My subject today is the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ - contrasted with the paradox - [ a paradox is an apparent contradiction ] - the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ contrasted with the paradox - of His infinite power and authority. - and His meekness and His patience and His grace, because, the person that we’re speaking about today is the one who was born in Bethlehem, was the master of the universe.

(In) Revelation chapter 1, John introduces Him as “the ruler of the kings of the earth.” That’s who he is.

And Jesus Christ has authority over Creation; over the powers of darkness; He has authority over sin and death; He has authority over all flesh; to Him every knee shall bow. His teaching when he was here on earth, was with authority, and His miracles demonstrated that authority.

And yet, in the face of extreme provocation, the man who is God displayed supernatural patience and gentleness and grace toward those who tormented Him. And he submitted Himself to the will of the triune God, to the great redemptive purpose of the ages: “the eternal purpose which God purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord,” as Paul says in Ephesians 3.

So, first of all,

His authority over the elements

The great Creator, when the storm arose on the Sea of Galilee … we’ll read about it just briefly in Mark chapter 4. We’ll turn to Mark chapter 4:39.

“And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, Peace be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”

The Lord was asleep in the stern of the boat, while this raging storm, the mountainous seas, threatened to overthrow the boat into the water. And I’ve been in a Force 10 gale between Aberdeen and Shetland and I can tell you it’s not a pleasant experience. These waves must have been similar, and that wind, that howling wind. And he stood up in the boat and he said,

“Peace, be still.”

He commanded the elements with one word and the whole thing calmed down in a moment, an instant of time. That’s His authority over the elements.

And yet when he was born into this world He submitted Himself to the weakness and vulnerability of a little child. He was dependent on His mother Mary for everything, totally dependent. And one of our hymns says,

‘He made the worlds by His great power, And none can stay His hand, or say, What doest thou? Thy wonders cease yet an infant babe He lay in Bethlehem’s manger on that day.’

It’s just amazing that the one who ‘upholds all things by the word of His power.’ That’s what it says in the scriptures. ‘He upholds all things by the word of his power’. And yet, this world hung on a slender thread, as it were, when he was born into this world as a little child.

And then in the prime of His manhood, at the age of thirty-three and a half or thereabouts, on the final day of His life’s journey to Golgotha, the man who is God, the one who has absolute power, and displayed that power over the raging elements, the sea and the wind - He submitted Himself in meekness to the rage of self-righteous, religious men, and to the unjust brutality of the Roman soldiers. The one who stopped the wind and the waves in a moment - He allowed puny, cruel men to nail Him to a cross and to subject Him to a storm of abuse.

They said ‘He saved others, himself he cannot save’. ‘Let him come down from the cross and we’ll believe on him’.

He could have come down. Why did he not? Why did he not deal with these insolent, profane men there and then? Because he had come ‘to fulfil all righteousness’. He had come to do the will of God. He had come to ‘restore that which he took not away’, the Bible says, to make atonement for sin. To ‘put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself’.

The Bible says we’re all sinners, you and I. Each one of us, we inherit original sin from Adam, our first parent. And God, in His mercy and grace, said, ‘I’m not going to destroy them. I’m going to send a Saviour to die and bear the punishment on their behalf.’ And he bore the wrath of God. The storm of God’s wrath was infinitely, infinitely greater than the rage of men and the storm on the Sea of Galilee.

Another hymn says, ‘That mighty stroke it fell on him, and life for us was won’. Only the man who is God had the power, the capability, the authority - ‘to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.’

He has authority over the spirit world.

When the devil took Him up to that high mountain and said - and showed Him ‘all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time’ - He said to the Lord Jesus,

‘To you I will give all tHis authority. If you will fall down and worship me.” And the Lord refuted every temptation that the devil gave Him there. He said, “It is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.” The Devil was defeated. He had no answer, no comeback. He had more than met His match in the man who is God.

And that was still the case in the upper room on the night on which the Lord was betrayed. even as the cross loomed large. The Lord Jesus said, “The Prince of this world comes, and he has nothing in me.” That’s the Devil he was referring to: Satan, the arch-enemy of God. And yet, although, he had authority over the Devil and power over Satan, yet to the armed mob that Judas brought to the garden of Gethsemane that night, the Lord Jesus said, “This is your hour and the power of darkness.”

He acknowledged that the power of darkness was in the ascendancy over Him. He meant the Evil One who is behind all the spiritual darkness In this world, that causes men to do violent deeds to each other.

Jesus submitted Himself in meekness to those who embodied the power of darkness that night - because He had come to do the will of God. We were thinking this morning of how the Lord prayed that agonised prayer three times in the Garden of Gethsemane. “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.”

