As we get deeper into the 8th chapter of John’s Gospel, I want to just say how struck I am at the importance of the reality of the Trinity and that doctrine of the Trinity to me and us as Christians.  In the notes that follow, I scratch the surface at the doctrine, and once again light upon how the truth of the Trinity has such an important affect on our lives and relationship to our Lord and Savior.  I hope you take time to reflect on the complexity, and yet the simplicity of this great truth about God’s being and personality.  Because He is who He is, you can know Him in a way that no man ought to know Him – certainly a way that no man deserves to know Him.

His depth of character, and complexity of being only magnifies the privilege of entering into a relationship with His Son, and sets in sharp relief the gracious state of our situation, namely our adoption, relative to His kingdom and His heavenly family.  This week, ask yourself this question: what does Jesus mean to me as it pertains to my relationship to the Father?  Words like “reconciliation” or “justification” might pass through your mind, or perhaps more simply “peace.”  I thank God for the reality of the life and death of Jesus Christ.

Enjoy the notes – and have a great week!

John 8:12-20

8:12 Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

The Backdrop

Sinclair Ferguson points out that there were 4 large candles in the courtyard of the temple. He also points out that John is indicating that Jesus fulfills three pictures at the feast of tabernacles: 1. the tabernacling of his people, 2. the light of the world, and 3. the life giving water.

In fact, there are a lot of parallels here to being born again, which we read about in chapter three – for instance, we will note the similarities between walking in darkness, and being dead in our trespasses and sins; as Piper says, “Dead people are blind; so they need life.”

Walking in Darkness

There is something starting here about Jesus’ statement about His being “the light”, and that is that He’s addressing the condition of those who do not walk in that light.  In other words, the presupposition that Christ makes is that the whole world is in a condition of darkness.  Ryle comments, “These words imply that the world needs light, and is naturally in a dark condition.”

So all men without Christ are without light.  Ryle says we can see this to be the case in our daily lives as we look around us: “The vast majority of men neither see nor understand the value of their souls, the true nature of God, nor the reality of the world to come!”

This evoked a terrible image in my mind – that of a group of blind people with no one to guide them. If you’ve ever watched a blind person operate, you’ll notice that if they are used to being blind they move slowly and carefully.  But observe the one who is freshly blind and still getting used to the tremendous difficulty of feeling around, this is a man most to be pitied.  Now imagine a whole mass of blind people who refuse to acknowledge their blindness at all!  They confidently wander into danger after danger, keep falling, keep injuring themselves, all the while living as though they know better!  As if they can see the full picture…and yet they can’t see a single thing!  Would you take council from a person like this?  Of course not.  That’s why Christ told the disciples, not to follow the teaching of the Pharisees because they were “blind guides” (Matt. 15:14) and we’ll talk more about that in a minute.

Now we must also examine what Jesus is saying about Himself.  This is quite a declaration! Jesus is saying that He is the light of the entire “World.”  He is making another exclusive claim about Himself here. Certainly “whoever” is a qualifier to the word “world”, and it causes us to ask questions about what John means by this phrase.  What does he mean by “light of the world”?  We know by simple deduction that all men don’t walk in this light, just because the light of the world came, doesn’t mean that these men could see it – the blind man cannot see the sun even on a beautiful day – he’s still blind.

John Piper explores more deeply what this phrase “light of the world” means by separating its meaning into four areas:

1. Jesus being the light of the world means, the world has no other light than Him. Apart from Him there is only darkness. Ryle says it this way, “For this state of things, the Lord Jesus Christ declares Himself to be the only remedy.”
2. It means therefore that all the world and everyone in it needs Jesus as the light.
3. It means that the world was made for this light.  God made the world for this light.  Creation was made for this light to fill it. It’s not a foreign light to this world, it the light of the owner of the world. The light of Jesus illumines everything in its proper beauty. Without this light we can’t see the world and how it was meant to be in God’s eyes. I think Ps. 36:9 is a great example of this, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.”
4. He is the light that will one day light the entire world. Piper says, “One day this world will be filled with the light of Jesus and nothing else. When this light comes, it not only makes sin plain but sooner or later it will take all darkness and banish it out of the world. All the works of darkness will be banished out of the world, all the sons of darkness will be banished out of the world, which is why Jesus calls Hell the outer darkness. There will be not darkness in the world, in the universe. Hell is utterly outside of the creation God has made. Except that it is held in being in its unique place, and it’s dark, totally dark. And don’t get bent out of shape about fire without light – that’s not a problem for God. There are more horrors in Hell than you’ve dreamed of…darkness…utter darkness.”

The Promise to His Followers

The third thing we see Jesus saying in this verse, besides His presupposition on the state of the world, and His declaration that He is the light of the world, is the result of coming to Him and “following” Him.

What does it mean to “follow” Christ?  Ryle is very helpful here, he says, “To follow Christ is to commit ourselves wholly and entirely to Him as our only leader and Savior, and to submit ourselves to Him in every matter, both of doctrine and practice. ‘Following’ is only another word for ‘believing.’”

