[Music]
Amen.
If you would please turn within your Bibles to the Gospel of John, chapter 8, beginning at verse 46.
Again, we hear Jesus speak, asking, ‘Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.’
And the Jews answered him, ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?’
Jesus answered, ‘I do not have a demon, but I honor my father and you dishonor me. Yet I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks it and he is the judge. Truly, truly I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.’
And the Jews said to him, ‘Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died as did the prophets. Yet you say, if anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham who died? And the prophets died. Who do you make yourself out to be?’
Jesus answered, ‘If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my father who glorifies me, of whom you say, he is our God. But you have not known him. I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.’
So the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet 50 years old, and have you seen Abraham?’
Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’
So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Lord, you’ve given us your word for instruction, for encouragement, for reproof. Help us to hear you speak through it, to have our hearts be changed, to do as you command, so that we may have confidence of eternal life in you. Help us to know you to know your father as our father and rest in the hope and confidence and promise that we are his children by adoption as you are his only begotten. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
So if you have been a Christian for any significant time and if you have ever engaged with John’s gospel, then it is near certain that you are aware of Jesus making several I am statements—certain specific claims of his divinity and self-identification as the Lord.
There are seven statements generally identified and grouped together to support his self-identification as God. And through our study together, we’ve already encountered two of them when Jesus said, ‘I am the bread of life,’ and said, ‘I am the light of the world.’
Theologically, we like the number seven because it’s the divine number of completion, particularly identified with the seven days of creation and the several sets of seven that are found in John’s book of Revelation. And the evangelist, he also likes the number seven, and he uses it to demonstrate a sense of completion and of totality for his twin arguments.
There are seven signs which are identified as evidence to prove that Jesus is the Lord God and seven I am statements where Jesus declares himself to be the Lord God. However, our passage today contains what is actually an eighth declaration that is different enough to justify its exclusion from the list of seven and important enough to warrant its own independent examination.
See, the primary difference between this one and the other seven is their absolute use of the definite article ‘the,’ being something that is specifically unique. We heard ‘the bread of life,’ ‘the light of the world.’ Whereas here, this declaration is closer to Exodus 3:14 as an absolute statement of being that Jesus is, was, and always will be the Lord.
And so making this the most definitive statement by Jesus declaring himself as God. It certainly is his most explosive statement. Yet when we read it more closely, we discover that it also unlocks how we find and see Christ in and throughout the Old Testament.
Meanwhile, in our narrative, Jesus has been going back and forth with the Jews. He has been affirming the rightness of his teaching and its consistency with the scriptures against the inconsistency of their teachings and traditions, accusing them of not knowing the Lord, of not keeping his commandments, and of actually being children of the devil.
They were just getting more and more upset and mad at him, feeling insulted and personally attacked by Jesus’s proclamation of the truth. But no matter what they tried or said, they were unable to refute Jesus or prove him to be in error. All that they could do was just devolve to name calling and slander, replying, ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and you have a demon?’
See, calling Jesus a Samaritan implied that he was an ethnic half-breed and painted him as a kind of religious heretic or apostate. It suggested that he did not belong or have any right to be even in the temple precincts. Accusing Jesus of having a demon was meant exactly as it sounds.
They believed him to be in league with the spiritual opposition, as was also suggested in the synoptics. And in one sense, I admit they were right. He is in league with the spiritual opposition—except they just had the spiritual teams reversed. And since they could not deny that Jesus possessed supernatural power and abilities, and since miracles were naturally impossible, and since there had not been a confirmed prophet in over 400 years, and since they refused to recognize and openly acknowledge who Jesus was sent by—the Lord God the Father—then their only reasonable attribution was to the devil and his demonic angels.
But of course, we know they’re wrong. Yet, calling Jesus a Samaritan and saying that he had a demon was not just a statement against him. It was also slander against everyone that paid attention to him, to everyone that believed in him, and who supported him in his ministry. Right? Even by this point in John’s narrative, their condemnation and contempt also already extended beyond Jesus to include his followers, a position which technically still has not changed even 2,000 years later.
Nevertheless, they had no evidence or proof to support their accusations. All they had were mean words spoken to simply hurt. But Jesus refused to sink down to their level. Although he had just publicly pronounced against them, ‘You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires,’ he did not resort to childish name calling.
He was not speaking slander but the truth. And he had the receipts to prove it. He told them that if you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did. But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. See, he was knowing that they were presently conspiring against him and plotting his earthly demise.
So, countering their slander, Jesus plainly asserted before the crowd, ‘I do not have a demon, but I honor my father and you dishonor me.’ Jesus said the quiet part out loud. He was calling a spade a spade and naming a thing for what it is and explained precisely what was going on here. He denied being possessed by a demon or being in league with the devil. He claimed to honor God with everything he did and taught.
