Another Confrontation
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep My saying, he shall never see death.” John 8:51
I am not one who likes confrontation. I know what I believe, and it usually does little good to argue with people who believe differently. That doesn’t mean that I won’t tell others what I believe in a non-confrontational way, but I won’t argue, particularly about God’s word, because the majority of folks are not familiar enough with the Bible to discuss scripture rationally with conviction. There is more about God’s word that I don’t know than what I do know, but I am learning all the time. Jesus was constantly being confronted by the religious leaders in Israel because they were jealous of Him. He was attracting a lot of attention and causing some folks to listen to His message. The religious leaders became very concerned about losing their power over the people. One of the worst kinds of people who disrupt just about everything are “control freaks”. They get satisfaction out of the power that they hold over others. The Pharisees, scribes, and other leaders were a lot like our politicians today. Maybe instead of calling our leaders Democrats and Republicans, we should just call them Pharisees and Sadducees! I won’t say which is which because it doesn’t really matter.
Jesus was in another confrontation with the religious leaders, and He told them that they were of their father, the devil, because they refused to believe the truth about God’s Son. Well, you can imagine their reaction. They acted like children when one child calls another child a name, and the other child calls him the same name. The leaders accused Jesus of being possessed by a devil. He told them that He did not have a devil, that He was honoring His Father, but they were dishonoring His Father. Whoever dishonors Christ, dishonors God. Everything that Jesus did on earth was for His Father’s glory, not His own.
Then Jesus said to them that if a man keeps His saying, he shall never see death. Well, that did it. The leaders said that now they were certain that Jesus was possessed by a devil. They had done this before. In Matthew 12:22-28, Jesus had cast a devil out of and healed a man who was blind and unable to speak, and the Pharisees accused Jesus of using the powers of Beelzebub. In scripture, Beelzebub is given different identifications: the prince of evil spirits, the prince of moral impurity, the Philistine god of flies, and the lord of the dwelling of evil spirits. Jesus was certainly a patient Man when it came to the attacks by those who hated Him. When Jesus said that to keep His sayings would keep a person from death, the leaders wanted to know how that could be true since Abraham and all the prophets had died. These men were only considering physical death. What is strange about this is that the Pharisees believed in a bodily resurrection (Matthew 22:28), but their minds were in the here and now, not in eternity. They then wanted to know if Jesus thought Himself to be greater than Abraham, who was a follower of God, obedient, yet he died as did the prophets of Israel. The Jews accused Jesus of putting Himself upon a pedestal.
Jesus replied to them that it was their God, His Father, that honored Him, and not Himself. He was only doing the will of His Father. He said that Abraham believed in Him and rejoiced that God would send a Savior. The leaders were confounded. They questioned the fact that Jesus was less than 50 years old, yet He had seen Abraham? Jesus then hit them with another outstanding fact: “Truly, truly, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I Am.” Jesus is eternal, no beginning or end. He was with the Father before creation, which was an incalculable amount of time before Abraham was born. For Jesus to claim that He was in existence before Abraham was the last straw for these religious leaders. They picked up stones to throw at Him, but He managed to disappear from them because it wasn’t His time to die nor was this the manner in which He would be sacrificed.
These religious leaders are like so many today who have so much pride that they can’t own up to their sins and confess that they are helpless and hopeless without Christ. I suppose anywhere there is a crowd of people, like Walmart, a sporting activity, on the job, or school, the percentage of people who have never repented and received Christ is fairly high. I have no statistics to back that up other than observations I have made noting the actions, words people say, and general attitude of folks. The pollsters tell us that the number of people who say they believe in God or who go to church on a regular basis gets smaller and smaller as each year passes. There are likely hundreds of reasons that could be sited which would help to explain the lack of interest in the things of God, but none of them point to the Lord or to the gospel. God and His word haven’t changed one iota. People are still sinners, and Christ is still the Savior of all who repent and receive Him, and those who do will live forever with Him. Like Jesus said: Whoever hears His word and obeys it will never see eternal death.