Clough John Lesson 39

Theme of Christian Apologetics – John 8:12-20

Tonight we will see one further scene in Jesus Christ’s confrontation with the authorities. In chapter 7 He has come to Jerusalem for the third Jerusalem trip. As He moved into the heart of the city of Jerusalem Jesus Christ took normal every day wise precautions on His life, knowing that the people of that day would try to kill Him because in going to Jerusalem He was going into the heart of apostasy. When the time came to declare the Word in the heart of apostasy, Jesus Christ screamed it across the court so every man in that court could hear it. Christ was not cowardly when it came to the right time and the right place to teach the Word of God. And remember as we go through this scene that depicts Christ and this confrontation with the authorities and the heart of their center, Jerusalem, what we’re looking at is a model that God has given to us through John the Apostle for later believers of a later era. This is also a model of what the Christian church was going through in confronting the Gentile world in the heart of their apostasy, Rome. So what goes on in Jerusalem in one generation will go on in Rome in another generation. The same tactics will apply; Christians will use common sense, they’re not deliberately to seek out martyrdom but if and when the time and the place arrive, if that’s the time and that’s the place to clearly state the issue of the Word of God then state it.

At this point, Jesus in John 8:12 gets up and makes another one of His titanic claims; claims that are so absurd on the face of human viewpoint that if Jesus is not who He claimed to be then He’s a lunatic. He gets up and He says, “I am the light of the world.” Now we want some background for what this statement is, why it was said, and to do this I’m going to back to John 1:4 for in the very start of the Gospel John gives his very mature reflections on this event as well as others, but I’m convinced that John was thinking primarily of this event when he wrote these words in the prelude to his Gospel. After describing the fact that God, the multiplicity in the Godhead, of God and the Logos, God the Father, God the Son, he describes creation in verse 3, he rejects the concept that the universe has within itself its creative force as evolutionists believe, he argues that creation is external to God, that God has made it by His own fiat. “All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.”

Then, in verse 4 he goes on to summarize what it was that Christ was getting at, at this confrontation in the temple. “In Him,” in the Logos, in the Logos that is God, “In Him there always life,” imperfect tense, continuous action in past time, there always was, there never was a time when there wasn’t life in the Logos. Now why is that life in the Logos a very important claim, promise? Because always in the history of man men have tried to make the creation the source of life. Always it’s something other than God; it’s always the created universe, though of course they deny that it’s created. It’s always this, that life is inside that universe, that life is some sort of mysterious force that is open to scientific investigation, that can be studied, that can be wholly described and that, therefore can be understood by man operating out from himself. And the Bible undercuts this and says no, a thousand times no, the life is external to the universe, it is put into the creation by God. God is the life-giver; everything would dry up and blow away if it wasn’t for God, it would disintegrate. God is the source of life, the creation is not self-sustaining. It constantly requires God beyond it. And it says further in verse 4, “and this life was continuously the light of men.” “The light,” the subject of John 8, “the light of men.”

Notice in verse 4 it is the life that supplies the light; it is that external force, beyond the creation, given to the creation that gives light, “light of men. Now what do we mean by the life giving the light to men? Light in John is always moral, ethical light, it is not just physical light, it is ethical light, moral light, justice, righteousness, and we have various orders of life in creation. We have what we call life, the Bible does not, we describe it as plants, organic, reproducing cells. This is the level of life according to modern biology. But the Bible does not make the division between the plants and the rocks the boundary of life. The Bible advances one further step and says the boundary between the living and the nonliving is not between plant and non-plant, but between plant and animal for it is the animal that has breath, it is the animal that in his developed forms of the central nervous system is capable of spirit indwelling and therefore the source of real life in Scripture is not plants. Trees are not living; this is why Adam and Eve could eat all the fruit they wanted to in the Garden of Eden and never cause death, simply because the consumption of plant life is not causing death.

And so we have the animals as living, they have a soul, the are specifically said to have nephesh; they are specifically said to have pneuma or spirit, or ruach in the Hebrew. And beyond this the one higher level is the level of man. How does man differ from the animal; the Bible insists that the animal has soul, man has soul. The Bible insists that the animals have spirit, and the Bible says man has spirit. Then what’s the difference? Are we locked down to what the evolutionist keeps telling us, that there’s a continuum between man and the animals? No, the difference between man and the animals is in the area called the image of God that is in man that is not in animals and this image of God consists, at least, of a conscience, the awareness that there are standards outside of our self. We, not animals, ask, is this statement a true statement or a false statement. We, not animals, ask is this a righteous thing or an unrighteous thing. When you beat your dog the dog responds to the pain and when the dog appears to have a guilty conscience it does not have a guilty conscience at all, it has been trained to respond to a certain behavior pattern what you’re going to do for that certain behavior pattern and it anticipates that. But the dog has utterly no sense whatsoever of right and wrong; no animal has, no animal ever will. Animals have no conscience; only men have conscience. And this is one of the great differences, manifest by the fact that man speaks language and animals don’t. Animals communicate information from one to another but men speak a language which can evaluate whether something is right or wrong, true or false. So there’s the difference.

