Two Kinds of Seeking, Two Kinds of Blindness Text: John 7:32-36
Introduction: The Authority Crisis
We come now to a passage that lays bare the central conflict of John's gospel, which is really the central conflict of all human history. It is a conflict over authority. Who is in charge? Who gets to define reality? Who sets the terms? The Pharisees and chief priests, the religious establishment of the day, believed that they were in charge. They had their system, their traditions, their control over the people, and their understanding of how God was supposed to operate. And then Jesus shows up, teaching in the temple, and He does so with an authority that completely bypasses their entire structure. He doesn't ask for their permission. He doesn't submit His credentials to their board. He speaks as though He has direct access to the Father, because He does.
This creates what we might call an authority crisis. When true authority arrives, all false and delegated authorities are immediately threatened. They have two options: submit or rebel. Bow the knee or try to break His. The response of the religious leaders is not to honestly investigate His claims. It is not to search the Scriptures with a humble heart. Their immediate, gut-level reaction is to shut Him down. They send officers to seize Him. Their solution to a theological challenge is not debate, but force. This is always the response of a bankrupt authority. When you cannot win the argument, you try to silence the man making it.
But Jesus is not intimidated. He is operating on a divine timetable, and He calmly informs them that their window of opportunity is closing. He speaks of a departure, a going away that they cannot comprehend. His words are plain, but their spiritual blindness is so profound that they can only interpret them in the most mundane, earthly terms. They are so locked into their own worldview, their own presuppositions about how the Messiah must act and where He must go, that the truth, spoken plainly, sounds like riddles and nonsense to them. This passage is a stark illustration of the principle that the natural man does not understand the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him. And when that natural man is a religious man, his blindness is compounded by his pride.
The Text
"The Pharisees heard the crowd whispering these things about Him, and the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to seize Him. Therefore Jesus said, 'For a little while longer I am with you, then I go to Him who sent Me. You will seek Me, and will not find Me; and where I am, you cannot come.' The Jews then said to one another, 'Where does this man intend to go that we will not find Him? Is He intending to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? What is this statement that He said, "You will seek Me, and will not find Me; and where I am, you cannot come"?'"
(John 7:32-36 LSB)
The Reaction of a Threatened Establishment (v. 32)
We begin with the response of the authorities:
"The Pharisees heard the crowd whispering these things about Him, and the chief priests and the Pharisees sent officers to seize Him." (John 7:32)
Notice the catalyst here. It is the "whispering" of the crowd. Public opinion is shifting. The people are divided, certainly, but many are beginning to wonder if Jesus is in fact the Christ. This is intolerable to the Pharisees. Their authority is built on their control of the popular narrative. Jesus represents a total loss of that control. He is a walking, talking refutation of their entire system of man-made righteousness.
So the Pharisees, the self-appointed guardians of the law, team up with the chief priests, who were largely Sadducees and political operators. These two groups were theological rivals on many points, but they found common ground in their opposition to Jesus. This is a classic case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." When the true King shows up, all the petty lords and squabbling factions of the counterfeit kingdom will unite to protect their turf. Their response is not theological, it is political. They send the temple police, the "officers," to perform a state-sanctioned arrest. They are not seeking truth; they are seeking to maintain power. This is what happens when religion becomes an institution of man instead of a response to God. It becomes about protecting the organization, not proclaiming the truth.
The Sovereign Timetable (v. 33)
Jesus' response to this threat is one of perfect, sovereign calm.
"Therefore Jesus said, 'For a little while longer I am with you, then I go to Him who sent Me.'" (John 7:33 LSB)
He does not panic. He does not call for His disciples to fight. He simply states a fact. He is on a mission from the Father, and that mission has a set timetable. He says, "a little while longer." He is telling them, in effect, "Your plans are irrelevant. Your officers have no power over me that is not given to them from above. You think you are in control of this situation, but you are merely actors in a play that has already been written by my Father. I will not be seized one moment before my appointed hour."
And then He tells them His destination: "I go to Him who sent Me." He is speaking of His ascension. He is declaring His origin and His destiny. He came from the Father, and He is returning to the Father. This is a direct claim to divinity, a statement of His heavenly citizenship. He is a foreigner here, an ambassador from another world. And His departure is not an escape, but a return. It is a promotion. He is going home.
Two Ways of Seeking (v. 34)
This is the heart of the passage, a statement of profound and terrible irony.
