Before Abraham Was

They’d lost the argument, so they reached for insults. Jesus had just told them they weren’t of God (John 8:47). Men who can’t answer the truth usually start attacking the man who tells it.

John 8:48-50 — A Samaritan with a demon

They asked Him if they weren’t right after all to call Him a Samaritan who had a demon (John 8:48).

A Samaritan, to a Jerusalem crowd, was a half-breed and a heretic, a man with the wrong blood and a rival temple (John 4:9, 20). Jesus had just told them they weren’t Abraham’s real children. So they threw it right back at Him. You’re the one outside the family. You’re the one with a bad father. And a demon was the easiest way to explain a man whose words they couldn’t refute. They’d said it before, and they’d say it again (John 7:20, 10:20). The scribes had even said He cast out demons by the prince of demons (Mark 3:22).

Look at how He answered. He let the Samaritan charge go without a word. He wasn’t ashamed of the Samaritans. A whole town of them had believed in Him at Sychar (John 4:39-42). But He did answer the demon charge, because that one touched His Father. He told them He didn’t have a demon. He honored His Father, and they dishonored Him (John 8:49).

Then He told them He wasn’t seeking His own glory. There was One who seeks it, and He’s the Judge (John 8:50).

That’s how the Son of God takes an insult. He doesn’t swing back. He hands the matter to His Father. He took abuse without answering in kind and left His case with the righteous Judge (1 Peter 2:23) (Isaiah 53:3). And He’d already warned His men that if the world slandered the Master, it wouldn’t go easier on His household (Matthew 10:25). A man who belongs to Christ will be called names. He doesn’t have to win the exchange. His Father keeps the books.

John 8:51 — Never see death

Then, to men who’d just called Him demon-possessed, He made a promise. Solemnly, He told them that anyone who keeps His word will never see death (John 8:51).

They’d come with insults, and He answered with an offer of life. That’s grace, even in a courtroom.

What does it mean to keep His word? It’s what He told the believing Jews a few minutes earlier: stay in it (John 8:31). Not hear it once and nod. Hold on to it, live under it, come back to it. And who keeps it? The ones the Father gave Him. On the night before the cross He’d tell the Father that the men He’d been given had kept His word (John 17:6). Keeping isn’t how a man earns his place among the elect. It’s the mark that he was there all along.

And what does it mean that he’ll never see death? The body of a Christian still dies. Jesus didn’t promise otherwise. But death as the wages of sin, death as the doorway to judgment, death as the second death, will never lay a finger on him (Revelation 2:11, 20:6). Christ took on flesh to break the devil’s grip on death and free men from a lifetime of fearing it, and He took the sting out of the grave (Hebrews 2:14-15) (1 Corinthians 15:55-57). He’d make the same promise to Martha at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:25-26).

A man who keeps Christ’s word will close his eyes in this world and open them in His presence. He won’t see death the way the unbeliever sees it. He’ll see his Savior.

John 8:52-53 — Who do You make Yourself?

They heard it, and it only proved their point. Now they knew He had a demon (John 8:52).

Their reasoning went like this. Abraham died. The prophets died. And this Man says whoever keeps His word will never taste death? Notice they changed His word. He’d said see. They said taste. They couldn’t hear anything but the grave. They were thinking of a body in the ground, and He was talking about the judgment of God.

Then they asked the question the whole chapter has been driving toward. Was He greater than their father Abraham, who died? The prophets died too. Who was He making Himself out to be (John 8:53)?

The Samaritan woman asked almost the same thing at the well. Was He greater than their father Jacob (John 4:12)? She asked it with curiosity, and she ended up running to town. These men asked it with contempt, and they’d end up reaching for rocks. Same question. Different hearts. The difference wasn’t in the question, and it wasn’t in the asker. It was the Father drawing one and passing by the others.

Later they’d say outright that their problem was a man making himself God (John 5:18, 10:33). They understood Him better than a lot of people do today.

John 8:54-56 — Abraham saw His day

Jesus answered the charge that He was puffing Himself up. If He glorified Himself, His glory would be nothing. It was His Father who glorified Him, the same One they called their God (John 8:54).

He wasn’t making Himself anything. He was telling them who the Father had declared Him to be. The Father would do it with a voice from Heaven, on a mountain, and finally through the cross and the empty tomb (John 12:28, 17:1) (2 Peter 1:17).

Then He told them plainly that they didn’t know the God they claimed. But He knew Him. If He said He didn’t, He’d be a liar like them. He knew the Father and kept His word (John 8:55).