And he pointed out that they, the religious authorities, were the ones unjustly disparaging him and his followers. He reminded them that they were actually dishonoring themselves by their attempts to dishonor him. And then he insisted, ‘Yet I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks it, and he is the judge.’
First, he denied the implication that he was just an attention seeker, a rabble-rouser, or just indulging in vain glorious self-promotion. Secondly, there is someone who does actively desire his glorification.
But up until this moment in the present discourse, everything that Jesus has said could be simply chalked up to nothing more or less than he said, she said. Then Jesus said something to make everyone stop to take notice and pay attention.
Jesus said, ‘Truly, truly I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.’
Remember, repetition by Hebrew Jewish speakers is a sign of emphasis and great importance. And underlying our English translation of ‘truly, truly’ is the Hebrew expression of ‘amen.’ Amen conveying the absolute sense of, ‘Lord, let it be.’ Or as Yul Brynner could have said it, ‘So let it be written. So let it be done.’
And he says, ‘I say to you,’ a direct pronouncement by Jesus without appeal or reliance upon any other or greater authority, much as he made during the sermon on the mount that caused the crowd to be so astonished at his teaching because he was teaching them as one who had authority and not as their scribes.
So this carried the imperative force of command. And then Jesus made the most shocking pronouncement. If anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.
This was not just shocking to his Jewish hearers, but it would also be unreasonable and unbelievable to anyone hearing it. Jesus promised something that was illogical and which could be considered easily disprovable the moment one of his followers died.
Yet in order to claim that Jesus was disproved, the part that would have to be ignored is the present fact of their prior sins. Because even if they were perfect going forward, their past failures and sin would still disqualify them apart from God’s atoning grace and mercy of forgiveness. That is why we need both the forgiveness of our sins and we need the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.
But this declaration is even more shocking because of how Jesus was claiming both the divine prerogative of granting or preserving eternal life and of himself personally possessing an authority equal to that of the Lord by making an equal and identical promise as God.
Saying, you know, in Leviticus 18:5, it reads, ‘You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules. If a person does them, he shall live by them. I am the Lord.’
So through this pronouncement, Jesus is unequivocally implying that he is the Lord, that his words are the same as God’s word, and that his words are truly the words of eternal life as confessed by Peter.
But they, the Jews, the leaders, did not initially take Jesus’s claim seriously since they replied, ‘Now we know that you have a demon,’ accepting his statement as proof of demonic possession or as evidence of his insanity.
They accepted this as proof for what they were wanting to believe about Jesus because it was safer and it was easier for them to accept than it was to believe God’s honest truth.
Even today, what is our reaction to a person who claims that they are a god? We would assume that they’re crazy and we would try to get them under psychiatric observation and evaluation. But we would not think that to be a criminal affliction, just a pitiable one.
From a certain perspective, presuming that Jesus was crazy, that was really the most charitable view because otherwise what he claimed was blasphemy and deserving of death if untrue. He was still, although Jesus was implying it, he had not yet outright claimed it.
So they asked some qualifying questions to try and get him to specifically say what it was that they thought he meant. They asked, ‘Abraham died as did the prophets. Yet you say, if anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham who died?’
Remember, from the Jewish perspective, the only person greater than Abraham, the progenitor of their religion, was God. The other patriarchs were held in high regard. The prophets were held in high regard. David and Solomon were great, but Abraham was greater than all the rest.
And so they were asking Jesus, ‘Who do you make yourself out to be? Who do you think you are?’
Which Jesus answered, ‘If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my father who glorifies me, of whom you say, he is our God. But you’ve not known him. I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and I keep his word.’
Again, Jesus here reiterates that he was not self-aggrandizing but that God the Father, the Lord, was glorifying him and arguing that if the Jewish authorities truly knew God, then they should already know this and understand that.
And again Jesus called them liars—people falsely claiming to be in a right covenantal relationship with the Lord.
And again Jesus affirmed the quality of his relationship with the Lord—with God as his father and himself as the beloved and obedient son.
So as extraordinary as this conversation already was, it then took a stranger turn. And that is the twist that we’re going to focus on.
See, Jesus continued by saying, ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.’
So the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet 50 years old, and have you seen Abraham?’
And Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’
Now, whenever Jesus says, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you,’ we know that the following is exceptionally important. Before Abraham was, I am.
And although the grammar of this phrase sounds horrible in English because of the mixing of tenses, the meaning that this phrase conveys is that before the lifetime of Abraham, who is a real historical person, Jesus— a definite living and present, in this narrative, historical person—already existed.
Or before the time when Abraham existed, Jesus was. And in the first century present, Jesus is; and therefore Jesus will also continue to be onward into the future.
