John 8:39-47

Hey, everybody.

Thanks for being with us.

Back into it.

And the Gospel of John, chapter eight, verse 39.

Just a reminder here.

Jesus is having an ongoing conversation

slash debate and soon to be

maybe even conflict with,

with others.

And so

we're in a, a section here where John

portrays a kind of heated exchange.

At least, maybe not heated,

but Jesus is saying increasingly difficult and and probably offensive things,

and we will get another layer into that today as we start reading in verse 39.

Then we'll come back and try to unpack some of it.

They answered him, Abraham is our father.

Jesus said to them, If Abraham, if you were Abraham's

children, you'd be doing what Abraham did.

But now you're trying to kill me.

A man who's told you the truth that I heard from God.

That is not what Abraham did.

You are indeed doing what your father does.

They said to him, we're not illegitimate children.

We have one father, God himself.

Jesus said to them, If God were your father,

you would love me, for I came from God, and now I am here.

I did not come on my own, but he sent me.

Why do you not understand what I say?

It is because you cannot accept my word.

You are from your father.

The devil.

And you choose to do your father's desire.

He was a murderer from the beginning

and does not stand in the truth, because there's no truth in him.

When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature.

For he's a liar and the father of lies.

But because I tell you the truth, you do not believe me.

Which of you convicts me of sin?

If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?

Whoever is from God hears the word of God.

The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God.

So if you were with us yesterday,

Or if you go back and listen to yesterday, that this Michael

is a pretty significant step up in the rhetoric, Jesus really

dials it up here as he confronts these people who are challenging him.

Now, if it sounds harsh on Jesus

part, keep in mind that I think

John has told us no fewer than

three times, possibly

four already, that they are looking for a way to kill Jesus and in one,

in one instance, attempted to kill Jesus.

So Jesus is not the only one here

involved in a serious, conflict.

The people are angry and bitterly unhappy with Jesus.

And so, in the midst of this,

Jesus confronts them with this idea

of why they don't believe and essentially says

they don't believe because they're not from God.

Now, you want to be careful here, because the Gospel of John also allows

for the possibility of belief, believing,

as we've made a case in this book, is one of the fundamental themes.

So it's not that they can't believe.

I don't think that's the point here.

It's that in choosing not to, they betray themselves

as not interested in truth, but instead interested in untruth.

In what? In lies in in

in what isn't of God.

And that, according to Jesus, convicts them

even as they try to convict him of sin.

And, yeah, Michael, I think we really,

we really kind of ratchet up the language here.

We are hitting very close to home here, because what we're doing in

the text is seeing how the crowd is really moving

to the next level of this argument with Jesus.

And it gets really, really close to home.

Right at the beginning.

They say, you know, Abraham is our father.

This is identity stuff.

This is who we claim as the source is the center as the beginning.

You know that this is right at the core of who they are.

And then Jesus just really firing you.

The heart of it says,

if you're Abraham's children, then you would be doing what Abraham did.

And here you are.

You're trying to kill the one that God has sent you in.

John's telling you the story, Clint.

Jesus is the one who fulfills the covenant.

Jesus is the one.

The word with God, even at the very beginning,

but also the one who was promised to fulfill God's

faithfulness to Abraham and all of his descendants.

So now that Jesus is walking on the earth and the people who claim Abraham

as their father as the source of their identity,

they say people are standing convicted in Jesus's argument

because they don't see the one who truly does come

from God, who fulfills the covenantal promise to Abraham and

that would be bad enough.

The turn that comes here when they say, hey, listen,

we're not illegitimate children.

We've had this over and over and over again in John, right?

We're not this is not new to us.

This idea that they take him literally, they respond literally.

And then Jesus moves on to the next and far more deep and impactful

interpretation of what is said when he comes

down here in verse 44.

It's going to land hard.

The reason why they don't understand it, the reason they can't accept his word.

You are from your father, not Abraham,

who they're claiming, but the devil and Clint.

That's the moment when the air gets sucked out of the room.

If you've been at a party or a meal and a person, you know,

things were going relatively well.

Maybe there were some bumps in the conversation.

But then the person says that thing, and suddenly

the entire room is deathly uncomfortably silent.

That's exactly what happens the moment that Jesus says that,

because not only is he calling the people illegitimate in the sense

that they were arguing,

they were talking about, you know, from where do we come now?

