When I was a kid, I was a huge fan of the Star Wars movies.
I can still remember sitting in the theater, watching that climactic scene in
The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker was engaged in that epic
lightsaber duel with Darth Vader. Here was Luke, the clean-cut, nice guy,
unlikely hero, trading blows with his evil nemesis. We were on the edge of our
seats, and we just knew that Luke would win, evil would be vanquished, and
there would be peace in the galaxy once more. But the scene didn’t end that
way. As Luke clings to a pole on a ledge over this cavernous airshaft, Darth
Vader said those four words that shocked us all: “I am your father!” And Luke
argued and disputed it, crying out in disbelief, “No!” as he plummeted into the
airshaft. Prior to that scene, Luke never knew who his father was. He had been
raised by his uncle, and mentored by the great Obi Wan Kenobi. In the absence
of his father, these men had shaped him into the person he had become. He bore
far more resemblance of character to these men than he did to his actual
biological father. Even though, biologically Darth Vader was his father, he was
not following in his father’s footsteps, and in that epic scene, he vows that
he will not come along side his father, but will do what is right.
This text reminds me of that scene a little bit. In this
text, Jesus is talking to a group of Jewish people – a group that had come to
some level of belief in Him, but it was not a genuine faith commitment. They
begin to dispute His words about being set free by His truth, and they claim
that they do not need to be set free because of who their father is. They are
the children of Abraham, and they say that they have never been enslaved. Never
mind that this is blatantly not true – for they had been continually enslaved
to various nations throughout their history. Jesus was talking about being
enslaved to sin. That is the true condition of every human being, no matter
their ethnicity or history. And so Jesus begins to talk about the truth of who
their father really is. And it is a difficult and painful truth for any person,
Israelite or Gentile to swallow. But as painful and difficult as this truth is,
it is necessary for us to understand the reality of our true spiritual condition,
and the identity of our true father, in order to see our great need to be
rescued by the saving work of Jesus Christ, and adopted by God into His family
forever. The passage speaks to us about the things we put our trust in, and
challenges us to make sure that we are not trusting in false assurances for our
spiritual satisfaction.
Verse 38 sort of sets the tone for the whole passage. Jesus
says, “I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also
do the things which you heard from your father.” As we so often say, “Like
father, like son.” Our character and conduct demonstrate our true position,
either within the family of God or outside of it. Jesus’ divine Sonship can be
demonstrated through the things which He says and does, which are things that
He has seen with His Father. If we truly belong to God, then there will be
certain “family resemblances” that are evident in our conduct, our character,
and our conversation. And to this group of people, Jesus says, “You do the
things which you heard from your father.” So, who is their father? We will see
in this passage who they claim their father to be, but we will also see the
cold hard truth about what their character and conduct demonstrates, and the
family resemblance that they actually bear.
I. Biological descent from a godly heritage does not place
us in the family of God.
(vv37-41a)
As you might have already guessed, I love movies. One of my
all time favorites is The Sound of Music. When the Von Trapp family fled from Austria , as depicted at the end of the film,
they made their way to the United States ,
ultimately settling down on a mountainside in Vermont . Come with us next year to Vermont on our mission
trip, and we’ll take you there to the Trapp Family Lodge. When we were there a
few weeks ago, some of us had a close encounter with a real live descendant of the
Von Trapp family there. Her grandmother was Maria Von Trapp. When she was
pointed out to us, I had this immediate thought, “Oh yeah, she kind of looks
like Julie Andrews.” Then I realized what a stupid thought that was. She is not
related to Julie Andrews. She is related to the person Julie Andrews played in
the movie! We wondered if we should go up and talk to her, but I could envision
myself saying something ridiculous like, “So, how do you solve a problem like
Maria?” Instead, we just said hello and went about our business, and let her go
about hers. I don’t want to assume that she derives her entire sense of
identity from being related to a family that had a movie made about them.
But some people do want to base their identity on their
family ties, and even put their spiritual identity and their eternal hopes in
their family tree. Perhaps you are the son or daughter of a preacher or a
missionary. Maybe your grandfather was a faithful deacon, or your grandmother
was a faithful Sunday School teacher. Maybe you were brought up in a family
that loved the Lord in a Bible-saturated home. Praise God for that. But none of
these things mean that you automatically have a right relationship with God.
You have heard me say perhaps before that God does not have any grandchildren.