So as with the other I am expressions, Jesus uses the Greek ‘ego eimi’ emphatically saying, ‘I—I am,’ or as God named himself to Moses from the burning bush, ‘I am who I am.’
And so by this, Jesus did not say that he was a god. Jesus did not say that he was like God. Jesus did not say that he was another God.
Instead, Jesus said that he is the Lord God. Jesus said that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus said that he is God. This emphatic, uncompromising, and undeniable declaration is why they then picked up stones to throw at him.
It was too much for them to handle. It was too difficult for them to accept or believe. Their unregenerate hearts could not receive this truth, so they had no choice but to try and blindly follow the law of Moses and stone Jesus for blasphemy.
Truly, this was a tragic turn of events. But this narrative provides us with a key that unlocks an important and necessary aspect of the Old Testament for us.
This narrative helps us to better identify and see the specific work of Jesus within the Old Testament—not just as types of shadows that point ahead, but also as a very knowable presence of the pre-incarnate Christ—God the Son.
See, there is a mysterious figure who appears frequently across Old Testament scripture. And he appears more often than we usually realize. But he’s never expressly named. Instead, he’s known by a title, the ‘Malak Adonai’ or the angel of the Lord.
Now, ‘malak’ or ‘angelos’ in the Greek are terms which mean messenger, and that is rightly descriptive of his function, his role, and duty to bring a message from God—similar to those called apostles with a lowercase ‘a.’
This messenger was sent, but he was sent differently from the New Testament apostles and evangelists, or even the Old Testament prophets—that’s before them—because he spoke differently from them.
He spoke with a different kind of authority because the message of the prophets and apostles was always spoken as a mediator proclaiming, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’
But the angel of the Lord, who would sometimes speak of God or speak from God in the third person as declares the Lord, he would also speak divine pronouncements in the first person as ‘I’ or as ‘me.’
Now messengers in the ancient world carried a tremendous weight of authority and responsibility. And since they were empowered to represent kings and kingdoms, whatever they did, or said, or had done to them was treated as if it was done by or to their master.
And while they spoke on behalf of their master, speaking for them, they still did not speak as their master. But the angel of the Lord did.
When the angel visited Hagar after she fled into the wilderness, the angel of the Lord also said to her, ‘I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.’ And she responded, saying, ‘Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.’
Because she understood that she had seen the person of God. After the angel appeared to Manoah and his wife, and after he had ascended to heaven on a pillar of fire, then Manoah knew that he was the angel of the Lord.
And Manoah said to his wife, ‘We shall surely die, for we have seen God,’ also recognizing the angel as God.
And when Moses was in the wilderness, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. Then God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses,’ affirming the angel as God, who then answers Moses’s question, ‘If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I say to them?’
God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’
So, you see, Jesus claimed to be both the Lord, and he identified himself here with the angel of the Lord—a claim that forces us to identify, recognize, and acknowledge this angel as also God the Son, the pre-incarnate Christ, and see his work in the Old Testament, which is why we often call those appearances ‘Christophanies.’
Identifying God the Son as the angel of the Lord does not injure his deity in the least because this use of ‘malak’ describes his role and his work rather than implying that he had a creaturely status, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons wrongly suggest.
And so this has serious implications for Christology—our understanding of Christ’s character, of who he is. These implications disprove and refute the dualistic heresy of Marcion, who wrongly taught that the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was an evil and lesser deity different from the good, loving God of the New Testament, Jesus.
It refutes it because if Jesus is God the Son—and he is—and he is also the angel of the Lord, which I believe scripture teaches, then he is also the powerful military defender and protector of God’s people as the commander of the army of the Lord, who helped Joshua against Jericho; as the one who struck down Sennacherib’s Assyrian army that besieged Jerusalem; and that he is also the executive of divine judgment as the one who stood in the road with his sword drawn against Balaam—the one who condemned Israel for its disobedience, for not fully cleansing Canaan; the one who punished Jerusalem and King David for his sinful senses.
He’s also the one who called and supported God’s chosen agents, as the one that called Moses from the burning bush, the one who called Gideon and Samson, and the one who defended Joshua the high priest against the accusations of Satan.
See, these implications further support, affirm, and prove the consistency and continuity between the Old and New Testaments related to the character of Christ. Because we know Jesus, he chose and called to himself and then sent out disciples, evangelists, and apostles.
He executed divine judgment and wrath against the money changers and sacrifice sellers in the temple. And he is promised and expected to return, leading at the head of the heavenly hosts to finally and utterly defeat Satan and his minions, rescuing, protecting, and defending all of God’s people against sin, death, and all the powers of darkness.
So it is rightly said that Jesus remains the same yesterday and today and forever. He is eternally consistent. God did not change himself between the Old and New Testaments.