Our reward for following/believing is to receive the “light of life.”

There is a beauty in this, and a rich history behind the idea of Christ as the coming light.  C.H. Spurgeon notes that during the darkest ages of history God chose to reveal to the prophets some of the most glorious news of the impending birth of the Christ.  Amid the distresses of our own lives, God has given us a bright Morning Star, He has fashioned within us that knowledge of the holy, that light is also in us because Christ’s Spirit has come to reside within us.  Spurgeon says, “In the worst times we are to preach Christ and to look to Christ! In Jesus there is a remedy for the direst of diseases and a rescue from the darkest of despairs.”

Read Isaiah 9:1-2 and we find this is the case.  It says, “But there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.”

To have the hope of eternity dwelling within us, to have the wisdom of God made manifest to us, and to have all the promises of God illumined to us in a way our ancestors before Christ never dreamed of, these are all manifestations of the fact that indeed those who come to Christ will “have the light of life”!

If I were a preacher and I were allotted 45 minutes to talk on one verse, it would be easy to talk more about this verse and all that it means.  But I must be satisfied for the time being and move on to the reaction this statement provoked from the Pharisees.

Side Note: As we read through the rest of this dialogue here, it almost seems a bit disjointed, as if Christ is allowing the conversation to get off his main declaration in verse 12 that He is the light of the world.  However, upon closer study, this isn’t the case at all. As we continue reading, it’s crucial to see how He’s using their interruption and the conversation about His truthfulness, and the connection to His heavenly Father to validate the declaration in verse 12.  Piper explains, “He isn’t an autonomous light. If Jesus is the light of the world He is the light of the world precisely because of his relationship with the Father.”

8:13-14 So the Pharisees said to him, “You are bearing witness about yourself; your testimony is not true.” [14] Jesus answered, “Even if I do bear witness about myself, my testimony is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going.

My Testimony is True

This is kind of a strange comment I think, and one that is hard to understand in a cursory reading.  What does Jesus mean that His testimony is true because He knows where He has coming from and where He is going?  What does that mean? Well, what seems enigmatic at first is actually not very hard to figure out with some thought.  The reason Jesus knows from where He is coming and going is because He is God and the Son of God.

Ferguson says, “He is saying as we read elsewhere in John’s gospel that he had come from there very side of the Father. He was in the beginning with God, and He was God. And the reason His testimony is valid and to be trusted, is because He is God.  And because God is to be absolutely trusted because his word is infallibly true.  Not only so, but it follows logically that there is no higher testimony to which Jesus could appeal.  You see they say to him ‘appeal to a higher testimony and then we’ll believe you.’ But since He is God there is no higher testimony for Him to appeal to. You don’t come to God and say ‘Prove yourself to me. Call in some more reliable witness than you are.’  So he says my testimony is reliable and valid and true because of my personal identity.”

The last thing to note about this little portion of Christ’s response is that he tells them that they don’t know as much about Him as they think they do. They are making all kinds of wild assumptions about Him, and Christ is not only setting them straight on the purpose of His ministry, but He’s also saying in affect, “you are assuming too much; you don’t know the first thing about me or where I came from.”

8:15 You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one.

This reminds us of what Jesus had said in chapter seven.  He said, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” (John 7:24)  These people can’t judge correctly because they are judging according to the flesh.  They judge what they don’t understand. Their assumptions are built on false premises. Why? Because they are judging from a position of darkness. Back to my analogy of blind men, this is like having these blind men tell Jesus what He looks like, and how he ought to style his hair one way or another, or shave his beard one way or another. What utter nonsense!  They can’t even see – they’re in no position to be giving advice about how he styles his facial hair!

So just as we mentioned earlier, Christ had used this same illustration in Matthew 15:14, and its worth marking in your text so that you can memorize it and keep on alert for “blind guides” in our own day and age.  This is why I so regularly harp on the false teachers of today – it is because they are dangerous!  They are blind guide who’d love nothing more than for you to gleefully and ignorantly skip down the street and fall into a sinkhole! All the to praise of their father, the Devil! And we’ll touch more on that front later in the chapter…

Fellow brothers and sisters, this is scary stuff. First, we must be watchful not to fall into the net of false teaching.  Second, we must test all teaching by the light of the Word of God.  Third, we must not regard the opinions of world as if they mean anything.

I Did Not Come to Judge

Sometimes it’s easy to read an isolated portion of Holy Scripture and forget that there is more to the story than an isolated verse. We have a phrase in theology for correctly reading the entire Bible in light of everything said, and not isolating single passages apart from the entire scope of Scripture, and that term is simply “always interpret Scripture according to Scripture” (2 Pet. 1:20-21).  There’s a lot of meaning in that term that I won’t go into here, except to say that we ought to follow basic rules for correct Biblical interpretation when looking at a difficult passage.  Some of the rules include the necessity of interpreting the implicit by the explicit, and the difficult by the more clear.  For we assume the Bible to be completely consistent and coherent.

