Sermon series: AN EXPOSITION OF THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

John 8:25—32
"Then they said to Him, "Who are You?" And Jesus said to them, "Just what I have been saying to you from the beginning.
I have many things to say and to judge concerning you, but He who sent Me is true; and I speak to the world those things which I heard from Him."
They did not understand that He spoke to them of the Father.
Then Jesus said to them, "When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things.
And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do those things that please Him."
As He spoke these words, many believed in Him.
Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, "If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed.
And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Message:
We need to understand, if we are to enter fully into the spirit of this chapter, that the relationship between Jesus Christ and the rulers of the people was deteriorating very rapidly! They are bent on destroying Jesus, at least that is the way we should describe it from a human point of view.
These chapters (chapters 5 through 8) record the rejection of Jesus by the leaders, beginning with their opposition to Him on the Sabbath question in chapter 5 and ending with their complete break in chapter 8. In fact, the next chapters will begin a new theme: the relationship of Jesus to those whom the Father has given Him and His provision for them. At this point, however, John is still tracing the deteriorating relationship between Jesus and the leaders and is showing us that it reached a new low!
It had sunk quite low already, of course; First, there was the attempt to arrest Jesus (7:32). This failed. Next, there was the attempt to trap Him in the matter of the woman taken in adultery (8:3-11). Jesus showed Himself to be too smart for the rulers in this situation. Third, there was the attempt to have His testimony discounted on the basis of a legal technicality (8:13). He had an answer even for this. So, after Jesus had escaped arrest, over come them in the test, and answered their objection to His testimony, the Pharisees and other leaders sank to the lowest level of all and began to make fun of Him personally.
They did this by asking insulting questions!
There were three questions. The first was, "Where is Your Father?" (v. l9) At the least this was a scornful rejection of Jesus' statement that there was a second witness to His claims. But it may also have been a reference to the particular nature of the facts surrounding His birth and to their belief--with insulting and demeaning overtones--that Joseph was not Christ's father. This slur may also be evident in the saying recorded later: "We are no illegitimate children" (v. 41).

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The second question was: "Will He kill Himself?" (v. 22)
The force of the query is seen in the Jewish belief that those who killed themselves went to the lowest part of Hades. Jesus had just said; "Where I go, you cannot come." They had correctly understood that He was speaking of His death, but they reasoned that since they would surely be going to heaven He must be going to hell, and the lowest part at that. Suicide was regarded as a very serious matter by first-century Jews. They were impressed by the words of Genesis 9:5 which reads: "And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting..." Generally speaking, suicide was thought of as desperately wicked and as inevitably bringing the punishment of hell on its perpetrator.
Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, speaks strongly about taking one's life. He writes: "But as for those who have laid mad hands on themselves, the darker regions of the nether world receive their souls, and God, their father, visits upon their posterity the outrageous acts of the parents." He goes on to point out that, though even the bodies of suicides remain unburied until sunset (as a form of punishment). He also says that in other nations a suicide's right hand must be cut off, "holding that, as the body was unnaturally severed from the soul, so the hand should be severed from the body."
It is interesting that the Jews should take such a strong line when the philosophers of Greece could regard suicide as a permissible, even a praiseworthy, way of bringing to an end a long and honorable life that had now become burdensome.
The third question that is hurled at the Christ by the Pharisees was: "Who are You?" (v. 25). It had the effect of calling Him a nobody. It implied rejection of all the things He had said about Himself previously. I believe that the R.V. gives us a more accurate rendering: "They said therefore unto Him, Who art thou? Jesus said unto them. Altogether that which I also speak unto you." This was a remarkable utterance!
The Pharisees had objected that Christ's witness of Himself was not true (v. l3). The Lord replied that His witness was true, and He proved it by an appeal to the corroborative witness of the Father. Now they ask, "Who art thou?" And the incarnate Son of God answered, I am essentially and absolutely that which I have declared Myself to be. I have spoken of "light": I am the Light. I have spoken of "truth": I am that Truth. I am the very incarnation, personification, exemplification of them. Wondrous declaration is this!
In our text, verse 26 reads:
"I have many things to say and to judge of you; but He that sent Me is true; and I speak to the world those things which I have heard of Him." As nearly as we can gather, the force of this verse is as follows: "Your incredulity is very reprehensible, and your insulting sneers deserve the severest censure, but I forbear." If Christ had dealt with these insulting opponents as they thoroughly merited, not only would He have upbraided them, but He would have passed an immediate sentence of condemnation upon them. Instead of doing so, He contented Himself by affirming once more that the witness He bore of Himself was true, because it was the most perfect accord with what the Father Himself had said.

