Jesus’ Boldest Claim

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My wife called me several months ago while I was at work and said, there’s a creature in our backyard. Now, we’ve had enough conversations about it that I know she doesn’t believe in Bigfoot. And so, what kind of creature are we talking about?

She said, I don’t know. Can you describe it? She said, I’ll send you a picture.

So she sends me a picture. She sends me a few pictures. And honestly, I’m not entirely sure what this creature was.

It looked like it could have been a coyote. It looks like it could have been a dog. It looks like it could have been, I don’t know, maybe Jim Henson was on something while he was designing one of the Muppets.

I don’t know. But it looked like it was in bad shape. And she said, what do we do?

I said, I don’t know what we do because I’m not even sure what that thing is. I mean, we’ve got to figure out what it is. Because if it’s a coyote and it’s coming in that close up to the house during the day and it’s shaking like that, then it’s rabbit or something.

And so the answer, what do we do, is I sit up on the balcony with a rifle and put it out of its misery. If it’s a dog, then it’s probably hungry and it’s somebody’s pet and it’s shaking like that. we don’t shoot it if it’s just a dog looking for something to eat.

In order to figure out how to respond to this creature, and it came around for a few days, but it would never come by when I was home. I don’t understand why. Maybe it was a coyote and it just knew about that conversation.

It’s a really smart coyote. But it came for several days and we kept having this conversation. What do we do about this?

How do we respond to this creature? and really it all depended on what the creature was. In order to figure out what to do about it, how to respond, we had to figure out the nature of what we were dealing with.

And in a sense, the same thing is true of our dealings with Jesus. I told you last week that we were going to spend some weeks talking about who Jesus is. And a good place for us to begin understanding who Jesus is in answer to that question that we talked about last week, is to understand first of all what Jesus is.

And when I say what Jesus is, I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way, but I mean getting at His nature and understanding His nature. Understanding what He is so that we can understand who He is. Because understanding His nature helps us to know how to respond to the other details about Him.

If He’s just a regular man, we respond to Him much differently than we do if He’s God in human flesh. And so it’s important for us to understand His nature. And so what we’re going to look at this morning, as we begin this series, is in John chapter 8, where Jesus Himself addresses His nature.

And pretty clearly, I might add, there are people who still today say, well, Jesus never claimed to be God. That’s not only skeptics, there are people in churches today that will preach. Jesus didn’t claim to be God.

He was a good moral teacher. I don’t buy that. Number one, we’re going to see a passage of Scripture today where He very clearly claimed to be God in John chapter 8.

If you have your Bible, if you turn there with me, John chapter 8 starting in verse 51. If you are using your phone or tablet, there’s a link to it in our bulletin, or if you don’t have any of those, it’ll be on the screen for you here. But if you would stand with me, if you’re able to, if you can do so without too much trouble, as we read together from God’s Word.

John chapter 8, starting in verse 51, and I turned to the wrong page. Starting in verse 51, Jesus said, Most assuredly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he shall never see death. Then the Jews said to him, Now we know you have a demon.

Abraham is dead, and the prophets, and you say, if anyone keeps my word, he shall never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham, who is dead? And the prophets are dead.

Who do you make yourself out to be? Jesus answered, if I honor myself, my honor is nothing. It is my father who honors me, of whom you say that he is your God.

Yet you have not known him, but I know him. And if I say I do not know him, I shall be a liar like you. But I do know him and keep his word.

Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad. Then the Jews said to him, You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham? Jesus said to them, Most assuredly I say to you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Then they took up stones to throw at him. But Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by. And you may be seated.

Now just to give you a little context, because I didn’t have time to go verse by verse through the whole text this morning. It goes back into the verses starting in the 30s, leading up to this story to try to make sense of it. So if I can summarize what brought us into what we just read, this is the end of the conversation.

Jesus and the Pharisees are talking as they frequently did because the Pharisees would come and challenge His authority. And so Jesus, in earlier verses, told them that they needed to actively seek the truth. They needed to find the truth because it would set them free.

Now, they took exception to this and said, we’re Abraham’s descendants. How can we be considered unfree. Why would we need to find freedom?