He submitted Himself to the cruelty of evil, wicked men who were motivated by the evil one. Because he had come to “fulfil all righteousness”, - “to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself”, to make it possible for guilty sinners to be forgiven and to come back to God, their Maker. Because it’s been well said before that there’s ‘a God-shaped hole’ in all our hearts, and “we’re restless until we find rest in Him”. That’s what Augustine said.

The authority of His teaching.

His teaching was “with authority”, the scripture says. It wasn’t like the teaching of the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees, who imposed overly strict codes of conduct and exempted themselves from the same obligations. The Lord said about them, He said, “All their works they do for to be seen of men”. And he said, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites”. What a devastating indictment that was of their hypocrisy.

So he had authority even over those religious men that held power in Israel at that time. And yet even as he hung on the cross, he didn’t respond to their wicked insults when they challenged His deity.

Even as the man who is God hung bleeding from His hands and His feet, they shouted, “Come down from the cross and we’ll believe on you”. “He’s the Son of God. Let him now come down”. “He saved others. He cannot save himself. Let God deliver him if he delights in him,” they said. And that was a direct challenge to the unity of the Godhead, because if Jesus had come down - as he well could have - there would be no hope for you or me. We’d be lost for eternity to God. Lost forever. But he stayed there on the cross. That was supernatural discipline. It says in 1 Peter, “when he was reviled, he reviled not again”. Isaiah says, “As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is dumb, yea, he opened not his mouth.” That wasn’t weakness. That was strength. That was divine strength seen in His meekness. Because he had come “to seek and to save that which was lost,” - you and me.

He has authority over the effects of sin.

The miracles of healing that he performed, I’ll just refer to one of them. In Mark chapter 7, there was a man who was, what we would say, deaf and dumb, brought to Him. He put His fingers in his ears and he touched his tongue and he said, “Ephphatha” (in Aramaic) - “Be opened”. One word, “Ephphatha”, and immediately his tongue was loosed and he heard, he spoke plain. Because he wasn’t able to hear what people could say, and he could - in an instant - Jesus fixed the man’s disability.

And he has authority over death.

He said to Lazarus, who had been three days dead in the tomb, “Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth bound hand and foot with grave clothes.”

And yet, the one who had power and authority over death, it says “he became obedient even unto death, yes, the death of the cross.” And he even told His own disciples before he went to the cross exactly what was going to happen. He knew exactly what lay ahead of Him. Let’s just read that in Mark 10, please. Turn over to Mark 10:32.

“And they were in the way, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going before them, and they were amazed, and they that followed were afraid. And he took again the twelve and began to tell them the things that were to happen to him. Saying, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man shall be delivered unto the chief priests and the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles. And they shall mock him, and shall spit upon him, and shall scourge him, and shall kill him and after three days he shall rise again.”

The man who was God was fully aware of what men were going to do to Him. He even said to Peter in the garden, when Peter took his sword to defend his Lord and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant - I think he must have been aiming for the man’s head. The guy just got out of the way in time and it cut - the sword - cut his ear off. But the Lord said to him, to Peter, “put your sword back into its sheath. They that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Do you not know”, he said to Peter, “that even now I could call twelve legions of angels. But how should the scriptures be fulfilled that thus it must be?” He had come to “fulfil all righteousness”. To make it possible for His righteousness to be imputed to you and me when we put our trust in Him. That’s why he didn’t resist arrest that day.

And so he has authority over sin and death and hell.

And, by His atoning death and His victorious resurrection, the cross of Christ is the greatest event that ever took place in this world. Because it was there that God in Christ, God in the person of His Son, the man who is God, asserted divine authority over death and sin, and Satan and his evil angelic followers.

Because it says in Colossians 2 I just want to turn to that. It’s quite a striking word - Colossians 2. That’s Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians 2:13.

“And you being dead,” this is Paul writing to believers in the Church of God in Colossae He says, “And you being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, you I say, did he,” (that’s the Lord Jesus), “did he quicken together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against us. which was contrary to us”. (It was like a legal document against us.) “And he has taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross. having put off from himself the principalities and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

So what that’s saying is that the Lord Jesus by His death on the cross triumphed over the powers of evil, the powers of Satan. And he “made a show of them openly.” And they have no comeback because their power is limited. And their day is coming, when he will judge them.

And so on the cross, as we were thinking again, as we remembered Him this morning, The Lord Jesus said, “It is finished”. The word teleo, which means complete. The atoning work of redemption was complete, and ‘he bowed His head and he gave up His spirit.’