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The thought is that the Father is utterly real and completely reliable. Jesus' hearers might quibble about the things He said and might fancy that they knew more about spiritual realities than He did. But He is pointing them to God as real truth. The trouble with the hearers was that they were substituting their ideas about God for the reality. No matter what they might say and no matter what we may say, no matter what their or our contemporaries may say, the truth of God still stands. And it is that truth that Jesus proclaims because what He says are the things He heard from the Father. Again we have a consistent thought in this Gospel.
Again and again John reports words of Jesus that bring out the truth that His message is not of human origin. He brings a revelation from none less than the Father. AND WHATSOEVER I HAVE HEARD FROM HIM, THESE THINGS I SPEAK TO THE WORLD. In every word of Jesus the mind of the Father is expressed.
When the Jews reject the One who now addresses them, they thereby reject the Father. What Jesus has heard (from all eternity) from the Father; these things He utters not only to the Jews but to Jew and Gentile alike; they are meant for all, for the entire world.
But the Jews did not understand. They did not know God nor did they know that He is in a special sense Jesus' Father (v. l9). so it is not surprising that they did not catch the allusion to "the Father" (v. 27). With their views about Jesus they did not care who His Father was; they had no idea that He had been sent by the heavenly Father. Their spiritual blindness meant that they did not recognize the mission of Jesus. Indeed, it is the basic fault of the enemies of Jesus right through this Gospel that they lacked spiritual perception and failed to recognize the wonderful thing that had happened in their midst, when the Son of God Himself came to live among them!
So Jesus took the discussion further. He spoke of the time when they would have "lifted up the Son of man" (v. 28).
John, as we have seen uses the word of Moses' lifting up of the bronze serpent in the wilderness. He has it four times more, and on each of these four occasions it refers to Jesus' crucifixion. In a sense that was a physical lifting up, so we can understand it being used of death in this way.
"Then shall ye know that I am He" intimated that the crucifixion would be accompanied and followed by such manifestations of His Divine glory that He would be fully vindicated, and many would be convinced that He was indeed the Messiah, and that He had done and said only what He had been commissioned by the Father to do and say.
When this "lifting up" takes place, Jesus says, "you will know that I AM" (v. 28). This means that the cross is not only the means of our redemption, but that it has a revelatory function. The cross forces people into a final decision. Face to face with the cross His hearers would come into either a place of salvation or of final condemnation.
They would accept Him as God's own Son and the Messiah who was bringing salvation. Or they would turn away from Him with finality!
Looking back on the long shadow that extends across twenty centuries, we can know that He is the I AM . I have heard that the geographical center of the city of London is Charing Cross.

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You can find your way anywhere in London if you are at Charinq Cross. The story is told of a little boy who was lost. A policeman came along and wiped away his tears! When he had gotten him settled, he said, "Can I take you home, son? The boy replied, Oh, no, sir, take me to the cross, and I’ll find my way home."
When we orient ourselves to the cross, we begin to see the I AM, the eternity and magnificence of God. By virtue of that understanding, we enter into the kingdom above by faith.
"I must needs go home by the way of the cross, there’s no other way but this; I shall ne'er get sight of the gates of light, if the way of the cross I miss. I must needs go on in the blood-sprinkled way, the path that the Savior trod, If I ever climb to the heights sublime, where the soul is at home with God. The way of the cross leads home, the way of the cross leads home, it is sweet to know as I onward go, the way of the cross leads home."
The way of the cross leads home! When we come face to face with it, when we see the One who died on it for us, then either we respond with penitence and faith and so enter salvation or we harden our hearts, reject the revelation, and shut ourselves up to the eternal consequences of our actions.
The cross is the complete revelation of the divine glory manifested in the Son. Jesus had told the first disciples of the coming time when they would see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man; they could see no greater vision than that (John 1:50).
"The Son of Man must be lifted up", he said to Nicodemus, "in order that every one who believes may have eternal life in Him" (John 3:15). As we have seen before, His being "lifted up" on the cross is not only pictured as the first stage of His journey back to the Father; it is in itself His exaltation, the occasion of His being glorified (John 12-23, 31-33). Mark, the earliest Evangelist, expresses the same truth when he tells how, at the moment of Jesus death, the temple curtain which concealed the divine glory was torn in two from top to bottom, while the centurion in charge of the execution confessed, Truly this man was God’s Son (Mark 15:38)
Jesus came into the world to reveal the Father, and He revealed Him most fully in His death on the cross. There, if any where, the scales fall from the eyes and the acknowledgement is constrained; 'lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him;...let us be glad and rejoice in His salvation’ (Isa. 25:9) Of course, even the cross and resurrection would not convince them all that the crucified One was the revealer of the Father, but if that would not convince them, nothing would!
WHILE HE WAS SAYING THIS, MANY PUT THEIR FAITH IN HIM! Such was the power with which He spoke that many of His hearers were convinced by His words without waiting for the final evidence of His ‘lifting up’. John does not tell us whether these were people from among Jesus' opponents who had been changed as a result of what He said to them or whether they came from among the uncommitted who were listening to what was going on. Either way the point is that not all who heard Him were hostile or indifferent. Even in a chapter like this, where there is so much opposition to Jesus and all He

