And we’re looking at an really interesting passage this morning. John 8. It’s a dialogue between Jesus and people who start out, they’re very positive toward him. And if you read this dialogue out loud, we’re not reading the full scripture because it’s a little longer this morning, but the dialogue couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes. Takes a really ugly turn by the end. Beginning of our passage, we read that these were Jews who had believed in Jesus. previous verse said that as Jesus spoke many had put their faith in him. So these were fans. These were positive. They liked Jesus not just for his works but for his words. They thought he was really on to something that they really needed. But our world of sin is a very unstable environment for the son of God. And that instability is demonstrated by the fact that by the end of this brief dialogue, those same positive people who believed in Jesus were picking up rocks to throw at him and kill him. So we’re eavesdropping on a conversation that went sideways really fast. It rapidly escalated into physical aggression. And if you remember in John chapter 6, Jesus uh was making claims about himself that caused many of his disciples, his followers, people who were learning from him to pack their bags and desert him. They said that’s too much. They said his teachings were too hard to accept. They no longer chose to follow him. And that was John chapter 6. But the statement and claims that Jesus makes in John chapter 8 are so dramatic and they’re so outside the box. just deserting Jesus is no longer the option. Killing him makes a lot more sense. So murder is definitely in the air in this chapter. There’s an author Andrew Claven published a book uh actually just earlier this month called The Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. And he takes off from the first murder in the Bible. Cain’s murder of his younger brother Abel in Genesis chapter 4 occurs right after the fall of man into sin. And Claven writes about finding the truth and the beauty of God in the midst of the deep darkness and evil in the world. And he reasons, and this was all part of his spiritual journey in coming to Christ, he reasons, if we perceive something as evil, as morally wrong, and we’re repulsed by it, it can only mean that the opposite must exist. There must be something called good, and that moral good must point unairringly toward God. So Claven adds that despite all efforts by secular human people to create some kind of better world, a utopia on earth, it always gravitates toward murder in the end. Now Claven has a unique vantage point to write those kinds of things. One, he’s a he’s a well-published novelist. He’s written many fictional accounts that always involve murders. So thinking about murder and that’s his occupation, his metier, his area of expertise. A pastor once snapped at Claven and said, “You make your living exploiting the very worst of human nature.” And Claven snapped back and a very good living, too. Now second, he also knows a lot about the world of mental and emotional darkness. He writes freely about the five years that he spent in therapy with a very wise psychiatrist. He was says he was in his late 20s at the time and before seeing his therapist his mind was fractured. He was shrouded in depression. He was delusional, just paralyzed in practical matters and creative matters. He was in desperate emotional pain. He wanted to die. He planned to die. But over the course of his five-year therapy, he was very definitively and permanently healed. And the third thing, Andrew Claven, he’s a man from a Jewish family who rejected his Jewish faith, tried his best to be an atheist, but he wound up converting to Christianity later in life, being baptized near the age of 50. So when he writes about evil and darkness and murder and redemption, he kind of knows what he’s talking about. and he presents Abel’s murder by his brother Cain, that prototypical murder from which all of our murderous thoughts and acts emanate. Now, Cain, of course, he was the first man on earth born of a woman. His story contains the Bible’s first references to sex and to birth and to sacrifice and to death. New Testament scholar John Byron says there’s no story about human beings in the world that doesn’t somehow dramatize themes that are introduced in the story of Cain and Abel. So that first murder described very early in scripture, it’s left a chemtrail that affects all of us. And if we have a hard time believing that, look at what Jesus said to a crowd of his fans, a crowd of people who liked him and who believed in him. In our passage in verse 37, Jesus said to them, you’re ready to kill me. Repeats that in verse 40. You are determined to kill me. And he ups the ante in verse 44 with, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there’s no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he’s a liar and the father of lies.” Imagine saying that to people who like you. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He’s a murderer and has been one from the beginning. So, not only is Jesus saying there that the devil is real, he doesn’t leave any room for intellectual snobbery or sneering or murmuring or doubts about the reality of a personal evil being who comes against all of us. Jesus also says this to people who were already on his side and who believed in him. So what was Jesus seeing in those people? They’re the same species as you and I. He looked down as the bottom of their souls and he saw this combustible material that would lead to actual murder if the right spark hit it at the right time. So, in our passage, we quickly build up to Jesus’ comments about murder by seeing how he first exhorted the Jews concerning their distorted understanding of family and their distorted understanding of freedom. He began by explaining to his audience what it really meant for them to be united to him, to be glued to him in a meaningful way. Meant more than just being a fan or a general believer. And as we went through John chapter 6, we mentioned that uh there’s a big spectrum of Edmonton Oilers fans and could be someone who just watches a couple games throughout the year, gets quite engaged during the playoff run. would also call someone an Oilers fan if they watch most of the games during the year and and they listen to sports radio and they know who’s hot and who’s not among the players and they can rattle off a few stats and would certainly call someone a fan if they’re at the level where they own three replica jerseys and they dye their hair and they paint their face and they stand in the moss pit for 5 hours cheering and screaming for the Oilers to succeed. You look out in our parking lot, there’s at least one car with Oilers flags. I know Ganu, I know you’re one of those. I don’t you you can paint your face for church if you like, but she’s the die hard. Yeah. Okay. So, like Oilers fans, disciples of Jesus, they cover a broad spectrum, various levels of commitment. But Jesus gives his criterion for disciplehip. In verse 31, he says to people who at least had a casual belief in him, if you hold to my teaching, you’re really my disciples. And that word hold means to abide to remain really just to stay put. It’s not a very active thing. It’s just a thing about just staying put and standing, planting your feet in Jesus’ word and not being swayed or distracted away from it. And Jesus goes on then in verse 37 to make the accusation that the people he’s speaking to are not like that. They’re not people who are holding to the word. He says in verse 37, “You have no room for my word in your heart.” Verse 43, he says, “Why is my language not clear to you? Because you’re unable to hear what I say.” Verse 45, “I tell you the truth, but you don’t believe me.” And in verse 47, he gives them the reason why they’re not able to hear and comprehend what he’s saying to them. He says, “The reason you don’t hear is that you don’t belong to God.” So these are not people who have the ability to hold to his teaching and as such they’re really not his disciples. Despite any superficial outward allegiance to Jesus, they’re not there yet. Despite kind of a general willingness to believe in him, his words have no way of penetrating, of getting through. And it’s all because of their family dynamics. Very simply, if you follow the conversation, they maintain that as children of Israel, Abraham is their ancestral father. So they draw confidence from their religious heritage. But Jesus says that despite the fact that they’re descendants of Abraham, their failure to adhere to Jesus’ words demonstrates that their real father is the devil. Now think about that’s a such a sharp and sobering statement. We often view our friends and neighbors and people we hang out with and people we love, although they’re not Christians, they they’re not they don’t seem opposed to Christianity. They’re not opposed to us. So we tend to view them in some kind of spiritually neutral place. They can move toward God. They can move away from him. Or they can sort of just stay in neutral and and live a good and happy life. But Jesus really tears that notion apart here. He says you have to be someone’s child, someone’s son. Your father’s even either going to be God or it’s going to be the devil. You’ll be the son of the creator or you’ll be the son of the murderer. You’ll carry some father’s DNA and that DNA will determine what you become. If you stay put in Jesus’ words, holding to his teachings, then what’s small and just embionic in you right now, it it’ll grow you eventually into this everlasting splendor of a person. But if your DNA is that of the devil, even though you don’t believe in him, it doesn’t really matter. You take your grumbling and your sadness and your disappointment. You’ve only had to put up with that for a few years to this point, but extrapolate your personality out for a million years or so, and you won’t be a splendor. You’ll be some kind of nightmare. So, everyone, Jesus is saying, is a chip off the old block, and eternally you’ll either look more like Jesus or you’ll look more like the devil, depending on your spiritual DNA. You’re like a little embryo now. But what will you look like when you’re fully grown? Now, the Jews listening to Jesus, they cried out, “Well, Abraham’s our father.” Jesus said, “If if you were Abraham’s children, you do the things that Abraham did. As it is, you’re looking for a way to kill me, a man who’s told you the truth that I heard from God.” Abraham did not do such things. You’re doing the works of your own father. “We’re not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only father we have is God himself.