John 8:37-47 (Hell's Paternity Test)

In the midst of John 8, we've been diving into deep covenantal theology. We've been trying to understand what's going on in this passage, and normally, I would say that the Shepherd's Church is a deep church.

We want to go deep into the Word of God, but the last couple of weeks have been especially deep. We've been all over the whole Bible, we've been talking about covenants and how they work so that we can understand why some of the people in this passage have true everlasting freedom and why some are going to be remained in slavery to sin.

We've come to grips with the fact that the radical blessings of Abraham are for some who are in Christ and for the rest. There's captivity and inability latent within the covenant of Moses that cannot be overcome by human effort and human power.

Even more simply than that, we've been looking at why the disciples are ready to follow Jesus, and in John 6, even say, you have the words of life, where can we go except to follow you? And yet at the end of John 8, this crowd of unbelievers are ready to pick up stones to kill him.

What's the difference between these two groups? Why are some ready to love him and then others ready to hate him? Why is he the greatest treasure for the disciples who will turn the entire Roman Empire upside down because of faith in Jesus, and why are others ready to see him buried?

Why is there such a stark contrast between these two groups? That's what we're going to explore today, and Jesus is going to give the answer to that. Jesus is going to tell us that there's two spiritual families that you can belong to.

I mean, every person on earth belongs to either one of two spiritual families. Now physically, we all are descended from Adam and Noah. Whether you're Greek, whether you're Hebrew, whether you're white, whether you're black, we all come from the same physical family, which was Adam and Noah.

But Jesus is going to be showing us today that spiritually speaking, that we are all descendant from one of two families, one the family of God and one the family of Satan. This is most clear in all the Bible here in John 8, so we're going to take our time to understand it.

If you will turn with me to John 8, 37 through 47, as we examine these truths together. Passage begins this way. I know that you are Abraham's descendants, says Jesus, yet you seek to kill me because my word has no place in you.

I speak the things which I have seen with my father, therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father. They answered and said to him, Abraham's our father. And Jesus said to them, if you're Abraham's children, do the deeds of Abraham.

But as it is, you're seeking to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God. This Abraham did not do. You are doing the deeds of your father. And they said to him, we weren't born of fornication.

We have one father, God. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me. For I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come on my own initiative, but he who sent me.

Why do you not understand what I'm saying? Is it because, or it is because you cannot hear my word. You are of your father, the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.

Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe me. Which one of you convicts me of sin? I speak truth.

Why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears the words of God. For this reason, you do not hear them because you are not of God. Let's pray. Lord, upon reading this, it is abundantly clear that the world can be divided into two categories, the children of God and the children of the servant.

Lord, I pray that there'd be no one here today who would find themselves in Satan's camp. Lord, whether you use today, the message, the songs, the time that we have together in fellowship or afterwards in conversation, Lord, if you want to use any of those things to bring someone into your kingdom, Lord, we will rejoice.

Like the old woman who found the lost coin, we will rejoice when a sinner is brought into the heavenly kingdom. Lord, we pray this church would be a church where the gospel is heralded and people who are far from God would find life in Christ.

And Lord, those of us who are already Christians, that we would not sit on the sidelines of our faith, but we would look at verses like this and see what you are saying and not just accept the reality that we're in the family of God, but Lord, that we would be active participants and members in your family, ready to please you, to love you and praise you in Christ's name, amen.

The Ironies in John 8 and the Purpose of John's Gospel

There's three initial ironies that come out of this passage. The first is that they accuse Jesus of having a demon. I find that absolutely fascinating. In John 7 20, they say, we know that you have a demon.

Next week, they're going to say the exact same thing to Jesus. They're going to say, we know for sure that you're a Samaritan and have a demon, because Samaritans like the bottom of the rung of their cultural caste system.

Now, while they're accusing Jesus of having a demon, Jesus reveals the truth under the matter that they are children of Satan. Isn't that ironic that the children of Satan would be so blind that they couldn't even recognize the son of God?

