Jesus’ Self-Witness (John 8:12–30) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul

0:00 Our scripture this morning, again, is from the gospel according to St. John. We're in the eighth chapter, and today I'll be reading verses 13 through 29. Hear then the word of God. The Pharisees therefore said to him, you bear witness of yourself.

0:26 Your witness is not true. Jesus answered and said to them, Even if I bear witness of myself, my witness is true. For I know where I came from and where I am going.

0:47 But you do not know where I come from and where I am going. You judge according to the flesh. I judge no one. And yet if I do judge, my judgment is true, for I am not alone, but I am with the Father who sent me.

1:12 And it is also written in your law that the testimony of two men is true. I am one who bears witness of myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness of me. And then they said to him, Where is your father? Jesus answered, You know neither me nor my father. If you had known me, you would have known my father also.

1:41 These words spoke Jesus in the treasury as he taught in the temple, and no one laid hands on him, for his hour had not yet come. And then Jesus said to them again, I'm going away, and you will seek me and will die in your sin. Where I go, you cannot come. So the Jews said, will he kill himself because he says, where I go, you cannot come? And he said to them, you are from beneath. I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I am he, you will die in your sins. And then they said to him, Who are you?

2:43 And Jesus said to them, Just what I've been saying to you from the beginning. I have many things to say and to judge concerning you, but he who sent me is true, and I speak to the world those things that I heard from him. They did not understand that he spoke to them of the Father. And then Jesus said to them, spoke these words, many believed in him. He who has ears to hear the word of God, let them hear. You may be seated.

3:47 let us pray again our father we ask that you would give us ears to hear what the savior has said that we may not judge him according to the flesh but that by thy spirit we might know him according to truth for we ask it in his name. Amen. Last Sunday, we looked at the beginning of chapter 8. We end at verse 12, where Jesus made one of his famous I am statements, I am the light of the world, and he who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life. And we read that the response of the Pharisees to this pronouncement of our Lord was this, you bear witness of yourself, your witness is not true.

4:59 Now there are a couple of things we need to note in this response of the Jewish leaders to Jesus' proclamation. The first thing they said was obvious that he was claiming to be something on the basis of his own testimony. He had just said, I am the light of the world. This was not John the Baptist declaring that Jesus was the light. This is Jesus himself making this affirmation. And under Jewish law, when testimony was given in the law court, for someone to be convicted, they had to be convicted on the basis of two witnesses. And the two witnesses had to agree in what was testified. And so here is Jesus declaring on his own using those words egoimi, which call back to the title of God in the Old Testament, a title of deity, and he said, I am the light of the world. And they say, you're saying that by yourself. Your witness is not true. Now, you see, the inference that the leaders made at this point was that unless two testimonies were given that corroborated one another, then the testimony had to be false and that the witness of Christ was a false witness.

6:34 I've said to you on many occasions how I react to that bumper sticker, God said it, I believe it, that settles it. I don't like that sticker. It should simply say, God said it, that settles it. Whether I believe in it or don't believe in it, if the Lord God Almighty opens His sacred mouth and makes a declaration. He doesn't need other witnesses to corroborate his testament. What he says is true. And here is the one who is the very incarnation of truth speaking to these leaders in Jerusalem, and they now forget about subtleties. They're in Jesus' face, and they said, your testimony is not true. They accused Christ of being a false witness.

7:41 Now, there's irony here because in the Greek text, the Greek word for witness is the word martyria, from which we get the English word martyr, because there's such a close relationship historically between the martyrs of the early church and their witness to the truth claims of Jesus. In other words, they bore witness to Christ by giving their lives. And because their testimony and their witness was so emphatic because it involved their own blood, the word martyr has now come down in our language from the Greek word that means to bear witness. And the irony is this. The first martyr of the Christian church was Christ Himself, and in His martyrdom, He bore supreme witness to the truth of the things that He is speaking even here. And so it terrifies me to think of anybody standing before Christ and saying, your testimony is false. If somebody says to me that my testimony is false, that's one thing.

