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When I was at university, the man who led me to the Lord was also a student professor. So he had an office in the science building, and I would visit him there occasionally. On the door of his office, he had a piece of paper with these words on it. It's not what you know that will kill you. It's not even what you don't know that will kill you. It's what you know that ain't so. See, Jesus said, if you know the truth, the truth will set you free. There are several things we see in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John that are true, and we're going to look at some of them. We're going to see what's true about God. Not everything, obviously. We would be here for the rest of our lives. What's true about God, what's true about us, what's true about salvation, and what's true about Jesus. The first thing I want us to see, the first truth I want us to see, is that God is a person. And so he's personal. Say, how do you know this? Well, ten times Jesus refers to God as His Father. Two times the Jews refer to God as their Father. Jesus said that the Father sent Him. That the Father taught Him. He says He has seen the Father and heard the Father. All of these things are referring to God as His Father. Jesus is talking about God in very personal terms. In verse 54, He says, I glorify myself. 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. And a couple of chapters later in chapter 10 of John's Gospel, He says, my sheep hear my voice and I know them. And they follow me. I give them eternal life. And they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all. And no one is able to snatch them out of my Father's hand. I and the Father are one. You see, He's talking about the Father as if He knows Him personally. And the only way you can know somebody personally is if they are a person. So God the Father is a person. He's personal. Now the Jews understood this, what Jesus was saying, so they picked up stones again to stone Him. Jesus said, I have shown you many good works, still in chapter 10, from the Father, for which of them are you going to stone Me? It is not for good works that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy because you, being a man, make yourself God. You see, this proves that Jesus was claiming to be God, even though some Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and others say Jesus never said that He was God. Well here, obviously the Jews thought that's what Jesus was saying because it was. Jesus said, is it not written in the law? I said, you are gods. If He called them gods to whom the Word of God came and Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of Him who the Father consecrated and sent into the world, you are blaspheming because I said I am the Son of God? Later in verse 38, He says, the Father is in Me and I am in the Father. It's important to understand that God is our Father and that means He is a person and He is personal. Why? J.I. Packer wrote this in his book, Knowing God, which I recommend that anybody who hasn't would read it. He says, you sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's Holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new and better than the old, everything that is distinctly Christian as opposed to merely Jewish is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. The Father is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption. That's why we start the Lord's Prayer with our Father, which art in heaven. God is personal. He's a Father. Another reason that knowing God as our Father is important is because of what happened in our culture or what's happening in our culture. Maybe you've heard people say something like, the universe is telling me. Or the universe has said this to me. See the original meaning of the universe is that it is everything that exists. This isn't an old or new concept. It's actually very old. It goes back to the Greeks and the Romans. They usually called it something like the fates. You know the song, have yourself a merry little Christmas. Someday we'll all be together if the fates allow. Those were not the original words. The original words were if the Lord allows but they rewrote it and said if the fates allow. The universe was not thought to care or even concerned with anything at all, mostly because it couldn't. There's a TV show that Tracy likes to watch. It's called 9-11 and there's a shoot off called 9-11 Lone Star. That's the one in Texas. One character who's supposedly Muslim, a Muslim woman, talks about the universe as if it was a person. The universe is telling you something, she'll say. Or the universe is speaking to me, she'll say. And then Tracy and I, I was momentarily, she likes them better than me, was watching a Hallmark Christmas movie. Do you all notice that? Hallmark comes out with all the, they do it in July too, Christmas in July. They just play one Christmas movie after another. And I caught about five minutes of one yesterday and the man was telling the woman who he's breaking up with that I thought the universe was telling us that we should be together but I think it's telling us that we should be apart. You see, the universe has replaced God in a lot of people's thinking and the universe is not personal. But Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all of these religions believe that God is a person. He's personal. And in Christianity, as we've seen, both from the Bible and from the quote from J.I. Packer, God is our Father. That means we are his children adopted into his family. So what is God or who is God? Our larger catechism, Westminster divines, which is part of our theology in this church, is the Westminster Confession, the larger catechism and the shorter catechism. The larger catechism answers the question what is God by saying God is the Spirit who in and of himself is infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection. He's all efficient. See, they're talking to him as if he's a person. He is all efficient, all sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, beyond our full understanding, patient everywhere, almighty, knowing everything, completely wise, completely holy, completely just, completely merciful and gracious, patient, and overflowing with goodness and truth. That's a lot to unpack. And I understand we can't do it all today, but I want to concentrate on a couple of things that are related to our text. And the first is that God is