They would say, you have a demon. That's the first irony that we initially see right off the bat. The second one, I think, is even more fascinating that they accused him of being illegitimate. They accused him of being born of illegitimate birth and a fornication, but yet they're the true love child in this story.

Now, there's a term in English that's used to describe this, where a child is born of questionable parentage. But because that word has the connotations that it has today, there is no good word to describe it.

There is no word that we could use that wouldn't be too harsh and too offensive, especially with little ears. So for the discerning listener, that is exactly what God has exposed this group as being. Born of spiritual illegitimacy in need of a spiritual paternity test because they don't know who they are.

They claim God as their spiritual father. They claim Abraham as their physical father. They need a spiritual paternity test to be able to understand who they are. Nine times in 10 verses, the word father is used because the indication is that they don't know who they are.

And Jesus is trying to reveal to them who they are, almost like an ancient episode of the Maury Purvich show, right here in Palestine. You've seen it. Maybe if you're younger, you don't know who Maury Purvich is, but you have parents who come in and they make this big thing about paternity tests, and at the end, everyone's acting completely ridiculous and yelling at each other and screaming.

That's kind of what's happening here. Jesus has revealed that their father is not who they think it is, and they're mad and angry and want to kill him. That sounds a lot like the Maury Purvich show, or Jerry Springer, or one of those others.

It's certainly an ironic feature in this passage. The most important irony in this passage, though, not the most shocking, is that this passage was written by John to help us believe. Every passage in John was written for that purpose.

If you remember the purpose of the Gospel of John, in chapter 20, 31, is these things have been written, so that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, that by believing that you may have life in his name.

The purpose statement for the Gospel of John is that these things have been written so that you would believe. This encounter with this group of religious people who are arguing over where they came from was written by Jesus, or by John, quoting Jesus, so that you and I would believe.

This passage can lead to belief in Christ. This passage can teach you who you really are, whether you are still lost in your sins and a child of the devil, or if you've been saved and brought into the family of God.

That's ultimately what we want to happen today, is we want to understand who we are. Are we in the family of God, or are we on the outside looking in? Now, today I want us to examine this in three parts.

I want us to look at what does it mean to be a child of the devil, certainly an interesting phrase. I want us to understand also how this phenomenon is not just a 2 ,000-year-old John chapter 8 phenomenon, that their world is still broken up into these two categories.

There are children of God in the world, and there are children of Satan in the world, and those categories are still intact, and the ways that we can see that will remain. And then I want us to end our time together by examining the gospel, because it's not our good works, and it's not our religious affections, and it's not our going to church and paying tithes and working at the soup kitchen that's going to get us into heaven like the Jews maybe thought that it could.

It is the gospel of Jesus Christ, the only way that we can be transferred out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light, so I want us to examine that as we conclude. So let's begin. What does it mean to be in the family of Satan?

Jesus says right in the middle of the passage, you are of your father the devil, and you are not of God. Can you imagine a more shocking statement of people who prided themselves on the fact that they were children of God?

It would be like ordering one of those Ancestry .com tests and then getting it back to say that the Lord of Darkness is your daddy. I don't know anything that can prepare you for that. It would be like going to school and bringing your father to school day, and the fireman gets up and he shares about his life, and then the police officer, and then your father gets up and brags about enslaving the entire human race and being the power behind every war and every suffering and every malice, and maybe you wouldn't have bullies attack you anymore, I don't know.

It would be like going to a family reunion and introducing yourself as Satan's kid. Now depending on your family, maybe that already is the case. Maybe your family already thinks that your dad is Satan.

Maybe that wouldn't be all that controversial for your family reunion. All joking aside, this is a shocking statement that Jesus is giving to these people, especially the fact that they believe that they're special and that they're the children of God.

The first line of evidence that he gives that they are part of Satan's family instead of God's family is that they reject God's son. He says, I know that you're descendants of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my word has no place in you.

The plain and simple fact is that they hated Jesus. They rejected God's appointed Messiah, and they wanted him dead. The fire of hell was boiling over, and their own hatred of Jesus, like a pot of water that had been left on the stove too long, is now spilling out and scorching everything that it touches.

