What's Hiding Under that Cloak?
by Pastor Ricky Kurth
“If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin” (John 15:22).
What on earth did the Lord mean here when He said that if He
hadn’t come, the unbelieving Jews He had mentioned in the previous
verse “had not sin”? Surely they had sinned, whether He had come or
not!
To find out what He meant, we have to define a word that we don’t use
very often, the word “cloke,” spelled cloak in our day and time.
A cloak is a loose, sleeveless garment that is worn over other
clothing, and about the only time that this writer hears the word even
mentioned is when someone puts their coat in the cloakroom of a
restaurant. If you can’t picture what a cloak would look like, but you
can picture the mythical character Dracula, he is always depicted wearing
a cloak.
Now the thing about a cloak is that you can easily conceal
something under a loose, sleeveless garment, such as a dagger. This has
given rise to the expression cloak and dagger, a figure of speech that
refers to espionage. For this reason, when this word is used as a verb,
to cloak something means to hide it. Star Trek fans will remember
that Klingon and Romulan vessels were equipped with cloaking devices that
made it so that you couldn’t see their ships coming. And no, I’m not a
geek, I had to look that up!
All of this helps us understand what the Lord meant when He said that
if He hadn’t come they would not have had sin. He didn’t say “they
had not sin, then I came and now they have sin.” He rather said, “They
had not sin, then I came and now they have no cloak for their sin.” In
other words He was saying, “Now that I’ve come, they can’t hide
their sin any more,” and I believe He had a specific sin in mind, an
all-encompassing one that He mentions in the next verse.
“He that hateth Me hateth My Father also” (John 15:23).
The comprehensive sin that these unbelievers were cloaking so
successfully before the Lord came was hatred of the Father. Since the
Law commanded the Jews to love the Father (Deut. 6:5), it was a sin to
hate Him, and for centuries unbelieving Jews had cloaked their hatred
for God with their religion, which provided the perfect cover.
Practicing Judaism made it appear that unsaved Jews loved the Father, but
as the Lord said of them: “This people draweth nigh unto Me with
their mouth, and honoureth Me with their lips; but their heart is far
from me” (Matt. 15:8 cf. Isa. 29:13).
If you are wondering how the Lord’s coming uncloaked their hatred of
the Father, remember that He was God the Father in the flesh, and so when
He showed up and they hated Him, it showed they hated the Father.
But notice in our text that it wasn’t just the Lord’s coming
that uncloaked their sin. He said, “If I had not come and spoken unto
them, they had not sin” (v. 22). How did His words uncloak their
hatred? Well, remember, His words were the Father’s words (John 3:34;
8:26; 12:49). So when the Lord spoke the words of the Father and they
hated His words, they were actually hating the Father’s words!
If you are not convinced that this is what the Lord had in
mind, consider what He went on to say:
“If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father” (John 15:24).
This sounds a lot like what He said in our text verse, but
remember that there He said that His words uncloaked their hatred, while
here He affirmed that His works uncloaked it, speaking of the
miraculous works that He did among them. If you are wondering how His
works uncloaked their hatred of the Father, remember He said that
“the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works” (John 14:10). And
so when the unbelievers in Israel ascribed His miraculous works to
Beelzebub (Matt. 12:24), their hatred of His works were actually hatred
for the Father’s works. That’s how the Lord’s words and works
uncloaked their hatred of, as He says here, “both Me and My
Father.”
All this reminds us of how if you are looking for a certain book on
the internet, you will usually see advertising popup ads that say
something like, “If you like this book, you might also like…,”
and then go on to try to sell you some other books that are similar to the
one for which you had been searching and found. Similarly, if you don’t
like the Lord Jesus Christ, you don’t like God the Father. You might say
that you do, as the adherents of many religions do, but you really
don’t! Religions that claim to love God but reject His Son are nothing
more than cloaks for hatred of the Father, and you have God’s Word on
it0!
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