Clough John Lesson 38
The
Woman Caught in Adultery – John
In
John 7, last time we gave an extensive background on the Feast of Tabernacles
and Succoth of what the Jewish people call this feast and we showed how Christ
took advantage of certain things that were going on in the middle of that
feast. We saw how to begin with John is
using multi-layered irony in that no matter who speaks, whether Jesus is
speaking or whether the crowds are speaking it seems like they can’t get a word
out of their mouth without intentionally or unintentionally predicting what’s
going to happen.
Remember
for example in verses 33-36 in that little short give and take between Jesus
and the crowd, where Jesus said, “Yet a little while I am with you, and then I
go unto Him that sent me. [34] You shall
seek Me, and shall not find Me; and where I am, there you cannot come.” You remember there are all sorts of double
meanings here both of which are true, “I AM,” ego eimi, the Old Testament word for God, “where I am,” not where I
will be but “where I am now, you cannot come.”
And then you remember the sarcasm of the mob and their response to Jesus
in verse 35, “Where is He going to go, that we can’t find Him? Is He going to go to the Diaspora, and from
there teach the Gentiles?” Precisely,
that’s exactly where He’s going to go because that’s the only place where
there’s positive volition. So the crowd
and the mob, even in their rebellion against God’s Word cannot help but praise
God. They cannot help but enunciate the plan
of the Holy Spirit in generations to come.
And so this almost total, all enveloping control by the sovereign God over the situation is the theme throughout this chapter. And finally it came down to that dramatic announcement in John 7:37-38 where Jesus Christ had been standing a while in the court, and He “screamed out, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. [38] He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” And with that we have at least three principles, or three great truths that depend upon Christ using the ceremony of water libation, where the people would process out of the temple at the crack of dawn, go down to the pool of Siloam, dip in the pool, gather up water, take it all the way back in a ceremony, back to the temple, and then pour it in a bowl that would drain down into the earth, called a libation. I libation is an offering made back to the earth, and it shows you that in the Feast of Tabernacles they were basically praying for the prosperity of the future crops. And prophetically the Feast of Tabernacles commemorates the establishment of the millennial kingdom.
And so while the ceremony goes on Jesus makes an announcement, and the first thing that we notice about His announcement is that He places Himself in the position of Jehovah, for when the people went on this ceremony and they left the temple to go down along that long perimeter over the City of David down to the pool of Siloam, remember that as they left the gate they uttered this phrase and the crowd chanted this phrase: “Our fathers looked to the east where they saw the sun, but we look to the west, to You, O Jehovah.” And so Jesus picks up that little phrase, He says oh, you look to Jehovah do you, then come unto Me. That’s the context that He says “come unto Me.”
The second thing is where He places Himself in the line of Jehovah is that He says “come unto Me, ye that thirst.” In the context of what was going on at that moment the people were praying to Jehovah to supply their need because they thirsted, because Jehovah alone could supply that need they prayed to Jehovah alone. They had been trained not to pray to any other God but Jehovah for rain as the incident of Elijah showed. And they never forgot the incident of Elijah, you don’t pray for Baal, you don’t pray to nature forces, you pray to the Creator over the nature forces. And so in the middle of that context here comes Jesus Christ getting up and saying if you thirst, come to Me.
And then finally the Jewish people in the Feast of Tabernacles were looking forward to the establishment of the great temple and when this temple would be established, from that temple would go literal water out across the face of the earth, watering and giving prosperity to all areas. And so what does Jesus say? He says, “He that believes on Me,” that is one who has trusted in Me, “as the Scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water,” in other words Christ announces in a sort of semi-ambiguous way here, that He’s about to establish a living temple, made up of people, and from that living temple, just as in the literal physical temple the waters will go out across the earth, a prophecy of the Church spreading the Word of God over the people; it connects very well with verse 35, the prediction that yes indeed Christ will go, He will go incarnate in His temple out to the Diaspora and through them to the Gentile world.
So we have Christ at this point claiming identification with Jehovah. And I went over all those details of the ceremony to heighten the tension between Jesus and the context, to show you the magnitude of Jesus’ claim. Jesus Christ could do nothing else in this situation with these kinds of remarks than claim to be God, and this is what we must say over and over and over and over again. You have to force the critic of the Christian faith to the conclusion that either Jesus Christ is God or He’s an imposter but He can’t be a good teacher. Now very few people are really willing to admit this. Time again we say it, and time again we go over it. Yet time and again very few people are willing to come to this conclusion.
