From Above

Jesus is still in the temple, and He’s still talking to the same kind of crowd that wanted to know where His Father was (John 8:19-20). John doesn’t tell us whether this is the same afternoon. He only tells us Jesus spoke to them again, and this time He told them plainly what was at stake.

John 8:21-22 — Where you can’t come

Jesus told them He was going away. They’d look for Him, and they’d die in their sin. Where He was going, they couldn’t come (John 8:21).

He’d said something close to that before, and the crowd wondered if He meant to go teach the Greeks (John 7:33-36). He’d say it again, later, to the Eleven at the supper table (John 13:33). But listen to how He finishes it each time. To His disciples He promised they’d follow Him afterward, and that He’d come back and take them to be with Him (John 13:36, 14:2-3). To this crowd He promised nothing like that. He told them they’d die in their sin.

That’s the most frightening sentence a man can hear, and the crowd laughed at it. The Jews wondered out loud whether He planned to kill Himself, since He said they couldn’t follow (John 8:22). It was a sneer. And it was dead wrong in the way only unbelief can be. He wasn’t going to take His own life in despair. He was going to give His life on purpose. Nobody would wrench it out of His hands. He’d lay it down and take it back by His own authority, under His Father’s charge (John 10:17-18).

Don’t miss the warning in the first half either. They’d seek Him. There’s a seeking that comes too late. Wisdom warns of men who call and get no answer because they hated knowledge when it was offered (Proverbs 1:24-29). Isaiah told Israel to seek the Lord while there’s still time to find Him (Isaiah 55:6). The door gets shut, and men stand outside knocking (Luke 13:24-25). Christ was standing in their temple, offering Himself, and they were cracking jokes.

John 8:23-24 — Below and above

So He told them the difference between Him and them. They were from below. He was from above. They were of this world. He wasn’t (John 8:23).

That’s not a matter of manners or education. It’s a matter of origin. John the Baptist had already drawn that line between the One from Heaven and every man who’s of the earth (John 3:31). Paul sets Adam, made from dust, against Christ, who came from Heaven (1 Corinthians 15:47). Every man born of Adam starts below. Nobody climbs from below to above. That’s why Jesus told Nicodemus a man has to be born from above, and that’s a birth God gives, not one we arrange (John 3:3, 5-8) (James 1:17-18).

Then He said it a second time, so nobody could miss it. That’s why He’d told them they’d die in their sins. Unless they believed that He is who He says He is, they’d die in them (John 8:24).

Look at the wording. In the Greek He doesn’t finish the sentence with a title. The pronoun at the end in your English Bible is supplied by the translators. Jesus used the same bare self-naming the Lord uses all through Isaiah to set Himself apart from every idol, the God who was first and will be with the last, besides whom there’s no savior (Isaiah 41:4, 43:10-11). It points back to the God who named Himself to Moses at the bush (Exodus 3:14), and it points ahead to the day Jesus would say He existed before Abraham and they’d pick up stones (John 8:58-59).

So He wasn’t asking them to believe a few good things about Him. He was telling them to believe He’s the Lord come down from above, or die in their sins. There’s no third option. Life is in the Son, and a man without Him doesn’t have it (1 John 5:12). God gave no other name to be saved by (Acts 4:12). Sin pays out in death, and a man who dies still holding that debt carries it into the judgment (Romans 6:23) (Hebrews 9:27).

John 8:25-27 — Who are you?

They asked Him who He was (John 8:25).

It wasn’t an honest question. He’d been telling them for a long time. He’d told them He was the bread from Heaven, the Son the Father sent, the light of the world (John 6:35, 7:28-29, 8:12). So He answered them that He was exactly what He’d been telling them from the beginning.

Then He said He had plenty to say about them and plenty to judge. But the One who sent Him is true, and He tells the world only what He’s heard from Him (John 8:26). He wasn’t freelancing. He was the Prophet Moses promised, the one God would put His own words in (Deuteronomy 18:18). Everything He said, the Father gave Him to say (John 12:49-50).

And John adds a sad little note. They didn’t understand that He was talking to them about the Father (John 8:27). He’d said it as plainly as it can be said, and it went right past them. That’s what it looks like when a natural man hears spiritual things. He treats the things of God’s Spirit as foolishness, and he can’t grasp them, because it takes the Spirit to see them (1 Corinthians 2:14). Plain words don’t fix blind eyes. Only God does that.

John 8:28-29 — When you’ve lifted Him up

So He told them when they’d understand. When they’d lifted up the Son of Man, then they’d know who He is, and that He does nothing on His own but speaks just what the Father taught Him (John 8:28).

Lifted up means the cross. John tells us so himself (John 3:14, 12:32-33). And notice who He says will do the lifting. They would. These men would hand Him over and shout for His death, and they’d do exactly what God’s hand and plan had already decided would happen (Acts 4:27-28). They meant it as the end of Him. God meant it as the center of everything. They weren’t running the day. The Father was.

And they’d know. Some of them would know it with broken hearts. Weeks after the cross, Peter told a Jerusalem crowd that the Man they’d crucified was the Lord’s own Christ, and thousands were convicted and believed (Acts 2:36-41). The rest will know it too, on the day the whole world bows before Him, the men who nailed Him there included (Philippians 2:10-11) (Revelation 1:7). Every man will learn who Jesus is. The only question is whether he learns it as a forgiven son or as a condemned rebel.

Then Jesus told them the One who sent Him was with Him. The Father hadn’t left Him alone, because He always does what pleases Him (John 8:29).

Always. Not mostly. No man in that temple could say that, and no man reading this can say it either. Only one Man has ever lived a whole life pleasing to the Father, and the Father said so from Heaven (Matthew 3:17). And that perfect life is what God credits to every man who believes. He laid our sin on the Son who never sinned, and He counts the Son’s righteousness as ours (2 Corinthians 5:21). Even the darkness of the cross wasn’t the Father losing track of His Son. It was the Father’s own will being done (Isaiah 53:10).

John 8:30 — Many believed

John closes the scene with a surprise. As He was saying these things, many believed in Him (John 8:30).

Same sermon. Same temple. Same hard words about dying in sin. Some mocked, and some believed. The difference wasn’t in the preaching. It was in what God did in the hearers. Paul and Apollos could plant and water, but only God makes anything grow (1 Corinthians 3:6-7). The same sun that hardens clay melts wax.

John is about to test that faith in the very next verses, and we’ll walk through that next. For now, notice that Christ’s hardest words were the ones God used to bring men to Himself. He didn’t soften the warning to get a better response. He told the truth, and the Father drew whom He would (John 6:37, 44).