John 17, please. John 17 and reading from verse 1. This is the prayer that the Lord Jesus made on the night on which he was betrayed. And this is just the start of His prayer to His God and Father. And he said these words.

“These things spoke Jesus, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, Father, the hour is come. Glorify your Son, that the Son may glorify you. even as you gave him authority over all flesh, that whatsoever you have given him, to them he should give eternal life.”

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has authority over all flesh.

And that means that because His sacrifice availed for all mankind - because he died for all, he took the sins of this guilty world, “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever,” - that means all - “whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Because he died for all, then he has the right, the power, the authority, the legal, judicial entitlement to pronounce righteous judgment on all flesh. It says in John 1:12, “to as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.” So he has the right, the authority, to bestow eternal life on all those who believe on Him. And he also has the right to pass sentence, to judge those who reject Him.

“To as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.“

God and the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the triune God, have absolute authority over all things.

And that divine authority God has delegated to men. Men rise to positions of power and authority in this world, but that power and that authority is delegated authority, it’s limited. So when Pilate said to the Lord Jesus on that day when he was crucified, Pilate said, “Are you not speaking to me? Do you not know that I have authority? To release you and authority - power - to release you and power, to crucify you. That word power there is exousia, which means authority. Different from the word power dunamis - is power to heal.

“Do you not know that I have authority,” said Pilate to Jesus. “Over you?” Jesus said to him, “You would have no authority, no power over me, except it were given you from above.” And so the rulers of this world wield delegated authority, but they will answer to God for the way in which they have used that authority that God has given them.

What Pilate did not know was that the man who is God who stood before him that day had already surrendered His will, as we thought of what He said in the Garden of Gethsemane, “not my will but yours be done.” The Lord Jesus had already, in His mind and heart, given Himself for you and for me. There was no turning back for Him. No matter what it cost Him to go to the cross and bear the storm of God’s wrath against our sins. God took our sins and laid them on His beloved Son, that Holy One, and he was forsaken by God on the cross. And we will never know what it cost our Saviour to give His life for us. But he did it out of love. Out of grace and mercy toward each one.

We are ultimately accountable to His authority.

In Philippians 2 it says, “In the name of Jesus every knee shall bow”. One day you and I, and every person since Adam, will bow the knee whether willingly or unwillingly, we will bow the knee to Him, to His authority. And Paul writes in Romans 14 that “each one of us shall give account of himself to God”, quoting Isaiah 45.

So, my final question, which I want to ask of anyone who is not saved, who hears what I am saying today, “does Jesus Christ have the authority over your life?” Are you willing to surrender your heart to Him, to His authority? Are you willing to say, as the old hymn says, which we are going to sing in a minute:

“King of my life, I crown 

You now

Yours shall the glory be

Lest I forget Your thorn crowned brow

Lead me to Calvary.“

Will you bow to His authority now? Put your trust in Him, and let Him straighten out your life for time and for eternity,

We’ll just have a word of prayer before we sing our hymn.

“I would love to tell you what I think of Jesus, 

Since I found in him a friend so strong and true. 

I would tell you how he changed my life completely,

He did something that no other friend could do.”

[Hymn singing]

Let’s pray.

God of all the earth, we come before you, knowing, O God, that our lives are in the palm of your hands. You give to us the number of our days will never exceed what is not in your plan. And O God, we thank you that you sent your Son that He might meet with us, we might receive Him, and might know the blessings of being right with God.

And so as we look at some things and those that you met, we ask That you’ll speak to us, Lord, from your word, and that alone. Let your Holy Spirit make the words that we read meaningful. For we ask these things in the precious name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.

As common with each one of us, we meet many people throughout our lives. But what is not common is when we think of those that Jesus met ... WE meet people by accident, or by appointment, or through some other way. The people that Jesus met, HE came looking for THEM. They didn’t know it. And if you belong to Christ, He came looking for you.

I want to turn to a a very well-known incident. It’s John 4. Please turn to John 4. It’s about what has been called “the woman at the well”. And the story is known well. Jesus is on a journey with His disciples. He’s coming from the south. and he’s going north. He’s coming from Jerusalem and he’s going back to where he was born in the region of Galilee. And as has been often said, the way which he came this way, he didn’t need to come this way, but he CHOSE to come this way. He came via Samaria, and a particular town called Sychar. And as he’s on his journey and he comes to this well, of which it said it’s Jacob’s well, referring back to the forefather Jacob who dug the well.