For example, a few years ago I was discussing a point of Genesis and creation with a professor and to get the point across that the Word of God ultimately depends on the essence of God and the authority of God I said basically this is what Jesus believed. And He claimed to believe it this way and therefore that’s our authority, to which the person responded, but that’s an authority that is invalid today. I said then Jesus Christ was a liar as far as we are concerned and an imposter. Well, I wouldn’t say that. Why wouldn’t you say that? And it went from there. In other words, you must press this claim and it takes time to press it and make it stick, that Jesus Christ is a lunatic to do this kind of thing if He wasn’t who He claimed to be.
Now in John 7:40 we pick up the results of that confrontation. Tonight we’re going to study the last part of chapter and the first 12 verses of John 8, which some of you have new translations will notice is not in the main body of the text, for the reason that this first part of John is a disputed passage, the dispute as to where it came from, the dispute of where it belongs, even a dispute whether it’s canonical Scripture or not. But for the sake of contrast and continuity I’m going to start in John 7:40, we’re going to finish chapter 7 and watch Christ’s characteristics shown there, then we’ll pick up the twelve verses as chapter 8 and we’ll treat these as a unit, a unit that depicts the nature of Jesus Christ because remember John was written many years after Christ physically left the scene. And therefore John is to instruct us as if we are filled with the Spirit, and if the Spirit’s role is to reproduce the character of Christ in us, then a Spirit filled mature person will have some of these traits shown here that belong to the person of Jesus Christ. So thus the portrait that we get of Christ in the last part of 7 and the first part of 8 fits together and is important.
John 7:40, “Many
of the people therefore, when they heard this saying, said, Of a truth this is the
Prophet. [41] Others said, This is the
Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of
Now in verse 40 the crowd is responding, the word “therefore” is there. In other words, because of this almost violent, flamboyant, arrogant display on the part of Christ as He screamed across the court, “You come unto Me, all you who thirst,” as a result of this they began to respond. It shows you that when Jesus Christ, and by the way John is showing us as members of the Church, he’s saying see, when the Word of God is presented vigorously and in an unadulterated way, not watered down but the full sledgehammer blow to the Word of God comes against people, it sets in motion a reaction. People cannot help but react if they have any normal hearing and understanding when they feel the sledgehammer blows of the claim of Christ. And if people aren’t doing that, and they are indeed listening and understanding, then our presentation of the Word is faulty. You should be very discouraged when people don’t get agitated over the Word of God. If somebody gets so violent they want to give you a knuckle sandwich, that’s great because it shows a response of their part; maybe a negative response but at least it’s a response, they don’t sit there like rocks. So this kind of response is normal.
“Many of the people therefore, when they heard this saying, said, Of a truth He is the Prophet.” “The Prophet!” Now to show you how much the crowd has responded to Christ by this point we want to go into what this title, “the Prophet” means. They were a little fouled up on who “the Prophet” was because you can see from the next verse they apparently of that day distinguished between “the Prophet” and “the Messiah.” They thought of “the Prophet” and “the Messiah” as two different people. So I that sense they are a little fouled up. But the reason this is an important note on the response of the crowd is who this prophet is supposed to be.
In Deuteronomy
So Deuteronomy being given by Moses, Moses is about ready to die, understands that the people are going to be feeling leader-less when he goes to be with the Lord. And so he warns them that when I’ve left and the Torah has become enscripturated, and you have a static canon of Scripture and it seems like there is no living voice, don’t be tempted to go into this satanic occultism because you’re going to get burned if you do. Instead of that he says, verse 15, “God will in the future raise up the Prophet, and the Prophet whom He will raise up shall be the One that gives you guidance.” Now, in verse 18 he quotes God, “I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak unto them all that I shall command Him. [19] And it shall come to pass,” now verse 19 is the key to understand what happened with the crowd in the temple, “And it shall come to pass whoever will not hearken unto My words … I will require it of him.” “I will require it of him!” In other words, when the Prophet comes you’d better be prepared to obey Him without any ifs, ands or buts, or any opposition. What He says you say “Yes Sir” and you do it. That should be the attitude toward the Prophet. Now turn back to John 7 and notice something about the crowd.
