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CHILDREN OF THE DEVIL

John 8:41–5

They said to him: ‘We were born of no adulterous union. We have one Father – God.’ ‘If God was your Father,’ said Jesus, ‘you would love me. For it was from God that I came forth and have come here. I had nothing to do with my own coming, but it was he who sent me. Why do you not understand what I am saying? The reason is that you are unable to hear my word. You belong to your father, the devil, and it is the evil desires of your father that you wish to do. He was a murderer from the very beginning, and he never took his stand in the truth, because the truth is not in him. When he speaks falsehood it is his characteristic way of speaking, because he is a liar and the father of falsehood. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe in me.’

JESUS had just told the Jews that by their life and conduct and by their reaction to him they had made it clear that they were no real children of Abraham. Their reaction was to make an even greater claim. They claimed that God was their Father. All over the Old Testament, there is repeated the fact that God was in a special way the Father of his people Israel. God commanded Moses to say to Pharaoh: ‘Thus says the Lord: Israel is my first-born son’ (Exodus 4:22). When Moses was chiding the people for their disobedience, his appeal was: ‘Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you?’ (Deuteronomy 32:6). Isaiah speaks of his trust in God: ‘For you are our father, though Abraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O Lord, are our father, our Redeemer from of old is your name’ (Isaiah 63:16). ‘Yet, O Lord, you are our Father’ (Isaiah 64:8). ‘Have we not all one father?’ demanded Malachi. ‘Has not one God created us?’ (Malachi 2:10). So the Jews claimed that God was their Father.

‘We’, they said proudly, ‘were born of no adulterous union.’ There may be two things there. In the Old Testament, one of the loveliest descriptions of the nation of Israel is that which sees in her the Bride of God. Because of that, when Israel forsook God, she was said to go awhoring after strange gods; her infidelity was spiritual adultery. When the nation was thus faithless, the apostate people were said to be ‘children of whoredom’ (Hosea 2:4). So when the Jews said to Jesus that they were not the children of any adulterous union, they meant that they did not belong to a nation of idolaters but they had always worshipped the true God. It was a claim that they had never gone astray from God – a claim that only a people steeped in self-righteousness would ever have dared make.

But when the Jews spoke like this, there may have been something much more personal in it. It is certainly true in later times that a most malicious slander against Jesus was circulating. The Christians very early preached the miraculous birth of Jesus. It was put about that Mary had been unfaithful to Joseph; that her lover had been a Roman soldier called Panthera; and that Jesus was the child of that adulterous union. It is just possible that the Jews were flinging at Jesus even then an insult over his birth, as if to say: ‘What right have you to speak to the likes of us as you do?’

Jesus’ answer to the claim of the Jews is that it is false; and the proof is that if God was really their Father, they would have loved and welcomed him. Here again is the key thought of the Fourth Gospel; the real test is how people react to Jesus. To be confronted with Jesus is to be confronted with judgment; he is the touchstone of God by which all are judged.

Jesus’ close-knit indictment goes on. He asks: ‘Why do you not understand what I am saying?’ The answer is terrible – not that they are intellectually stupid, but that they are spiritually deaf. They refuse to hear and they refuse to understand. We can stop our ears to any warning; if we go on doing that long enough, we become spiritually deaf. In the last analysis, we will only hear what we want to hear; and if for long enough we attune our ears to our own desires and to the wrong voices, in the end we will be unable to tune in at all to the wavelength of God. That is what the Jews had done.

Then comes the cutting accusation that the real father of the Jews is the devil. Jesus chooses two characteristics of him.

(1) The devil is characteristically a murderer. There may be two things in Jesus’ mind. He may be thinking back to the old Cain and Abel story. Cain was the first murderer and he was inspired by the devil. He may be thinking of something even more serious than that. It was the devil who first tempted Adam and Eve in the old Genesis story. Through the devil, sin entered into the world, and through sin came death (Romans 5:13). If there had been no temptation, there would have been no sin; and, if there had been no sin, there would have been no death; and therefore, in a sense, the devil is the murderer of the whole human race.

But, even apart from the old stories, the fact remains that Christ leads to life and the devil to death. The devil murders goodness, chastity, honour, honesty, beauty, all that makes life lovely; he murders peace of mind and happiness and even love. Evil characteristically destroys; Christ characteristically brings life. At that very moment, the Jews were plotting how to kill Christ; they were taking the devil’s way.

(2) The devil characteristically loves falsehood. Every lie is inspired by the devil and does the devil’s work. Falsehood always hates the truth and always tries to destroy it. When the Jews and Jesus met, the false way met the true, and inevitably the false tried to destroy the true.

Jesus indicted the Jews as children of the devil because their thoughts were bent on the destruction of the good and the maintaining of the false. Everyone who tries to destroy the truth is doing the devil’s work.