So in John 1:4 when it says “the life was the light of men,” what John is talking about is the fact that men given conscience and given the image of God in their souls require still a source of outside guidance; “the life was the light of men.” The conscience is upheld by God’s created order. In Proverbs 20 it says our consciences are the candle of the Lord. All mental illness apart from organic illness is due to a violated conscience. It is due to sinful behavior patterns. There is no such thing for the thorough thinking intellectual Bible-believing Christian as mental illness for the simple reason that ideas do not get ill, only physical bodies get ill. There is no such thing as mental illness. So life was the light of men, and Jesus Christ, then, as the Word, is the particular person of the God head that gives this light.

Dropping down to verse 9, John took this in his meditations a bit further, this claim that Jesus was the light of the world. He claims, “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” That “lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Now the question is, does John mean to say in verse 9 that the unbeliever has a relationship with Christ, that the person who rejects Christ is still related to Christ? Yes, that’s exactly what John intends to say. He intends to say that this is not a saving relationship but it’s a creature/Creator relationship, that the unbeliever, the most ardent, vehement, atheist unbeliever daily is supported in his ardent unbelief by Jesus Christ. Daily the most obvious unbeliever lives by means of the Lord Jesus Christ. Cornelius Van Til has put it this way: the little child, in order to slap his father’s face has to sit on his father’s knee. And so even the non-believing creature must sit on God’s knee to slap God’s face. And this is what John says, his view of Christ is so big that even the non-Christian who rejects Christ accepts Christ; he accepts Christ for the simple reason that he must make moral judgments at some point and where he makes moral judgments he admits to Christ’s existence and to Christ’s influence in his life. He refuses to recognize it and he refuses to admit it and acknowledge it before men but nevertheless he does it. He has to breathe every day when he wakes up, he has to consciously think about breathing, and so also he has to consciously appropriate what Christ gives him.

“The light of the world,” this is the background, this is what John saw when he began to think about this scene that occurred that day inside the temple. Now to recall exactly what that temple looked like, again I review what that court of women looked like where this all took place. Here is the model of Herod’s temple that is on display in Jerusalem. We have this inward area and Christ operated inside that area. Here is the court of women. In this area was the area of John 8, the first part in the area of John 7. Here today is one of the treasuries, John tells us that this scene took place on that portico, outside of the treasury. Here’s where the scene occurred. The scene occurred some days after the Feast of Tabernacles was finished but something had been done inside that very court approximately 25 to 30 feet from where Jesus was standing when He made this claim in John 8, just about 50 feet to the southwest of where He was standing on this set of steps was a ceremony that had been going on during those days.

During the Feast of Tabernacles they would light the candelabra, except there weren’t candles on it, this would be a vast tall thing that looked like the Jewish set of lamps. These were approximately 180 feet tall, and they would have young men training for the priesthood who would make wicks for the lamps that would burn oil and they would climb up this vast tall structure to light those lights. And the temple tradition says that when the lights were lit, and during the Feast of Tabernacles all of the city of Jerusalem was lit up from them, you could see the lights high in the temple looking out over the whole city of Jerusalem. Now something else happened also that day in the days of the Feast of Tabernacles. When the feast began on the first day it began exactly on the day when the sun would go down at the same time in the west that the moon was rising in the east full. Now there’s significance to this, remember they had a lunar calendar, they measured their dates by the lunar calendar. All during the night of the party that we’ve mentioned before you have a full moon; the moon would be going across the sky and finally setting in the west just as the sun would come up from the east. The ceremony began exactly at that point. Why as this? So there would be no darkness; the Feast of Tabernacles speaks of the coming millennial kingdom when the light of the Lord shall fill the world, and therefore they picked just that time of year when the sun and the moon come up exactly at the same time and the moon comes up full, so there would be no darkness. Besides the light of the moon and the light of the sun there would be these giant 180 foot tall lamps that would show light throughout the whole court.

Now that has been going on for some time, now the day, probably a day or two after the feast, John 8:12. After all of this typology, after all this background, “Then spoke Jesus again unto them,” He spoke “unto them” and this time no longer the crowd, the crowd is no longer mentioned from verse 12, which substantiates our position that John 8:1-11 did in fact occur here chronologically because you notice in verses 1-2 Jesus has left, it’s one day after the last day of the feast, and so the feast has broken up and many of the crowd have gone home but they remember that great, great scene, and Jesus chooses after the candles are no longer lit to make this statement. He chooses a time when the moon is no longer coming up in the east when the sun is setting in the west. He chooses a time when the world has gone back to darkness, when there’s no longer that illuminating moon all night and there’s no longer those 180 foot tall lamps shining across the courtyard and down on the hill to the city of Jerusalem. Men are reminded that they live once again in a dark world; the darkness has come upon them again.