Notice John 7:7, review of certain characteristics that occupied that crowd and that temple that day when this happened. Remember what the atmosphere was that day? Just to remind you, Jesus talking to his brethren says, the world hates Me. In verse 12, what was going on among the crowd? They were murmuring about Christ but it says in verse 12, “some said, He is a good man; others said, No…. [13] However, no man was speaking openly of Him for fear of the Jews.” What was the all pervasive attitude of the crowd when this happened? It was one of fear; fear of the police, fear of the Pharisees, fear of what someone would think. The very fact that now down in verse 40, when they get to the point of saying this is the Prophet, something fantastic has happened because to just consider Jesus as the Prophet would mean that they themselves would have to say “Yes Sir” to Him and ignore the police, the Pharisees and the rulers whom they deeply feared. So when they say, “Truly this was the Prophet,” the crowd has come a very long way. Christ has made a deep inroad and a deep penetration in their minds to get a mob of people who are taken with a spirit of fear to the point where they’d be willing to consider Him as the absolute authority over and above the officials who they are terrified of.
John 7:41, “Others
said, This is Messiah. But some said,
Shall Christ come out of
Now we know, having read the Gospel of John and we know the virgin birth of Christ, we know who the real Father and the real mother of Jesus really are. And thus to us seeing this objection, we understand very well, this is the blind crowd just spewing out their hot air. In other words, the objections to the Christian faith don’t carry weight; not only do the objections to the Christian faith not carry weight; they carry within them the seeds of the proof of the Christian faith. So John delights in recalling all of these little remarks made along the side. He says see, see these stupid people with their stupid objection to the Christian faith, their very objections refute their position. Like the person who comes up to you and says that all truth is relative; the most titanic absolute statement anybody can make; that very inane and idiotic statement carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. How can all truth be relative? Figure it out.
All right, here in
John 7 we have another one of these delightful little things that John the
Apostle enjoys. He remembers what the
crowd said that day, and he said some of those stupid people in the crowd, do
you know what they actually said? That
this can’t be the Christ because the Christ should come from
Some of them were so mad, it says in John 7:44 that they were constantly willing to arrest Him. [“And some of them would have taken him; but no man laid hands on him.”] Now not only the police, not only the Pharisees, not only the rulers, are looking for an opportunity to arrest Christ, now some of the mob are this angry. You see, the mob in John 7 understands very well what Jesus is claiming to be. They’re not some naïve group that thinks well, that poor little fellow over there, he’s just another rabbi, just another prophet. Oh no, they are so angry with Christ for interrupting this ceremony, for making these audacious claims in front of the public, that they want Him arrested.
John
Now when the Gospel writers go to depict the kinds of men that Jesus Christ made the deepest impression on they inevitably pick law enforcement type people. For example, in that glorious testimony as Christ dies on the cross who is it that bears his testimony of the person of Christ but the centurion? Now the centurion has seen many people die; a centurion wouldn’t be an officer of that rank had he not a vast, vast amount of experience in evaluating men. He could look at a man and tell whether that man would cut and run in the middle of hand to hand combat. He had a basic ability to evaluate men that most men don’t have. And that was the kind of person the Gospel writers say that Christ impressed. Isn’t it interesting that none of these narratives ever give you the impression of the religious people, none of them; maybe Nicodemus was one exception to that but if you think of all the stories you’ve ever read in all the Gospels, how many stories have you read where the reaction of a deeply religious person is being given? Very, very rarely; always it’s some person that’s completely out of the religious area. Do you know why? Because most religious people are flaky. And they’re unstable and they have no common sense is what it amounts to. We have Christians that way, absolutely no common sense, know a little doctrine but they couldn’t come in out of the rain, and that’s saying something around here but we have believers that are just that way, absolutely no common sense. I can tell by the way, I’ll teach something, I’ll try to make it balanced, and they will walk out of here, or hand me some feedback card that tells me, Clough, you didn’t come within a thousand miles of communicating to that person because they took everything you said, ran it through their grid, and boy, what kind of a mess, I taught that??? No I didn’t, but that’s the way it came out. So religious people are sometimes the world’s biggest screwballs and this is why the Gospel writers don’t give the time of day to most religious people.
But here in John
Read that statement over again; if you have a modern translation it comes out a little clearer in the more modern translation. “Never has a man spoken like this,” or, “Never does man speak like this.” Both statements are true. Now the police meant to tell the Pharisees, why, we’ve never met a man that talks this way before. By the way, what do you think was so unusual about Christ that they said that? Because of His inherent authority. Most rabbis would get up and they’d say well, this says this because rabbi so and so said it, rabbi so and so said it, rabbi so and so said it and they’d give you 25 footnotes for everything they said. Christ gets up and says it because this is the truth, period. No references, no backup, nothing, He just arrogantly states the truth, you take it or leave it. And He isn’t just being a smart person with this, He actually conveys this inherent authority in His own person and these men couldn’t get over this; this was unique. So they’d never seen a person like this before, but now John is having fun with us because in reporting the police as saying, “There never was a man who spoke like this,” he uses the anarthrous form of the word “man,” and it can also read, “Never does man speak like this.” And he puts unconsciously into the mouth of those police officers a testimony, Jesus is more than a man.
