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Today’s post continues with a study of John 8, not included in the three-year Lectionary for public worship in Catholic and mainline Protestant churches.
As such, this chapter qualifies as part of my ongoing Forbidden Bible Verses series, which contains readings which are also essential to understanding Scripture.
Today’s reading comes from the King James Version with commentary by Matthew Henry.
38I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.
39They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham.
40But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham.
41Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.
42Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.
43Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.
44Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
45And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
46Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?
47He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.
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In last week’s post, the Pharisees continued debating Jesus after the Feast of Tabernacles in the Court of the Women, where the temple treasury was located.
After Jesus told them that ‘the truth shall make you free’ (John 8:32), they invoked Abraham (John 8:33):
They answered him, We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?
Jesus calls them out on their false claim (John 8:37):
I know that ye are Abraham’s seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you.
Essentially, He is saying that from a lineage point of view, yes, technically, they are descended from Abraham. However, the fact that they seek to kill Him shows that what He is saying as God’s Son has no meaning to them at all.
The discussion continues in today’s verses. Jesus will prove that the Jewish hierarchy and He are of two different spiritual families, with two different fathers. This begins in verse 38, where Jesus says that He speaks of what God the Father has shown Him whereas the hierarchy follow in the footsteps of their father.
Once more, they invoke Abraham (verse 39). This discussion is not unlike the one Jesus had with the hierarchy in John 5 after He had healed the man at Bethesda. His opponents invoked Mosaic Law and claimed that it forbade Jews working on the Sabbath, to which Jesus replied (John 5:46-47):
46For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me; for he wrote of me.
47But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?
In both instances, Jesus is telling them that if they really did revere their lineage — that of Abraham and Moses — then they would understand His words. However, it is plain that they do not. Abraham sought to do God’s will. Surely, then, when God’s Son appears among His Chosen, should they not listen, understand and obey what He says?
Jesus points out that they want to kill Him because He speaks the truth as He received it from His heavenly Father (verse 40): Abraham would never have behaved like the Pharisees.
In verse 41, we see that Jesus is close to delivering a hard truth to them: ‘You do the deeds of your father’. This implies that their father is not His Father, despite their objection when they say that they were not born of fornication, so, they, too, claim God as Father. ‘Fornication’ in Scripture is sometimes used in a spiritual as well as a sexual sense. The same is true of ‘adultery’ and ‘adulterous’, which sometimes refer to ‘idolatry’ and ‘idolatrous’.
Matthew Henry explains (emphases mine) and indicates the selective memory the Pharisees have of their ancestors (as recorded in the Old Testament):
(1.) Some understand this literally. They were not the sons of the bondwoman, as the Ishmaelites were; nor begotten in incest, as the Moabites and Ammonites were (Deu. 23:3); nor were they a spurious brood in Abraham’s family, but Hebrews of the Hebrews; and, being born in lawful wedlock, they might call God Father, who instituted that honourable estate in innocency; for a legitimate seed, not tainted with divorces nor the plurality of wives, is called a seed of God, Mal. 2:15.
(2.) Others take it figuratively. They begin to be aware now that Christ spoke of a spiritual not a carnal father, of the father of their religion; and so,
[1.] They deny themselves to be a generation of idolaters: “We are not born of fornication, are not the children of idolatrous parents, nor have been bred up in idolatrous worships.” Idolatry is often spoken of as spiritual whoredom, and idolaters as children of whoredoms, Hosea 2:4; Isa. 57:3. Now, if they meant that they were not the posterity of idolaters, the allegation was false, for no nation was more addicted to idolatry than the Jews before the captivity; if they meant no more than that they themselves were not idolaters, what then? A man may be free from idolatry, and yet perish in another iniquity, and be shut out of Abraham’s covenant. If thou commit no idolatry (apply it to this spiritual fornication), yet if thou kill thou art become a transgressor of the covenant. A rebellious prodigal son will be disinherited, though he be not born of fornication.