We belong to Abraham. Because they were the children of promise as opposed to the children of bondage, if you go back to the story of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac. So Jesus explains in starting around verse 34 that they’re slaves to sin.

He said, you really can’t call yourselves free. You’re slaves to sin. And I know that you’re slaves to sin, and I know you’re going to remain that way because when you hear my message, when you hear my word, you reject it even though it comes from the Father.

And I’m paraphrasing here just to get through the text. It comes from His Father. And they say, well, Abraham is our Father.

They’re having this battle back and forth over Abraham. Who really speaks for God? Who really speaks for His truth?

Who really represents the God of Abraham? And in so doing, who represents the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham? They say, Abraham is our Father.

Jesus says that very clearly they’re somebody else’s children since they won’t follow Abraham’s example. You know, if you were Abraham’s children, you’d behave like Abraham. Because sometimes our children pick up our mannerisms, whether it’s on purpose or not.

He said, you’d be following Abraham’s example. You’re somebody else’s children. So they say, well, God ultimately is our father.

God is our father. And here we go. Just starting in verse 42, Jesus calls them children of the devil.

I hear sometimes when you want to speak up about the truth. Oh, that’s not nice. You should be like Jesus and be nice.

Jesus called these people children of the devil. Now, it was true. And by the way, Jesus was very kind and very loving, but Jesus also would correct us if we needed it.

He calls them children of the devil because he says they’re not open to God’s message. They’re not children of the devil because they’re wrong. They’re children of the devil because they’re not open to being corrected.

So they turn around and accuse him in verse 48 of being demon-possessed. And Jesus responds in the verses just leading up to where we started, that I can’t be demon-possessed. My only aim here is to glorify my Father.

And so they have this back and forth about glorifying the Father. And that’s where Jesus says, where we picked up, if anyone keeps my word, he’ll never see death. They objected to this because Abraham and the prophets are all dead.

And if you say, listening to you, we won’t taste death, then you’re saying you’re greater than Abraham and the prophets. Jesus tells them, I’m not the one making myself out to be great. I’m here to glorify the Father.

The Father is glorifying me. If I told you how great I was, it wouldn’t mean anything. We can all do that, right?

Any one of us can brag about ourselves. It means something greater if it comes from somebody else. And he says, my Father is the one who glorifies me.

And they get into the discussion that we have just read. And so we see in the verses 51 through 59 that we read when we stood together, that Jesus here makes some unique claims that cannot possibly be true unless He’s actually God. I want to look at what some of these claims are that Jesus made.

Because it’s important for us to understand, this is not something that people made up. If you have questions about this, I’d love to talk with you about it, maybe longer than you would like. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about.

But if you’ve got questions, we can talk later on about how we know the Gospels have not been changed over time. There’s actual textual evidence to say that what they say now is what they said when they were written. I don’t have time to get into all that this morning.

But this idea that we hear so often that, well, him being God, that’s something his followers made up later on. No, Jesus made the claims himself. He made claims here, and it’s important for us to understand those claims. Claims that cannot be true unless he’s actually God.

So in verse 51, he claims to have power over death when he says, Most assuredly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he shall never see death. Jesus sets the criteria here about determining people’s eternal destination. You can’t, I can say those things to you.

I could tell you if you want eternal life, go roll a golf ball with your nose up I-44 to Oklahoma City and you’ll have eternal life. I can tell you that, but it doesn’t make it so. I can’t actually do that unless I’m God.

I can’t let that be the criteria. I can’t make that rule. Jesus here said, if you’ll heed my words, you’ll have eternal life.

This doesn’t work unless he’s actually God. He promises a reprieve, by the way, from the second death. If you’re saying, what about all these people who’ve trusted him and then died?

Jesus was not confused. He didn’t contradict himself. Jesus kept his word better than anybody and he died.

He knew that he was headed to the cross. His followers who he personally trained, presumably followed his word, maybe not perfectly. But they were trained by him to follow his word and he told them that they were going to die.

And the majority of them did die as martyrs. What he’s talking about is what the Bible calls the second death, eternal death, eternal separation from God. He said we won’t taste that.

We won’t experience that if we do what he says. So He promises us a reprieve from this second death. He promises us eternal life.