So watch how John
does this. In John
And then what does
John proceed to show us? Nicodemus, who
does believe on Jesus, one of their number pops up in the very next verse. So you see the fun that John the Apostle is
having, he’s ridiculing these people, this is sarcasm, folks, as you read this
you just have to sit back and enjoy it, but John is being deeply sarcastic at
the opponents of the Christian faith. He
says these people are so dumb they don’t even know when they’re being deceived. They think they’re not being deceived when
they are being deceived. That’s how
thick they are. But then that isn’t
enough, he adds another irony, he has them say in John
No sooner did they get this pearl out of their lily white lips but John adds Nicodemus, in verse 50, “Nicodemus saith unto them,” and then John puts a parenthesis just to give the jab, you know, “(he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,)” that’s to remind us that oh, none of the Pharisees believe on Him huh, what’s Nicodemus doing there. And what does Nicodemus say after the Pharisees have just said verse 49? Lo and behold in verse 51 Nicodemus says, “Does our law judge any man, before it hear him, and knows what he is doing? “ In other words, you dopes, here you are saying the masses are cursed because they don’t know the law and while you’re doing that you’re breaking the most elementary law, “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” So this is how John gets through, if you can think of an octopus, all wrapped up in himself this is the way John the Apostle views the opponents of the Christian faith.
John 7:52, John
couldn’t leave us without even adding one more little jewel of showing how
stupid these people are. “Are you also
of
So far in the portrait of Christ we’ve seen His courage. It’s not a martyrdom foolish rush-to-judgment type courage. Christ takes precautions on His life; He sneaks in to the Feast of Tabernacles, He doesn’t just go in hey everybody, here I am, come kill Me. Christ doesn’t do that; that’d be foolish. Christ takes normal common sense wise precautions on His life. But, when the time comes to speak out the Word of God and attack the issue on the basis of the Word of God, Christ in all His glory and courage speaks. And so you have a picture of Christ’s wise courage in John 7, His wise courage. Now the next section.
As I said, this
next section was put in here in John, later on, after John was written, we
believe, the best texts, it’s terribly… those of you with a Greek text if you look
at the footnotes you’ll see that the text, if you have a critical apparatus on
your translation, look down that critical apparatus and you’ll see where it’s
reading after another, one reading and a misreading, and different sources
reading different things, this whole thing is found here, it’s found at the end
of Luke in some manuscripts. In other
words, the writers and preservers of the New Testament didn’t know quite what
was going on here in these 11 verses. We
don’t know why, the theology is orthodox but the problem is we don’t know why
it got in here. For years the commonly assumed position was that it doesn’t
belong here because verse 52 was the cut off to a dialogue that was resumed at
John 8:12. And if you’re, if you just
read John
So this was the commonly prevailing view because nobody could figure out how this woman caught in adultery got stuck in the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles, and to this day, I will be honest, most Christians who study the issue do not buy this passage; this passage is not bought by most Bible teachers, it’s just simply eliminated or it’s exegeted as a separate thing. I don’t know who wrote it, maybe John wrote it. And I don’t know whether it was there when John finished the Gospel or not, but I’ll tell you something, it fits with what we know of the Feast of Tabernacles now that more research has been done on that feast.
I want to show you again some slides of the temple so we can picture how this incident came about, how it got started. Here is our model of the temple in Jesus Christ’s day. I previously misled you saying this outer court was the court of the Gentiles and women; I was wrong, this outer court is the court of the Gentiles only. The Jewish women were allowed into this inner area, and the Jewish men up into here and then the Levites only here. So I misled you here. This court is called the court of the women. In our next slide I’m going to move around and shoot down inside that court of women and here’s what it looked like. Around the outside of that court, this is a large cross shape, this door had a sign on it and that sign has been found: Death to any Gentile entering these gates. The women could go up to these steps and no further, only the men could go up those steps and they changed Psalms 120-135, those are the Psalms of the steps. Now inside this is where the women were kept during this Feast of Tabernacles. You’ll notice porticos around this, here’s one, all around here is one, it goes up along that south side and all the way up in here, and you’ll notice there are actual passages out to the left and right underneath those pillars. During the Feast of the Tabernacles the women would gather here and the men used to gather behind this door.
Now let me fill you in some of the details, you can see where it happened, now let me show you what was happening. I gave you the sequence of the things in the Feast of Tabernacles, you remember the Jewish day begins at night. All night, I said, they had what they called very euphemistically in the Talmud, light-headedness in the women’s court. Now what that meant was hell-raising in the women’s court. And during the night they got to partying and by the fourth or fifth… now remember, this is a 24 hour party, this just goes on and on and on and on, and after you’ve had a little wine and you’re tired you know what happens, some of you don’t I know, but things would happen and one thing would lead to another and the men started mixing with the women’s court and you can imagine what happened from that point on. So they had what it amounted to was a sex orgy in there at times and this was reported by the rabbis under the very euphemism, “light-headedness,” and it concerned the rabbis very much. They did everything they could, they even put a wooden barrier across those steps that you saw, the Talmud tells how they built it, trying to keep the men in one place and the women in another and somebody would cut through and so on. It’s just as bad as a co-ed dorm. So while these women were in here, the men intermingled with them, you lead your little sanctified imaginations to think what happened.
All this went on until the priest blew the horn for the water libation ceremony in the morning. Well now John 8:1-11 can be seen to fit very well on the morning after one of these things. So let’s read it in that light. As I say, I offer this as a possibility, I can’t be dogmatic because there’s not enough facts to control these first 11 verses. They sit here in the canon of Scripture, I believe they belong to the canon of Scripture, but I don’t know exactly where they belong in the canon of Scripture. I offer this as a suggestion.
John
… get down to the point, where is it, verse 7, that’s the famous one everybody remembers, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.” And that verse has been used to say you ought never to condemn anyone, never evaluate their behavior in the light of the Word of God because after all, you’re a sinner too. Well, to a degree that’s right in the sense we have to be grace oriented and give people a chance under grace; that’s correct. But the promiscuous blanket misuse of this verse is atrocious. When we get through tonight I’ll show you what the verse is rally talking about; it has nothing to do with sinless prerequisite for judging someone. Here’s why. Let me go back and read the results of one Dr. Duncan Derrett who investigated the laws of the Old Testament as they existed in Christ’s day about the act of adultery. In his very valuable article, New Testament Studies, Vol. 10, 1963-64, pages 1-26, Dr. Derrett stresses that the witnesses must have seen the couple in coitus, there is absolutely no question of their having seen the couple in a compromising situation. For example, coming from a room in which they were alone of even lying together on the same bed, even that would not be considered an act of adultery. The actual physical movements of the couple must have been capable of no other explanation and the witnesses must have seen exactly the same act at exactly the same time in the presence of each other so that their dispositions would be identical in every respect. In other words, to say that they were caught in the very act, they are bringing forth a classic point of reference. The only way anyone in Christ’s day could ever be condemned of adultery is if more than one person actually saw them having sex at the height of the act. You couldn’t be caught with a woman, you had to actually be having intercourse with her and have that viewed by someone.
Now that’s what they’re talking about when they say in verse 4 she was caught in the very act. When they say she was caught in the very act they mean she was caught in the very act. All right, now, what are they going to force Christ to? This is a trap because Christ is caught if He does and if He doesn’t. At this time in history the old Mosaic Law about stoning was not being carried out. Adulterous cases were being handled as a divorce situation. So when they present this obvious case to Christ, where there is no doubt, there are multiple witnesses to this situation, they’re asking Christ, are you going to carry out, you claim to be so literal, are you going to re-invoke that old cruel, harsh Mosaic Law, and in front of all these people that you just got through saying “Come unto Me,” you’re going to have this woman stoned here in public? And so it put Christ in the position of having to reinforce the old Mosaic Law Code which hadn’t been enforced for centuries on this point, because keep in mind what kind of an incident it was. Or, if Christ said no, it doesn’t apply, then they had Him because He said but You say You’ve come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets. So it was a very clever, very, very clever attack.
