conflict: "Do not judge by appearances, but judge with righteous judgment."

Outline

Context In John

This passage occurs during the Feast of Tabernacles, a major Jewish festival. Jesus had initially told His unbelieving brothers He was not going up to the feast, only to go up later in secret (John 7:1-10). The atmosphere in Jerusalem is thick with tension and debate about who Jesus is (John 7:11-13). This public teaching in the temple is therefore a dramatic and deliberate act. It is a direct challenge to the religious authorities on their home turf. The conflict here over Jesus's authority and His actions on the Sabbath picks up a theme from chapter 5, where Jesus healed a man at the pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath and declared His equality with the Father, which was the initial cause for the leaders seeking to kill Him (John 5:16-18). This section, then, is not a new dispute, but an escalation of an ongoing, central conflict. Jesus is forcing a decision. He is laying out the terms of the debate, exposing the moral bankruptcy of His opponents, and demonstrating that their rejection of Him is a rejection of the very law they claim to uphold.

Key Issues

The Uncredentialed King

The central issue that surfaces immediately is one of credentials. The Jews marvel, "How has this man become learned, not having been educated?" In their world, and in many of our religious worlds, authority is a function of institutional approval. You are qualified to teach if you have graduated from the right schools, been ordained by the right presbytery, and have the right letters after your name. Jesus has none of this. He is a carpenter from Galilee. By their standards, He is an unqualified layman.

But this is the point. God's wisdom consistently confounds and overturns man's systems of credentialing. The apostle John himself was an "unlearned and ignorant man" in the eyes of the Sanhedrin (Acts 4:13). Jesus's authority does not come from the bottom up, through the approval of men. It comes from the top down, directly from God the Father. This is a fundamental challenge to all forms of religious elitism. The question is never "Which seminary did he attend?" but rather "Has God sent him?" Jesus forces this question into the open. He is not just another rabbi offering another interpretation; He is the Word of God incarnate, and His teaching carries the authority of Heaven itself.

Verse by Verse Commentary

14 But when it was now the middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple, and began to teach.

Jesus's timing is deliberate. The feast is in full swing, the crowds are at their largest, and the temple is the center of everything. He doesn't lurk in the alleyways; He goes to the very heart of the Jewish religious establishment and takes the floor. This is not a rash act, but a calculated, kingly one. He is asserting His right to instruct His people in His own house. The verb "began to teach" implies a continuous action. He took up a teaching position and held it.

15 The Jews then were marveling, saying, “How has this man become learned, not having been educated?”

The reaction is one of astonishment, but not necessarily in a good way. They recognize the substance and power of His teaching. He clearly knows the Scriptures inside and out. But this knowledge is a problem for them because it doesn't fit their categories. "Not having been educated" means He had not been formally trained in the rabbinic schools under a recognized teacher. They are not asking about basic literacy; they are asking about His theological qualifications. In their minds, true learning was a product of a specific, human-controlled process. Jesus's wisdom was an anomaly they could not account for, and so it was suspect. It was like a man performing brilliant surgery without ever having been to medical school. Their amazement is a backhanded acknowledgment of His power, but it is rooted in unbelief.

16 So Jesus answered them and said, “My teaching is not Mine, but from Him who sent Me.

Jesus answers their unspoken challenge directly. He does not deny His lack of formal training; He renders it irrelevant. He traces the pedigree of His teaching not to a famous rabbi, but to the ultimate source: God the Father. "My teaching is not Mine" is not a statement of humility in the modern sense of self-deprecation. It is a staggering claim of authority. He is saying, "When you hear me, you are not hearing my private opinions. You are hearing a direct transmission from the throne room of the universe." He is a sent one, an apostle, and the message belongs to the one who sent Him.

17 If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know about the teaching, whether it is of God or I speak from Myself.

This is one of the most important principles for spiritual understanding in all of Scripture. Jesus tells them that the obstacle to recognizing the truth is not intellectual, but moral. The problem is not in their heads, but in their wills. A man whose heart is set on doing God's will, a man who is submitted to God, is given the spiritual taste buds to recognize God's cooking. But a man who is in rebellion against God, whose will is set against God's will, will be spiritually tone-deaf. He cannot hear the music of heaven. True knowledge is therefore inseparable from obedience. You cannot stand back as a detached, "objective" observer and evaluate God's truth. You must be willing to surrender to it. Their unwillingness to do God's will was the very thing that blinded them to God's Word when He was standing right in front of them.

18 He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who is seeking the glory of the One who sent Him, He is true, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.

Jesus now provides the litmus test for any teacher. What is his ultimate motive? A man who is making it all up, speaking "from himself," is always, at the end of the day, building his own little kingdom. He is seeking his own glory, his own reputation, his own following. But a true messenger of God is consumed with the glory of the one who sent him. Jesus's entire ministry was oriented toward the Father. He lived for the Father's glory. Because His motive is pure, His character is pure. "He is true, and there is no unrighteousness in Him." This is a quiet, almost incidental, claim to sinlessness. A man who seeks only God's glory is a man in whom the truth resides without any admixture of falsehood or sin.