And this is something that no mere man is capable of giving. And anybody who tells you they can, they’re either God or they’re lying to you. It’s that simple.

So He’s promising something that He cannot deliver unless He’s God. There in verse 51. Then we come to verse 54 when He speaks again, and He claimed to receive glory from the Father.

He said, if I honor myself, my honor is nothing. Again, I can say whatever I want about myself. It doesn’t necessarily make it true.

It doesn’t prove it because we can all do that. It is my Father who honors me, of whom you say he is God. And he answers their question, who is your Father?

He says, my Father is the one that honors me. Naturally, their next question is going to be, who is your Father? He says, by the way, the one you call God is the one I call Father.

So he tells them, the God of the Old Testament, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, the God of Noah, the God of creation, he honors me. Now, God is not in the business of glorifying his creatures. That’s called idolatry.

When we give honor and glory to creations that only God deserves, that’s called idolatry. God’s not in that business. Instead, God made his creatures, He made us to give Him glory.

That’s the way it works. So it would be absurd. It would be presumptuous.

It would be crazy for Jesus, for any mere human to say that God is focused on honoring Him. It would be crazy for Jesus to say that if He was a mere man. And yet He says, the Father honors me.

The one you call God honors me. It doesn’t mean that God, the Father, worships Him. I’m not really sure the mechanics of how that would work.

God worshiping God. But he says, the Father gives me the honor that I’ve received. And here he also points out their separation from God.

When they had wanted to prove through their rituals and their religiousness and all their rules that they were close to God. He says, your God honors me while you reject me. See, they were trying to make it out as God and the Pharisees against Jesus over here.

but he points out that it’s the Father and Jesus against these religious people. He turns the tables on them. And that sets the stage for the next claim.

In verse 55, right after this, he claimed to know the Father in a unique way. He says, yet you have not known Him. Now, they were experts in the Scriptures.

And yet somehow, in all their study, in all their learning, in all their religiousness, they still managed to miss God in there. In spite of all of that, he says, you have not known Him, but I know Him. Don’t miss what he’s saying here.

Jesus is looking at the most devoutly religious people of his day. He’s looking at the experts of the experts and saying that they were strangers to God. They did not know God.

But he looks at them and in contrast, he argues that he knew God. Where all of the experts did not, he said, I know him. I know him in a way you don’t.

And he uses a Greek word here that indicates he had full knowledge. We talked about this a little bit in Sunday school today, about how Greek is really specific. English, we have words that mean lots of things, and in Greek, they have words that mean very specific things.

There are different words that can mean what we take as the word no, K-N-O-W. There are some words that talk like something you learn, something you grow in the knowledge of, and then there’s something that you just have, and there’s full knowledge of. And Jesus is using the full knowledge word.

He’s not even telling them, I have learned about the Father. He’s telling them, I know Him. And so in contrast to them who were supposed to be the experts, He said He knew the Father fully.

He knew the Father intimately. He knew the Father by experience. It wasn’t something He learned.

It was just part of who He is. I know Him. So He’s claiming to know the Father in a unique way that even the religious scholars didn’t have.

Then in the latter part of he claimed to meet the Father’s impossible standards. He said, and if I say I don’t know him, I shall be a liar like you, but I do know him and keep his word. He’s talking here about obedience.

He’s talking here about fulfillment of the Father’s plans. And again, he looks at the most religious people and points out what big sinners they are. He said, if I said this, I’d be liars like you.

Again, he’s looking at the most religious people around and calling them liars, calling them sinners. It doesn’t mean that all religious people are liars, but we are all sinners. And this is because according to Jesus’ teaching, it is impossible for humans to meet God’s standard of righteousness.

God is absolutely holy. And it is impossible for me to be good enough to meet that standard and be acceptable to God. It’s impossible for you to be good enough for God.

but I want you to hear and understand it is impossible for me to be good enough for God’s standards. This is not the preacher saying shame on you for that. I’m saying God’s standard is so high that I don’t reach it and neither do you.

We can’t. You read some of the stuff that Jesus told his disciples to do. It is impossible to live up to.

