John 8:39-59 – The Gospel of John

Welcome to City Church Dublin Semmon Archives.

Join us this week as we continue to walk through the book of John in our series, The Gospel of John.

Let me add my welcome to Duncan's.

My name's Mark.

I'm one of the leaders here at City Church.

Very welcome to you if you're new or visiting with us.

Can I uh encourage you also to have that passage open in front of you?

There's lots going on in that passage.

I've been banging my head off it a little bit, uh I must confess, this week.

And uh so we're going to see if we can't get it to uh release some of its gems.

But my hope uh this morning uh from this sermon for the kind of half an hour or so that we are looking at this text, uh, my hope is that actually uh most, if not all, of you uh will go away from here thinking that I've done a good job because I work really hard on it.

Um I want you to go away uh thinking uh well of me as a uh as a preacher, uh as a pastor.

Uh my goal, uh my hope, uh really what the kind of the cherry on the on the top of the cake for me on a Sunday is when people actually come up to me and say that I did a good job.

Um so I would like that.

It would be good if you uh came up and uh mentioned how uh how great my my presentation, my oratory, my my managing of the text uh was.

I don't know why you're laughing.

Uh because the reality is that I don't get that sort of affirmation on a Sunday, uh I I go home uh a little bit grumpy.

Um I go home kind of wondering if I did a good job.

Um I go home wondering if you've listened at all.

Uh sometimes I even go home wondering, do you even like me?

Um so I would really uh just make my socks roll up and down if uh if you all came and uh gave me some glory.

It feels slightly awkward, doesn't it?

Um and embarrassing uh to have the preacher uh speak in those sorts of terms.

Uh really, if I if I can be serious and honest, what I've done there is I've said the quiet part out loud.

The quiet part that should never be said, that there is a part of me, a dark part of me, a part of me that I don't like to acknowledge or verbalize, that actually does want you to come and say you did a really good job.

A dark part of me that does actually crave your affirmation and wants you to like me.

There's a story, it may well be apocryphal, of the uh of the 19th century Baptist pastor Charles Spurgeon.

Uh he was a pastor of a large church in London, and uh he was preaching one evening, and this uh this sweet lady uh came up to him and said, Dr.

Spurgeon, may I be the first to congratulate you on an outstanding sermon?

And Spurgeon looked at her and responded, My dear lady, you are not the first.

The devil told me as soon as I got out of the pulpit.

There's a dark part of me that wants to receive glory from you.

And maybe if you're willing to admit it, you have that dark part too.

That you just want a bit of recognition.

Just every now and again, you would like to serve on a Sunday and just have somebody say, Well done.

Or that they even noticed that they thanked you for the cup of tea that you gave them.

Maybe sometimes your service is motivated because you want to be told how good you are at doing your job.

Maybe it motivates your uh career.

Some of us have parents who we really, really want to say them to say to us, I'm proud of you, or you've done a good job, and it never comes.

You want them to affirm you, maybe it's not parents, maybe it's somebody else.

But that's why you're pushing yourself to succeed, that's why you're terrified about letting those other people down because you're craving something from them, you're seeking glory from them.

I suspect though that some of you here hate the idea of coming and saying, well done, you just kind of cringe, you're like, oh no, don't say it.

You feel like you've just kind of ruined it because you've made me prideful.

Or you're like, you've noticed me.

And yet we still spend so much of our time thinking about, well, how am I coming across that person?

How is that person perceiving me?

Uh how is that coming across?

How is this coming across?

How am I appearing on online?

What's my persona like?

What will they think of you, think of me?

What if they hate me?

What if they think that I'm useless or worthless?

You're still in the same boat as those of us who are overtly glory hungry.

You're still governed by the regard of others, even if you wouldn't quite say it out loud.

In those times, people are big and God is small.

To quote the title of Ed Welch's great book on the fear of man.

Do you ever go through your life with people being big and God being small?

Because you're seeking glory from people.

This idea of seeking glory and honor from uh from people is actually a bit of a theme in John's gospel.

We've noted it from time to time, but we're really going to look at it now.

Because it comes up again and again, and it's kind of at the heart of what's going on in this conversation about Abraham and who the devil's daddy is and uh and all of that sort of thing.

Let me draw your attention back to uh to chapter five, uh, where it comes up first.

This is the first kind of real uh debate between Jesus and the Pharisees, and in chapter five, verse 44, Jesus says, How can you believe when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

What's keeping them from belief?