The shocking part of this that really ought to grab our hearts is this is not a group of Satanists out in the woods practicing some kind of clandestine ceremony. This is not Wicca, warlocks, or voodoo spiritualists.

These are religious people. These are people who read their Bibles. These are people who claimed that just a couple of verses ago that they believed in Jesus and that they loved him, and now they're seeking to kill him because he didn't fit into their view of religion.

That ought to shock us that this passage is talking to religious people, people who go to church, people who do the right things, people who don't drink or curse or steal or do any of that stuff, and yet they're part of the kingdom of Satan.

And they're the ones that are going to kill him in John chapter 19 and just seven months from this passage. They're the ones that are going to arrest him and lie about him and beat him and turn him over to the Romans and like heckling hyenas, laugh at him and cheer out along with the chorus of the enemy, crucify him, crucify him, and they're going to smile and go home and sleep that night with peace in their hearts because the Son of God has died.

That's the kind of folks we're talking about, and they're not pagans and they're not Satanists. They're religious people. This sits close to home for the church. They hated God even while professing that they loved him, which should be shocking to us to say the least.

Now again, this doesn't just happen in John 8. This happens all throughout church history. Family of Satan is alive and well, not just then, but today as well. If you look back 2 ,000 years ago, these sorts of things were happening in the stonings that were happening in Judah.

The family of Satan was not just attacking Jesus, but they were attacking his followers. They were stoning Christians. They were beating them in the synagogues. In the city of Rome, they were beheading Christians like the Apostle Paul.

They were crucifying Christians like the Apostle Peter. They were feeding them to lions in the Colosseum. They were setting them on fire in Nero's gardens. It doesn't just happen, though, in the first, second, and third century, though, no.

You look at even more modern history with the firing squads where they shot Christians in India or where Indian tribes killed missionaries whenever they went to share the gospel of Christ. You look at religious types in Europe who set Christians on fire because they had a copy of the Bible.

The family of Satan and that God-hating, Christ-abhoring spirit has been alive and well for the last 2 ,000 years. And it's mostly perpetrated by religious folks. In America today, we don't see the kind of extreme violence that we see in the ancient world.

Praise God for that. Praise God that we're still in a country where we have freedom of religion. But I want you to understand that satanic opposition to Christianity is not dead in America. It just has taken a different form.

The same desire that would cause these people in John 8 to want to push Jesus out of society completely by killing him and burying him in a tomb is the same desire today that wants to push Jesus out of our governments and out of our academic institutions.

Our elite academic institutions were founded to train up Christian pastors who would be missionaries to the Indians. And yet today, our elite institutions look more like Karl Marx than Jesus of Nazareth.

Scientism, evolutionary theory, cosmology, epidemiology, all of the disciplines of science have now turned their back on God when they were founded by Christians, denying even the possibility of intelligent design.

They want Jesus rejected. Maybe they're not violent about it, but they want to push him violently out of our culture and out of our society. Sadly, I think that this has crept into the modern American church as well, where the true knowledge of God and the true knowledge of Jesus Christ has been pushed out for emotionalism and concert-style events that entertain pagans but don't accomplish the work that God has told us to accomplish.

Every week, thousands of people gather in churches where Christ is not proclaimed, his gospel is not preached. A man named Paul Washer said that Sunday morning has become the greatest hour of idolatry in a 168-hour week.

Because we don't know Christ and because we worship a loving Jesus that loves us and never confronts our sin. I've said this to our small group, he looks more like a European hair model. He's nice, he's kind, he doesn't mess with us, he doesn't tell us to repent, he doesn't tell us to change our life and turn to him, he just affirms us in everything that we do.

I've seen that all over Christianity. I think that's why Christianity is struggling. Think about it, if you were an enemy, say Satan, would you want to attack the Satanist or would you want to attack the Christians?

You've already got the Satanist, you've already got the Wicca, you've already got all of that stuff. You'd want to come into the church and pervert the truth little by little by little. One degree of error over time will lead you in a place that you've never even thought that you would end up.