Jesus comes, and it says ‘he was wearied with his journey’ and so He sat by the well as he was. He just sat down as He was, like we do many times. Just as we are, He was wearied with his journey. As a physical journey - He was on another journey. And the journey that’s the most important journey, is the journey to find people. He wasn’t wearied with that. He was wearied with his normal journey. So He’s coming and He’s coming specifically to meet one person. And He’s searching for her. And lo and behold, as He’s there on his own, and the majority of the disciples are probably not there. Perhaps John was there because of the detail that’s recorded here. Maybe John was an observer.

But this woman comes, and if you’re looking down the road towards the village of Sychar, she was probably very discernible, as in those days they carried the jars on their hair, their head. And there was women who didn’t bother so much about their hairstyles, but you could tell - here’s a woman coming, and this woman did this thing every day, maybe two or three times a day. And she was coming as she came the day before. And perhaps one of her responsibilities was to take water, perhaps along with others, into the village. That was their water source.

And so she came with her jar, her vessel. She saw him, she recognised right away this man’s a Jew. even before he spoke, because he would have the blue tassels on the bottom of his garments. And she knew he was a Jew. And to her surprise, he says, “Will you give me to drink?” She thought, well, ‘why are you asking me for a drink?’ You know, you Jews don’t have anything to do with us Samaritans. So all of a sudden, if you’re reading this story, you’re saying, it seems to be two races here. Where did she come from? She knew where HE came from. Where did she come from? She said something later on when she realized, she says, “You want me to give you something to drink, but you don’t have anything to drink with”. And she posed - it’s almost two mini statements - she says, (first one) “are you greater than our father Jacob? Who gave us this well?” - Mistake number one. And how is it a mistake? Because Jacob wasn’t her father. She states her ancestry. Are you greater than Jacob?

The Son of God could have said, Wait a minute, you’ve got it all wrong. But he didn’t. Where did this woman come from? There’s an incident in the Old Testament - Israel was made up of twelve tribes. There came a schism in them. Two tribes, Benjamin and Judah, to the south, the other ten tribes to the north. They carried on as they carried on - and they did carry on against God. God had enough. And he sent this Assyrian power with the army and they finally, after three years’ siege captured the whole ten tribes. And it was like ethnic cleansing. They took everyone they could find. And they transported them from Israel up and down into regions of Mesopotamia. And then they repopulated the area by people from Kutha, Babylon, brought people back into Samaria.

That’s where she came from. Jacob wasn’t her father. But why did she say that? In Sychar There’s two mountains not far, Ebal and Gerizim. And we’ll speak about Gerizim a little bit later. But when this people, this foreign people, repopulated the area called Samaria, they got the name of being Where they came from - a Samaritan. And they certainly weren’t like our modern-day Samaritans. Well, they didn’t have telephones for a start, and they weren’t for helping people.

They took the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. And they said, anything other than Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, anything after that is false.

They set up their own priesthood, they sacrificed the same sacrifices, they kept the same feasts, particularly the Passover. So there’s a culture that believes what they’re doing is worshiping God. And that’s why the difficulty she was finding. “But you’re a Jew. Why are you speaking ... Why am I speaking to you? Why are you speaking to me?”

And the Lord says, “if you knew who was speaking to you and the gift of God, you would be asking me for that gift, for living water” - not this water here.

Now I don’t know the intelligence of this woman. I don’t know if she was educated. But one thing she knew, in her own mind, this conversation was going on. He’s speaking about something that I don’t have. And the way in which he’s speaking about it, I want.

I remember that - see that hymn - “No one ever cared for me like Jesus” - that became very meaningful to me when I was 22 over in Australia. I was going through quite a bit of trouble. Emotional trouble, and that hymn was sung and it just seemed to meet my need.

“I would love to tell you what I think of Jesus, 

For in him I’ve found a friend so strong and true”

“He did what no one else could do”. 

And I found that in Christ.

And this woman realized He’s got something that I don’t have, and he’s speaking about it in a certain way. And when I was over in Australia, a man spoke to me about his love of Christ and I realized he enjoys having Christ in his life and I don’t have that. And it was the way he spoke about it, and the way in which Jesus spoke about it here, she knew that she was deficient in something. Sometimes we sing a hymn from the book here.

“Oh, that the world might taste and see, the richness of his grace”.

The Lord’s looking for people today as he was in those days. To fill their lives, the emptiness that’s there. And he knew this woman was so empty, and he came looking for her. So the story goes on, and here we come to the epicenter of the story.