He only has sons and daughters, and those are the ones who come to Him
personally by faith in Jesus Christ. You can inherit a lot of things from your
ancestors. You cannot inherit salvation from them. You cannot be a generation
removed from God. Each person has to make that faith commitment to Him for
themselves.
This is what Jesus is saying to His audience here in the early
part of this text. When He spoke of being set free by His truth, they claimed
that they did not need to be set free by His truth, because they were Abraham’s
descendants. Here in verse 37, Jesus says, “I know that you are Abraham’s
descendants.” But then in verse 39, when they repeat that Abraham is their
father, Jesus challenges that assertion and says, “If you are Abraham’s children, do the deeds of Abraham.” He says
that their deeds prove that they are not really Abraham’s children. So, is
Jesus contradicting Himself here, or speaking out of both sides of His mouth?
No, not at all.
The thrust of what Jesus is saying cannot really be detected
in the English text. If we look at the underlying Greek words that Jesus is
using here, we see what He is getting at. In verse 37, he says, “I know that
you are Abraham’s descendants,” and
the Greek word is the word sperma.
You recognize the connection with the English word sperm. It has to do merely with biology. They possess the same
biological DNA with the family of Abraham. But, the word He uses in verse 39 is
different. He says that they are not acting like Abraham’s children, and the Greek word there is tekna. This word speaks not merely of biology, but of relationship.
The difference is not hard to see, especially in our day when multitudes of
children are “fathered” biologically by men who have no desire to maintain a
“fatherly relationship” with them. They are fathers in the sense of the word sperma, but their children do not have a
relationship with them in the sense of the word tekna. So here, the Jews can look to Abraham as their father in the
biological sense (they are products of his sperma)
but not all of them have this kind of relationship to him in the sense of being
his tekna. They have not learned from
or emulated the character of Abraham.
In verse 37 Jesus says, “I know that you are Abraham’s
descendants (his sperma, his
biological offspring), yet you seek to
kill Me.” Then in verse 39 He says, “If you are Abraham’s children (his tekna, his children who are related to
him and who emulate his character), 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.” In the account of Abraham in the book of
Genesis, we see a man who believed in the Lord, and who was made righteous
before God through his faith in Him (Gen 15:6). We see a man who obeyed God
(12:1-9; 22:1-19), and who welcomed the divine messengers of God with
hospitality (18:1-8). Abraham was not a perfect man, and the Bible records some
of his flaws, but at the end of his life, God could say of Abraham that he
“obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes, and My laws”
(25:6). But these things are not true of the group of his biological
descendants that Jesus is confronting here in the text. Jesus has come as the
ultimate messenger of God – God Himself in human flesh – and they are not
receiving Him. Rather than continuing to abide in His word, as Jesus says in
verse 31 (the true mark of being a follower of Jesus), they reject His word,
and seek to kill Him. He says in verse 37, “My word has no place in you.” In
rejecting Jesus, they are rejecting God, and thus proving that they are not
ultimately Abraham’s children. Jesus says to them, “You are doing the deeds of
your father,” but the clear implication is that their true father is not
Abraham.
The really interesting thing about this is that Abraham’s
true children (His true tekna) can be
found even outside of Abraham’s biological descendants (His sperma). In Romans 3:28-29, Paul writes,
“he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is
outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is
that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is
not from men, but from God.” A right relationship with God is not a product of
mere biology, and it cannot be obtained through an external ritual such as Jewish
circumcision, or even Christian baptism, but it is something that is received
through a personal relationship with God whereby we receive His saving grace
through faith. In Romans 9:6, Paul says, “they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel , nor are they all children
because they are Abraham’s descendants.” There Paul uses the same two Greek words
that Jesus uses here. Not all are Abraham’s tekna
even if they are his sperma. So
Paul says in Galatians 3:7 that it is those who are of faith who are sons of
Abraham, even those from many nations outside of Israel . The Jewish people can boast
in being Abraham’s biological descendants, but if they do not have the faith of
Abraham, then they are not his spiritual children. Non-Israelites who believe
in God through faith in Jesus Christ are more Abraham’s children than are those
who are his descendants through mere biology. Their descent from even such a
godly ancestor as Abraham does not place them in the family of God by faith.