But, and this is why again I think it fits here and I think John may have been the author because I’ve stressed to you over and over to kind of prepare you for this, John is one of these people that loves to teach with tongue in cheek and show you the irony of things. How he has these people come up with this absolutely brilliant scheme to trap the smartest teacher that ever walked the face of the earth, go to all the trouble of satisfying the details of the Mosaic Law and they forget one thing. It takes two people to commit the act of adultery, doesn’t it. Where’s the man? See, the point is that the men have come out of that court of women. Now everybody knows what was going on in the court of women all that night. And what they in fact apparently had done is they just grabbed some woman that was involved in the orgy and brought her out and dropped her in front of Jesus’ feet and said here. Now this is what Christ means when He says, “And he who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” In other words guys, where were you last night? See, you were in the court of women; where’s the man that was with her. You guys were out there, you were fornicating all night, so don’t come and blame this girl, you all were doing it too. And therefore Christ sets up this. He is not saying, “He who is without sin let him cast the first stone” in the sense that you have to be sinless to condemn someone. He’s just simply saying you’d better be careful because she can then turn around in a court of law and condemn you. So guys, do you really want to press the case, because if you press the case I will investigate her and we’ll find out who the other person was involved; do you want me to press the case that far. Oh no, and then you read what they said. Look at how they slink away. By the way, He wrote on the ground, there’s a lot of commentaries on what did Jesus write on the ground? Nobody knows, it doesn’t say what He wrote on the ground, but we do know that the writing on the ground, before He gets up, you see what He’s saying is in verse 5, they come to Him and they make the accusation. [5, “Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?”]
All right, as they work with this situation, as this came about, it was noticed by some scholars that this is exactly what Christ is doing, it’s not what He is writing it’s what He is doing. Here they are all gathered around, Christ appears never to have registered on His mind what they were saying, He just stoops down and He writes, and you cant tell by what they say in verse 7, “So when they continued asking him,” continued, over and over and over and over they kept asking Him this, they kept pestering Him, and then, He stood up and He gave the sentence, [“He lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”] So I think what He was doing was simply writing the sentence on the ground, as the Roman judge would, saying see, we observe all the legal sanctions here, you can’t trap Me, you’re not going to make Me do something that’s going to offend the Romans unnecessarily.
So He gets up, John 8:8, “And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.” And I would say at this point He’s writing the dismissal of the case. It’s a mistrial. He’s not condoning the action but He’s declaring that it is a mistrial because of the circumstances this woman was brought to. And so in verse 9, here is the most beautiful scene to my way of thinking, “And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one,” you can just hear the stone drop, plunk, walk out, plunk, walk out, plunk, walk out, and notice who goes first, the older men go first, “beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: [“and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.]” Do you know why? Because under the Mosaic Law they would have had to throw the first rock. See, the Mosaic Law had a very interesting thing, whenever you had a capital punishment case the witnesses… witnesses by the way, had to be the one to throw the first rocks, and this was a kind of a device to protect false testimony, because you if you knew as a result of your testimony someone had to die and you had to face that person eyeball to eyeball and throw some rock and smash them in the face, and somebody else would throw some rock and maybe severe an artery in their neck and after they were crushed under about half a ton of rocks, you’d sit there looking at this bloody pulp that you killed, it had a little sanctifying effect on the trial. So as these people kind of dropped their rocks and walked off, they were also admitting that the sentence that Jesus passed in verse 7 was upon them. Where were they? They were in the court of women last night.
And so in John 8:10 we have, I think something that fits with John 7, Jesus Christ’s courage but it shows that the man who moments before screamed across the court in a voice heard by thousands of people was also the kind of Savior who can look us straight in the face on a man to man basis and deal with us. He could deal with the mob but He could deal with an individual woman, and He could deal with a woman trapped in a situation, in a male dominated culture. This woman wouldn’t have had a chance had Christ not done this; not a chance. Not in this situation.
And so He lifted Himself up, and the whole picture is you see, Christ isn’t even looking at them, He’s looking down at the ground and everybody is looking at Christ. And Christ keeps stooping down on the ground, He never even gets up and the men walk off, slinking, until finally this woman is left. [10, “When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman] so Jesus gets up and “He said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?” Now she doesn’t confess faith in Christ, we don’t know whether she became a believer at this point or not. She does say, [11] “No man, Lord.” But that could also mean just a title of respect to Christ. “And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and stop your sin pattern is what He tells here, “Go and sin no more.”
He recognizes that she’s sinned, but He says break the habit, get out of it. And therefore we conclude with verse 11, ready to start next time verse 12 with the rest of the Feast of Tabernacles. What have we seen in this portrait of Christ, chapter 7, chapter 8. We’ve seen His fairness, we’ve seen His stability, His courage, His wisdom and His love for men. And it’s that kind of Christ that the Holy Spirit wants to inculcate in our hearts. Christ is our model and you’ve seen there His behavior on two widely differing kinds of situations, one with a mob and the other with a very small scale individual personal situation. Same courage, same loyalty to the Word, same orientation to grace.