Jesus starts this section with another "I am" statement by declaring "I am the light of the world," which the Pharisees responded that He bears witness of Himself and therefore His witness is not true. Dr. Sproul investigates Jesus' response that has several reasons why His witness is true and discusses how the Pharisees did not understand His statements about who His Father was. John mentions in verse 20 that "His hour had not yet come" and Dr. Sproul discusses the aspects of time.

Our Scripture this morning is from the gospel according to Saint John. Today I will be reading John 8:13–30. Hear, then, the Word of God:

The Pharisees therefore said to Him, “You bear witness of Yourself; Your witness is not true.”

Jesus answered and said to them, “Even if I bear witness of Myself, My witness is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going; but you do not know where I come from and where I am going. You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one. And yet if I do judge, My judgment is true; for I am not alone, but I am with the Father who sent Me. It is also written in your law that the testimony of two men is true. I am One who bears witness of Myself, and the Father who sent Me bears witness of Me.”

Then they said to Him, “Where is Your Father?”

Jesus answered, “You know neither Me nor My Father. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also.”

These words Jesus spoke in the treasury, as He taught in the temple; and no one laid hands on Him, for His hour had not yet come.

Then Jesus said to them again, “I am going away, and you will seek Me, and will die in your sin. Where I go you cannot come.”

So the Jews said, “Will He kill Himself, because He says, ‘Where I go you cannot come’?”

And He said to them, “You are from beneath; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.”

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.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Let us pray.

Again, our Father, we ask that You give us ears to hear what the Savior has said, that we may not judge Him according to the flesh, but that by Your Spirit, we might know Him according to truth. For we ask it in His name. Amen.

Christ’s Witness

Last time, we looked at the beginning of John 8. We ended at verse 12, where Jesus made one of His famous “I AM” statements: “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” We read the Pharisees’ response to our Lord: “You bear witness of yourself; Your witness is not true.”

There are a couple of things we need to note in the Jewish leaders’ response to Jesus’ proclamation. The first thing they said was obvious: He was claiming to be something on the basis of His own testimony. He had just said, “I am the light of the world.” This was not John the Baptist declaring that Jesus was the light. This was Jesus Himself making this affirmation. Under Jewish law, when testimony was given in court, for someone to be convicted, it had to be on the basis of two witnesses who had to agree in their testimony.

Here, using those words ego eimi, which call back to a title of God in the Old Testament, a title of deity, Jesus is declaring on His own, “I am the light of the world.” The Pharisees say: “You’re saying that by Yourself. Your witness is not true.” You see, the inference the leaders made at this point was that unless two corroborating testimonies were given, then the testimony had to be false, and so the witness of Christ was a false witness.

I have said to you on many occasions how I react to the bumper sticker that reads: “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” I do not like that sticker. It should simply say, “God said it. That settles it.” Whether I believe in it or not, if the Lord God Almighty opens His sacred mouth and makes a declaration, He does not need other witnesses to corroborate His testimony. What He says is true.

Here is the One who is the very incarnation of truth speaking to the leaders in Jerusalem, and they forget about subtleties. They are in Jesus’ face, and they say, “Your testimony is not true.” They accuse Christ of being a false witness.

There is irony here because in the Greek text, the word for witness is the word martyria, from which we get the English word martyr. There is a close relationship historically between the martyrs of the early church and their witness to the truth claims of Jesus—in other words, they bore witness to Christ by giving their lives—and their testimony was so emphatic because it involved their own blood. For this reason, the word martyr in our language comes from the Greek word that means “to bear witness.”

The irony is this: The first martyr of the Christian church was Christ Himself, and in His martyrdom, He bore supreme witness to the truth of the things that He is speaking here. It terrifies me to think of anyone standing before Christ and saying, “Your testimony is false.”

If someone says to me that my testimony is false, that is one thing; but to hear the testimony of Jesus Himself and to declare that it is false is quite another. Yet that is what every unbeliever in the world says to Jesus, because the spirit of unbelief accuses Christ of false witness. If there are any such people here this morning, I plead with you to be very careful before you call Christ a false witness.

