“Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear My word.” – John 8:43
The end of John 8 has Jesus in one of the great arguments in Scripture. It is such a bad argument that by the end people are ready to stone Him. So why? What gets folks so angry? Well, Jesus notes that they cannot bear to hear His word – but what word is that? In verse 32 Jesus had said, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” This should be a good thing, right? Except their pride was pricked. They didn’t want to be helped; they wanted to do it on their own. They didn’t like being told that they were actually enslaved to sin and that they needed a real rescue from sin and death.
We can have a hard time hearing God’s word in its full, unbridled power. We don’t like the full, unabashed Law that shows us our sin and that we deserve death; we will often instead try to water it down into mere moral advice. We fight against the full, unabashed Gospel where Jesus does everything; we will instead try to water Him down into a mere teacher who gives us a gentle push in the right direction. That’s what all false teaching is – a blunting of the law and a gutting of the Gospel. That’s what our sinful flesh likes. We want to be the hero of the story, and when Jesus tells us that He is the One who does the saving (and that we really needed some real saving), our flesh gets all riled up.
Yet Jesus is persistent in His desire to save you. He has baptized you, not just to forgive your sins once, but so that daily His word would drown and beat down your sinful flesh that wants to get all proud and boisterous. He continually and repeatedly gives you His Word and Spirit, so that you would have His life. He comes to you and gives you His Body and Blood so that He does in fact rescue you from sin and death, both now and eternally. He opens your ears to hear, so that you receive from Him every good gift.