holy, which means that he's pure, sinless, sin can't enter his presence. This is why when Isaiah in Isaiah chapter six enters into the temple, he says he saw the Lord high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim, each having six wings. With two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, with two he flew and he and one called out to the other saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory. And because Isaiah saw the holiness of the holy God, he said woe is me for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell amidst a people of unclean lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts. He was coming apart at the seams. Theologian D.H. Packer said the holiness, that holiness is the greatest of God's virtues is revealed in these verses of Isaiah. These angels which cover their faces and their feet before the glory of God can only repeat themselves. When they would express his great glory it's almost unutterable. And that astonishing glory of God, a glory that fills the whole earth is his holiness. All kinds of gods are being preached in churches nowadays, he writes, but it is not being preached according to scripture and it is not preached enough that our God is a holy God. So briefly, which is all we can do here, is we've said that God is a person. He's not the universe. He created the universe. God is holy. Because he's holy and pure sin cannot stand before him without being judged. That means that God is our Father, personal, that he's holy and that he's our judge. Where does that leave us? We're sinners. Sinful, lawbreakers. We can see in this chapter that is what Jesus is teaching us. He said to them in verse 23, I am from above. You are of this world. I am not of this world. I told you you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he, that I am he, you will die in your sins. So what is sin? Sin is any nonconformity to God's law, any breaking of one of God's commands. Jesus said, truly I say to you in verse 34, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. From the beginning Adam and Eve had sinned in the paradise that was the Garden of Eden. And all of humanity after them were born sinful. You and me. Everybody you know, everybody who's ever walked the face of the earth was born sinful except for Jesus. You say, well why not Jesus? Well because he did not have a human for a father. He was conceived in the womb of Mary by the Holy Spirit. It's called the incarnation. It's what we're supposed to celebrate at Christmas. But the rest of us have Adam as our father. Adam is our representative. And we are guilty of sin. As David said in Psalm 51, he was conceived in sin. And we sin because we are guilty. And we're guilty because we sin. And we're guilty before the God who is our judge. This is what Paul wrote to Titus. For we ourselves are once foolish, disobedient, let us stray slaves to various passions and pleasures passing our days in malice and then be hated by others in hating one another. So far we've seen that God is our father. He's a person. He's personal and holy. Which means he's pure and without sin. And that sin is a lack of conformity to God's law or breaking any of God's commands. So then what are we to make of this story at the beginning of the chapter? If you have your Bible, you can see that there's a story of a woman who is brought to Jesus by the Pharisees who has been caught in the act of adultery. Not the rumor. Not hearsay. Not a report after the fact, but caught in the act. Now that happened, we don't know, but so she's brought to Jesus. And they say, teacher, we caught this woman in the act of adultery. Now in the law of Moses, it commands us to stone such women. What do you say? See, they were doing this to test him. They didn't really care what happened to the woman, which showed the blackness of their hearts. They didn't care if she lived or died. As a matter of fact, they would have been perfectly fine with her dying in order to trap Jesus because that was their goal. In Leviticus 20, verse 10, it says, if a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulterous shall be put to death. In Deuteronomy 22, verse 22, if a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lays with the woman and the woman, so you shall purge the evil from Israel. So why didn't Jesus just agree with them? I mean they have her caught in the act of adultery. They bring her to him. The law says that she should be killed. But instead Jesus bends down and begins writing in the sand on the ground. And they continue to ask him, and he stood up and he said, let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her. What is he writing in the ground? Is it the words of the law? We don't know. But what is missing? What is missing? More accurately, who is missing? Supposedly she's caught in the act. Well if she's caught in the act, where's the man? Shouldn't they both be there? Is the man one of them? What is Jesus writing in the sand? We don't know. We're in the ground. There is no man. The man and the woman according to the law should die. And throughout the history of the world, women have always had to face more consequences than men in things like this. Today if a woman becomes pregnant out of wedlock or even if she's married, but if a woman becomes pregnant, and a lot of times she will go to have an abortion, and people say, a lot of Christians say, well, she's killing her baby and her doctor is helping her kill the baby. And that's true. And that's wrong. But where's the man in this? A lot of times the woman is doing that because she's been abandoned by the man. So here again, where was the man? And yet we know from the scripture that mercy is extended sometimes. It's not always enforced. You think about King David who clearly committed adultery with Bathsheba. Not only did he do that, he had her husband killed. Both of which, according to the law, are crimes worthy of death. And yet he was allowed to live. Remember in John chapter 4, Jesus confronts the Samaritan woman. He says, go call your husband. She says, I don't have a husband. He says, that's right, you've had five, and the one you're living with now, or the one you're with now, is not your husband. You've said truly you have no husband. And yet he doesn't demand that she pay for that sin. So when Jesus said, let him who's without sin be the first to throw a stone at her, he's not only extending mercy to the woman, he's condemning the Pharisees for being heartless enough to kill