In the context of this He says, “I am the light of the world.” Now clearly at this point Jesus Christ is making a Messianic claim. If you turn to Isaiah 49:6 you’ll see that the precise language is used. In this passage in Isaiah God the Father is talking to God the Son and He promises certain things to God the Son. Verse 5, He’s speaking to the nation Israel primarily, but the epitome of the nation Israel is the Israelite who is none other than Jesus Christ. And so where this is directed basically to the nation, as for example verse 3, “O Israel, My servant,” ultimately it is fulfilled in the Israelite par excellence. “He said unto Me, Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified. [4] Then I said, I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing, and in fain; yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and my work with my God.” He sees no immediate results of His work but He trusts in the Father’s plan. [5] “And now, saith the LORD God who formed me from the womb to be His servant, to bring Jacob again to Him,” notice this is why we have to say this is primarily Messianic, because if it’s “O Israel” in verse 3 how do you explain verse 5? Israel can’t bring Israel to itself; there’s a different personage that appears subtlety in the text at verse 5. “Now, says the Lord that formed me from the womb to be His servant, to bring Jacob again to Him, Through Israel be not gathered, yet I will be glorified in the eyes of Jehovah, and my God shall be my strength. [6] And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Israel, and to restore the preserved of Israel; I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles that thou mayest by my salvation unto the end of the earth.”

They knew that, they’d read Isaiah many, many times. It was very clear what Jesus was claiming, “I am the light of the world,” it’s a Messianic claim, understood by any Jew who knew his Old Testament. Turning back to this claim in John 8, Jesus add something about this light. The light is not automatic. Though Jesus is the light this does not mean all men have the light. And this is why in John 8:12 He says, “he that follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Who? “He that follows Me,” the one, present tense, who continually follows Me, only that person is the one who has the light of life. We’re going to wind up with a verse that substantiates this claim in verse 12, at the end, we’re going to go all the way down to verse 32 and we’re going to take this entire section tonight and I want to show you how it all hinges together on this fact of who are the true Christians; they are the Christians, the people who continually follow the light. This is why John in John 1 says that they who walk in the light as He is in the light they are the ones who are cleansed. All that talk in 1 John 1 came out of this interlude, this episode in the temple.

So Jesus says “he who continually follows Me will never walk in darkness but shall have the light of life,” the light that is given by life, what John developed in John 1, I will give them eternal life and that eternal life will give you moral judgment. Let’s give some practical illustrations so we understand what this light is all about, how it shows up in history. Light, obviously, gives you the ability to see where you’re going. Most Americans right now do not know where they’re going. And they do not know where they’re going because there is no doctrine. We have people involved in the political area and they tell me time and time again, you go into committee, meeting after meeting, and you are essentially up against darkness. People do not know what the issues are; to be specific, they do not know what the norms are to be. What is the norm and standard for (quote) “good society.” What you dream up or what Marx dreams up? Or perhaps what Trotsky or Lenin dreamed up? What is the standard for the good society? They have no idea what the standard is.

Well, you can’t shoot at a target if you don’t know where the target is and that’s the darkness of the world. Men do not even know what they really want and that darkness is awfully hard to get rid of; the darkness is just kind of, it’s almost like a solid kind of darkness, it’s like glue and it sticks on our very souls so even Christians who ought to know better don’t know what the ideals and the norms and the standards are. This is why we have so many Christian homes where the woman is assuming the responsibility to train her children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and the man sits by on his fat butt doing absolutely nothing, a great specimen of manhood.

I have never been able to understand men who will not put the Word of God first. I can understand men dropping the ball and getting out of it, that I can understand but I can never understand men who show no interest in the Word of God; I have no patience with that kind of individual and the reason is because if you are a man you have got to be making decisions that count, every day, you’re setting up priorities in your business, on the campus, wherever you’re going, you’ve got a calling and you have to make decisions every day in that calling and if you don’t have the Word of God, I don’t know what goes through your brain and I have no idea what goes through the brain, I guess nothing, of men who take no time to be in the Word of God. How they make their decisions I do not know; well I know how some of them do because you can get involved in certain businesses and watch how these businesses operate. We have some young men in business that are appalled by what they see in their own companies, it’s absolute chaos and the wonder of it all is how do these businesses stay in business. Just kind of loaf along until the next great depression and then they’re going to fall apart.