[2.] They boast themselves to be true worshippers of the true God. We have not many fathers, as the heathens had, gods many and lords many, and yet were without God, as filius populi-a son of the people, has many fathers and yet none certain; no, the Lord our God is one Lord and one Father, and therefore it is well with us. Note, Those flatter themselves, and put a damning cheat upon their own souls, who imagine that their professing the true religion and worshipping the true God will save them, though they worship not God in spirit and in truth, nor are true to their profession. Now our Saviour gives a full answer to this fallacious plea (v. 42, 43), and proves, by two arguments, that they had no right to call God Father.
Reading these exchanges between Jesus and His detractors helps clarify St James’s Epistles with regard to faith and works. It is not enough to say, ‘Hey, I believe, I’m saved — I’ve been baptised, I receive the Sacrament’. No, our faith must also bear the beautiful fruits of obedience and holiness, through a spontaneous desire to do God’s will. That is not a matter of following a checklist of behaviours nor is it coasting along in life doing nothing which makes our faith manifest to others. Otherwise, we are no better than the scribes and Pharisees.
The Pharisees’ objection edges Jesus closer to revealing who their true father is. Jesus tells them that if God were truly their Father, they would surely recognise Him as God’s Son (verse 42). Furthermore, He tells them that they do not understand what He is saying because they cannot hear it (verse 43). They have blocked their minds; they will not hear and, as a result, refuse to understand what He has to say.
If this sounds familiar, it is. We read similar verses in His discussion with them after the Bethesda healing:
37And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me. Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape.
38And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not. (John 5:37-38)
Also:
42But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you.
43I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.
44How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only? (John 5:42-44)
Read those last three verses once more. Jesus returns to this point in verse 44 and tells the Pharisees the blunt truth. He says they are the Devil’s children and do the deeds — lies and murder — which they learned from him! The Pharisees are uttering lies and soon they will be complicit in murder. If you’ve been following this series or know John’s Gospel, this evil act is mooted in:
John 5:16, after the healing at Bethesda: ‘And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day’.
John 5:18: Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.
However, Jesus is also accusing the Pharisees of murdering the souls of the ordinary Jews over whom they exercise spiritual control.
Henry draws comparisons between families. A hard-working, God-fearing father who is close to his family tends to instil the same traits in his own children. In contrast, a ne’er-do-well who cheats and defrauds people tends to produce children who gladly imitate his example.
And it does appear as if the Pharisees are rather relishing these exchanges in spreading lies and contemplating how they can put an end to the Son of God. They are displaying ‘the lusts of’ their ‘father’.
Henry unpacks Jesus’s accusation:
You are of your father the devil, v. 44. If they were not God’s children, they were the devil’s, for God and Satan divide the world of mankind; the devil is therefore said to work in the children of disobedience, Eph. 2:2. All wicked people are the devil’s children, children of Belial (2 Co. 6:15), the serpent’s seed (Gen. 3:15), children of the wicked one, Mt. 13:38. They partake of his nature, bear his image, obey his commands, and follow his example. Idolaters said to a stock, Thou art our father, Jer. 2:27.
This is a high charge, and sounds very harsh and horrid, that any of the children of men, especially the church’s children, should be called children of the devil, and therefore our Saviour fully proves it.