"You will seek Me, and will not find Me; and where I am, you cannot come." (John 7:34 LSB)
This is a devastating prophecy. He is telling them that a day is coming when they will desperately want to find the Messiah, but it will be too late. There are two ways to seek Jesus. You can seek Him now, in humility and repentance, as the Savior from your sins. Or you can seek Him later, in desperation and terror, as a deliverer from your circumstances. The Pharisees are currently seeking Him to arrest and kill Him. But Jesus foresees a time, after His resurrection and ascension, when the consequences of their rejection will come crashing down upon them. In the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, they would frantically look for a Messiah to save them from the Roman legions, but they would not find one. They rejected the true King, and they would be left with a succession of false messiahs who would lead them to ruin.
To seek Jesus on your own terms is not to find Him at all. They wanted a political Messiah who would fit their nationalistic ambitions. They did not want a crucified Messiah who would forgive their sins. Therefore, when they sought Him, they would not find Him, because they were not looking for the real Jesus. They were looking for a projection of their own desires.
And the final clause is a sentence of exclusion: "and where I am, you cannot come." He is going to the Father's right hand, a place of glory and authority. This is the realm of heaven, the kingdom of God. And the door to that kingdom is Jesus Himself. By rejecting Him, they are slamming that door in their own faces. Unbelief creates an impassable gulf. It is not that Jesus is hiding from them; it is that their sin and unbelief make it impossible for them to enter the place where He is. Heaven is not a place for those who think they have no need of a Savior.
The Blindness of the Experts (v. 35-36)
The response of the Jewish leaders to this profound spiritual declaration is a perfect illustration of their blindness.
"The Jews then said to one another, 'Where does this man intend to go that we will not find Him? Is He intending to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? What is this statement that He said, "You will seek Me, and will not find Me; and where I am, you cannot come"?'" (John 7:35-36 LSB)
They are completely earthbound in their thinking. Jesus speaks of ascending to heaven, and they can only imagine Him taking a trip to another country. Their minds immediately go to geography. "Where does this man intend to go?" They speculate that perhaps He is planning to leave Judea and go minister to the Jews scattered abroad, the "Dispersion among the Greeks." Perhaps He will even start teaching Gentiles, "the Greeks."
There is a deep irony here that they are completely oblivious to. They mean it as a sort of scornful dismissal. "Is he going to abandon the Holy Land and go out to the unclean Gentiles?" And the answer, of course, is yes. The gospel is going to do precisely that. Because they, the natural branches, are rejecting the Messiah, the gospel will go to the Gentiles, and they will be grafted in. They are accidentally prophesying the future of the church, and they do not have a clue. Their mockery will become the marching orders of the Great Commission.
They end by simply repeating His words back as a confusing riddle. "What is this statement...?" They are the religious scholars, the teachers of Israel, and the plainest statement of spiritual reality is utterly opaque to them. They have the Scriptures. They have the prophecies. But they are reading them with a veil over their hearts. Their presuppositions have blinded them. They are so sure they know what the Messiah will be like that they are incapable of seeing the Messiah standing right in front of them. This is a terrifying warning. You can be an expert in the Bible and miss Jesus entirely. You can have a seat on the council and be spiritually deaf, dumb, and blind.
Conclusion: Seeking While He May Be Found
This passage presents us with a stark choice. We are all seekers. The question is not whether you will seek, but how and when. The Pharisees sought Jesus with malice, in order to destroy Him. Later, their descendants would seek a Messiah out of desperation, to save their nation. Both were seeking on their own terms, and the result was that they did not find Him.
The gospel call is to seek the Lord while He may be found. The "little while" that Jesus spoke of to the Jews is, for us, this present moment. Now is the day of salvation. He is with us now through His Spirit and His Word. But this opportunity will not last forever. There is a time coming when the door will be shut.
The blindness of the Pharisees was not an intellectual problem. It was a moral and spiritual problem. They loved their position, their traditions, and their power more than they loved the truth. Their pride was a fortress that the Word of God could not penetrate. They claimed to see, and so their guilt remained.
The only cure for this kind of blindness is to first admit that you are blind. It is to abandon your own terms, your own definitions of what a savior should be and what he should do for you. It is to come to Jesus as He is, not as you would have Him be. It is to seek Him for who He is, the Son of God who takes away the sin of the world, and not as a means to some other end, whether that be political power, personal prosperity, or national deliverance.
If you seek Him this way, in humble faith, you will find Him. And where He is, in the presence of the Father, you too will one day be able to come. But if you seek Him on your own terms, driven by pride or by panic, you will find nothing. And the place where He has gone will be forever inaccessible to you. The choice is yours, but the time is short.