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your father, you would love me. For I’ve come from God, and now I’m here. I’ve not come on my own, but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you’re unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire.” So Jesus, he doesn’t leave any room open for spiritual neutrality. Creator or murderer, those are your only parental options. And to drive the point home, Jesus put says it another way. He says, “You’re all either a slave or you’re a son, but if you’re a slave, I can set you free.” And that was again highly offensive to the Jews because in their thinking, they had never been slaves of anyone. Oh, sure. Historically, they had spent 400 years enslaved in Egypt. Other times, they’d been under the thumb of the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks. They were currently living under Roman occupation. But the Jews always thought of themselves as liberated. Always imagine themselves as inwardly and spiritually the people of God and therefore free. So they get their backs up. They bristle when Jesus says that. They say, “We’re Abraham’s descendants. We’ve never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we’ll be we shall be set free?” So this sense of inherited privilege that was very strong. So strong they couldn’t they couldn’t acknowledge their spiritual need. They couldn’t recognize the very son of God when he was talking with them. So Jesus slays them really with what he says next. He says, “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. He says, “I speak the truth. The truth will set you free. If the son sets you free, you’ll be free indeed.” What’s Jesus saying here? He says, ‘I can set you free if you’ll only hear my teaching and grasp them and hold on to them and stay put with me. Then I can and I will transform you from a slave into a son. A slave’s position in a home, Jesus says, is always very tenuous. And I think the greatest cruelty of the transatlantic slave trade and the centuries that slavery was an act of American institution and in parts of Canada also a Canadian institution. The greatest cruelty was that any time for any reason the slaveholder could split up families. Could sell children away from their parents and wives and husbands away from one another and grandchildren away from grandparents. Historian Elizabeth Brown Prior writes how that famous southern general and slaveholder Robert E. Lee, whose monument in Richmond, Virginia, was only taken down four years ago. It his family’s tradition was that they would respect the unity of enslaved people’s families. But he uh he went against that grain. He broke up every family that he was in control of on his estate, hiring individuals out to various other plantations. Elizabeth Prior writes that Lee’s slaves regarded him as the worst man they’d ever seen. So breaking up families like that happened all the time. It was a simple transaction between slaveholders. Often when it happened, those family members would never hope to see one another again. So there was no guaranteed family stability for an enslaved person. Just as Jesus comments, a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. A son has a place of stability and permanence. A son doesn’t fear being thrown out of his bedroom or having all of his possessions taken away or being tossed out on the street and sold to another family. A son ought to have every reason to be confident and secure in his father’s love. Every son should feel that way. Now Jesus says anyone who sins though is a slave to sin. And to understand what Jesus is saying there, we might need to reccalibrate a little bit our sense of what it means to be free. Many modern people would describe or define freedom as uh freedom from restraint. Freedom to do really what you want to do when you want to do it so long as you don’t hurt anyone else with no real outside constraints imposed upon you. But no one can really live a life of freedom that way. Rather, the only real way to understand freedom, it’s a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain a better and deeper freedom. You choose the right set of constraints, the most liberating set of constraints. Couple of examples. We might want