Jesus says it would be a lie for Him to play humble here. The Son alone knows the Father, and He makes Him known to whoever He chooses (Matthew 11:27). There’s no false modesty in Christ.

Then He answered their question about Abraham. Abraham, their father, had looked ahead with joy to His day, and he did see it, and it made him glad (John 8:56).

So what did Abraham see? Scripture doesn’t give us everything, and we shouldn’t build a cathedral where God left a tent. But it gives us enough. God promised Abraham that all the nations of the earth would be blessed in his offspring, and Paul says that was the gospel preached ahead of time, and that the Offspring is Christ (Genesis 12:3) (Galatians 3:8, 16). On Moriah Abraham assured his son that God would supply the lamb, and God put a substitute in Isaac’s place, and Abraham named the mountain for the Lord’s providing (Genesis 22:8, 13-14). Hebrews says it was as good as getting Isaac back from the grave (Hebrews 11:17-19). The patriarchs died before the promise came, but they spotted it on the horizon and welcomed it (Hebrews 11:13).

That’s the point. Abraham, the father they kept bragging about, looked ahead to the day of Christ and was glad. The prophets searched to know what time the Spirit of Christ was pointing to (1 Peter 1:10-12). And these sons of Abraham had that day standing in front of them, and they wanted it dead. And Abraham is alive to God right now (Luke 20:37-38). If they could’ve asked him, he’d have told them whose side he was on.

John 8:57-58 — Before Abraham

They scoffed. He wasn’t even fifty yet, and He’d seen Abraham (John 8:57)?

Fifty wasn’t His age. He was somewhere past thirty (Luke 3:23). It was a round number to say He was a young man talking nonsense. And notice they flipped His words again. He’d said Abraham saw His day. They said He claimed to have seen Abraham. They meant it as a joke. It was the truest thing they said all day.

Then Jesus solemnly gave them the answer (John 8:58). And the grammar is the whole sermon.

When He spoke of Abraham, He used a word that means came to be. Abraham had a beginning. There was a day when Abraham wasn’t, and then a day when he was. But when Jesus spoke of Himself, He didn’t say He came to be before Abraham. He didn’t even say He was there before Abraham. He used the plain present tense, the bare self-naming with nothing after it: “I am.” Abraham came into being. He simply is.

No Jew in that courtyard could miss where that came from. When Moses asked God at the burning bush what name to give Israel, God named Himself as the One who is, the self-existent God with no beginning and no end (Exodus 3:14). Every faithful Israelite treated that name with holy fear. And here was a Man in the temple courts, not yet fifty, taking it on His own lips.

He wasn’t claiming to be old. He was claiming to be eternal. The God who was there before the mountains has no starting point at all (Psalm 90:2). The psalmist says creation will wear out while the Lord never changes, and Hebrews says that psalm is about the Son (Psalm 102:25-27) (Hebrews 1:10-12). The God who calls Himself the first and the last is the same Jesus who’s the Alpha and the Omega (Isaiah 48:12) (Revelation 22:13). He never changes (Hebrews 13:8).

That’s why Abraham could be glad about Him. The One Abraham looked forward to had been there before Abraham was born, calling him out of Ur.

John 8:59 — Stones in their hands

So they picked up stones to throw at Him (John 8:59).

That tells you what they heard. Nobody stones a man for saying he’s older than he looks. The law said a man who blasphemed the name of the Lord was to be stoned (Leviticus 24:16). They heard a man claim the name of God, and they reached for the law’s penalty. They’d do it again when He claimed oneness with the Father (John 10:30-33). Men who wanted Him dead understood Him perfectly. They just didn’t believe Him.

And there are only three choices with a claim like that. Either He was a liar, or He was a lunatic, or He’s the Lord — the eternal God, and every man should fall at His feet. There’s no polite middle ground where He’s just a good teacher.

But the stones never left their hands. Jesus slipped out of sight and left the temple (John 8:59).

Don’t picture Him cornered and lucky. Nobody took His life from Him. He’d lay it down on His own authority, at the time and in the way the Father had decreed, and not one minute sooner (John 10:18). The crowd at Nazareth had tried to throw Him off a cliff, and He walked right through the middle of them (Luke 4:29-30). These men could hold all the rocks they wanted.

And then He left the temple. The God of Abraham walked out of His own house, and the men who ran it didn’t even know who’d just left. Ezekiel once saw the Lord’s glory leave the temple over Israel’s sin (Ezekiel 10:18-19, 11:23). John doesn’t draw that line, but it’s a sober thing to drive out the One you claim to worship.

That’s the end of John 8. Next, John shows us a man born blind.