This is the plight of men who are in darkness, who have no idea where they are going, have no idea of proper standards, have no idea of what they are to be doing tomorrow, what they ought to have done yesterday, what their values are to be, how they are to operate in marriage, in family, in the local church and on the job, absolutely in darkness. And the Bible calls them fools, so the world is inhabited with fools, and we even see it here in this congregation with certain men who it’s beneath their dignity to spend 15 minutes a week with their children, let mamma do it, but they would think nothing of spending two hours with their kid at little league, that’s okay because after all baseball is baseball, that’s the man’s thing. Right there you’ve shown your colors because essentially that kind of a person has stated that baseball is more important than the Word of God. There’s no other interpretation; I challenge you to give me another interpretation of that behavior pattern; there is no other interpretation; something else, other than the Word is the anchor, is the base and so this is what it means to walk in darkness.

And Jesus says those that follow Me, not everyone, but just those who follow Me, “those who follow Me will not walk in darkness, but shall have the light given to them by eternal life.

Now in John 8:13 an objection is raised by the Pharisees, and from verses 13 on down through verse 20 we have a great theme, it’s a theme of the apologetic of the Christian faith, “apologetic” does not mean you apologize, it means that you give an answer and this is how you give an answer. Christ is going to respond to criticism of the Christian position; the Pharisee’s objection in verse 13 would be analogous to the objection raised today, well, I’m not sure I believe that, with all the pious academic intimations in the voice, I’m not sure I believe that. This is exactly what the Pharisees are doing here; we are not sure we believe that claim, say the Pharisees, because you bear record of yourself; your record is not true. [13, “The Pharisees therefore said unto him, Thou bearest record of Thyself; Thy record is not true.”] Now they’re not denying that His record may be true, though that’s involved here; the main issue here is that your record is not valid. There always had to be two witnesses; you know that from our study in Deuteronomy.

At this time in history we know that from Mishnahic law. Again, reading from the Mishnah, which is the compilation in writing of the oral traditions that the Pharisees had, we find in the section on marriage contracts this passage: “If a woman was imprisoned by Gentiles for an offense concerning property, she is still permitted to her husband, but it was for a capital offense she is forbidden to her husband.” This is getting involved into what is a proper divorce and what isn’t. “If a city was overcome by a besieging troop all women therein of priestly stock shall be ineligible for marriage with a priest.” The problem would be the army went in and raped them and so they would be considered unclean as wives of the Levites. “But if they had witnesses, even a bondman or a bondwoman, these may believe, but none may be believed when he testifies of himself.” “None may be believed when he testifies of himself,” Phariasic law.

And that’s exactly what they are raising here at this point; You testify of Yourself, and therefore your testimony, being self-testimony is not valid. They claim a legal objection. Now the presupposition behind verse 13 is one that Christ is going to attack. Learn from this! Many, many times I have lost an encounter this way and many, many times I’m sure you have. We allow our opponent to set the answer by the way he asks the question. As I have said time and again, don’t answer questions too fast until you have thought through what that question implies. This question has within it the seeds of apostasy. The unbeliever can’t ask right questions, that’s the testimony of Scripture. Don’t accept questions from unbelievers until you’ve run the question back through your framework to re-set the question up again. And that’s what Jesus does. Too often we say oh, gee, you object to this, here’s your objection now how am I going to answer that objection. Careful; careful! Be careful you understand what the objection is.

In this case it seems like a relative innocuous objection, after all, isn’t it correct that Jesus in making these claims ought to give legal evidence. Wait a minute, to whom is the Law addressed? To God or to man? The Law is addressed to man, isn’t it? And then does this verse 13 imply therefore Jesus, being only man, must conform to the Law that God gives to man. So the question presupposes that Christ cannot be God. The question has within itself the seeds of its own answer. Presupposing Jesus that You are just man, any man who makes these claims must make them by two witnesses. But the precise question at hand is: is Jesus just man, or is He God-man in one person forever. And if Jesus Christ is God-man in one person forever, the objection loses force because God is not bound by two or three witnesses. And that’s exactly what Jesus raises in verse 14. Jesus answers the question by destroying the presupposition under the question.

Notice this, excellent technique. Here’s the objection, here’s the presupposition underneath the question. Jesus Christ does not answer the question, He answers the presupposition underneath; topple the foundation and you’ve destroyed the question, and that’s exactly what Jesus does to the opponents of the Christian faith. He doesn’t answer them directly, He challenges the very foundation of their question. And so He says, when He responds to this legal objection based on Mosaic Law plus the Pharisaic interpretation, John 8:14, “Jesus answered and said unto them, Though I bear record of Myself, yet My record is true,” here’s why, “because I know whence I came, and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go.” What kind of an answer is this? Jesus Christ is claiming eternality; He is claiming His eternal existence. “I know where I have come from,” I have come My Father’s right hand, I am eternal, I preexisted My physical human birth and because I did that makes Me more than a man and because I’m more than a man, your law doesn’t apply to Me. I don’t need to give two witnesses to Myself; I am God and when I speak a word the word has implicitly authority. God’s Word has self-authenticating power. God does not have to meet a standard external to Himself, He is the standard by which man judge. How can you have a standard that is going to judge God?