Jesus is making the spiritual point that they are actually coming from the

the devil himself, but evil itself, evil incarnate,

that's told in, you know, the Genesis text, this serpent

who deceives that this clan is

without question an offensive statement to everyone there in the room.

Now the question is, can you see in the offense truth or can you not?

And I think we can tease that out.

But the way that John tells this, Jesus goes right for the center.

Yeah.

And and again, this is not a this is not a teaching story.

This is a full out conflict story.

And what if Jesus language sounds harsh?

It is.

But how do we get there?

We get there with people accusing him of deceit,

who claimed that because they are Jewish,

because they are in the lineage of Abraham,

they are God's people,

or that they are godly, perhaps even.

And Jesus is telling them no, that their lineage does not define

their faithfulness, that what they believe and what they see to be true

is ultimately the measure of whether they're paying attention to God or not.

It's not all the laws, it's not the rituals, it's not the procedures.

It's their faith and their ability to discern what God wants of them

and what God wants of them is to come to his chosen one, his Messiah.

And so now Jesus says, you,

you are from your father, the devil.

A he was murderous.

You're trying to murder me and be, he believes, lies.

In other words, he he spreads lies.

He doesn't stand for the truth.

And you're accusing me of not

being the Christ, which means that you don't know the truth.

And so, Yes, this is very conflictual language.

This is very harsh for Jesus to say that, you know, John,

does that sometimes.

Jesus is very blunt in this gospel, though

there's parts of that in all the Gospels.

And then he says, you know,

you do not believe in me,

which

is because you don't hear the word of God.

The reason you do not hear

the Word of God is that you are not from God.

You've separated yourself from God by refusing to believe

and by your actions that are not in keeping with what God wants.

And therefore, if you've separated yourself from God,

when what do we call God consistently through this gospel?

The father, then your father is of the world.

Your father is a of something other than God.

And and for Jesus that falls under this, this title,

the devil, the one who is opposed to what God is doing. So,

that's not to minimize the pointed ness of it.

It is very, very blunt.

I mean, it is sharp, but understand

what Jesus means when he uses the language, I think.

I think, don't you think, Clint, that some of the context is helpful here

in remembering that the Pharisees really represent, one very popular strain.

But there are several strains of Judaism at this time that are very much

calling the people to a new kind

of sustained and intentional practice of the the Jewish faith.

There's a kind of renewal happening that's not incredibly old.

It stretches some ways back, but this is just a moment

where there's a lot of people turning back to the Abraham, Moses,

Joseph, Jacob, Isaac stories and finding in them

a real inspiration for living out the faith.

So this idea that the Pharisees specifically, and the Jews,

as John describes them throughout this book, are calling Jesus to the mat

to really get in with him and engage with him on these

these topics is in some way, I think, actually, in a charitable sense,

people really caring about the faith, people really

wanting to lean in and to take Jesus seriously.

On the flip side of that equation, when their imaginations are restrained

by the way that they read the Bible historically,

I think when we come to a text like this one that ends in verse 47 with,

whoever's from

God hears the words of God, and we remember that

this book began with the word capital W of God.

I think we would be very remiss to not understand

that there's a lot of plays happening here between knowing the Scripture,

knowing the words in lowercase w,

and then recognizing and seeing the word capital w.

And I think they're really challenging.

And we're going to see this even more tomorrow if we continue on.

In verse four, the eight is going to be that

the more and more that you're exposed to the the lower case

w the words of Scripture in John, it actually may raise the likelihood

of your inability to see and recognize the capital W word.

And I think that's one of the things that makes this book so fascinating is

because we would take that for granted while knowing the Scripture

is going to be a help in discerning the Messiah, so would of everyone

who was listening to Jesus, and then see how this conversation tracks it.

It becomes hostile because the revelation is not what they expect.

And there's an interesting intersection there.

I don't want to steal tomorrow's

thunder, but I think it's helpful maybe to mention today.

We'll get back to it again tomorrow.

If you go to the next verse and you mentioned it, Michael,

verse 48, hear the Jews answer him.

Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?

So it's interesting to hear

where they take Jesus's criticism.

Jesus says, you stand apart from God, therefore

you're doing the work of the devil

who is a liar and a murderer, which are the things you're trying to do.