to eat as much pizza and hamburgers and ice cream as we want, but we also might have a general desire to live past 45 and have some semblance of health and strength. So, we have these competing desires and we’re not free to satisfy both of those at the same time. So, we have to make some kind of strategic choice which involves saying no to some freedoms in order to gain others. Or you’re married, but you meet someone else who you think it’d be really nice to get to know and and that person could really satisfy you and make you feel exhilarated and make you happy. So, you one desire that favors family stability that involves working on your marriage and providing a stable home for your children and keeping the promises you made on your wedding day. and you have another competing desire to satisfy your yearnings for someone new. Your desires, they’re playing chicken with one another, seeing who will flinch first. Wisdom would involve choosing the right set of constraints that best line up with how God has made us, that best line up with God, how God wants us to be. But you have to make a choice, a strategic choice that involves saying no to some kind of freedom in order to gain a richer and better and longerlasting freedom. And freedom really doesn’t work any other way. One last example. Most of us, we can’t stand up and play guitar like Luke or drums like Baboyet or sing like Gu. We’re not free to do that because we didn’t do what they did. They at some point said no to hours of playing outside as kids or watching TV or playing video games so they could tediously practice scales and rhythms on their instrument instead. Maybe their parents made them do that. Those nasty Gurwing parents just made them do that. But still, a strategic choice was made to say no to some freedoms in order to gain the freedom that they now have to lead us in worship. Freedom only comes to those who have submitted to discipline. So Jesus says to his listeners that he can set them free. If he does set them free, they’ll be free indeed. But to receive that freedom, they have to hold to his teachings. They have to make room in their lives for his word. They have to hear him and answer his call on their lives and be loyal and stay put with him. Freedom doesn’t mean having no master. And Jesus says that he can set us free if we make him our master. To be free, we just have to settle in and live with Jesus and enjoy his guiding, directing, restricting, but liberating word over our lives. Doesn’t mean we have to be perfect. Remember in John 6 when so many of Jesus’ disciples were deserting him, Jesus looked at his inner circle of 12 disciples and said, “Do you want to leave me too?” And Peter said, “Where would we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you’re the holy one of God.” Peter’s saying, “I don’t have an alternate story to live out of. We have no choice but to hold to your teachings, to hear, to believe, to obey as best we can. You have the words of eternal life and we just have nowhere else to look. That’s the truth that sets people free. That makes a way for people to be transformed from slaves to sons, adopted out of the murderer’s family into the family of God. Andrew Claven describes the kind of freedom that Christ offers us this way. He says, “Almost everyone at some point has betrayed their principles for personal gain, believing that this served their authentic selves. The gain, whatever it was, the money, the sex, the success, seemed real to them in that moment in a way that their higher aspirations did not. Their principles felt like an enforced overlay, a shall not oppression that could be reasoned away in the face of desire. This felt to them like freedom. Christ’s vision of the human person is just the opposite of this. If you live in the logos, in the word, you’ll come to a different sense of yourself than the materialist. Instead of feeling that your desires are real, while moral rules are restrictions on your authentic nature, you’ll find that love is your authentic nature and your selfish desires are getting in the way. They’re imposed obstructions. They’re signs of brokenness. They’re what Christians call sin. A quote attributed to German writer Yoan Wulf Gang Van Goita says, “None are more helplessly enslaved than those who falsely believe that they’re free.” And that’s the kind of people Jesus was speaking to in John 8 who falsely believed they were free. So that rather than receive the liberating constraints of Jesus’ teaching, their autonomy was based on something as slim as their religious heritage, they couldn’t recognize that their real father was not Abraham. Their real father was not God, but their real father was the devil, a murderer from the beginning and a liar. Sounds very harsh to think of those who aren’t children of God as children of the great murderer, doesn’t it? to think of people living in the home of the murdering father who the guy who’s only going to lie to them because lying lying is