9:18 But to hear it from Jesus Himself and to declare that His testimony is false is quite another. And yet, beloved, that's what every unbeliever in this world says to Jesus, because the spirit of unbelief accuses Christ of false witness. And if there are any such people here in the congregation this morning, I plead with them to be very, very careful before you call Christ a false witness. And so Jesus responds to this charge and says to them, even if I bear witness of myself, my witness is true. why? Because I know who I am. I know where I came from and where I'm going, but you don't know where I come from and where I am going. You judge according to the flesh. I judge no one. Now, this phrase is elliptical, and so what is understood here when Jesus says, you judge according to the flesh, I judge no one, he is saying, I don't judge anybody that way.

10:32 You judge everybody by the flesh. I don't ever judge by the flesh. I judge from the perspective of where I came from. And of course what he's saying is, my origin is heaven. I will ascend into heaven because I first descended from heaven. I know where I come from, and where I came from was eternity. But of course, he's speaking in a cryptic way to them at this point. I know where I came from. I know where I'm going. But you don't know where I come from. You don't know where I'm going. You judge according to the flesh. But if I judge, my judgment is true, for I am not alone.

11:28 but I am with the Father who sent me. As it is written in your law that the testimony of two men is true, I am one who bears witness of myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness of me. Now again, when we hear this, when we read this, we know obviously in light of the rest of Scripture that when Jesus refers to His Father who sent Him, He's obviously referring to God. who is his heavenly father. But if you can put yourself in the shoes of these people who first heard Jesus make this affirmation, they're scratching their heads when he says, you know, my father sent me here, and my father backs up my witness. My father agrees with the testimony that I give, and he testifies to me. What are you talking about?

12:25 Joseph? Who's he to back up your testimony? When we were kids, I had a friend who lived up the street who got in more fights than anybody in the community.

12:46 He got beat up every time. And every time he got beat up, he would go away crying and he would say, I'm going to get my cousin and my cousin will come and beat you up. Now is there any boy who hasn't done that or said that I'm going to get my brother? I wouldn't say that. God didn't have a brother. I'd say my sister's going to come and get you because she could take care of most of these guys. But we had Eric who was always talking about his cousin. Wouldn't you know a few years ago at one of the PCA ministry conventions, I met a fellow who had the same last name, and I said, you're not related to Eric, are you? That's my cousin.

13:37 I was afraid he was going to say, I've been looking for you for 20 years. But there's always this idea, I'm going to get my dad. My dad's bigger than your dad. And so they're looking around to see who this Father is to whom Jesus is appealing, who has so much authority that He sent Jesus to say what He's saying, and who is going to back up that testimony. They have no idea that He's speaking of His heavenly Father. And so Jesus said, it's not my self-testimony. and as this interrogation continues throughout the gospel of John, we see Jesus appealing to the writings of the sacred scriptures of the Old Testament that were the Word of God that the Father had given to the Jewish people that bore witness to His Son who was to come. These people obviously weren't present when the heavens opened and God declared with a voice that was audible at the time of Jesus' baptism, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

14:53 Nicodemus got it. Remember when Nicodemus came to Jesus at night and he said, teacher, we know that you are sent by God or you would not be able to do the things that you were doing Nicodemus understood the function of miracle. I hear people say that the miracles of the New Testament prove the existence of God. No, they don't. God demonstrates His existence long before a single miracle is ever performed by anybody. The function of the miracle is not to prove the existence of God, but it is to demonstrate and authenticate a messenger of God. That's why Jesus said, if you don't believe Me for what I say, believe Me for My works that I do.

15:50 but here he doesn't talk about God. He talks about the Father, and he says a string of contrasts here. Notice this. He said, I know where I came from, and I know where I'm going. You don't know where I come from. You don't know where I'm going. You judge according to the flesh. I don't judge according of the flesh. And yet if I do judge, my judgment is true. I am one who bears witness of myself, and so on. And they said, where is your father? Now here's a verse that we need to pay close attention to. Jesus said, you don't know me or my father, because if you had known me, you would have known my father also. I came to you. You don't know where I came from, and you don't know who I am, and the reason you don't know who I am is because you don't know my Father.