The Lord wanted to give us something, but first He had to prepare the ground. He says to her, Go and call your husband. And I wonder if she sort of looked at him. And perhaps her whole body sort of changed; maybe she bowed her head a bit and says, “I don’t have a husband”. And the Lord says, “you’ve answered right for the one that you now have, the man that you now have is not your husband”. She must have been absolutely flabbergasted. “How in goodness’ name” she may have thought, “could he possibly know this?” Five husbands. “Mrs: what’s wrong with you that you’ve had five husbands?” In the community that she lived in, they followed the writings of Moses. And in Deuteronomy chapter 24 It has the instruction that if a man marries a woman and she displease him He can write a bill of divorcement, give it to her and send her out of the house. But everybody would know that the Bill of Divorcement meant that she hadn’t done anything immoral, because if she had, she would have been stoned.

This poor soul had five bills of divorcement. What was wrong with you? The Lord knew, but we certainly don’t know what was wrong with this woman. Every man that she was married to seemed to find something about her nature, her character, her ways, that displeased him. And obviously, she got the bill of divorcement, and she got married again. And Deuteronomy 24 says, if the second husband hates her. He could send her forth again. So, what do you call a woman who’s been married five times and divorced five times? You might say unlucky. Well, it depends who she was married to. I would say it’s shocking.

What did that do for this woman’s way in which she looked at herself? It’s bad enough. Have you ever known rejection? Have you ever known rejection? She knew it at least five times. And whatever was the reason, not one of us knows, but the one that was speaking with her, HE knew. And she was going to find out something about this man that had never taken place with any man. “Go and call your husband”.

The conversation changed, obviously, because she says in verse 20, “our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and you say that in Jerusalem is a place where men ought to worship.”

Jesus says to her “woman, Believe me, the hour comes when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall you worship the Father. You worship that which you know not. We worship that which we know for salvation is from the Jews”. Verse twenty-five - “The woman said to him I know that Messiah comes, which is called Christ. When he has come, he will declare unto us all things. Jesus says to her, I that speak with you am.”

The conversation changed from speaking about her marital state, to speaking about worship.

And she says, “Our fathers worshipped in this mountain”. Now, what she was referring to was Mount Gerizim - Mount Gerizim - the Samaritans built their temple there and carried out, as was said, the same sacrifices. In about 110 BC, a man called John Hyrcanus Who was the high priest in Israel at that time, raised an army, fought against the Samaritans and completely razed to the ground the temple in Gerizim. And it’s never been built again.

And yet, every year there is a Samaritan organization still, a group that meets in the ruins of Mount Gerazim.

“Our fathers worshipped here, and you say, you say Jerusalem’s the right place to worship” - but Jesus doesn’t press the point. He’s got something better to say than what’s going on in the time, on which he’s speaking about. He wants to bring her to somewhere. He knows that she wants living water And then she says something that provides the avenue for him just to come in. She says, “We know” - “we know”. Well then, how do you know that Messiah is coming? She could have said, well, “Moses says a prophet’s coming, like none other”. “We know that when the Messiah comes, he will teach us all things”.

And it was almost like saying, and he’s from the Samaritans, not from the Jews. They believed that. And Jesus just sets the record right. He could have said, “Jacob’s not your father”. Didn’t say that at all. You couldn’t ... What do they say ... “You could win the battle, but lose the war”. And Jesus let it go because he wanted to bring her to this point, (when she said “we know that Messiah comes”) - and Jesus just turned and says, “My dear, he that speaks with you I am.” In an instant - instantly the penny dropped. Instantly, she realized what the conversation was for.

And the amazing thing is in verse 28 it says this: “So the woman left her water pot, went away into the city, and says to the men, Come, see a man which told me all things that ever I did. Can this be the Christ? They went out of the city and were coming to him”.

She came back into the city. “Where have you been? Where’s the water?”

“Come and see a man that told me all things that ever I did!”

“Calm down, calm down!”

She left her water pot. And she fulfilled and showed what Paul spoke about in 2 Corinthians 4. “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” What she didn’t know, she was going back and she was God’s vessel. She was going back with a treasure that she was going to share. With the people amongst whom she lived.

And her testimony was this. “You’ve got to come and see a man that told me all things.” Now, some of the things, we know what he told her, “this is not your husband”. I think there was a whole host of other things that Jesus would just bring to her and she would be absolutely confounded. With the knowledge that He had.

But the outstanding thing to me is what she doesn’t say, but what she knew. “Come see a man that told me all things.” And she could have added, “And you know what? In knowing all these things, you never blamed me. He never said I was wrong. He never got on to me. You know what? He just seemed to accept me as I am.”

I wonder what her partner said. “Who’s this man you’re talking about?”