So there is a lesson for us here in this. If you had godly
parents, grandparents, or some other faithful influence in your life, you
should absolutely rejoice and give thanks to God for that blessed gift of His
grace. But you should by no means be mistaken and think that your connection to
those people automatically makes you a participant in the family of God apart
from your own personal exercise of faith in Jesus Christ. When you stand before
God in judgment, He will not ask you to account for the faith of your father or
your grandmother. He will hold you accountable for yourself. You will not be
able to slide in on the coattails of your godly ancestor. The question is, have
you come to Jesus and trusted Him as your Lord and Savior, and do you have a
personal relationship with Him for yourself? If you are trusting in your
connection to some other godly person, even if that person is Father Abraham
himself, then you are outside of the family of God. He does not have
grandchildren, only sons and daughters who come to Him personally through faith
in Jesus Christ.
II. Living in a land, or among a people, historically
blessed by God does not place us in the family of God. (v41b-42)
Realizing perhaps that they were not getting anywhere with
the whole “descendants of Abraham” argument, the crowd now ups the stakes. They
retort to Jesus, “We were not born of fornication.” This is the second of three
veiled attacks on the character of Jesus here in this chapter, aimed at the
unusual circumstances surrounding His birth. It was perhaps becoming common
knowledge that Jesus was conceived prior to the marriage of Mary and Joseph,
and that Joseph had acknowledged that he was not the child’s father. The truth
of the matter was that Jesus had been born in a miraculous way, without an
earthly father, conceived as the Son of God by the power of the Holy Spirit
while Mary remained a virgin. But it did not take long for rumors to begin
swirling. One early story that began to circulate was that Mary had engaged in
fornication with a Roman soldier by the name of Panthera. Whether it was this
particular version of the story or some other that had captivated the
imagination of this crowd of people, the question of Jesus’ true paternity is
here raised in an attempt to discredit Him. “In the ancient Near East, ‘to
question a man’s paternity is a definite slur on his legitimacy.’”[1] So
in their protest, they say, “We were not born of fornication;” in the Greek, it
is the word porneia (from which we
get the word pornography), which is a
broad term for sexual sin. Their statement seems to imply that even though He
claims to be the Son of God, He really is not. They suggest that Jesus is the
child of sexual sin, but they say, “We
have one Father: God.”
Their claim to have God as their Father comes from Jewish
history. In Exodus 4:22, God speaks of Israel as “My son, My firstborn.”
Through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord said, “I am a father to Israel ,
and Ephraim is My firstborn” (Jer 31:9). King David had prayed, “Blessed are
You, O Lord God of Israel
our Father forever and ever” (1 Chron 29:10). In these and many other passages
of the Old Testament, God was spoken of as being the Father of the nation of Israel . About
this there can be no debate. Jesus does not deny God’s Fatherhood of Israel. It
was through His sovereign work that Israel
came into being as a nation, and through His preserving grace that Israel remained
a nation. But Jesus does take issue with the underlying assumption that the
people seem to have, namely that simply because they are from the land and
people of Israel ,
that they are personally part of God’s family of faith. As in the previous
exchange about Abraham, here again Jesus says in essence, “Your character and
your conduct disprove your claim.”
Jesus says in verse 42, “If God were your Father, you would
love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come
on My own initiative, but He sent Me.” In their hearts, there is brewing a
murderous hatred for Jesus. Jesus says this is incongruent with their claim
that God is their Father. God is the One who sent the Lord Jesus into the
world. It is theologically accurate to say that God not only sent Jesus, but came in the person of Jesus. But Jesus is speaking with Trinitarian
language here to say that He came from God, not on His own initiative, but was
actually sent by God. In their
attempt to discredit Jesus and their desire to murder Him, they are despising
God’s heavenly Ambassador. It is the ultimate dishonor to God to reject and
despise the One whom God has sent. That is not how one ought to treat his or
her Father. Jesus claims to be the Son of God, and that claim is validated by
His words and deeds. The Israelites claim to be the sons of God, and their
claim is voided by their words and deeds.
Let’s bring this home to us. We live in a land that boasts
of having been greatly blessed in our history by the hand of God. We sing it
often enough: “America , America , God
shed His grace on thee.” Whatever our personal opinion or theory on America’s
spiritual heritage might be, it is right for us to give thanks to God for the
freedoms and the blessings that we have experienced from His hand here in
America. But we must not make the mistake of these Israelites and assume that
just because God has blessed our nation in the past, that He is obligated to
always do so. It is a mistake to assume that being American means that we are
more loved and more favored by God than, say, people who live in Iran, Egypt, China,
or Russia. It is a mistake to think that America
is God’s favorite nation in the world, or that He automatically smiles on all
that Americans do, or on all that America represents. We hear people
saying all the time that America
is, or was, a Christian nation. Whether that is true or false, the Church in
America needs to be very clear to the world that we do assume that every
American is a Christian or that the American government always acts on
Christian, biblical principles. If you think, that because you live in a land
and among a people that have been historically blessed by God, you are by
default a member of God’s family of faith, then hear the Lord Jesus telling you
that you are sorely mistaken. This is something that cannot even be claimed by Israel .