Yet apart from asserting that Jesus, being God the Son and the Christ, pre-existed the time of Abraham, what does this really have to do with Abraham?
See, Jesus had just said something very special and specific, speaking a detail easily overlooked. He said, ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.’
He did not imply that Abraham experienced a vision of the future, nor did he refer to Abraham’s present spiritual status. Instead, it was the past tense. And since Abraham was not presently alive and on earth, Jesus could only mean that Abraham saw him in the flesh and therefore was glad sometime during Abraham’s natural lifetime.
But when or where could that have been? It was on Mount Moriah when Abraham was prevented from sacrificing his son Isaac. Remember, the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham.’
Allow me to suggest that it was the angel of the Lord, the pre-incarnate Christ, that intervened in Abraham’s attempted sacrifice. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. Behind who?
When a person looks up, they’re looking ahead and perhaps beyond whatever is in front of them. So, allow me to suggest that the angel of the Lord, the pre-incarnate Christ, was physically there, present, and fully visible to Abraham.
So, Abraham was stopped by Jesus, who then showed him the ram as a substitute. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.
So finally, allow me to suggest that by receiving his son back from an anticipated death, by not needing to actually sacrifice or kill his son, by receiving this ram as a substitute from the Lord’s hand, Abraham had an exceptionally good and a very great reason to be glad and to rejoice upon seeing Jesus.
So although Jesus was less than 50 years old in his incarnate form as the God-man, he actually had seen and been seen by Israel’s patriarch Abraham.
Recognizing and understanding that Jesus is eternally God and that not only was he before Abraham was and that Abraham and these many others knew him as the angel of the Lord—which were surely exciting spiritual experiences—what does that have to do with us today? Why does that matter for us?
See, knowing this helps us to better understand parts of our Christian faith. And one of the most challenging questions that believing Christians face, from within ourselves and from those on the outside, does relate to the Trinity—the three persons and their distinct work and their knowable presence in the Old Testament.
I mean, since the word ‘Trinity’ is not found in scripture and since because of the strict monotheistic perspective expressed by the Shema, ‘Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one’—identifying the three persons as one God in Hebrew scripture can be troublesome.
God the Father—he’s easily identified in direct references to the Lord Yahweh or God as Elohim. God the Holy Spirit—we can recognize him by references to the spirit of God or the spirit of the Lord. Whereas identifying God the Son in the Old Testament otherwise requires theological gymnastics and strange interpretations, like correlating God the Son as the divine word to the verbal pronouncement of creation—’And God said, let there be.’
But once we see him as the angel and messenger of the Lord, seeing him fulfill a particular role—like the Holy Spirit fulfills particular roles—then we can feel more confident understanding that the Trinity—that God really is three distinct persons.
Knowing this also helps us to refute arguments that suggest our Christian faith is inconsistent—accusations that suggest the character of God changed from wrath in the Old Testament to love in the New, as with the Marcionite heresy or as some modern preachers, like Adam Stanley, suggest; because God does not change.
Or which suggests that the person of our God—the person whom we worship—our God himself was changed between the two testaments or suggests that the idea of the Trinity was something newly created and crafted by Christians, or that suggests that God cannot be at once one God and also three distinct persons—defending against a modalist heresy that suggests that who God is depends on what he is doing at a given time.
See, knowing this helps us to better understand the inherent consistency of Jesus’s revealed character. Because just as the Marcionites were tempted to try and distance the more seemingly nice and loving Jesus from the seemingly wrathful and judgmental God of the Old Testament, some modern Christians have tried to keep the Jesus of the Gospels separate from the Jesus of Revelation by downplaying or ignoring the clear promise of his return in glorious judgment and wrath and power.
Those theological liberals and progressives, they’ll just pick and choose whatever preferred moralistic sound bites seem to justify or support their immediate position.
Rather, by viewing the Old Testament angel of the Lord through the New Testament lens of Jesus, we can better see this expression as a manifestation of his divine restraint and mercy in redemptive history.
And that by considering the character of Jesus in light of his past performance as his Old Testament messenger, we better understand and become more confident in the prophetic promise of his impending return.
That the Jesus of the past is the same Jesus of the Gospels and that he will be the same Jesus in the future in the last days of the end. Because the Lord God, Jesus the Christ, the Holy Spirit, and scripture are always perfectly consistent and constant.
And this certitude provides us with confidence and faith, building up our hope in all of God’s promises and in their eventual fulfillment and completion in his divinely ordained guidance.
God has always been faithful and true. God is always faithful and true. And God will always be faithful and true.
We can believe this and we can trust this because even before Abraham was, Jesus is. And even after we are gone, Jesus will still be. Jesus is God forever. Amen.