“This man I’m talking about, his name’s Jesus. And he’s the Messiah. And he’s given me something that I couldn’t possibly get myself.”

“And how did you get it?”

“I believed what he said about himself: I am the Messiah.”

When she took her water pot, it probably couldn’t have been brim full because it was spill when she went into the village. SHE was full to the brim! It must have been with such a joy and such a genuineness, because they knew this woman.

And when she says, “Come and see a man”, and it says “They went out of the city and were coming to him”.

They went out. Why did they come out? They went out of the city because She so spoke in a way, she convinced him that what she had was nothing ordinary.

This area, Samaria, it was a very fertile place, and that’s borne out by what the Lord says to his disciples when you can see them coming down the road from the village, he says, “Look at the fields, they’re white unto harvest”. It was a place where corn and plant growth was in abundance.

But look what’s coming. Maybe the disciples were a bit taken aback. “Oh, what are we going to do?” The Lord’s always in control.

And they came. And they weren’t very sure. They were only going on the testimony of this woman. And when they came, and when they spoke with him, and when he said, as only what Christ could say And he imparted, “I’m the Saviour of the world. I’ve come to save you from your sins. Only if you’ll receive me.”

And they did. And so, when they had a chance to speak with the woman, From verse 39 it says,

“And from that city many of the Samaritans believed on him because of the word of the woman who testified, he told me all things that ever I did.

So when the Samaritans came unto him, they besought him to abide with them, and he abode there two days, and many more believed because of his word. And they said to the woman, Now we believe not because of your speaking, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.”

They’re saying to her now, “We heard what you said” - but they would ever be indebted to her. Because she was a bridge that the Lord used to reach hundreds in that village.

And so it shows to you and I, for those of us who belong to the Lord, every day we should be seeking, if there’s an opportunity, to be the bridge from ourselves to those that we speak, about the Gospel of Christ to the end that we might say, to folks that we know,

“could I speak to you about a man who told me all things that ever I did? This is the Son of God, the Messiah.”

Shall we pray.

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“And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night comes, when no man can work. When I am in the world, I am the light of the world. When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and anointed his eyes with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which is by interpretation, Sent). He went away therefore, and washed, and came seeing.” (John 9:1-7)

Consider Young’s Literal Translation of verses 3-4 without a full stop in between. In the originally written Greek scriptures there were no punctuation marks—no spaces between words. In Young’s Literal Translation (YLT) the sense reads as follows:

“...but that the works of God may be manifested in him; it behoves me to be working the works of Him that sent me while it is day”

A similar sense would be (I’m paraphrasing): ‘but that the works of God may be manifested in him, I (we) must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day’ [AV: ‘I’ ... RV: ‘we’] (John 9:3-4)

Why did Jesus perform so many miracles on the Sabbath day?

'“The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath: therefore the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28 AV)

And there is a far greater rest than the Sabbath: the rest that is found in Christ:

“Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28 AV)

Apparently the use of saliva was a traditional ‘remedy’ for blindness. The Lord mixed his spittle with the dust of the ground—there may not have been anything out-of-the-ordinary about this situation to those looking on. However, this traditional ‘remedy’ in the Lord’s hands was transformative! Then the Lord says, “Go away to the pool of Siloam and wash.” We can picture the blind man eagerly, carefully, tapping his way with his staff, heading to Siloam. John specifically tells us the meaning of Siloam: ‘sent’. The water from the Gihon Spring was sent to the pool of Siloam—descending no more than 12 inches over the third of a mile length that it travelled. There would be a much steeper descent for the blind man who was sent from the temple mount down to Siloam but the Lord would not have sent him to Siloam if he wasn’t capable of getting there. No doubt he would have been well familiar with the route.

The waters were sent from the Gihon Spring. The blind man was sent from the temple mount.

In pointing out the meaning of Siloam as ‘sent’, John may be conveying to us the far greater descent from heaven, “The Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.” (1 John 4:14)

Miracles, signs, works: these terms describe the same thing.

So the man, blind from birth, went away and washed in Siloam and came seeing. This was a great miracle, a unique miracle:

“Since the world began it was never heard that any one opened the eyes of a man born blind.” (John 9:32)

This miracle and the many miracles Jesus performed made known the glory of God and showed the deity of Christ. But though he had done so many miracles before them, they were not believing on him. (John 12:37)

Jesus said, “If I had not done among them the works which none other did, they had not had sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father.” (John 15:24)

Finally, John sums up his account of the miracles he’d witnessed:

“Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31)

Scripture References are from the Revised Version unless marked as AV 12th April 2026 - James Johnson

When all thy mercies, blessed God,

Each rising soul surveys,

Transported with the view, we’re lost

In wonder, love and praise.