For instance, if I walk out of my house and I go to the end of my road and I'm just one degree off, I'm only a couple inches off course. If I go all the way around the world, starting in New York, let's say I fly out of JFK Airport, I'm one degree off, I'll end up in Miami, Florida.

By one degree, thousands of miles off course. I think that's what Satan has tried to do in American Christianity is take us one degree off course for the last 50, 60, 70 years and now the church doesn't look anything at all like it's supposed to look in the New Testament.

Charles Spurgeon once said that pastors now are spending more time entertaining the goats than preaching to the sheep and he's right. The church today looks more like a circus than it does a cathedral of God's glory.

Now, I want to be clear, we don't have a goat problem, we have a sheep problem in the church and what I mean by that is that we've structured everything around lost people. What are lost people like? What do lost people want?

How much volume in the service should we have? You know, maybe we turn the lights down to emotionally manipulate people. I'm not kidding, these are things that conversations of pastors have. You can go to a conference in Texas called E3 and they tell you how to emotionally manipulate people to get them to do what you want.

I was in a church called Elevation in Charlotte, North Carolina, that was the first church I visited. If you're shocked, I am too looking back on it. But they would plant people in the congregation. That was their job, was to be dynamic in their worship, to raise their hands.

They're called the bullpen, that was the volunteer team that they were. So that they would plant themselves near people who weren't really worshiping vibrantly, who weren't raising their hands, who weren't swaying their hips, who weren't acting like they're in a club.

They would plant these people all throughout the congregation to try to encourage that sort of behavior. On baptism Sundays, they would plant people in the crowd who would stand up when it was time to get baptized, and they would walk down to the front.

And everyone who maybe thought that they might possibly want to get baptized saw this groundswell of people going down front. And then they got up and they did it too, and it was all an emotional experience.

I was a part of the team that called people after they got baptized, and most people wouldn't pick up the phone. The other people that talked to me, almost 90 of them said it was about the experience.

They really felt like they needed a shot in the arm spiritually. They'd been baptized two or three times before, but they just needed to kind of re-up. That's not the church. That's Satan attacking and perverting the church.

And I'm not saying that unbelievers are not welcome. I'm saying that unbelievers are not the focus. And I'm not even saying that Christians are the focus. I'm saying that God is the focus of our church.

Churches don't exist for unbelievers, and they don't exist for believers. They exist for the glory of God. And when the glory of God is being declared in our churches, Christians are built up, and non-Christians look and they say, God must be in this place.

That's the first way that this passage kind of teaches that we can be children of hell is to reject Christ, and not just to kill him like they did, but to reject him for who he is, reject him for what he said about himself, and to believe in a false Christ, which I think is a modern thing that the church has done.

Acting Like Satan by Rejecting Christ's Word

The second way that you can be children of Satan is to act like Satan. This doesn't mean dressing up in red pajamas and putting on horns that you buy from the mall and parading around getting candy, although if you're a Christian parent, I don't know why you'd dress your kid up like Lucifer.

Satan doesn't come like that, though. I think hell's PR department laughs every time that that image of Satan is propagated by us gullible humans, because that's not how he comes at all. He comes as an angel of light.

He comes disguising his poisonous deeds, tempting us away from righteousness, tempting us away from holiness so that we will do his bidding. It means for a person to act like Satan, it means to clothe yourself with his spoiled character and to act like him and think like him and talk like him and walk like him.

Jesus says to the crowd in verse 38, I speak the things to you which I have seen with my father. Therefore, you also do the things which you've heard from your father. And they answered and said to him, Abraham is our father.

Jesus said to them, if you are children of Abraham, then do the deeds of Abraham. Jesus is teaching them that children end up acting a lot like their parents. As much as when we get older, we hate to admit that boys end up becoming like their dads.

Girls oftentimes end up marrying people like their dads. Even when children rebel from their parents, it's their father who often sets the trajectory of their life for good or for ill. Father is one of the most important members of your family.

Jesus is saying for an eternity, I've been in a relationship with my dad. I've been watching him, learning from him, and here I am, I'm living out the deeds of my father in front of you and yet you say that God's your father.

