I
know that you are Abraham’s descendants….If you are Abraham’s children, do the
deeds of Abraham. But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told
you the truth, which I heard from God, this Abraham did not do…You are doing
the deeds of your father…If God were your father you would love me…You are of
your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. [Excerpted
from John 8.]
This is a dangerous passage because
they contain words that only God can speak but which man too often presumptuously
speaks. In only the rarest of rare occasions might we hear a man speak these
words, and then in fear and trembling being moved by the Holy Spirit – so it is
better to say that only God can speak these words and if a rarest of rare
occasion should come upon us let us trust God to help us negotiate it in
humility and sorrow knowing that presumption on own part is grounds for our own
conviction. Only God knows the hearts of men and women.
It is dangerous enough to judge others,
it is far more dangerous to attribute the parentage of others to the devil;
these are words only God can speak.
Those whom Jesus is addressing are
Abraham’s children one minute and the next minute they are not. Paul helps our
understanding in Romans Chapter 9:
But
it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel; nor are
they all children because they are Abraham’s descendents, but: THROUGH ISAAC
YOUR DESCENDANTS WILL BE NAMED. That is, it is not the children of the flesh
who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as
descendents.
Paul also writes to the Galatians: For you are all sons of God through faith in
Jesus Christ. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed
yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave
nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all in Christ
Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs
according to the promise.
If Jesus’ audience had no warrant to
trust in its genealogy, perhaps we should take care not to trust in our
traditional or current affinities. Being members of a spiritual or religious
culture, no matter how correct in doctrine and practice, is not the same as having
a relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ.
The evil in the world as expressed in
John 8 is clothed in religious garb. This is not evil as we normally think of
evil; and indeed evil has many forms – some hideous to the eye, all hideous to
the heart. Some forms of evil would have us think that all religion is evil;
some religion would have us think that all ways of living other than its
particular way are evil. As in this chapter, so in all of life’s chapters, the
Person of Jesus Christ is the line of demarcation.
Sometimes things are as they appear;
sometimes they are not as they appear. There are those who profess Christ but
who perpetrate evil; there are those who make no explicit profession of Christ
but who are merciful and gracious. There are those who have heard the Gospel
yet who live like devils; there are those who have never heard the Gospel and
yet live like saints. There are tensions in life that only find their
resolution before God’s judgment seat.
Betsey
and Corrie ten Boom, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others witnessed concentration
camp guards with hearts filled with sustained merciless evil turn to Christ in
repentance. Despite appearances, those guards had appointments with redemption.
And yet there are others, whether appearing in overt wickedness or in the garb
of religious or social respectability, that have no such appointment with
redemption; while on the one hand we acknowledge this reality on the other we
admit it is beyond our understanding. We must never underestimate evil, but we
must also never forget that evil is no match for God Almighty.
The
context of John 8 is the Temple; it is not a
heroin den, nor a sex-slave house, nor a field of genocide, nor an executive
board room ruled by the dollar; the context is the Temple. One only has to read the Letters to
the Seven Churches in Revelation if one wants to see what evil looks like in
the church; some of the evil is apparent, some of the evil is not – some of the
evil in the Seven Churches is only seen by the piercing eyes of Christ. Let us
not forget that the Laodicean church was an affluent church – so much for the
health and wealth Gospel, but also so much for any Gospel which is defined by
economics – including an economic class’s status quo. When Christians speak
more of the economy than they do of the Christ of the Cross and the Cross of
Christ what do we tell the world about where our hearts are? About where our
treasure is?
The
words of Jesus Christ in John 8 do not lead me to wonder about others, they
confront me with myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment