Alive In Christ Series

Good morning. If you have your Bibles, please open up to John 8:21. As you all know, we have been going through the book of John, and we are almost halfway through it. We have quite a ways to go. You may recall, if you were here last week, we talked about how Jesus was being challenged once more by the Pharisees, the ruling religious elite. And Jesus being Jesus is always up for a challenge. Last week, we saw how he stood up in the middle of the temple in the middle of the festivities and said “I am the light of the world. If anyone follows me, he will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Of course, they challenged him on this. They challenged him, though, on a technicality. In their law, it required two witnesses. They told Jesus you can’t be your own witness. He said I know where I have come from and I know where I am going. You on the other hand have no idea where I have come from or where I am going. He goes on to say, if you need a witness, I am my own witness. But if you need another witness, I am going to give you my father as one who testifies on my behalf. By the way, you don’t know him because if you knew me, you would know him. Today, as we continue on in the story, they are once again having this discussion with Jesus. Jesus to this point is not telling them that he is the light of the world. He is telling them that unless they begin to believe that he is the one that he claims to be, they will die in their sins. Once again, we are going to be reading from John 8:21, the New International Version. We will be reading down to verse 30. (Scripture read here.)

Jesus is confronting the Pharisees again. There is a lot of information in these nine verses. We can’t go through all of them completely. Really, Jesus sums them up in the very first passage there in John 8:21. He says “I am going away and you will look for me.” Then he goes on to say “and you will die in your sins. Where I go you cannot come.” At this point, once again, the Pharisees are getting a little confused. They begin to grumble and mumble among themselves and say what is he going to do. Is he going to kill himself? Is that why he is saying where I go you cannot come. Jesus obviously picking up on this decides to unpack this whole passage a little bit more. He decides to let them know that it has to do really with their origins; where they are coming from and where he comes from. He goes on to say “You are from below. I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world.” When we think about this idea of world and from above and below and that sort of thing, we often think of earth and heaven. That is one way to look at it because when they refer to the word world the underlying Greek is actually cosmos. It has the idea of the physical realm. Really he is talking about the spiritual realm. He is talking about the world that they live in is a world in opposition to God. It is a world in opposition to the kingdom. It is a world in opposition to the things of God, the values of God, the holiness of God, and the purity of God. Once again, when he says he is from above, he is saying I am in alignment with the father. You are below. You are in alignment with the world and all the evil systems associated with the world, which happens to be under the control, at this point as he would say, under the evil one. We will talk about this in a few weeks when he will actually imply that the Pharisees were children of the devil. The idea back then was that the enemy, Satan particularly, is in control of the world.

In fact, we see this very clearly in 1 John 5:19 where he says “We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” The logic behind this that basic Christianity teaches is that when man fell, they lost their relationship with God. We became disconnected with God because man wanted to do his own thing. Then what happened is not only did we lose that connection with God, we lost the authority that God gave us over all of creation. You may recall back in Genesis God told the people to go forth and multiply and look over the animals and all the systems and jobs and everything else and create whatever they can, but they chose to do their own thing. Because of that, they basically gave that control away. They were supposed to oversee God’s creation while under submission to God. They chose not to be under submission. Basically, that control was handed over to Satan. That is the way it worked. Ever since then basically, the idea is that he is somewhat in control. God has allowed him to be in control. You begin to see that evil manifest itself in many different ways. If you look around and look in the news lately and you see things like the economy going up and down, you see all sorts of perversion, you see poverty, and you see weather doing weird stuff. We could say that this is all accident or we could say maybe there is something in the spiritual realm that is shaking some things up. I am not here to talk about the end times, but I think there is something going on there that gives you a clue that maybe something is up. Something big is about to happen. That is the situation. The people are living somewhat at that point in the worldly system according to the corruption of the world. So he says I am from above and you are below. You are from this world. I am not of this world. What Jesus is doing here is saying it is getting close. It is about six months and I am going to be crucified. Your whole life is about to be turned upside down, all the religious systems and everything, so I am here to warn you about something. I am here to let you know. In fact, I have told you over and over again. I told you that you would die in your sins. If you do not believe that I am the one I claim to be, you will indeed die in your sins. Indeed. Truly. Amen. That is basically what he is saying. So he is giving them a warning. In many ways, he is acting like what we would call a watchman. Back in the book of Ezekiel it talks about a watchman. The watchman was basically the person who would stand at the gate or stand on guard and when the enemy would come in and begin to invade, they would basically be the ones responsible for waking the people. Getting the people up basically and making sure they can protect themselves. If the watchmen didn’t do his job, then the watchman was responsible for the blood of the people. Jesus is acting the role of the watchmen. He is saying time is coming that things are about to change and I am letting you know right now. I have told you that you are going to die in your sins. If you do not believe that I am the one that I claim to be, you are indeed going to die in your sins. That is what he tells them.