So, if these people are not the true children of Abraham,
and not the true children of God, then who is their father? This is the
startling reality …
III. To not be under the fatherhood of God is to be under
the fatherhood of the devil (vv44-47).
There is such a thing as a false dichotomy. That is where
two alternatives are presented as the only
alternatives, when in fact other alternatives exist. So for instance, someone
may ask you if you are a Republican or a Democrat. The question posed is a
false dichotomy because it assumes that one must be either a Republican or a Democrat,
and that there are no other alternatives. But there are other alternatives. Not
every issue is a juxtaposition of two and only two polar extremes. But when it
comes to being a child of God, there are really only two alternatives. If God
is not your Father, then the devil is. Who said that? Jesus said that, right
here in this text. In verse 44, He says, “You are of your father the devil.” Now,
lest you think that this statement only applies to this particular group of
people, and not to anyone else in the human race, hear what Paul says in
Ephesians 2: “You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly
walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the
power of the air (that’s the devil), of the spirit that is now working in the
sons of disobedience. Among them we too
all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the
flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children
of wrath, even as the rest.” Who’s Paul talking about? He’s talking about
every single human being who has ever lived, including you and me. All of us,
at one time, were children of the devil, children of wrath. And the family
resemblance could be seen within us.
Jesus said to the crowd of people there, “You want to do the
desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning.” They want to
kill Him because it is in their DNA. From the beginning, their father was a
murderer. The words “the beginning” take us back to the garden of Eden. There,
God had set aside one tree of all that He had made and said to Adam, “In the
day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die.” And what did Satan conspire to
lead Adam to do? To eat of that tree and die. Adam, and indeed every human
being since Adam, bears the unique image of God. The human race is an affront
to Satan, because it reminds Him of the glory of God, the creator. Jesus said
in John 10 that the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. He wants people to
die; he wants the human race to be destroyed, because everywhere a human life
exists, it is a representation of the image of God. And because Satan wanted to
rid the world of the image bearers of God, he tempted Adam and Eve to defy
God’s command and eat of the forbidden fruit so that they would die. And not
them only, but through Adam’s sin, death has infiltrated the entire human race.
Paul says in Romans 5:12, “Through one man sin entered into the world, and
death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”
Satan is a murderer.
Wherever there is a murderous hatred in the hearts of men, there is the family
resemblance. At some point in our lives, we have all wrestled with that
murderous DNA that we inherited as children of the devil. When we have hated
another person, we have committed murder in our hearts against them, and
fantasized of ridding the world of that particular image bearer of God. We see
it here in the desire of these people to kill the Lord Jesus Himself. Satan had
been scheming to destroy the Messiah since before the birth of Christ. He
sought to use Abraham’s sin with Hagar to thwart God’s plan to bring the
Messiah into the world. He sought to use the infanticide of Pharaoh in Egypt and the
genocide of Haman in the days of Esther to rid the world of the Messianic
promise. When Jesus was born, he inspired the murderous plot in the heart of
Herod to kill all of the male children. These people want to kill Jesus because
they seek to follow in their father’s footsteps.
Not only is Satan a murderer from the beginning, Jesus says
that the devil “does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.
Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and
the father of lies.” Lying is his native tongue. The first lie ever told on
earth was told by the devil. God said, “In the day that you eat thereof you
shall surely die.” Satan tempted Eve with a lie. He said, “You surely will not
die.” He told her that God was just holding them back from true greatness,
because if they would only eat of that fruit they would be more like God. The
truth was that they could not be any more like God than they already were. It
was a lie. And every lie ever told by every human being who ever told it is a
product of the devil who is the father of lies. We were all born fluent in the
language of dishonesty. You know, I never really had a very strong Southern
accent. What little I did have, I’ve worked hard to shake off over the years.