I'm living out the deeds of God right in front of you and you hate me and you can't accept me. There's no evidence at all that they're children of God. No evidence at all that they're children of Abraham.

Abraham loved God. Abraham worshiped God. Abraham obeyed God. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Here they are rejecting God and the ultimate consequence is that they're not a part of the family of God.

They have no faith. Verse 41, Jesus says, you're doing the deeds of your father. Verse 44, he makes it even more clear, your father's the devil and you want to do the desires of your father. Like a doting child who wants to work with their dad.

I got a conversation with Graham today and I told him that he could stay afterwards with me and help me upload the sermon and he was like, yes. Kids want to be in relationship with their dad. Kids want to please their dad.

Kids want their dad to look at them and to notice them and they want their dad to be happy with them and here this group desires Satan's approval. They desire to do the things of the enemy. They're so blind they can't even see it.

Jesus further proves their parental lineage to Lucifer by saying in verse 44 that he was a murderer from the beginning. He does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature and he is a liar, the father of lies.

Notice what he says here. He says that he's a liar, that he perverts the truth and that he's a murderer. This is exactly what is happening in John 8 because they are lying about who Jesus is. Their version of the truth has become so perverted that they're going to pick up stones to kill him now and eventually they're going to kill him for real in John 19 because they cannot see the truth because they're under the spell of Satan.

Today it's no different. John 8, you have people living in lies today. Look at all the lies that are being perpetrated in our culture. Look at how reality has been bent and shifted and mangled. Today parents are now willingly submitting their boys to chemical castration because a YouTube influencer told them that they're really a girl.

Parents are willingly causing their daughters to go through early menopause before they're even going through puberty because their guidance counselor said that that awkward feeling that they're having as a prepubescent girl, which all prepubescent girls and boys are awkward.

But no, it can't be that. It has to be the fact that you're really a boy trapped in a girl's body. So we need to do top surgery. We need to chemically cause you to go through menopause and permanently mangle your body.

The father of lies is alive and well. Reality has been crushed and destroyed in this society. If you think about it, the foundation of truth and reality is Genesis 1. That's where God declares things good and very good.

He says in Genesis 1, just a few topics, worship, obedience to God, marriage, sex, gender, masculinity, femininity, children, pregnancy, human leadership, society, godly rule, dominion. All of those things are set up according to God's standard in Genesis 1 and all of those things are under attack today by the father of lies.

Take marriage, for example. We were worried 10, 15, 20 years ago when marriage was being redefined as not just a man and a woman. Now it's possible for a man who identifies as a pansexual mermaid to marry a river fairy who's born non-binary.

We laugh because it's so ridiculous. Do you see how much Satan has perverted this culture? Masculinity and femininity. Today, it's celebrated when men wear dresses and where women are angry and militant.

The father of lies is alive and well in our society. You think about cheering for sin at the end of Romans 1 after this downslide into sin, this God giving them over to depravity. At the end of Romans 1, at the height of their debauchery, it says that they not only do these things, but they celebrate and cheer for those who do.

I remember seeing, not even six months ago, girls on college campuses cheering for their abortions. We vote wicked rulers into our nation. We're on the brim of moral collapse. Satan is alive and well in this society.

It starts at the top. You look at our president. I don't care about politics. I like following it. I like understanding it. But I'm not one of those people who are just like, if you're a Christian, you have to be a Republican or a Libertarian or you have to be, I don't care.

But our president claims to be a practicing, devout Catholic, and yet he does everything he can for the unrestricted murder of babies. He's not a Christian. He's not a Catholic. He's acting out that he's in the family of Satan.

That's at the top. And the rot just doesn't end there. The rot goes all the way down. If America were a person, they would be in stage four mesothelioma, which is the worst version of cancer and the most uncurable kind.

When we send our kids to school, and I know that I'm not, it's not homeschool point, but we send our kids to school, we're sending our kids into the den of Satan and we wonder why they come out as little devils.