her in order to trap Jesus. They didn't care about the law, obviously, or the man would have been there. They only cared about trapping and condemning Jesus. And if the woman died in the process, oh well, they didn't care. No wonder Jesus said to them, woe to you, you brutal vipers. And these were the religious leaders. So we've talked about God, how sinful we are, and so what hope is there for us? That's the question the disciples add for Jesus when he said it's easier in Mark 10, 25, it's easier for a man to go through the eye of a needle than, or a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. They were astonished and said, then who could be saved? Jesus looked at them and said, with man it's impossible, not with God, for all things are possible with God. So how does our Father in heaven, our God who is personal and holy, save us? And what are we being saved from? We're saved from our sin. Jesus said, I told you, you would die in your sin unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sin. And verse 34, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave doesn't remain in the house forever, the son remains forever. So if the son sets you free, you'll be free indeed. I don't know if you remember, but in Exodus chapter 20, the 10 commandments begin with the words, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. So God freed Israel from 400 years of slavery to the Egyptians, and we've been enslaved to sin our entire lives from the time we're born. And Jesus is saying that if we believe in him, we will be delivered from our sin, from that slavery. So he said to the woman, isn't there no one to condemn you? She says, no one, Lord. He says, neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more. Jesus says, and excuse her sin. He gives her mercy and grace and tells her to repent and sin no more. So we're saved from our sin, we're saved from fear. Verse 51, he says, truly I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. And we know from Hebrews chapter two, that God says he will deliver those who through the fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. Think about it, anyone who no longer fears death is free in the most ultimate way. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, they're taught and conditioned to not fear death, or at least to fear not doing their duty more than they fear death. But we're free from the fear of death because we're free from the fear of judgment. We're free from the consequences of our sin, according to Jesus, if we believe in him. We're also saved from darkness. Jesus in verse 12 says, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness. But will have the light of life. Believing in Jesus is a lot like seeing things that are as they are for the first time. In Ephesians chapter five, verse eight, Jesus says at one time you were darkness, but now you were light of the Lord. Walk as children of light. Do you ever think about you're talking to somebody and you say, how can you see things that way? What makes you think like that? Sometimes it's our own cultural bent, but a lot of times it's because you're Christian, you have Christ in you, you see things clearly, and somebody who doesn't have Christ in them can't see things the way you do at the end of 1 Corinthians chapter two. It says that we don't understand spiritual things apart from Christ. I saw this online. Do you know that there are colorblind glasses? Have you heard of that? People who are colorblind, they have these glasses they can put on them and they can see color for the first time in their lives. There was a video of this 60-ish year old man and for his birthday, his family got him colorblind glasses and he put them on. He started weeping for the first time in his life. He saw things the way they are. For the first time in his life, he saw the beauty of the created world. Everything had been gray, tones of gray up until then and now he could see things as they were. Another video in that same series, it was a 16-year-old, about 16-year-old boy, and he was given the glasses and he put them on and he's going like this. He said, is this reality? Is this how things really are? Is this reality? Believing in Jesus is like putting on the colorblind glasses. You see reality how it is. You see it for the first time. We believe in Jesus. We can see the world as it is. We can see who we are. We can see who he is. We can see each other that we're all made in the image of God. That's why Jesus says in Luke chapter 4, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. This is from the scroll of Isaiah. And he rolled up the scroll and he gave it back to the attendant and sat down in the eyes of all the synagogue were fixed on him and he began to say to them, today the scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. How can Jesus do all of this for us? The scripture says he's the light of the world. He's the one who extends to us grace and mercy. He is the one who sets us free from our sin. He's the one who lets us see how things really are. He says, anyone who keeps my word will never see death. The Jew said to him, now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died and as did the prophets and yet you see if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. Jesus said, your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day and he saw it and was glad. So the Jews said to him, you're not yet 50 years old. And have you seen Abraham? Jesus said, truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am the one who was, I am. Not I was, I am. So they picked up stones to throw at him but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple. I am is the name of God. Remember Moses, when God told him to go to Pharaoh, he said, who shall I say sent me? He says, I am that I am. Tell them I am. Sent you. I am is the name of God. Jesus is God. Jesus is the reason that the woman was not condemned. It's because Jesus was condemned for her. That's why we're not condemned for our sin, because Jesus was condemned in our place. The reason that we are brought out of darkness is that Jesus tasted darkness for us. The reason we're saved from our fears is that Jesus faced all of our fears. Fear of death, the fear of judgment, the fear of hell. The reason we will not taste death is that Jesus was put to death in our place. And he could only do that because he was God and man. The scripture says, for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Let's pray.