But every now and then, I will say something that sounds like just pure
hillbilly. Try all you want, your native tongue shines through. And when we
lie, we are speaking with a hellish accent. It’s in our DNA, because by nature,
we were born in this state of sinfulness, children of the devil. In our human
nature, we fear the truth; we hide from it; we try to cover it up; we do not
seek it. Jesus says, “Because I speak
the truth, you do not believe Me.” Why do they not believe Him? Because He speaks the truth. In verse 43
He says they don’t understand Him; they cannot hear His word. It is like He is
speaking another language. And that is the way that all of us respond to truth
in our natural condition. We hate truth, because truth shines a bright light on
the dark realities of our sinful hearts. It exposes the family ties that
connect us, not to God, but to the devil. He says, “For this reason you do not
hear” His truth: “because you are not of God.”
That’s hard to swallow isn’t it? Everything within us hears
that, and we want to say, “That’s not true!” But Jesus says, “Which one of you
convicts Me of sin?” Are we going to call Jesus a liar? We cannot! He speaks
the things which He has seen with His Father. He tells us the truth which He
heard from God – from God, from whom He proceeded forth and came from; from
God, who sent Him. He speaks the truth, and His truth is true, whether we
believe it or not. Our disbelief gives the lie to our false claims to be in
right relationship with God. God cannot be our Father while we are resisting
and rejecting the truth that confronts us in the person of Jesus Christ. And if
God is not our Father, there is only one other alternative: the devil is. It
doesn’t matter if we descend from a long line of godly men and women of faith.
We cannot cling to our spiritual ancestors. It doesn’t matter if we were born
in a land and among a people who were historically blessed by God. It doesn’t
matter if we are Jewish, or American, or anything else. These things do not
bind us to God. Trusting in them only proves that we do not belong to God, but
that our father is none other than the devil himself.
That’s bad news. But there is good news. You see, in His
infinite love, God desires to rescue the children of the devil and adopt them
as His own sons and daughters. That is why Jesus said in John 3 that we must be
born-again. We must be born anew by
the Holy Spirit into the family of God. How does this happen? It is the result
of God’s sovereign grace, drawing us to Himself. We are so deceived and so
enslaved to sin that we would never come to Him unless He drew us. That’s why
Jesus said in John 6:44, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me
draws Him.” And He said, “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the
one who comes to Me, I will certainly not cast out” (6:37). And so by God’s
sovereign, saving grace, He draws us out of our old life of sin, and He draws
us to Himself through Jesus Christ. We come to see Him by faith as our sinless
Savior, who came from God – better, in Whom God came to us – and He lived and
died and rose again on our behalf. He died so that the full measure of all of
our sin – all of our lies, all of our murderous hatred, every bit of our unrighteousness
– could be punished in Him as He died on the cross as our substitute under the
wrath of God. Our hearts are opened to His truth, and we begin to hear Him, to
understand Him, and ultimately to believe in Him. And John 1:12 promises us
this, “As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of
God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood, nor of
the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
So, who’s your father? What are you trusting in? Are you
trusting in your family ties to some godly person who lived before you – your
parents, your grandparents, a friend, a mentor? Even Abraham’s descendants
could not trust in this. Nor can we. Are you trusting in your national or
ethnic heritage – that you are an Israelite, that you are an American,
whatever? No, not even the Jews can trust in that. To trust in these things is
to remain children of the devil. So how do you become a child of God? You trust
in Christ and come to Him by faith as your Lord and Savior. Then God will adopt
you into His family and lavish His fatherly love upon you. Is the Father
drawing you today? Perhaps in your heart of hearts you can hear Him beckoning
you, “Come home. Be born again. Become part of My family.” Jesus Christ is the
way. And if you have come to God by faith through Him, you are now part of His
family. He is your Father. Maybe you never had a father before, maybe you had a
wonderful earthly father. It doesn’t matter. God will be a greater Father to
you than you have ever imagined. He loves you. Rest in His love. He is with
you. You aren’t alone. You have a Father in Heaven who will never leave you,
and from Whom you can never be severed. He is for you. Trust in His goodness.
Find in Him your complete satisfaction, knowing that you belong to Him forever.
You’ve been rescued. You’ve been adopted. You are secure in His family, set
free from the sin of your past through the blood of Christ that was shed for
you. And as you rest in Him, He will transform you by His Word and by His
Spirit, so that the family resemblance between you and your Heavenly Father
will become more apparent with each passing day until you see Him face to face,
and He receives you to your eternal home with a welcoming embrace. For I am confident of this very thing, that He who
began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus (Phil
1:6).
[1] Andreas
Kostenberger, John (Baker Exegetical
Commentary on the New Testament; Grand
Rapids : Baker, 2004), 265; citing Leon Morris and
Merrill Tenney.
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