I want you to open your Bible with me in John, Chapter 5 and we're just concluding our series we've been doing on Who is Jesus, and this is number four. We looked at Jesus as revealed in the Book of Revelation. The Bible tells us, Jesus spoke in John 5 verse 39, and He said: you're searching the scriptures, hoping that in them you'll find eternal life, yet these speak of Me, and you won't come to Me, that you'll have life. So the scriptures, one end to the other, reveal who Jesus is, and when we know who Jesus is, it changes how we relate to Him. So as we increase in the revelation of Jesus, it changes how we live our life, so we don't want to live in yesterday's revelation, we want to grow. So the questions we've been looking at: Who is Jesus; and how should I respond to Him, what should I do, because any revelation of Jesus, any new insight in Him, must lead to something changing in our life.
So this is what Jesus said, and we looked in the Book of Revelation, and we saw Jesus revealed. We saw Him revealed as the passionate bride groom, the one - and remember these are just pictures. They're pictures to help you understand a person - and so He's portrayed as the passionate bride groom, someone who just loves people. If you love someone deeply, what would you do to rescue them? If you loved your child deeply, what would you do to help them, if they're in a mess? You'd do all you could.
Secondly, we see Jesus revealed as a king, and so as a king He has great power. So if you loved someone, and you had great power, would you not use your power to rescue the one you love? Okay then, so we saw He's revealed not just as a bride groom who loves us and pursues, and gave His life for us; as a powerful king who has power to heal and deliver and transform our lives; but we see also He is a righteous judge. This is an aspect of Jesus people don't like, or don't feel comfortable with.
But that means often it's because we don't understand. When we think of judge, we think of being punished. For many people the only thing they think of judge, they think when they appeared in Court, because they had a fine of some kind, and it was a horrible experience and they got punished. That's what we tend to think - judge, we tend to think of punished. Yet there's far more to it than that, so let me just rephrase it again. If you really loved someone passionately, and had all power available to help them, and you saw them in a place of great injustice, would you not step in and make it right? So when it says that Jesus is the judge, He's the one who steps in, with all power to make things right, to fix it up. So as we're looking at that, we're going to help you understand a little bit about what God is like, and I want to particularly apply it, because revelation without anything to apply in our life, it doesn't do us any good at all. It's just a lot of knowledge.
So let's have a look in Psalm 89. Here's the thing I want you to get the first grip on, is that God loves justice and judgement. He actually loves justice and judgement. We live in a world which is full of injustice; turn on the news, you'll see injustice and oppression. Everywhere you go you see injustice. You see the injustice in nations, the injustice in governments, the injustices - injustice is all through the world. It's because the world is fallen, and ruled by oppressive demonic spirits, and so the world living in sin is a terrible unjust place. So wherever you look in the world, you'll see and hear examples of injustice, and you shake your head at it, you think that's terrible, or if you experience injustice, you get really angry. You say that's not right! There's a great sense - have you ever noticed with kids there's a great sense of justice in them? You give one strawberry too many [laughter] and you'll know whether that's in them or not. Immediately those eagle eyes, that's not fair! Kids have a greatly developed sense of justice when they're quite young.