They are too obsessed with the glory that they receive from each other.

They're looking for the affirmation and praise of men.

Or uh in chapter 7, uh, verse 18, where Jesus says, the one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory.

But the one who seeks the glory of him who sent me, uh who sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood.

What Jesus is saying here is some of you are you're you're saying you're saying uh great sounding things, you're making great proclamations, you are saying all of the right religious words, but what you're doing, your motivation in doing is you're seeking glory for yourself in saying them.

Or if we skipped ahead to chapter nine, uh, which we will uh get into in the coming weeks.

In chapter nine, uh Jesus heals a man who is born blind, and his parents are brought before the Pharisees to uh to really to give it a kind of was he really blind?

Like was he always blind?

And uh they are uh very defensive, and we're giving this little editorial note down in verse 22 of chapter 9 where it says that his parents said these things because they feared the Jews.

For the Jews had already agreed that anyone who should confess Jesus to be the Christ was to be put out of the synagogue.

And you're like, well, there's no mention of the word glory there, but what's going on?

They don't want to lose their social standing, they don't want uh any, they don't want their faith to cost them anything.

That to be put out of the synagogue would be dishonor, it would be unglorious, inglorious.

Uh uh, and so they they shrink back because they don't want that shame or final uh theme in John's Gospel, chapter 12, verses 42 and 43.

This is the very end of uh Jesus' ministry, where uh John writes, nevertheless, verse 42 of chapter 12, nevertheless, many even of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue.

For they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.

They love the glory that comes from man, and so do I, and so do ye.

Here in this chapter, we've heard last week Jesus' diagnosis of uh well of humanity, but of the Jews who are there talking to them, and his diagnosis is that they are enslaved, that they're not free, that they're enslaved because sin has taken them captive.

It's captivated their desires, abilities, opportunities, and destiny, as we saw last week.

It is taken their thoughts and actions captive so that they're not free.

And the Jews that Jesus was spoken to, like us, who hear those words, you don't like to hear you're a slave, you're a slave to sin, your desires, your thoughts, your actions, your destiny, your opportunity, your ability, they are not free.

Nobody likes to hear that.

That's not uh that's not fun times.

And they didn't like to hear it.

They didn't like to hear that they were enslaved, a place of dishonor, a place of non-glory.

And so in the section that we're looking at this week, they respond to Jesus in a sense to give a defense about how they are not enslaved, but how they are not in this place of dishonor and glory.

That they have much to be proud of.

Where does their glory come from?

Where does their honor?

Where does their source of pride come from?

Well, it's two places that they that they point to in this passage.

First of all, is their ethnic pride?

They are ethnically superior, verse 39.

And they answered him, Abraham is our father.

Abraham, for those of you who don't know, is kind of a big deal.

He's the Ron Burgundy of the Old Testament.

Uh, he's kind of a big deal.

Uh he is the uh the primogenitor of the Jews.

He is the first, he is the man of faith, he is the one that God called, the one that God gave promises to, that through him he would bless the whole world.

And so these guys were just delighted that they could trace their ancestry back to this guy.

Don't know if you have a famous person uh in your in your ancestry, but maybe if you do, you kind of look back and go, actually, you know, my great-great-great-grandfather was that's what they were doing.

They were part of that family, that ethnic group, and they were delighted in it.

It was a source of glory and honor for them.

More than that, but overlapping with it, secondly, is that they believed that they were religiously superior, not just ethnically set apart from everybody else, but religiously superior.

This is what they mean in verse 41b, where they say we are not born of sexual immorality.

We'll come to that in a second.

We have one father, even God.

In the Old Testament, God called Israel, the whole nation, his firstborn son.

And so the leaders are thinking, no, God thinks that we're pretty great.

God said that we're his son.

We are of his religious lineage, and that is much to be proud of.

That is much to glory in.

So they thought that they were ethnically superior and they thought that they were religiously superior.

We see that with religious people all the time, don't we?

They glory in their religious superiority, that they are morally superior, that they are better than others.

It's part of the reasons why maybe some of you here have been put off coming into church because there's this sense of uh Christians are holier than thou, that they are religiously and morally superior, that they look down their noses at people.

That's what the Pharisees were doing.

Or that you get those people who who love that they are from this family.

You're one of the church families, and they've got a pew named after their great-grandfather, or a plaque on the wall saying, to the glory of God and in the memory of.

And they draw their worth and their honor from that sort of status.