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stood for, many came to trust Him. And, in a world that is as hostile and indifferent as ours is; it is heartening to reflect that there are still many who come to believe!
It encourages all God's servants to persist in their mission as Jesus did in His and to trust the same heavenly Father who did such things in and for and through Him.
JESUS THEREFORE SAID TO THE JEWS WHO HAD BELIEVED HIM, "If you remain in My word you are truly My disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free."
This passage is a dialogue between Jesus and some Jews who "had believed Him" (v. 31). It is plain from the exchange that their faith did not go very deep. In fact it can scarcely be called faith at all. We are reminded that there are degrees of conviction (the parable of the Sower).
Evidently these people had been impressed by some of Jesus' sayings. They believed them, and they counted themselves as followers of Jesus. This may mean only that they agreed that some of Jesus' teaching were true. The Greek construction John uses could mean no more than that they accepted as true what Jesus had said. These people who claimed to be disciples of Jesus had a very shallow commitment. Jesus now speaks to them about the meaning of true discipleship.
To 'remain' in Jesus' word' is to adhere to His teaching--to direct their lives by it. The power of what He said had already moved some of His hearers to believe in Him, but discipleship is something continuous; it is a way of life.
A true disciple has an affinity for his teacher's instruction and accepts it, not blindly but intelligently. The teacher's instruction becomes the disciple's rule of faith and practice.
What Jesus taught was the truth; His disciples, by paying heed to Him, received the truth. False belief holds the minds of men and women in bondage; truth liberates them.
Truth by its very nature cannot be imposed by external compulsion, nor can it be validated by anything other than itself. One either sees the truth for what it is, or one does not. When we bear in mind the meaning of 'truth' in this Gospel, where the concept finds its embodiment in Jesus Himself, it follows that for His disciples to know the truth they must not only hear His words; they must in some sort be united with Him who is the truth.
IF YOU REMAIN IN MY WORD is not a condition of discipleship, it is a manifestation of it! It is this, among other things, which distinguishes a true disciple from one who is merely a professor. It is not how a person begins, but how they continue in their walk with Christ. To His apostles Christ said, "He that endureth to the end shall be saved: (Matt. 10:22). Not, we repeat, that enduring to the end is a condition of salvation, it is an evidence or proof that we have already passed from unto life. YE ARE MY DISCIPLES INDEED.
The word "indeed" signifies truly, really, genuinely so. By using this word Christ here intimated that those referred to in the previous verse, who are said to have "believed on Him", were not "genuine disciples." AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE. "To know the truth is something more definite than to know what is true; it is to understand that revelation with regard to the salvation of men, through the mediation of the incarnate Son, which is so often in the New Testament called, by way of eminence,

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'the truth',--the truth of truths,--the most important of all truth,--the truth of which He is full,--the truth that came by Him, as the law came by Moses,--the truth, the reality in opposition to the shadows, the word of the truth of the Gospel.
Truth is closely connected with the Person of Christ, so that knowledge of the truth is naturally associated with being His disciple. What is essentially part of Himself He communicates to His followers. The truth of which John writes is the truth that is bound up with the Person and the work of Jesus. It is saving truth. It is the truth which saves a man or woman from the darkness of sin, not that which save them from the darkness of error (though there is in sense in which men in Christ are delivered from gross error; this Gospel has a good deal to say about knowledge).
Luke tells us that Jesus saw fulfilled in His ministry the prophecy that "He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives." (Luke 4:18). It is this kind of freedom of which John writes. Men do not always, or even usually, realize that they are in bondage. They tend to rest is some fancied position of privilege, national, social or religious. So these Jews, proud of their religion, did not even know their need to be free. Jesus was well aware of the fact that sin binds people, shuts them up to a cramped, narrow experience and prevents them from enjoying real freedom.
Jesus was not speaking of freedom from sin in the sense of a way of liberation from what we see as shackling us, so that we could use His teaching to get free from something that we could not defeat in any other way. Jesus is talking about liberation from the whole way of the world, with its concentration on the things of here and now. He is talking about the liberation that brings us near to God, so that our concern is with Him, with the doing of His will. We are no longer caught up in our own selfish concerns, in the darkness of sin and evil, of alienation from God, of concentration on the world. The liberation of which Jesus speaks brings us into fellowship with the Father!
Jesus wants us to know very clearly what it means to be His disciple...a true believer in Christ. Here we come face to face with a 'teaching' that is prevalent in many churches today...a teaching that one is a believer, a disciple of Jesus if he simply acknowledges the facts of the Christian faith. No repentance is required. Faith, to them, is merely a personal appropriation of the promise of eternal life. They say...'repentance is a change of mind about Christ...no turning from sin is required for salvation’! They also contend the 'submission to Christ's supreme authority as Lord is not germane to the saving transaction...neither dedication nor willingness to be dedicated to Christ are issues in salvation.
NO LORDSHIP SALVATION IS HERESY! Jesus said that we are only His disciple if His word remain in us. True saving faith is a very wonderful thing; it involves a change of the whole nature of man; it involves a new hatred of sin and a new hunger and thirst after righteousness. Such a wonderful change is not the work of man; faith itself is given us by the Spirit of God. Christians never make themselves Christians; but they are made Christians by God.
WE ARE HIS DISCIPLES AS HIS WORD ABIDES IN US AND IS THAT TRANSFORMING POWER MAKING US MORE AND MORE LIKE CHRIST!