16:53 Now later on, he'll turn this around when they appeal to be children of God. and he will say to them, you don't know the Father, because if you knew the Father, you would know the Son. There are millions, if not billions of people out there in this world who claim to know God, who claim to know God as their Father, yet they reject the Son. You cannot know God the Father and repudiate the Son, and you cannot know the Son and repudiate the Father because their testimony is one. The Father bears witness to the Son. The Son bears witness to the Father. These words Jesus spoke in the treasury as he taught in the temple. The treasury there was a portion of the temple. They had 13 receptacles that were shaped in the form of the shofar, the ram's horn, and each one had inscribed upon it a different need or concern where the alms would be used to alleviate suffering in the community.

18:14 And in the midst of this place where the donations were given, the greatest gift that God has given us is attacked. But no one laid hands on him, for his hour had not yet come. How many times do we get that strange foreboding comment throughout the Gospel of John, where Jesus speaks it or John speaks with respect to Jesus' hour?

18:55 My hour has not yet come. Oscar Kuhlmann, the Swiss New Testament scholar, wrote a trilogy of books that were very important in the 20th century, one of which was called simply Christ and Time, where Kulman analyzed in great detail and in great depth the time words that we find in sacred Scripture. He noted, for example, that in our language, we have two words for time. We have one word, time, two words in the Greek. There's the word chronos. This is called a wristwatch. More technically, it's called a chronometer, something that measures chronos. It measures the moment-by-moment passage of time. And that's one way in which the Bible speaks of the word time in terms of chronological sequence. But there's another word for time in the Greek that is pregnant with meaning, and it is the word kairos. And the word kairos refers to a specific moment in time. We have something close to it, but not exactly.

20:13 in our language, we distinguish between the words historical and historic. Somebody just said to me the other day, such and such was a historical moment. And I smiled and I said, every moment's a historical moment. What he meant was it was a historic moment, a moment that was of great significance, a moment that would define the future, a moment in which the movement of the past had reached its climax. And throughout Scripture, we have many such moments, kairotic moments. The exodus is a kairotic moment. The birth of Christ is a kairotic moment. The cross is a kairotic moment. It's a moment in time that is so pregnant that it defines all of time. And that time, Jesus keeps referring to as his hour. but there's also a little vacillation in the use of this term hour in the Bible. Sometimes it is filled with the idea of the hour of glory, the hour of exultation, His finest hour, but other times it refers to the darkest moment of Christ's life, the hour of His agony, the hour of His grand passion, the hour of His suffering, and of His death. But again, there's irony in this very text here. Let me just drop down here for a second.

21:56 Jesus says in verse 28, when you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He and that I do nothing of myself, but as my Father taught me, I speak these things. And what does Jesus mean when He says, when I am lifted up? it's clear that there's a double significance to this, because His hour comes when He is lifted up on the cross to be crucified. And that's what He's talking about when He said, I'm going away, and where I'm going, you can't come. The initial movement there is not about His ascension into heaven, but He's talking now about leaving them, and they are confused by this. Is He going to kill Himself? He could have answered, no, you're going to do it for me, but when I am lifted up on the cross...

22:59 that being lifted up as a public spectacle of scorn and hatred and animosity is also the time of His exaltation as the Redeemer of His people. It is at once His darkest hour and at the same time His greatest hour as it is in that hour that He brings us our redemption. The contrast continues in verse 23. You're from beneath. I'm from above. You're from this world. Therefore, I'm not of this world.

23:48 Therefore, I said to you that you will die in your sins. for you do not believe that I am He, Egoimi. You will die in your sins. Let me just conclude this with this careful warning. In the Bible, when the Bible speaks of death, friends, it speaks of dying in one of two ways. For the people of God, for the saints of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, Their death is precious in the sight of God.

24:26 And it is said of them when they pass that they die in faith. And all of those who die in faith enter into that place that God has prepared for His people from the foundation of the world. the only other way you can die is to die in your sins. Now the Bible makes it clear that we're all sinners. but when the Bible speaks of being in sin or in faith, it talks about the state of our souls before God. A person who has no faith, the unconverted person, remains in their sin, and the worst calamity that could ever befall a human being is to die in that state. There are people in this room this morning.

25:31 who are still in their sins. and who, if they do not come to Christ, will die in their sins.