The problem there is that Jesus, the the most gracious, the most loving, kind, truthful person who has ever uh walked the face of this earth, Jesus cuts through all of that crap.

It gets right to the heart of the issue and it makes them uncomfortable.

The issue is that they are seeking glory for themselves, and that's not how Christianity works.

So, what do the Pharisees do?

Well, they begin to disparage and belittle Jesus.

Have a look again at verse 39 for me.

Uh they answered him, Abraham is our father.

Jesus said to them, If you were Abraham's children, you'd be doing the works that Abraham did.

We'll come back to that.

But now you seek to kill me.

A man who has told you the truth that I heard from God, this is not what Abraham did.

You are doing the works of uh sorry, you are doing the works your father did.

And they said to him, Uh, we were not born of sexual immorality, we have one father even God.

What are they getting at?

And they say, We're not we're not born of sexual immorality.

They're going your your mum is a she's betrothed, wasn't she?

To to Joseph.

She got pregnant, didn't she?

I wonder how that came to be.

They're calling Jesus a bastard.

There's no two ways about it.

They're saying that Jesus is a bastard.

We're not born of sexual immorality.

But you might be.

Or they pointed even more down in verse 48.

The Jews answered him, Are we not right in saying that you're a Samaritan and have a demon?

That's pretty critical.

Like if you're calling somebody demon-possessed, uh, that's you're not you're not giving them a greetings card, right?

You're saying they're saying, Jesus, aren't you a religious half-breed?

Aren't you a mud blood?

And you're demon-possessed.

We'll look at these things in more detail, but here's what you need to note just for now.

Very often we will seek to dismiss Jesus' words, those words that make us bristle and uncomfortable, in order to avoid dealing with him.

Some of you here have been writing Jesus off with your objections of, oh well, you know, the new testament can't the Bible can't be trusted.

How do we even know that Jesus existed?

There's answers to all of those questions, have you examined?

Or are you dismissing Jesus out of hand in order not to have to deal with him?

That's what the Pharisees are doing.

They're dismissing Jesus as a demon-possessed, half-breed bastard so that they don't have to deal with him.

Lots of people want to write him off as a lunatic so that they don't have to deal with him as a lord.

Their desire for self-glory trumps their pursuit of truth.

Because they would rather have glory for themselves.

The theme of truth uh runs through this chapter.

Let me just make that case for you that truth keeps coming up again and again.

Cast your eye on up to verse 31.

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, If you believe, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

So the truth there is synonymous, it's parallel with Jesus' words.

So that's going to be important.

Jesus' words are the truth that sets you free.

Uh cast your eye down at verse 40.

But you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.

Or verse 43, why uh why do you not understand what I say?

It is because you cannot bear to hear my word.

That word that is truth that is coming to you.

They can't stand it.

They are bristling, they are moving away from it.

And so comes the diagnosis in verse 44.

You are of your father, the devil, and uh and your will is to do your father's desires.

He was a murderer from the beginning.

He has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.

Verse 45, but because I tell you the truth, you do not believe me.

Verse 46, which one of you convicts me of sin if I tell the truth?

Why do you not believe me?

Verse 51.

Truly, truly, that's verily, verily, Amen, Amen.

Listen up, everyone.

Truly, truly I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, that word that is truth, he will never see death.

The battle lines are being drawn starkly here by Jesus, between the self-glory seekers, and the one who doesn't seek any of his glory as will come to, between the one who is speaking truth, that freeing truth, and those who would prefer lies.

Jesus is bringing them truth, ultimate truth.

His word is truth, but they are rejecting him, and so they are rejecting the truth that has come from God.

Moreover, not only are they rejecting the truth, but they are embracing and propagating lies.

When they go, Oh, we're not born of sexual marriage.

Aren't you a Samaritan?

Don't you have a demon?

They are propagating and embracing lies about Jesus, don't you see?

That he is of illegitimate birth, that he doesn't know what he's talking about, that he is wicked and evil.

And that, friends, is not just lies.

That is the lie.

The lie that human beings believe is that God is not good.

The lie that human beings believe is that God himself is bad, that he does not want good for you, that he does not want good for his people.

And so, in a sense, in this passage, we have uh two family portraits, two family resemblances that really stand over all of humanity.

The first is of the the son who speaks truth, who seeks no glory for himself, but who seeks to speak the words and to do the works that he was sent to do.

The second portrait is of sons, daughters, who speak lies, who plot murder, who seek death, who grasp for glory and crave the honor and praise of others.

