Read John 8:48-58
"Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am! At this, they picked up stones to stone him" John 8:58
The saying goes, ‘People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’. It means if your life is vulnerable to accusation you shouldn’t start accusing others. Throwing stones is usually an expression that means attacking someone verbally, defensively. In the second part of the ch 8 discourse, the religious leaders are reaching for rocks! Why were they so offended? They need to be careful…
Yesterday we read how Jesus cut to the heart of their problem—not believing he was God and not believing they were slaves to sin even because they were Abraham’s children (the religion trap). Now they get nasty, they play the Samaritan card at Jesus and accuse him of being demon possessed (2 of the biggest insults in the Jewish book).
Jesus explains that if Abraham had’ve seen Jesus’ day, his coming into the world to reverse the curse of sin (Gen 12:3) he would’ve rejoiced. Now the Jewish leaders are really seeing red. They are so offended they cannot engage spiritually. They bunker down in their offence, “You are not yet fifty years old,” the Jews said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”
Jesus (as usual) delivers a profound response, “before Abraham was born, I am!”
Were they offended that Jesus had invoked the name of Abraham, lightly? No. More to the point, Jesus had invoked the name of YHWH, the sacred name for God— ‘I AM’ (Exodus 3:14). Jesus was saying he was before all things, that he was God. And in doing so he had just invoked the death penalty on himself.
The next time someone says “Oh, but Jesus never claimed to be God. That’s only what other people said about him” take them to John 8! The religious leaders knew exactly why they were reaching for rocks.
Are you seeing Jesus clearly for who he is? Or are you having an each way bet with other gods? Jesus never said he was ‘one of the ways to God’ he said “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”.
RevGeoff
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