This is precisely the sin of Adam and Eve. In Adam and Eve, in Adam and Eve you had them in the Garden and along came Satan to Adam and Eve, and God had told Adam and Eve, eat of this tree and you’re going to die. Satan says eat of this tree and you won’t die. So we have one claim of God and one claim of Satan. And so Adam and Eve decide to relegate to themselves, to form a test, is God’s claim correct or is Satan’s claim correct, let’s test. But the very proposal to put God’s Word to the test has already rejected the authority of God’s Word. It’s already, in effect, admitted that possibly God’s Word is not true; possibly God’s Word does not carry within it sovereign authority; possibly God is not God. And so to say with Adam and Eve, we are going to have a test and God must meet our test before we pass Him… it’s like the philosophers, all the western history, every philosopher that’s come up with a proof for the existence of God has always said that God exists because he meets my intellectual test. Now that’s to put the cart before the horse. What’s the basis for the intellect in the first place? Because God is there, God is the Creator of the man who makes the test.

How dare finite man say I will evolve a proof for God and if God can meet my standards that I crank out of my finite mind, then we know that God exists. Small wonder that as the history of philosophy went on you get to Kant and Hegel, the men just simply denied that God is there completely. God becomes something else. What did they do? They simply recognized that the early philosophers who were proving God, such as Aquinas and others, that these men were just proving an idea about God, they had no proving God’s existence, it was an idea about God that they were proving. And so the next philosopher came along and said huh, I don’t accept your proof of the existence of God, what have you proved? That you thought the idea of God but I can think many ideas in my head, I can think brown fairies live in my backyard but because I think brown fairies live in my backyard doesn’t mean they’re there. And that’s the whole disproof of the proofs for evolution. You disprove the proofs for evolution by simply showing they only prove the idea of God, they don’t prove God.

And this is what’s always been the problem because you can’t prove that God is there. There is no way to prove God’s existence because the very concept of proof itself presupposes God is there. As Van Til said, a child must sit on his father’s knee to slap his father’s face and man must presuppose that God is there in order to deny that God is there. He has to presuppose all these things. If you want the details of this I urge you to read Van Til, Gordon Clarke, Frances Schaeffer and some of these men for the details of how this is done. But Jesus is clearly conscious of this and that’s why He answers in this oblique way He does in verse 14, I can say a word about Myself and it’s self-authenticating, I don’t meet your standards; when I tell you to do something you do it because that’s My Word.

Now we can’t do that; no man can do that. I have no right as pastor-teacher to stand up here and tell you, you must believe this because I said it to you. Because my word is nothing, my word cannot be authoritative, I can only point you to God’s Word and describe God’s Word and say that word is authoritative. Parents can’t come to their children in an epistemological sense of coming and saying, child you have to obey everything I say because I’m your parent. Not so; you have not unconditional sovereignty over your child, I have no unconditional sovereignty over believers as a pastor, and no human office has unconditional sovereignty. No one has this; this is a prerogative of God only. And so therefore Jesus says, “I bear record of Myself;” and that can be a valid testimony because of I am God. That’s the thrust of His word.

Now to set Himself off in His divine nature over and against man, and here’s what He’s doing, let’s get clearly in mind man and God. God is sovereign, man has volition; God is righteous and just, man has conscience. God is loving, man has a concept of love, at least he can love truly in history though not infinitely like God. God is omniscient, man has the divine viewpoint with which he’s capable of understanding. God is omnipotent, omnipresent; man has some power that is limited and he is certainly limited in space though he has imagination through which he can journey in his head to other places than where he is. And you have God who is immutable, man who has stability; God who is eternal, man who has temporal nature. Now that’s the difference between God and man, and that’s why man can’t proceed one inch without presupposing God.

Let’s see how this works, just so everyone can get this idea of what I’m trying to go over and over to show you how Christ is answering. This is what I mean; some of you probably do not understand when I say that the unbeliever has to presuppose God in everything he says, that you can’t say 2 + 2 is 4 without first presupposing the God of the Bible. Here’s why; the God of the Bible has all these attributes; those attributes all men have to have in order to think, in order to live, in order to understand we have to have all those attributes. Now the non-Christian who denies Christianity, what he has to do, take the non-Christian scientist who says I don’t need God, I have natural law; what that person has done is take the attribute of immutability, remove it from God, drop it down inside the creation and make it into a principle of uniformity. So his natural law that he depends on for his science is nothing but a ripped off attribute of God. He has ripped it off and uses it now for his own foundation and very cleverly he tells us I don’t need God, and we should say oh yes you do because you’re using Him. You’re using Him in your concept, in your bastard concept of natural law, it’s bastard because it’s not part of the family, it’s a bastard concept that you’ve imported and you depend daily on the attribute of the immutable personal infinite God of Scripture. Any time you speak of natural law you presuppose the God of Scripture. Any time you work with the universe and the evolutionist, the cosmic evolutionist does this.

Where does he get the present world from? He goes back to a prior order. Where does he get the prior order from? He goes back to matter/energy. Where does he get matter/energy from? From a prior existing thing, maybe the big bang idea, but it’s always back, back, back, back, back, back, back to a prior existing universe because he can’t get out of the universe; he’s got to have it always there in some form, state of shape. And what is that but the attribute eternality. He’s transformed the creature into the eternal God and therefore he presupposes that God is there, he presupposes that he must have eternality or he can’t make a statement that’s true in cosmic evolution. He has to presuppose immutability or he can’t make a statement true of natural law. He has to presuppose that there are moral absolute standards of righteousness and justice or he can’t make a statement of right and wrong. At every point in his life he presupposes the attributes of God. What he does is rip them off and put them on idols, but always he comes back to having to accept these attributes of God somewhere in his system and that’s where you hang them. You have to study it and study it and study it but always the non-Christian carries the seeds of his own reputation in his system because in his system somewhere in the length and the height and the breadth he’s had to build on these attributes. He cannot escape them because he’s a creature made in God’s image and he can’t even take a breath without depending on these attributes. The whole intellectual thought structure of man presupposes such a God as the God of Scripture. And all systems, even atheism, presuppose these attributes do exist. What they do argue about is where you locate them.

So what Jesus says again in verse 14, I bear record because I know where I came from and where I am going,” He describes His eternality, He describes His omniscience, He says I am not limited. He says look at you people, here’s your finite limited human knowledge, and you claim this law, that’s good, you need it, because because your knowledge is finite one of you may be wrong. A finite person cannot by himself have perfect knowledge because he doesn’t have access to all the data. You could be an innocent person morally; Adam and Eve could be innocent morally and be wrong in their understanding, as Eve was, in her knowledge of the prophecy. Before the fall man could be intellectually mistaken, and why could he be mistaken? Why could he be mistaken about the nature of creation? Because he’s limited and therefore you have this legal principle laid down in the Old Testament and amplified at the time. Finite creatures, your truth is acceptable only if you have two witnesses and that’s a confession of your finitude, it’s a confession that you’re just creatures and that we need substantiation for the statements we make because the statements we make don’t come from a reservoir of omniscience. But, says Jesus, because I do have these attributes I can make these kinds of statements; you can’t, I can because that is My being, I make these statements.

Now it’s very interesting but not only does Jesus make these kinds of statements but in reality every man makes these kinds of statements. Think of the person who says the universe is… and then proceeds to describe it. Hasn’t he made an absolute statement? Has he taken a rocket ship and gone through the length and the height and the breadth of the universe and through experimental confirmation of every point in the universe by taking a rocket ship he comes back and gives you a report, the universe is…. And furthermore to get that infinite reservoir of knowledge to come up with a statement the universe is, not only would he have to take a rocket ship and visit every point in space but he would have to take an infinite number of rocket ships and visit every point in space simultaneously because one might change while he was over here.

Now think of the statement, the universe is…. Next time you open your science textbook or you read a book that’s somehow halfway intellectual, or you open a social studies book that describes history, watch for that beautiful little statement, history is…. Really now, history is…. You’ve gone and ventured to the length, breadth, height of history and you’ve come up with this titanic statement that history is…. See what you’re doing, you’re claiming autonomy and that you’re God; that’s sin in the area of the intellect. Finite man who is fallen always sins in the area of his thought life. Those are sinful statements. What do we have, the fundies with their textbook protest, worried about a few four lettered words on page 108 when the whole book starts out sinful in its very epistemological and knowledge base, it’s wholly sinful from the very start. Nobody ever objects to that. I have been before textbook committees in this state and when you make this objection they don’t even understand what you’re saying, and these are the people that are passing judgment on the text books; never heard of metaphysics and epistemology. They never heard of the fact that there is such a thing called the philosophy of knowledge. Never heard of the fact that when you make these statements, this is… you are claiming to be God, right when you make that statement; you’re presupposing that God is there and that you are that God. That’s what you’re doing, and when any person comes up and makes that kind of a statement think of this diagram; the attributes of God ripped off. They presuppose those attributes but they realign them and ultimately they align them to themselves.

Now think, as you’ve thought through the Word of God, as you’ve studied the Word of God, what sin in the Scripture does that remind you most of. Remember Isaiah 14, the sin of Satan himself. What did Satan say? I will be like the Most High God. Don’t you see in our thought life how satanic man is, I will claim these attributes for myself so I can make these sub [can’t understand word] statements about the universe and I can decree what the source of right and wrong and I will control all knowledge by myself. Satan… Satan speaks through such a person, through such thinking.

