How Can You Believe While You Receive Honor One of Another

There is a face he sees when he thinks about a decision, and it is not God's.

It happens before he is aware of it. He turns something over, and somewhere in the turning there is a moment where he imagines telling a particular person about it, and he watches their expression in his head, and the expression settles the matter.

He has never once decided to do this. He would not defend it if he saw it written down. But it is the actual mechanism, and it runs faster than thought, and by the time he is consciously weighing anything the weighing is already over.

The face has changed over the years. It used to be his father's. For a long while it was a man at his church. These days it is a smaller group, three or four people whose opinion of him he could not tolerate losing.

There is a question in John that connects this directly to whether a man can believe anything at all, and the connection is not obvious until it is pointed at.

The question

Here it is, in the King James Version:

How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only? (John 5:44)

How can ye believe.

That is the verb He puts first, and it is the surprising one. He does not say how can you be brave, or how can you be honest, or how can you be free. He says believe, as though the two things were mechanically connected.

Which receive honor one of another. Receive is the key word. It is not about wanting approval, which everybody does. It is about receiving it, taking it in as the thing that establishes you.

And seek not the honor that cometh from God only. There is a second source named, and the word only is doing work: it comes from God alone and cannot be obtained anywhere else.

So the picture is of a man running on a supply he can get from people, which means he never goes looking for the one that is not available from them, and Jesus says that arrangement makes believing hard in a structural way.

You are not being called a coward and you were never doing this on purpose. John 5:44 ties believing to where a man receives his standing from, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a decision to care less who moves a man off a supply he has been running on since he was a boy.

Why it makes believing hard

The mechanism is worth spelling out, because it sounds like a moral point and it is closer to a structural one.

Believing something means accepting a report from outside yourself as true, on the authority of the one who gave it. A man who runs on human approval already has an authority, and it is the room. So when the report from God and the report from the room disagree, the room does not lose, because the room is where his standing comes from and standing is not a thing a man can do without.

He does not consciously choose the room. He simply cannot hold a conviction that costs him the thing he is made of.

And John gives an example three chapters later that is unbearably precise.

Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God. (John 12:42-43)

Many believed on him. They did. John says so plainly. The believing was real.

But because of the Pharisees they did not confess him.

So a man can genuinely believe and be unable to say so, and John names the reason in the next sentence, and it is comparative rather than absolute: more than.

You are able to believe and to say it and you were never permanently held by a room. John 12:42 records men who believed and could not say it and names the reason, and it is His Spirit who supplies the standing that makes saying it possible.

The other source

And the sentence that says what the alternative supply actually is.

Paul, describing his own working conditions:

But as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the gospel, even so we speak; not as pleasing men, but God, which trieth our hearts. (1 Thessalonians 2:4)

Which trieth our hearts.

That is the supply. Not a God who has no opinion, which would be no supply at all, but one who examines and whose examination is the one that counts.

And Galatians, in the sharpest form:

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. (Galatians 1:10)

That verse has been used as a license to be difficult and it is not that. Paul was capable of enormous accommodation and says so a few chapters later. It is about which audience a man is playing to, not about how he treats people.

And Proverbs names the mechanism as a trap rather than a sin, which is a more useful frame:

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe. (Proverbs 29:25)

Bringeth a snare. A snare holds a thing in place without killing it, and the animal usually cannot see what has it.

You have a source of standing that no room can supply and you were never going to find it in one. John 5:44 calls it the honor that cometh from God only and 1 Thessalonians 2:4 says He tries the hearts, and it is His Spirit who makes that supply something a man actually draws on.