Their father is not Abraham.

Their father is the devil.

Jesus here does not treat the devil uh as a metaphor.

The devil in the in the Bible is a is a real being, he is a created being.

We're also uh we're also not what you would call dual uh we're not dualistic.

It's not that God and the devil are equal.

You know, lots of Hollywood Hollywood movies uh like to kind of pit God the God and the devil as equal boxers in a ring, duking it out.

No, the devil is a created being, a defeated enemy.

But what was his sin?

He grasped for glory.

Why do you ascend to the heights, O morning star, O son of the dawn?

Said the prophet Isaiah, you will be laid low.

He sought glory.

He sought glory and he told lies.

And he tells lies still.

Lies which undermine our faith in God, lies which seek to convince us that God is not good, that he has forgotten you, that he would not let that happen to you if he really loved you.

He tells you lies about yourself, lies that you are your own master, lies that you are worthless, lies that you are unlovable, lies that you need to prove yourself, lies that no one would ever really like you if they knew what you were like.

Lies, lies, lies.

Or maybe it's lies that convict you and convince you that you are superior to those around you, to him or to her.

Lies that you would be happier if you focused on yourself more.

Lies.

Lies from the beginning.

The devil is a liar and the murderer.

Why?

Because the lies, believing the lies, always leads to death.

This is why the shadow of death hangs over every one of us.

Because we, as humanity, have believed lies.

We've believed the big lie.

That we could be our own God.

That God is not good.

We did it in the garden.

We believed the lie.

The lie that God was a tyrant and that we could go our own way.

We believed the lie, and so we sought our own glory.

We sought our own honor.

That's what Adam and Eve were doing.

They were seeking to decide for themselves.

They were seeking their own glory.

And the result?

That lie has enslaved us.

When we pursue these things that God has made as gifts, when we pursue them as ultimate, when we pursue sex and money and success, all those things that we think will satisfy ultimately, we're seeking glory for ourselves.

And that pursuit will ultimately kill us.

It killed Adam and Eve in the garden.

Have you realized that?

It's one of the things that really struck me when I was reading this this week.

Genesis 3, Adam and Eve eat the fruit.

Now God said in Genesis 2, 17, On the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

They ate of the fruit, and then were sent out of the garden, and we're told that Adam's body lived another 900 or so years.

Have you ever wondered, well, what's going on with that?

God said 2.17, on the day that you eat of it, you'll surely die.

And it looked like Adam lived another 900 years and had many sons and daughters.

And then he died.

If you do not grasp that Adam and Eve died that day, then what Jesus has to say in just a moment will make no sense.

On the day that they ate the fruit, they died.

It took a while for their body to catch up, but they were dead.

The day that they were set out sent out from the presence of God, separated and estranged from him, was the day that they died.

They were dead.

And their body caught up a few years later.

Adam's heart didn't stop beating for many centuries.

But because he believed the lie, he died.

Brothers and sisters, friends, you need to see that there is a death that is worse than the physical act.

If you cannot see that, if you cannot see that Adam and Eve died the day they ate the fruit, then verse 51 will make no sense.

Let's read it together.

Jesus says, truly, truly, Amen, Amen.

Listen up, everyone.

I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.

This is the consequence of believing the truth.

You will never die.

Do you believe that?

The consequence of believing the truth is that you never die.

What this means is that we cannot, we must not think of death only in or even primarily in physical terms.

That's the misunderstanding that the Pharisees make.

So they respond to him in verse 52.

The Jews said to him, Now we know you have a demon.

Abraham died, as did the prophets.

Yet you say, if anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.

See, they actually change it a little bit.

Taste death is the undergo the experience of having your heart stopped.

That's not what Jesus is saying.

Saying if you believe my word, you will never see death.

I really was struck with this, by this this week.

I really want at my funeral for somebody to get up and with no sense of irony or hyperbole to say to all of you here gathered, Mark Smith is not dead.

He is more alive than he has ever been.

He's more alive than he ever thought possible.

Yes, his heart has stopped.

Yes, the synapses in his brain have stopped firing.

His fingernails have stopped growing, but he is more alive now than we could ever dare dream.

That's the truth of Jesus' word.

Do Christians die?

Yes.

Their hearts stop, brain function ceases, rigor mortis sets in, and they are interned in the dust of the earth.

Do Christians die?

No.

When Jesus promises eternal life, he is not talking about something that will happen upon his return.