Jesus argues, then, contrasting Himself with the Pharisees, I speak because I know where I came from. Now to heighten the contrast if you read carefully what He says to the Pharisees, you’ll notice He does a little trick on the verb. Notice how He starts off? He says “I know where I came from, you don’t even know where I’m coming from.” He shifts from the past to the present. In other words, He says Pharisees, I don’t expect you to know where I was before the virgin birth, I don’t expect you to know My preexistence but you people are so stupid, so limited in your understanding you don’t even know what I’m doing, right now, in front of your face. That’s how limited your understanding is, and you, with that limited knowledge, presuppose to evaluate Me? And then even to heighten it further there’s a shift in grammar between those two clauses. One reads, I know both where I come from and where I’m going, but you know neither where I am coming nor where I am going. So it’s a deliberate either/or strong separation between God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge. The Pharisees can’t even see the present and they can’t even see a piece of the present. That’s what He’s saying.

That’s why He says now in John 8:15, “You people are judging after flesh, I’m not even judging any person.” He says you are making Me pass your requirements. And then there’s a threat, there’s an implied threat in verse 15 that He’s going to carry out as the text goes on. I right now an judging no man; later on He’s going to say I have many things to say about you people, many things, and some day you will hear Me say them before the Great White Throne; right now though I’m not judging you. Right now is the hour of grace and I’m giving you an opportunity to turn off this apostate autonomous kind of lifestyle, turn an absolute 180 and become wholly dependent on Me, My authority, and My Word. That’s the choice I give you and you’d better take it because there isn’t much time left. You judge after the flesh, I am judging no man.”

But in John 8:16 He says, “And yet if I should be judging you,” third class, maybe I will and maybe I won’t, but “if I should judge you,” let’s pick up that little business of the test, He didn’t answer. See, verse 16 is going to answer the direct attack of verse 13 but verse 14 knocks the presupposition out from under it. He’s eventually going to say I do meet the legal criteria because I do have two witnesses. See, here’s the question, here’s the presupposition behind the question. Jesus wipes this out in verse 14 and now having wiped that out He answers the question in verse 16 on His terms. He clears the groundwork so He can answer the question with His set of rules in His ballpark, not their ballpark. “But if I do judge, my judgment is valid [true]: for I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent Me.” So He claims that within the God head there are two persons that witness to Him, both the Son and the Father. John 8:17, “It is also written in your law, that the testimony of two men is true.”

Now in John 8:18-19 He answers it, “I am one that bear witness of Myself, and the Father that sent me bears witness of Me.” That’s the miracles, that would be the sign in the Jordan, that would also be the circumstances, the subtle circumstances that John the Apostle’s aged eyes and mind have thought about for many, many years, and he’s bringing to our attention. Verse 19, “Then said they unto him, Where is thy Father?” “Where is your Father?” See John’s irony, stupid people, they’re asking about God and they profess to believe in God and they’re asking, really, where’s God. But because of their blind stupidity they don’t understand what they’re really saying and in their blind stupidity their very question confesses the truth of the Christian faith. “Where’s your Father?” And Jesus gives this statement and this is one of the cardinal doctrines of the Trinity and this is one that was fought over for 400 years until the Council of Chalcedon, not just this one statement but statements like this. Watch carefully what is said here, this is one of the most important statements about Jesus Christ’s person that was ever uttered in history. “Jesus answered, You neither know Me, nor My Father: for if ye had known Me, ye should also have known My Father too.”

Turn to Matthew 11:27 for a very, very similar statement. Look at what that statement is saying about the Trinity. He says, “All things are delivered unto Me by My father, and no man knows the Son, but the Father; neither knows any man the Father, save the Son, and He to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” Now watch that very, very carefully. I want to show you what is said and I want to show you why this is very important and this is not a fine point. Here’s the Father, here’s the Son and here’s the Holy Spirit. What Jesus has just said is that you cannot know the Father at any way, shape or form, unless you meet Him here; all that is known of the Father, everything that has ever been known of the Father or ever will be known about the Father has been known by means of the Second Person of the Trinity. It is the Son, not the Father and not the Holy Spirit that is the transmitter of revelation, that is the source of knowledge. God the Father, God the Holy Spirit work through the Son. It is the Son from whom proceed all revelation.

Said another way, no revelation proceeds out of the Father and out of the Holy Spirit to us, only through the Son does such revelation proceed. The Father never directly reveals Himself except through the Son. The Holy Spirit never revealed a thing about Himself except through the Son. The Son draws together everything in Himself and therefore as in this verse, “no man knows the Son,” because the Son isn’t the object. There are many things we don’t know and the Son isn’t the issue; “no man knows the son,” and we might say probably for all eternity no man will know the Son in His essence and His being. It is the First Personality of the trinity that our worship is directed to, always the Father and therefore we pray not to the Son and not to the Holy Spirit, we pray to the Father, Father in heaven, never Jesus. You do not pray to Jesus. The source of our worship is the First Personality of the Trinity because “no man knows the Son.” The only person of the Godhead that is known, says Jesus, is the Father and that only those whom the Son grants the knowledge. It’s like a door in a room; the Father is the room and the Son is the door; you don’t study the door, you study the room but in order to study the room you’ve got to go through the door. So the Son is the door to the Father. And the Father is the ultimate object of our worship and adoration.