The apostle Paul said part of that is that it’s a it’s a training. The law is a training tool to point us to our need for Christ. We see the standard and how high it is. I liken it to going to an amusement park and there’s always that sign that says you must be this tall to ride this ride.

Now imagine there’s a sign that says you must be this holy to ride this ride. Only the marker is so high up in the sky you can’t even see it, let alone ever reach it. And that’s where you and I are according to God’s holiness.

It is impossible even for them, even for these devoutly religious people. He looked at them and said to the others who were listening, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. You’ve got to be better than the most religious people to get in.

You’ve got to do it even better than they do to reach the Father. It is impossible for us to get there by being good enough. And yet Jesus says not only does He know the Father’s Word, but He keeps it.

Jesus lives up to the Father’s standard of holiness like you and I can’t, like no human can. And then in verse 56, He claimed to be the focus of the Father’s plans. There’s all this back and forth about Abraham and the prophets, and what they’re really fighting about is what the father’s plans are and what’s at the center of it.

They think it’s the nation of Israel and their rules and their rituals, and Jesus says, no, it’s me. He says in verse 56, your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad. So when they accused him of exalting himself above Abraham and above the prophets, Jesus’ response was, I didn’t do that.

Abraham and the prophets did that. I didn’t show up here at Bethlehem and suddenly come into existence and then decide I was greater than everybody else. I’ve been here all along, and when Abraham and the prophets were talking about what God was doing, they were talking about me.

Jesus was claiming to be the fulfillment of the Father’s promises to Abraham and the nation of Israel. When the Father said that in Abraham all the nations of the world would be blessed, he was talking about Jesus Christ. All of these promises that he gave were fulfilled in Jesus Christ. That’s the point that he’s making. This puts Jesus at the center of the Father’s plans, and it makes the Scriptures all about him.

And so we see all throughout this conversation, Jesus is making the case that he’s God. He’s making these claims that cannot be true unless he’s God. And it all leads us to the main point that Jesus is God, and he always has been.

Jesus didn’t suddenly become God. He didn’t become God at his baptism. He didn’t become God at his birth.

When you look at the Bible as a whole, Jesus has been God from eternity past. And that’s why Jesus uses this really odd phrase. It sounds odd to us because of the grammar. In verse 58, he told the Pharisees, Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.

Now, Jesus hasn’t gotten his verb tenses mixed up here, and he’s mixing up present and past. He’s identifying himself as the God of the Old Testament. That phrase, I am, had a very specific meaning, and it wasn’t just the way we use it in a casual way. You know, I am here.

I’m going to eat more than I should later. Any of these things. He was claiming a title for himself.

This goes all the way back to Exodus chapter 3, when God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, and God said to Moses, I am who I am. See, Moses asked God, when I go to the people of Israel, who shall I tell them sent me? He said, I am who I am.

And he said, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am has sent me. Moreover, God said to Moses, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever.

And this is my memorial to all generations. And in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that they would have used in that day. Exodus chapter 3, when he says, I am that I am, the words there are ego aimi, the same words that Jesus used here in John chapter 8.

I am. He is claiming to be the God of the Old Testament. He’s saying, I am God.

Not just a God, but the God. He was claiming to be the God of Israel, the God who spoke to Moses and spoke to Abraham. and that He always has been.

And some people do teach that He became God at some point. But part of being God, part of God’s nature is being eternal. The Bible says that He doesn’t change. King David said, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

Part of being God is being eternal. If you could start being God, you can’t be God. If you could stop being God, then you’re not God. If there was ever a time when he was not God, then he’s never God.

I’m getting into deep water here. I’m going to confuse myself. Hopefully that makes sense to y’all.

But if you could ever not be God, then you could never be God. And so if we can ever pinpoint any time in history or before time began and say at that spot, Jesus was not God, then he never could be God. And he says, I am.

Before Abraham was. You go back to the earliest days. I was already there and I was already God.

And some people will say, well, we’re reading too much into this statement. There are churches that will try to excuse the whole, before Abraham was, I am. Well, he was making a rhetorical point.

It was, you’re reading too much into it saying that he was claiming to be God. Listen, it’s possible to read too much into things. I’m not infallible.