The Father Bears Witness

Jesus responds to this charge and says: “Even if I bear witness of Myself, My witness is true.” Why? In essence: “Because I know who I am. I know where I came from and where I am going; but you do not know where I come from and where I am going. You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one.”

This phrase is elliptical, so when Jesus says, “You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one,” He is saying, in essence: “I don’t judge anyone that way. You judge everyone by the flesh; I don’t ever judge by the flesh. I judge from the perspective of where I came from.” What He is saying is this: “My origin is heaven. I will ascend into heaven because I first descended from heaven. I know where I came from, and where I came from was eternity.” Of course, He is speaking in a cryptic way at this point. He says:

“I know where I came from and where I am going; but you do not know where I come from and where I am going. You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one. And yet if I do judge, My judgment is true; for I am not alone, but I am with the Father who sent Me. It is also written in your law that the testimony of two men is true. I am One who bears witness of Myself, and the Father who sent Me bears witness of Me.”

When we read this, we know in light of the rest of Scripture that when Jesus refers to His Father who sent Him, He is obviously referring to God, who is His heavenly Father. But if you could put yourself in the shoes of those who first heard Jesus make this affirmation, they are scratching their heads when He says: “My Father sent Me here, and My Father backs up My witness. My Father agrees with the testimony that I give, and He testifies to Me.” They say: “Who are you talking about? Joseph? Who is he to back up your testimony?”

When we were kids, I had a friend who lived up the street. He got in more fights than anyone in the community, and he got beat up every time. Every time, he would go away crying, and he would say, “I’m going to get my cousin, and my cousin will come and beat you up.” Is there any boy who has not said that? “I’m going to get my brother.” I would not say that because I did not have a brother. I would say, “My sister’s going to come and get you,” because she could take care of most of those guys.

It was a kid named Eric who was always talking about his cousin, and wouldn’t you know, a few years ago at one of the PCA ministry conventions, I met a fellow who had the same last name. I said, “You’re not related to Eric, are you?” He said, “That’s my cousin.” I was afraid he was going to say, “I’ve been looking for you for twenty years.”

There is always this idea: “I’m going to get my dad. My dad’s bigger than your dad.” So, the Pharisees are looking to see who this Father is to whom Jesus is appealing, who has so much authority that He sent Jesus to say what He is saying, and the Father is going to back up that testimony. They have no idea that He is speaking of His heavenly Father. So Jesus says, “It is not my self-testimony.”

You Do Not Know the Father

As this interrogation continues throughout the gospel of John, we see Jesus appealing to the writings of the Old Testament, the Word of God that the Father had given to the Jewish people to bear witness to His Son who was to come. These people were obviously not present at the time of Jesus’ baptism, when the heavens opened and God declared with an audible voice, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17).

Nicodemus understood it. Remember in John 3, when Nicodemus came to Jesus at night, He said, “Teacher, we know that You are sent by God, or You would not be able to do the things that You are doing.” Nicodemus understood the function of miracles. I hear people say that the miracles of the New Testament prove the existence of God. No, they do not. God demonstrates His existence long before a single miracle is ever performed by anyone.

The function of a miracle is not to prove the existence of God, but to demonstrate and authenticate a messenger of God. That is why Jesus said: “If you don’t believe Me for what I say, believe Me for My works that I do. Don’t they manifest that God is with Me, that God has sent Me?”

Here, Jesus does not talk about God. He talks about the Father, and He gives a string of contrasts. Notice that He says, in essence: “I know where I came from, and I know where I’m going. You don’t know where I come from, and you don’t know where I’m going. You judge according to the flesh; I don’t judge according to the flesh, and yet if I do judge, my judgment is true. I am One who bears witness of Myself.”

The Pharisees responded, “Where is your Father?” Here is a verse to which we need to pay close attention. Jesus said essentially: “You don’t know Me or My Father, because if you had known Me, you would have known My Father also. I came to you. You don’t know where I came from, and you don’t know who I am, and the reason you don’t know who I am is that you don’t know My Father.”