Now why is that an important doctrine? That is the doctrine that protects the deity of Jesus Christ. In Church history every movement… repeat, every movement that has denied the deity of Jesus Christ cuts all revelation from God. Every movement that denies the deity of Christ has always sooner or later wound up with an unknown God and unknowable God; that is always the result of destroying the deity of Jesus; destroy that and you destroy the know-ability of God Himself. God cannot be known if Jesus is not God. That has always happened. Arianism is the name for this kind of a heresy. Arianism argues that the Son is not really the Son, Jesus Christ is not really God, and Arianism always winds up with an unknown, unknowable and impotent God. In the history of the Church do you know who has always favored Arianism? And this shows you the average clod in the street senses this, don’t think I’m teaching you a fine point of doctrine that the average person in the street doesn’t sense. They may not be able to state it but they know very well; the proof of it is that every time Arianism has arisen in history the imperial powers of state love it.

During the days when this battle was being fought the Caesars loved Arianism and they hated orthodoxy. Do you know why? Because orthodoxy made Jesus superior to Caesar. But Arianism knows and the state knows that if we have a Christ who is not God and an unknowable God, then in effect the only God we’ve got is the state because the God who is unknowable is impotent, He can’t do anything, we don’t know anything about him, he’s off in the wild blue somewhere, unknown to us. And so we must have something in the interim to pull ourselves together and get it all together and what is it that gets it all together. Now no longer the sovereign unknowable unknown God but the knowable almighty state. So every movement to totalitarianism has had to attack orthodoxy. Historical point of reference, communism triumphed in Russia not just because of Lenin but because the Russian Orthodox Church had an Arian view of Jesus Christ and the Trinity. They held to a subordination concept.

One of our professors at Dallas Seminary came from Russia and I once asked him, do you suppose that if the evangelical church had occupied a position in the 19^th century in Russia that Lenin could have pulled his…with all of his radicals he could have pulled it off. And he said no, what happened in our country happened because the church lost a virile testimony to the Trinity, they lost an Almighty Christ and a knowable potent God and therefore the Czars built up their power, they built up their bureaucracy and so therefore communism, the new Czarism, comes in; it was just changing hats, but it’s the same man. Communism under Stalin developed a new Czarism. Stalin had more power that these Czars ever hoped to have; there was no change radically at all between communism and pre-communist Russia. It was all the same thing and it all started because Christians failed to teach an Almighty Jesus Christ. The orthodox church was weak and it failed and why this is very important to you is because you’re going to live over the next 5 or 10 years and you’re going to reap the results of the very same thing; the liberal churches in this city as well as all over the country have denied a potent Jesus; they have subscribed to Arianism, they have made the Son weak and if you make the Son weak God is an unknown God, and He’s an impotent God and therefore the churchmen are the ones who flock to the World Council for a world government. We’ve got to pull it together because God isn’t, He’s unknowable, He’s impotent, who cares about Him. We’ve got to deal with the imminent now, they say. Result: the political fallout from destroying the Trinity and in our own evangelical circles that is where I see the charismatic movement going; by exalting God the Holy Spirit they have destroyed God the Son and in destroying God the Son ultimately they are going to wind up on the same rock, smashed like all promoters of Arianism, people who have made the Father unknowable and unknown and the moment they do that and have a weak Jesus they too, by subjectivism and all other things, will subscribe to an almighty state. We face the same battle that has been going on with Rome for over a thousand years, and you stand in the tradition, it’s up to you and to me and to the other believers whether we’re going to go out with the Lord Jesus Christ on this verse. As He says, “You neither know Me nor My Father, if you had known Me you should have known My Father also.”

John 8:20, “These words spoke Jesus in the treasury, as Me taught in the temple: and no man laid hands on him; for his hour was not yet come.” Verse 20, and we’ll conclude here, verse 20 is an application, actually, of what we’ve discussed, to encourage believers who would be living in John’s day and would become martyrs to the almighty Roman state. These men had to lay down their lives and they needed a model for how to do it. John gave the martyrs of 90 AD a model of how to live for Christ when the state crushes you in its hands. How do you do it? You do exactly what Jesus is doing here. Martyrs, says John, don’t worry, you relax because the police won’t lay a hand on you until your hour has come. You can use Jesus as your model; if you are following Him using the faith technique, trusting and when the chips are down you blow your mouth off about the Word and sock it to them, then relax, because they won’t lay a hand on you till your hour has come and when your hour has come let them lay a hand on you because then you can be a martyr for the cause of Jesus Christ, and there are great rewards for being a martyr for the cause of Jesus Christ. So the admonition and the exhortation is one to trust Him.

Next week we’ll continue this attack between the Jews and Jesus.