So what did Jesus mean when He said, “I judge no one”?  What He meant was exactly what He said, namely that during His earthly ministry He didn’t come to judge anyone.  He mission during this period was not to judge humanity but to save humanity. His earthly ministry revolved around salvation (John 3:17; 12:47).

However, when Christ returns, we are told that He will judge the world, and that all judgment has, in fact, been given into His hands.  So it is not as if He will never judge the world, or that we will somehow escape this judgment (Acts 17:31; Romans 2:16).

8:16-18 Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me. [17] In your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. [18] I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me.”

So the first appeal Christ made was to His deity.  They could trust Him because He was and is God. Therefore He is trustworthy. Here He’s saying something else.  He’s saying that even in according to the strict Law of Moses, His testimony was true because He had two witnesses.  Who are the two witnesses?  Jesus is one of them, and the other is the Father. This is a hint at His deity, and the fact that the Father was “always with Him” – something we’ll talk about more when we get to verse 29.

I mentioned in the last section of scripture about how in order to condemn an adulteress to death there had to be at least two witnesses – and preferably three.  The same was true for other capitol offenses or testimony in the courts (see Numbers 35:30, Deut. 22:22-24 etc.)

8:19 They said to him therefore, “Where is your Father?” Jesus answered, “You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”

At the announcement that He had more than one witness, the Pharisees stopped Him again and said, “wait a minute, who is your father?” To which Jesus responds that they don’t know His Father.

Now to them this may have seemed a little odd, since perhaps they might have been familiar with Joseph, or have heard a little background info on Jesus from some of the folks listening to Him.  They probably weren’t completely ignorant of Jesus’ life, but it seems that there’s also a chance that they were simply by their question.  The other possibility here is that they knew of Joseph, but when they said “where is your Father” they were meaning to say “where is he we want to call him as a witness – go ahead and bring him out so we can question him.”  They may have even been hinting that they thought Jesus might have been born illegitimately (MacArthur – citing verse 41).  But whatever the case, “they were rejecting Him” (MacArthur).

Ironically, later in the discussion in verse 41 Jesus says, “You are doing the works your father did.” And the Pharisees responded by saying, “We were not born of sexual immorality. We have one Father—even God.”  But of course Christ goes on to correct them – but we don’t need to read that far to hear Christ’s rebuke, He’s already rebuked them in verse 19, they were just too dense to see it.  When Christ says, “You know neither me nor my Father” He is saying that they don’t know God! He is saying point blank that the religious leaders of the day didn’t even know the author of their religion.  What an insult, but what truth!

The Nature of the Trinity and Our Privilege

Not a week goes by and we don’t see John recording for us some very clear manifestation of Christ’s teachings on the nature of the Godhead.  It is not insignificant that Christ says here, “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”

Not only does the statement have significance in the context of the discussion Christ is having with these false teachers, but it rings true for us today.  The reason is thus: if we know Jesus, if we have a relationship with Him, by this relationship we also “know” the Father as well. That because the Holy Spirit has befriended us by the power of the new birth (John 3) we have entered into a family in which the Creator of the Universe is our daddy.  The significance for daily living cannot be understated.  When we commune with Christ we commune with the Father – what more do we need out of life than that?

Because of Christ we have “boldness and access” to the Father (Eph. 3:12), and can confidently approach the throne of the great God of the Universe (Heb. 4) because of how we are related to Him – we are adopted (Heb.12)!

Spurgeon relished the reality of what the Trinity means for us and said this, “He who comes forth fresh from beholding the face of God will never fear the face of man.”  What splendid promises, what beauty we have the privilege to access, what depth of love are we at leisure to plumb.  We who were sinners are now related through adoption to our great Creator.  All because of the significance of Christ’s words here – “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”

8:20 These words he spoke in the treasury, as he taught in the temple; but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.

The “treasury” could have meant a number of things, and the ESV Study Bible has some helpful notes on this:

The treasury as a structure is mentioned in Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 19.294; Jewish War 6.282) and likely was located adjacent to the Court of the Women (Josephus, Jewish War 5.200; cf. Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4). The NT occurrences of this Greek term may indicate either a collection box for the treasury or the treasury structure itself. Furthermore, in John 8:20 the Greek preposition (en), translated as “in the treasury,” can mean “in the vicinity of” (i.e., “at” or “by”); thus it need not be assumed that Jesus and the disciples had access to the secured halls that stored the immense wealth of the temple.

I have mentioned before that when no one arrested Him, it was because He was completely sovereign over the events of His life and ministry. No one by Christ controlled Christ. No one set the agenda for God besides God.  He and He alone had complete control over His destiny – an even more mind-bending thought when we meditate upon His sufferings, and the fact that at any time He could have called down myriads of angels to vanquish His foes (Matt. 26:53).