the only language he knows and they’re not living in the home of the creator. Sounds harsh, but Jesus really doesn’t pull any punches on this. In his sermon on the mount in Matthew 5, he says, “You’ve heard that it was said of old, you shall not murder. Whoever murders will be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who’s angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council. Whoever says you fool will be liable to the hell of mur the the hell of fire. So Jesus is saying that just upstream of murder is the various anger and contempt we hold toward others. No one’s ever going to take us to court for being angry or feeling contempt toward others. But in God’s court, it’s all of one piece. our anger and our and actual murder. It’s all of one piece. Mentioned before that for a for a number of years I would spend Saturday regular Saturday afternoons with a group of mostly murderers up at the Edmonton Maximum Security Institution leading Bible studies and praying and get to know predominantly pretty young guys. And during those times, I often felt that the only difference between those guys and me was about 30 seconds of reckless, thoughtless anger because the murderous seeds that are in me had sprouted in them and it gave vent to actually taking someone’s life. So to be honest with ourselves, I think is to realize each of our sin natures bears some residue of our of a murderous father’s influence. French philosopher Albert Kimu commented on how we all tend to feel that we’re innocent people, but the test comes when we take up a cause or take up an ideal. The test is whether or not we can actually avoid committing murder. He says we shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men. And many people throughout history who who had great ideals and great ideas about how to make the world a better place in implementing those ideas, they killed millions. Andrew Claven puts it, “Despite the inevitable blood-drenched failure of man’s utopian plans, the slave camp that was the Soviet Union, the hell on earth that was Hitler’s Germany, the wasteland of tyranny and starvation that was Ma’s China, those mortals who possess the knowledge of good and evil keep trying to slaughter their way back to paradise. So, what will deliver us from the seeds of murder in our hearts and allow us to move out of the house of the murderous dad? Jesus tells people in John 8, but their ears just won’t hear. By verse 48, things have escalated to the point that they’re so angry with Jesus, they say, “You are a demon-possessed Samaritan.” I mean, if Jesus wants to accuse them of having uh the devil as their father, they’ll lash out at him and say, “Jesus, you have the devil right inside you.” And Jesus says, ‘I tell you the truth. If anyone keeps my word, he’ll never see death. But the dialogue is at such a knife edge at that point that the crowd angrily reacts, now we know you’re demonpossessed. Abraham died as did the prophets. Yet you say, “If anyone keeps my word, he’ll never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died. So did the prophets. Who do you think you are?” and that poisoned atmosphere. Then Jesus makes one of the clearest self-disclosures in the Gospels. This is one of the clearest claims he could ever make, explaining that he is indeed God in the flesh. Remember the crowd’s very proud of their religious heritage from Abraham. But Jesus says to them, you know, your father Abraham, he rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day. He saw it and was glad. And they’re very puzzled by that. They say, “You’re not even 50 years old and you claim to have seen Abraham.” And then Jesus just drops the bombshell. He says, “I tell you the truth before Abraham was born. I am.” And when he says, “I am,” he’s taking on himself the divine name that uh God disclosed to Moses in front of the burning bush in Exodus chapter 3. Jesus is saying by mentioning that, Jesus is saying nothing less than I am the self-existing one. I didn’t come from something. I didn’t come from someone else. I’ve always been. I simply am. I depend on nothing. I depend on no one. In fact, everything that exists depends on me. And Jesus uses that sacred name for himself. This is a name that the Jews refused to pronounce. They refused to spell. It was such a holy sacred name, the name Yahweh. That’s my name, Jesus says. So you can either crown me or you can kill me. crowd had no doubt about the implications of what Jesus was saying. He was saying that he was the self-existent God. It was either the truth or this was blasphemy of the highest order. Crowd decided it was blasphemy. So that mob of murderers then revealed their true family heritage. As the offspring of the great murderer, they picked up stones to complete their father’s task of murdering Jesus. Now, it wasn’t Jesus’ time yet. that would come in the spring. This is in the fall. Our passage closes by telling us that Jesus somehow hid himself and slipped away from the temple