You don't have the Word of God because you don't listen to me.

I came from God and the reaction is twofold

you have the wrong lineage.

In other words, aren't we right in saying you're a Samaritan?

So they question Jesus's parentage?

And then aren't we right in saying you have a demon?

So in other words, not only are you not one of us, you're not speaking for God,

which is essentially the highest blasphemy that you can level against Jesus.

And in fairness, Jesus has leveled it against them.

But rather than

rather than ask about the

word, rather than ask about God, rather than pursue

anything that Jesus has perhaps uncovered in their hypocrisy,

they say instead, well, you must be this and this.

And, I think that makes a very interesting bridge.

Again, we will cover some of that tomorrow.

But I do think, I think it's helpful to see

ultimately where this goes to, to understand,

both.

Why why Jesus is perhaps being so outspoken

and harsh and and secondly,

how difficult it is for the people to hear what he's saying.

I think I'm going to save, this for tomorrow's conversation.

So I'll only speak around this, but I, I think that

there's two senses in which this is really important.

And the first is it really helps us understand

how natively complex

and conflictual the early church's experience of the faith really was at you,

I think, struggle as a 21st century American, I know

I do, to put yourself in the context of those earliest Christians.

They have no churches to call their own.

They have no real clergy to call their own.

That right. There they are.

They are a young

group of people responding to the revelation of Christ.

They're trying to figure it out every day to to teach each other to

to listen in to other conversations

and to get a new letter that, for us becomes a book in the New Testament.

But for them, you know, hey, we just got this

from the church in Ephesus or from the church in Philippi.

I there's so much in flux.

And I think a text like this would have been a reminder to them

from Jesus's own teaching, that that there is conflict in the revelation,

there's misunderstanding that happens, and it requires real wisdom.

It requires real humility to hear Jesus for who he actually is

and for what he has to say.

I think there's a kind of really humanizing note in that

there's also a very modern kind of practical value,

which we'll get to tomorrow, I think, because it's easy for us

to get an imagination for who Jesus was

and then to say, well, this is who Jesus was.

And then we never sort of live into the complexity of being a human,

saying these things to people who he might have been able to name in that crowd.

And Clint,

that this kind of

discourse shows us that Jesus is making an extreme claim

about who he is and about the right way to understand his relationship to God.

Whether or not he's right is left to our faith and time and all these other forces.

But make no mistake about it, and we'll get to this tomorrow.

Jesus is not being coy.

He's not. He's not pulling punches.

Jesus is going to lay out in the book of John, this is who I am.

And you either get it and see it, or you don't.

And that's the end of that story. Yeah.

And if we could do maybe just a little bit of like, extra

biblical kind of history,

we've said this before, but it's worth remembering,

John is thought to have been the last gospel written,

or the latest of the Gospels, and that means it would reflect a time

with probably the most conflict between

those early Christians and the Jews.

And John is often noted for the level of animosity

between Jesus and those who oppose him.

And that makes sense, right?

Because if if John's gospel is later, and it comes from a time where

that animosity undergirds those relationships,

it only makes sense that we would see that in the text.

So keep in mind that these Christians of this era are living

under the

reality of Jewish people, calling them heretics

and calling them blasphemers and kicking them out of synagogues.

And this, this conflict that we see in the pages of the Scripture

are also happening in the communities of the faith.

And so,

they would have resonated, I think, with these words,

because in many ways they were living them.

Scripture has a way of reflecting the time

and context in people who are giving us the text.

And that is natural, because when your experience

saying something, the teachings of Jesus that are going to rise to the top

most quickly are the ones that are speaking to your context, right?

There's this whole body of things that Jesus said in a history tradition

being passed down in this time. And so

it's the same thing in your life

in one season, a story or a song is going to resonate,

and then the next season it's not going to is it still important?

It's just not the first thing that comes to the top.

And and that's how it works in the scriptures.

And I

it's just helpful to have that background when you're reading a book like John.

Yeah, it's it's a very oversimplified answer.

But if one was to ask why is it that John's

gospel seems more pointed in those areas,

a reasonable explanation is because that's where the church of John's day was at.

Yeah. So. Well, hey, thanks for being with us.

We've already alluded there's more to come tomorrow.

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