Through all eternity to Thee

A joyful song we’ll raise,

But e’en eternity’s too short

To utter all thy praise.

Shall we ask God’s help?

Oh God, our Heavenly Father. We ask for the presence of your Holy Spirit. We ask that you’ll reach down into our hearts and minds with your word, your word, and bless it to us, bless your thoughts and we need The ministry of your Holy Spirit from day to day, we ask for that communion of the Holy Spirit to be with us, so we ask, in the name of our Lord Jesus, Amen.

Now ,I’ve just got four short verses to read and as usual, I’m going off piste, I’m going off script, I’m sorry, but I just want to read before I begin, a verse that comes near the end of - it comes right at the end of 2 Corinthians chapter 13. You needn’t turn to it, but you can turn to it.

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Ghost (or the Holy Spirit) be with you all.”

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

So, what I have in mind, I’ve been reading through I’ve been reading through the book of Zechariah. And there’s one or two verses there that I would like to just pick up - but we’ll get to them shortly. The first place I would like to read one verse is in Psalm chapter 2.

We know these scriptures quite well. We know what the Psalm is about.

“Why do the nations rage, and the peoples imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed,”

And then verse 6:

“Yet I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.”

So we’ll move on from there to Isaiah. Chapter 9 and verse 6:

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with judgment and with righteousness from henceforth even for ever.”

And then to Zechariah chapter 9. And verse 10. Zechariah chapter 9. And verse - well we’ll start at verse 9.

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy king cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt the foal of an ass. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off; and he shall speak peace unto the nations: and his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.”

And then over to the last chapter, chapter 14 and verse 9. Zechariah chapter 14 verse 9.

“and the Lord shall be king over all the earth. In that day shall the Lord be one and his name one.”

And finally, chapter 14 and verse 16:

“And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles. And it shall be, that whoso of all the families of the earth goeth not up unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, upon them there shall be no rain. And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, neither shall it be upon them; there shall be the plague, wherewith the LORD will smite the nations that go not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.”

Well, how are we going to ... draw this together and it’s going to be probably broad brush strokes, if we’re talking about a painting to draw together what we’ve just read and the Psalms were written perhaps 900 years before. This is a prophecy that has yet to be fulfilled, what we read in Psalm:

“Yet I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.”

Isaiah probably about seven hundred years before the Lord Jesus came to this earth. And Zechariah probably about 500 years before that we read of something that was fulfilled when Jesus came riding into Jerusalem as king, although he was rejected, but he came lowly, the lowly king riding on an ass, the colt the foal of an ass. So there are things that are that we’ve read from these three books, two of them have been fulfilled.

The two that have been fulfilled were mentioned already, going into Jerusalem riding on the ass, and of course in Isaiah “unto us a child is born, a son is given.” The child that was born of Mary, the Son of God, the Son that is given. The incarnation, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem. So that’s the two that have been fulfilled. The other scriptures have yet to be fulfilled. They’re awaiting fulfilment. And we finished off with the Feast of Tabernacles, which comes when Jesus reigns as King from Jerusalem. Upon the holy hill of Zion from which he has his throne.

And the battles have been fought and won. And there’ll be some that didn’t come to fight in the I believe it would be the Battle of Armageddon. I need to go and check up on that again. But the Lord will have put down all the opposition and there’ll be those that remain of the nations that didn’t come up to Jerusalem to fight.

So, I just would like to consider the Feast of Tabernacles; we probably all can have a bit of the question as to why - why that there’s something from the Old Testament feasts of Jehovah still, still to be carried out? We might have a question about that, but the fact is that there are things that we can - we’re not ready always to take in, you know, the Lord said to the disciples, ‘I’ve got many things to tell you, but you’re not able to hear them now’, but later on they would. And when the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit would teach them and bring to their remembrance the words of Jesus and tell them of things that were to come.

So perhaps, perhaps there’s a certain amount that I’ll just say for myself that I’ve yet to understand concerning the Feast of Tabernacles in the future.

Now we all know what the Feast of Tabernacles is. It’s the time when, if we look back to Israel’s history, God brought them out of Egypt and through the wilderness and he said when you come into the land, there are three feasts that all the males will appear before me. Three feasts, and this was the final one, the Feast of Tabernacles, which is when the people were to dwell in temporary shelters, ‘booths’ is another word for them. Just little temporary shelters made out of palm branches, thick trees or entwined trees, I suppose giving structure to the booth, the temporary shelter, and willows from the brook. So there was - God prescribed - He told them, this is what you’ll do, because you’ll remember how you were brought out of Egypt. And, you know, God said, the land is mine. And, you know, you’ll remember that you were brought out of Egypt and through all that wilderness. And so when you come into the land and you enjoy the produce of the land and, the Lord has blessed you. Once they were settled in the land of Canaan, the land of promise, that, they would remember what they were brought out from and what they were brought into, the blessing that they were brought into.