1. By a general argument: The lusts of your father you will do, thelete poiein. (1.) “You do the devil’s lusts, the lusts which he would have you to fulfil; you gratify and please him, and comply with his temptation, and are led captive by him at his will: nay, you do those lusts which the devil himself fulfils.” Fleshly lusts and worldly lusts the devil tempts men to; but, being a spirit, he cannot fulfil them himself. The peculiar lusts of the devil are spiritual wickedness; the lusts of the intellectual powers, and their corrupt reasonings; pride and envy, and wrath and malice; enmity to that which is good, and enticing others to that which is evil; these are lusts which the devil fulfils, and those who are under the dominion of these lusts resemble the devil, as the child does the parent. The more there is of contemplation, and contrivance, and secret complacency, in sin, the more it resembles the lusts of the devil. (2.) You will do the devil’s lusts. The more there is of the will in these lusts, the more there is of the devil in them. When sin is committed of choice and not by surprise, with pleasure and not with reluctancy, when it is persisted in with a daring presumption and a desperate resolution, like theirs that said, We have loved strangers and after them we will go, then the sinner will do the devil’s lusts. “The lusts of your father you delight to do;” so Dr. Hammond; they are rolled under the tongue as a sweet morsel.
2. By two particular instances, wherein they manifestly resembled the devil-murder and lying. The devil is an enemy to life, because God is the God of life and life is the happiness of man; and an enemy to truth, because God is the God of truth and truth is the bond of human society.
(1.) He was a murderer from the beginning, not from his own beginning, for he was created an angel of light, and had a first estate which was pure and good, but from the beginning of his apostasy, which was soon after the creation of man. He was anthroµpoktonos-homicida, a man-slayer. [1.] He was a hater of man, and so in affection an disposition a murderer of him. He has his name, Satan, from sitnah-hatred. He maligned God’s image upon man, envied his happiness, and earnestly desired his ruin, was an avowed enemy to the whole race. [2.] He was man’s tempter to that sin which brought death into the world, and so he was effectually the murderer of all mankind, which in Adam had but one neck. He was a murderer of souls, deceived them into sin, and by it slew them (Rom. 7:11), poisoned man with the forbidden fruit, and, to aggravate the matter, made him his own murderer. Thus he was not only at the beginning, but from the beginning, which intimates that thus he has been ever since; as he began, so he continues, the murderer of men by his temptations. The great tempter is the great destroyer. The Jews called the devil the angel of death. [3.] He was the first wheel in the first murder that ever was committed by Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother, 1 Jn. 3:12. If the devil had not been very strong in Cain, he could not have done such an unnatural thing as to kill his own brother. Cain killing his brother by the instigation of the devil, the devil is called the murderer, which does not speak Cain’s personal guilt the less, but the devil’s the more, whose torments, we have reason to think, will be the greater, when the time comes, for all that wickedness into which he has drawn men. See what reason we have to stand upon our guard against the wiles of the devil, and never to hearken to him (for he is a murderer, and certainly aims to do us mischief, even when he speaks fair), and to wonder that he who is the murderer of the children of men should yet be, by their own consent, so much their master. Now herein these Jews were followers of him, and were murderers, like him; murderers of souls, which they led blindfold into the ditch, and made the children of hell; sworn enemies of Christ, and now ready to be his betrayers and murderers, for the same reason that Cain killed Abel. These Jews were that seed of the serpent that were to bruise the heel of the seed of the woman; Now you seek to kill me.
In verse 45, Jesus laments that He has been telling the Pharisees the raw, unvarnished truth and they refuse to listen. He then asks them to convince Him of his so-called sins and alleged violations of Mosaic Law (verse 46). Note that Jesus’s arguments are always better than theirs. We have read this throughout the Gospel of John. The scribes and Pharisees can only put up empty accusations with no concrete arguments to support them. They are relying on the lazy, perverse, adversarial principle of ‘throw enough mud and it will stick’.
Once again, Jesus asks them why they do not believe Him when He is clearly telling the truth and has been all along. And he also repeats that if they were children of God, they would surely hear Jesus’s words as God’s own (verse 47).
These verses hearken back to John 3:18-21:
18He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
19And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
20For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.
21But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
31He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is above all.
32And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth; and no man receiveth his testimony.
And John 3:36:
He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.
Those among the clergy and laity who see universalism or temporary punishment in the final day of judgment really should study this Gospel closely. More verses from John to support our necessary and salvific faith in Christ can be found here.
Next week: John 8:48-59