grounds. Now, of course, Jesus always had plans. He came to earth with the purpose of voluntarily allowing the children of the great murderer to murder him because in being murdered, that was the way to set people free. In trying to kill Jesus, they didn’t know what they were doing. But Jesus was willing to suffer, willing to die, go to the cross, be murdered in our place so that our sins can be forgiven. And all of us laten murderers could be released. We could move out of the murderer’s home, be transformed and adopted into the family of God, knowing God as our true and authentic father. In that sense, really, the murder of Jesus is the best thing that ever happened in our world. He died so that we wouldn’t have to face ultimate death and separation from God our father. Died as our substitute. He longed to set us free. He fulfilled God’s holy retribution against sin. He was the sinless one representing us making the payment for the sinful ones to make us children of God. So the murder of Jesus really the most beautiful thing that ever came into a world fallen into sin. That original prototypical murderer Cain who killed his brother Abel, he had a curse put on him by God. But that curse was reversed when the son of God was murdered. And if we put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for our salvation, that curse no longer has any impact on us. You at the close of his book, The Kingdom of Cain, Andrew Claven points out a piece of artwork that deals with the murder of Jesus. It’s the Madonna de la Pieta, the Madonna of compassion, the Pieta, it’s usually called. Sculpture of Mary with the body of her slaughtered son cradled upon her knees, the murdered son of God. The artist uh contracted to carve this work in 1498, was only 23 years old. And in that contract, when he was contracted, he said that the sculpture would be the most beautiful work in marble that Rome has ever seen. And Claven writes, “It was it is it is the most beautiful work in marble that anyone has ever seen. It may be the most beautiful object that a man has ever made with his mind and with his hands. It’s carved out of a single block of Carrera marble, a heavy yet fluid stone of liquid whiteness.” Clavven writes, “Mary’s body covered in drapery seems to pour down over her dead son like a universe of tears. He’s naked except for a cloth across his loins. He’s frail, wholly lifeless. The sorrow in Mary’s face is a grief majestic, still and infinitely deep. One of her hands turns outward as if to say, “Look, look what they did to the son I loved.” Yet for all this, Clayman writes, “What is it?” The Pieta, what does it show? It’s a marble image of the greatest suffering we know of. Saddest thing that could ever happen. A mother who’s lost her child. A mother mourning her dead child. It’s the dark fruit of the worst injustice. A man of perfect innocence. Condemned to death. Abandoned and condemned not by some villain but by every sector of society. Its religious leaders, its political leaders, its people, even his closest friends. Worse and worse still, it’s God himself who lies there dead. It’s God himself murdered. The logos of the world murdered by the world. The author of the moral order. A bridge across the empty space between time and eternity. The spirit that poured down into Mary, out of Mary, dead on Mary’s knees. His end is the end of every beginning. His death is the death of creation. The murder that began with the murder of Abel has evolved into the kingdom of murder, the kingdom of Cain. Look at this marble mother of mercy mourning the death of her sacrificed son. And then he said says, “If out of this ultimate depth of suffering, if out of this infinite darkness of grief, if out of this cosmic catastrophe of injustice, the hands of a mortal man can sculpt such perfect beauty, then what beauty can God not carve out of this sorrowful world in the liquid white marble of eternity?” And he closes. He says, “We live in the kingdom of murder. We live in the kingdom of Cain. But if out of our suffering such beauty can come, surely there’s another kingdom. Let us wait here for a while with this beautiful sorrow. Let us wait here with the mother of mercy. Let us wait here with the murdered God in the kingdom of Cain. Let’s linger for a little while and see what happens next. Now, here are a few things that we can go to prayer with. I think from this is a very powerful passage, I think. And one thing you can do is you can thank Jesus that if he has set you free, you are free indeed. And you can ask God this morning for a wise acceptance of freedom in your life that gladly receives the most liberating constraints. Some things have to go in order for a greater freedom to stay. And then pray for those you know whose father is the devil that they will be drawn to and will hold to the teachings of Jesus. Just take a couple of moments. This is your own personal time with God. And then I’m going to lead us into our time of corporate prayer.