He is talking about something that you enjoy from the moment you turn to him.

If you are a believer in Jesus, your eternal life has started already.

It is though you are back in the garden, in unbreakable, unending fellowship with the God who is your life, and nothing can take that away.

The fellowship that we enjoy with God cannot be ended.

It cannot be broken.

It is eternal.

When our bodies die, we do not experience any break in our fellowship with God through Christ.

Our fellowship, in fact, if you read the book of Hebrews, chapter 12, verse 23, you can note it down and read it later.

Hebrews 12:23

Our fellowship at that moment is perfected.

The life that we have with Christ in God today, because of the new birth, will never end.

That's what Jesus is saying.

You won't see death.

And so for me this week, the words of the hymn before the throne of God have suddenly come alive to me.

Because what does the last verse say?

One with himself.

I cannot die.

My soul is purchased by his blood.

My life is safe with Christ on high.

With Christ my Savior and my God.

With Christ my Savior and my God.

I cannot die.

That is what is at stake here.

That is what it means to embrace the truth that Jesus offers.

That though that though you die, yet shall you live.

The Pharisees, we wow, we really need to be done soon.

Okay.

Belabored that point a little bit much.

Okay.

Very quickly then.

The Pharisees respond, uh, they are just freaking out at this point.

And they basically say, Look, who do you think you are?

That you can make such claims.

And I'm gonna draw your, I'm gonna draw your attention to to two of them.

I did have three, but I'll cut one out.

Look, he begins to say, Abraham believed this.

That's the work that Abraham did.

It's not that Abraham was morally superior, it's that Abraham believed those promises.

That's what he means in verse 56, where he says, Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day.

He saw it and was glad.

What made Abraham a Christian, if you can talk in those kind of anachronistic terms?

Was it his moral goodness?

Was it his heritage?

Was it the sacrificial system?

No, the thing that saved Old Testament people is the same thing that saves you now.

It is the grace of God to trust the promises of God.

It's faith.

And that's what Abraham glimpsed.

He glimpsed with the eyes of faith the day that his offspring would bless the whole world.

He glimpsed Jesus with the eyes of faith and he rejoiced.

The second reason that Jesus offers for why he can make these claims is on down in verse 58.

So they respond, say, Well, you're not 50.

How can you have seen Abraham?

And Jesus responds, Jesus said to them, truly, truly, Amen, Amen.

Listen up, everyone.

I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.

They challenge that they couldn't, he couldn't have possibly interacted with Abraham, and he responds with a clear and unmistakable claim to divinity.

Some people throw up the agent, Jesus never said he was God, he's saying it here.

When he says, before Abraham was, I am, he's using God's name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3, 14, who shall I say sent me?

Tell them, I am sent you.

Before Abraham was, I am.

And they picked up stones to stone him.

Why?

Because that's the punishment for the sin of blasphemy, of claiming to be God.

They understood it as a claim to divinity, and so must we.

Only Jesus can offer us this unabridged, unassailed life because He is the I am, the ever-living and eternal one.

Only He can set us free from our addiction to glory.

We can think that Christianity, we can think that the gospel is about God coming and saying rather selfishly, you don't get any glory.

No glory for you.

Stop seeking it, stop looking for it, stop craving it.

It's all mine.

That's not the gospel at all.

Jesus doesn't seek his own glory.

What does Jesus say?

If you try to save your life, you'll lose it.

But if you give it up for me and for the gospel, you'll save it.

That's the way to receive glory.

That's the way to get the glory that your heart was made for.

Not by grasping at the stuff that God has made, but by losing your life in order to save it.

Jesus doesn't receive or sit, Jesus doesn't seek glory for himself, but he receives it from his father, and he receives it from all those who recognize that he is the one who brings us the truth that sets us free.

And so Psalm 2 says, kiss the Son, lest he be angry with you and you perish in the way.

And where does the Father glorify his son?

Where does the Father choose to show the glory of Jesus?

That he is the most worthy, most significant, most meaningful, most glorious thing ever to cross the horizon of this world?

Well, it is at the moment of greatest shame.

And as he hangs upon that cross, Jesus died to end the power of the lie.

He died to set you free.

He died that you might have unabridged, unassailable life with him and bask forever in the glory of fellowship with God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That's the promise of the gospel.

Receive it today.

Be set free.

Don't believe lies.

Believe the truth.

Don't seek glory for yourself.

Seek only the glory that can come from God.

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