19 “Did not Moses give you the Law? And yet none of you does the Law. Why do you seek to kill Me?”

Having established the divine source of His teaching, Jesus now goes on the offensive. He turns the tables on them completely. They were the ones who saw themselves as the guardians of the Law of Moses. Jesus confronts them with two brutal facts. First, Moses gave them the law. They all agree on this. Second, none of them actually keeps it. This would have been a stunning charge. They prided themselves on their meticulous observance. But Jesus cuts through the external show to the heart. And the proof of their law-breaking is their current disposition toward Him: "Why do you seek to kill Me?" The sixth commandment says, "You shall not murder." They, the supposed champions of the law, are actively plotting to murder the Son of God. Their hypocrisy is laid bare.

20 The crowd answered, “You have a demon! Who seeks to kill You?”

The crowd's response is a mixture of evasion and insult. It is likely that the common people were not privy to the secret counsels of the Sanhedrin. So for them, the charge seems insane, paranoid. Their explanation is that He must be demon-possessed. This is a common tactic when the truth hits too close to home: attack the sanity or character of the speaker. But it is also a profound spiritual blindness. They are looking at the one man in history without a demon and accusing Him of having one, while they themselves are being manipulated by the father of lies.

21-22 Jesus answered them, “I did one work, and you all marvel. For this reason Moses has given you circumcision (not because it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and on the Sabbath you circumcise a man.

Jesus ignores their insult and gets right back to the heart of the matter. The "one work" He refers to is the healing of the paralytic in chapter 5. That was the event that triggered their murderous rage. He says, "you all marvel," meaning they are all hung up on this one incident. He then begins to reason with them from the Scriptures, from their own practice. He brings up the law of circumcision. He notes, correctly, that the rite itself predates the Mosaic Law, going back to the patriarchs ("the fathers"), but Moses incorporated it into his law. Their own rabbinic tradition stipulated that if the eighth day for a boy's circumcision fell on a Sabbath, the circumcision was to be performed anyway. The Sabbath law was, in this instance, set aside for the law of circumcision.

23 If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath so that the Law of Moses will not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made an entire man well on the Sabbath?

Here is the devastating, unanswerable logic. Jesus's argument is what the rabbis would call a qal wahomer argument, an argument from the lesser to the greater. "If you," He says, "will perform a ritual on the Sabbath that involves 'wounding' a small part of a man's body in obedience to the law, why are you enraged that I performed an act of mercy on the Sabbath that made a man's entire body whole?" Circumcision was a sign of the covenant, a good thing. But healing a man from a crippling, 38-year-long disease is an even greater good. If their scrupulousness about the law allowed for the one, it was grotesque hypocrisy to condemn the other. Their anger was not rooted in a zeal for God's law, but in a personal animosity toward Jesus.

24 Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”

This is the conclusion of the whole matter. Their judgment was "according to appearance." They saw an apparent violation of the Sabbath rules as they had defined them. They saw a man without their approved credentials. They were judging superficially. Jesus commands them, and us, to do something different: "judge with righteous judgment." Righteous judgment looks past the surface. It understands the spirit and purpose of the law, not just the letter. It weighs the "weightier matters" like justice and mercy. It discerns motives. And ultimately, righteous judgment is judgment that aligns with God's judgment, which is always true and right. It begins with a submitted will and ends by seeing things as God sees them.

Application

This passage is a powerful diagnostic tool for the church today. We are constantly tempted to judge by appearances. We build our little systems of respectability, our institutional credentials, and we get nervous when God raises up a man who doesn't fit our mold. We are tempted to honor teachers who tell us what we want to hear and who seek their own glory within our tribe, rather than those who, like Jesus, care only for the glory of the Father.

The central challenge for us is found in verse 17. Do we want to know the truth? Then we must be willing to do the truth. Our theological problems are very often moral problems in disguise. We resist a particular doctrine because we do not like its ethical implications for our lives. We refuse to submit to a clear command of Scripture, and then wonder why the rest of the Bible seems so confusing. A humble and obedient heart is the best hermeneutical tool there is.

Finally, we must take to heart the command to judge with righteous judgment. This does not mean we are forbidden to judge. On the contrary, we are commanded to judge, but to do it rightly. We must not be superficial. We must not be hypocrites, condemning a brother for a speck when we have a log in our own eye. We must learn to distinguish the gnats from the camels. We must ask what the law is for. Is it for binding men up in misery, or is it for life and freedom? The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. All of God's law is a gift of grace that is meant to lead us to life. When we see the law as a tool for mercy, for healing, for making men whole, we are beginning to judge as our Father in heaven judges. And that kind of judgment will always lead us to Christ, who is the fulfillment of the law and the only source of true wholeness.