But I tell you, it seems pretty clear to the people he was talking to what he was claiming. The Pharisees weren’t confused about what he said. Look at what they did in verse 59.

It says they picked up stones to throw at him. We’re not talking about skipping rocks here. We’re talking about the mob wanted to kill him.

And they wanted to do that because they thought he was blaspheming. They understood that he was claiming to be God. They understood it and they wanted to kill him.

So for us to misunderstand this and be reading too much into it, then everybody through history has to have been reading too much into it. Why did Jesus not tell the Pharisees, whoa, whoa, guys, you got it wrong, you misunderstood. Put the rocks down and let’s talk it through.

He didn’t correct them because they understood him correctly. He was claiming to be God. Now, why does this matter?

Because we get into some of the deep theological stuff here, and then we go through our daily lives and we wonder where the connect is. Why does this biblical truth matter to me on Monday? Why does what is being taught on Sunday matter to me on Monday?

It matters because if Jesus is God, then we have to pay attention to the things that He taught and the things that He did. Going back to the story of the creature, knowing what it was made a determination in how I was supposed to respond to it. Did I shoot it or feed it, right?

Knowing whether Jesus is a man or whether He’s God makes a big difference in how I respond to what He says. Because if he’s not God, if he’s just a man, he said some things that might, you know, I could look at him and say, that’s a good idea. He also said some things that are pretty inconvenient to what I want to do sometimes.

And if he’s just a man, I can pick and choose. If he’s God, not so much. If he’s God, I have to pay attention to what he said.

And I like the point that C. S. Lewis made.

I put this quote up here. You may not be able to see that. It looked a lot bigger on the computer screen, but I’m going to read it to you anyway.

It’s a famous statement that C. S. Lewis made in Mere Christianity, that people have called Lewis’s trilemma, liar, lunatic, or Lord.

He wrote, I’m trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him. I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice.

Either this man was and is the Son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool. You can spit at him and kill him as a demon.

Or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.

He did not intend to. And some people have taken this as an argument proving that he must be God. Now, I believe that he’s God, but I don’t think this argument does that.

I think what Lewis, I think the point he makes is better served in saying he has to be one or the other. He’s either God or he’s not God. And if he’s not God, then he’s either not telling the truth or he’s crazy or something along those lines.

The point is with his claims, the one thing we can’t do is say, well, he’s a good teacher. In other words, we can’t be on the fence about Jesus. There’s no room for us on the fence about Jesus.

We either accept him for what he said he was, or we don’t. And now I’m not going to browbeat you on which choice you have to make. God has left each of us free will.

What I’m telling you is the evidence is before you. It’s in the scriptures. It’s in history of who Jesus claimed to be, of what he did, and he very clearly claimed to be God.

If he’s God, we have to acknowledge him as such, and we have to obey him. If he’s not God, we don’t get to just hang around in the middle and say, well, you know, he’s a pretty smart guy. He hasn’t left the middle ground open for us.

But if you look at what he says about himself and based on what he did, you’re convinced that he is God and that he’s who he claimed, then it affects how we respond to him. Either he’s God or he’s not. And correspondingly, either he’s worth listening to or he’s not.

Either he’s worth obeying and taking seriously or he’s not. And so we have a choice. Do we listen to what he says and take it to heart or do we not?

And this is particularly important in his teaching on eternal life. As he said to the people right there, if they were to heed his words, if they were to listen to him, they would not taste death. Jesus taught on eternal life and he promised us eternal life.

He claimed to provide eternal life. He looked at those of us who could not ever meet God’s impossible standard of holiness. And He claimed to meet and exceed that standard and provide eternal life for us.

And He was nailed to the cross where He shed His blood and died to do just that. And rose again three days later to prove it. Now we look at that and we can say either He was God who accomplished those things He said or He wasn’t.

Either He did it and we believe it or He didn’t and we don’t. but if you believe he is who he said he was then the path that’s open before you is clear it’s understanding that you and I have sinned and our sin separates us from a holy God we can never meet his standard we can never be good enough but believe that Jesus Christ took every bit of the punishment we deserve for the way we fall short he died on the cross for us and he rose again to prove it and he offers that salvation if we will simply turn to him and believe