Now, the Feast of Tabernacles took place at the end of the agricultural year in the seventh month. So if we say our April all the way to our October, something like that. The first month Abib. So there were different feasts the Passover and then the Feast of Weeks seven weeks later and that was to do with harvest as well, but this final this final feast to the Lord it’s referred to in Exodus as ‘the feast of in-gathering’ because it was to do with once all the harvest had been brought in. And then there were . . . And it took place five days after the Day of Atonement. That’s another thing, by the way.

So they were to rejoice when they had those seven days. The first day was to be like a Sabbath. They were to do no laborious work that first day. And also, at the end of the seven days, they were to, I think it says they were to put away you know, that was then finished with the booths and there was an eighth day where they actually had returned or reverted to their dwellings, their normal houses.

There were different sacrifices that were associated with the seven days. I’m not going to go through them all, but you just probably remember when I say that on this particular celebration in which they were to rejoice before the Lord, there was to be, on the first day, thirteen bulls that were to be sacrificed. On the next day there was to be twelve bulls and they were to work their way one bull less every day until they got to the seventh day and then there would be seven bulls that would be offered on that day. And then on the eighth day there was only to be one bull offered. Now you can take that away and meditate on that because I’m not going to suggest what I’m, I’m really just dipping my toe in the water here.

So all these things, all these things that were in the past are carried forward beyond this period of time, this dispensation of grace, this day of grace in which we live, and they’re carried beyond and into the millennial kingdom of Christ.

Now, I don’t fully understand it all, but I think there’s significance that what God is doing, that there’s still this one feast that all the nations that are left, they’re required to come up and to worship the king. The King is the Lord Jesus Christ, the King ruling from Jerusalem. I’ll not even touch on where we fit in to all this. But from year to year, we’re told that all the nations that are left, they’ve to go up and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. The Lord’s name would be one, so there would be peace, the Prince of Peace and joining with his people are the nations coming up year after year. This is all God’s plan unfolding, and of course when we get to the end of, when we get to the end of this thousand years: ‘the increase of his government and of peace, there’ll be no end’. So the thousand years will not end the government of Christ, the rule of Christ and peace. It will be forever and so we think of the day of eternity. We read about that in the margin in what Peter wrote ‘to the day of eternity.’ Or the day of God, maybe we could say that that is the start of the day of eternity. But these are just as best I can, a few a few thoughts And as some preachers have said before, you know, if they only read if all they read was a certain bit well, it’s worthwhile. So, I’ve come to a shuddering halt, but there we are.

We’ll close in prayer and then we can sing 402. Okay.

Oh God, our Heavenly Father, we give thanks for being able to consider the scriptures and we confess our dullness in understanding, but nevertheless, we pray that your word might do us good. And the things that we can understand that we might hold fast, and the things that we are yet to fully, or more fully grasp, that You’ll help us to discern Your thoughts. So O God, we commit each one of us into your care. You know our situation here from week to week. And so O God, strengthen us each and overrule in all our futures, for we ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus, Amen.

Amen.

So, I would like us to sing hymn number 402 and we’ll just sing the whole hymn.

‘I am not skilled to understand. What God has willed, what God has planned, I only know at his right hand stands one who is my Saviour.’ We’ll just sing the whole hymn.

I am not skilled to understand

what God has willed, what God has planned;

I only know that at his right hand

Stands One who is my Saviour!

I take him at his word indeed:

“Christ died to save me” this I read;

For in my heart I find a need

Of him to be my Saviour!

That he should leave his place on high

And come for sinful man to die,

You count it strange? So once did I,

before I knew my Saviour!

And oh, that he fulfilled may see

The travail of his soul in me,

And with his work contented be,

As I with my dear Saviour!

Yea, living, dying, let me bring

My strength, my solace from this spring;

That he who lives to be my King

Once died to be my Saviour.

LINK TO COMPLETE SEMINAR PLAYLIST ON THE INTERNET ARCHIVE:

https://archive.org/details/HarryKingTrack2/Harry+King+-+track+1.mp3

An illustrated A4 book giving relevant Bible references for each section of the above chart, is available on Amazon here: https://mybook.to/PropheticChart