Later on, Jesus will turn this around when the Pharisees appeal to be children of God, and He will say to them, “You don’t know the Father, because if you knew the Father, you would know the Son.” There are millions, if not billions, of people in this world who claim to know God, who claim to know God as their Father, yet they reject the Son. You cannot know God the Father and repudiate the Son. You cannot know the Son and repudiate the Father, because their testimony is one. The Father bears witness to the Son; the Son bears witness to the Father.

His Hour Had Not Come

“These words Jesus spoke in the treasury, as He taught in the temple.” The treasury was a portion of the temple. It had thirteen receptacles shaped in the form of the shofar, the ram’s horn, and each one had an inscription of a different need or concern, indicating where the alms would be used to alleviate suffering in the community. In the midst of this place where donations were given, the greatest gift that God has given us was being attacked.

“And no one laid hands on Him, for His hour had not yet come.” How many times throughout the gospel of John do we get that strange, foreboding comment: “My hour has not yet come,” whether Jesus speaks it or John speaks with respect to Jesus’ hour?

Oscar Cullman, the Swiss New Testament scholar, wrote a trilogy of books that were very important in the twentieth century, one of which was called simply Christ and Time. In this book, Cullman analyzed in great depth and detail the “time” words that we find in sacred Scripture. He noted, for example, that in our language, we have one word for time from the two different words for time in the Greek.

There is the word chronos. A wristwatch is technically called a chronometer, something that measures chronos. It measures the moment-by-moment passage of time. That is one way in which the Bible speaks of time: in terms of chronological sequence. But there is another word for time in Greek that is pregnant with meaning, and it is the word kairos. The word kairos refers to a specific moment in time.

We have something close to kairos, but not exactly. In our language, we distinguish between the words historical and historic. Someone just said to me the other day, “Such-and-such was a historical moment.” I just smiled and thought, “Every moment is a historical moment.” What he meant was that it was a historic moment, a moment of great significance, a moment that would define the future, a moment in which the movement of the past had reached its climax.

Throughout Scripture, we have many such kairotic moments. The Exodus is a kairotic moment. The birth of Christ is a kairotic moment. The cross is a kairotic moment. It is a moment in time that is so pregnant that it defines all of time, and that is the time Jesus keeps referring to as “His hour.”

There is also a vacillation in the use of the term hour in the Bible. Sometimes it is filled with the idea of the hour of glory, the hour of exultation, or Jesus’ finest hour. Other times, it refers to the darkest moment of Christ’s life, the hour of His agony, the hour of His grand passion, the hour of His suffering and His death.

Again, there is irony in this text. Let me drop down in the text for a moment. Jesus says in verse 28, “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.” What does Jesus mean when He says, “When I am lifted up”? It is clear there is a double significance to this, because His hour comes when He is lifted up on the cross to be crucified, and that is what He is talking about when He says, “I’m going away, and where I’m going you can’t come.”

The initial movement is not about Jesus’ ascension into heaven, but He is now talking about leaving them, and the people are confused about this. They say, “Is He going to kill Himself?” He could have answered, “No, you’re going to do it for Me, but when I am lifted up on the cross, My being lifted up as a public spectacle of scorn, hatred, and animosity is also the time of My exaltation as the Redeemer of My people.” It is at the same time His darkest hour and His greatest hour, as it is in that hour that He brings us our redemption.

Die in Faith

The contrast continues in verse 23. “You are from beneath; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am He”—ego eimi—“you will die in your sins.”

Let me conclude with this careful warning. When the Bible speaks of death, it speaks of dying in one of two ways. For the people of God, the saints of the Old Testament and the New Testament, their death is precious in the sight of God. It is said of them when they pass away that they die in faith. All who die in faith enter into the place God has prepared for His people from the foundation of the world.

The only other way you can die is to die in your sins. The Bible makes it clear that we are all sinners, but when the Bible speaks of being in sin or in faith, it talks about the state of our souls before God. A person who has no faith, an unconverted person, remains in their sin, and the worst calamity that could ever befall a human being is to die in that state. There are many people who are still in their sins, and who, if they do not come to Christ, will die in their sins.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.