That's a modified quote from a man named Voddie Bauckham who said, if we keep sending our kids to Caesar, why are we confused when they come back looking like Romans? Now they're good teachers and they're kids who come out of public school who worship the Lord and follow him, but where truth is abandoned and where lies are propagated, and when they're indoctrinating our kids with critical race theory and queer theory, and they're teaching our children to hate their country, which what country could possibly survive when its citizens are told to hate it?

When we have that much error in, what do we expect? The family of Satan is alive and well today. That's the third evidence, or the second evidence that we live with people in a society who act like Satan, who's the father of lies.

They don't love Christ, they reject him as the son. The third evidence is that they don't love Christ. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, then you would love me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come of my own initiative, but he sent me.

This evidence is crucial. If you say that you are from God, then you have to love Jesus Christ. And again, we think that this kind of applies to crazy cult people out in the woods doing all kinds of crazy things, or God-hating, city-burning liberals.

We often think that way, and yes, God-hating, city-burning liberals are in the family of Satan, but so are people who love their country more than Jesus, and who love the Republican Party more than Jesus, and who love their whatever more than Jesus.

Hell is going to be filled with people who don't get drunk and don't cheat on their wives and go to work on time and succeed. They don't rip people off, they don't do shady things. By all metrics, they're a model citizen, and yet hell will be lined with those folks.

Because it's not about what you do, it's about who you love. Do you love God, or do you love yourself, in whatever various manifestation that works itself out in. Jesus said, if God were your father, then you would love me.

That means that anyone who is not in love with Jesus, and passionately ready to follow him and serve him, then God's not your father. From the shrieking death metal head to your sweet grandma who loves you so much, but doesn't really love Jesus, the family of hell will be the most eclectic group of people ever assembled that's ever been.

From the man on the street corner with the needle in his arm, to the man who's walking down the street in an Armani suit on his way to a nice corporate job, to the one who has nothing to their name, to the one who has stock market accounts that could total everything you and I own in this room, and multiply that by a factor of 10.

To people who abandon their kids and foster homes, to people who teach parenting seminars, it's not about what you do, it's about who you love. And if you do not love Christ, then you are not a part of the family of God.

If Christ is not your greatest treasure, you are not a part of the family of God. And God forbid anyone in this room would be deceived to think that I came to church today, I read my Bible, I did all the stuff that I'm supposed to do, I even served in a soup kitchen or maybe I told someone about this Jesus guy, but if you're doing that for any motivation other than the love of God and the love of Christ, then at minimum, you're on dangerous ground.

Jesus says, if God were your father, you would love me. That means if you don't really love Jesus, you need to examine whether or not God is really your father. If his word is not a delight to your heart.

If participation in his kingdom and the members of Jesus's body don't inspire you, if you yawn at prayer, if you're filled with bitterness over something that's happened to you, whatever it is, if you are not in love with Christ.

Then you need to evaluate whether you're a child of God. The Bible says that we are supposed to work on our salvation with fear and trembling. Only Satan would cause you to live in a sort of self-congratulatory ignorance where you never examine yourself and you say, well, my pastor told me 10 years ago that I'm a Christian because I raised my hand at the end of a service, so therefore I must be good.

Or I got baptized in the Catholic Church or I went to this camp or my parents were Christians. If anything other than the love of Jesus Christ is what you're holding to, it.

Won't hold you at best.

That's counterfeit religion and we don't always notice it. I'm listening to a podcast right now. It's called, Who Killed Mars Hill? Mars Hill's a church out in Seattle, was a church out in Seattle. And in my formative years of learning about Reformed theology and learning about who God is, I really enjoyed listening to Mark's sermons.

I didn't know all the things that were going on. I couldn't discern it. I didn't detect it. I'm listening to it now almost in tears because I'm like, how did this happen? You and I can't always discern whether someone's a member of the family of God or whether someone's a member of the family of hell.

We're not that discerning and some people are really good at pretending. But Christ can discern who's a member of the family of God. And if you stand today on shaky ground, Christ already knows it. The point is not for you to hide and to pretend and for you to fake it until you make it.

The point is to be honest and say, I don't think that I believe this. That's infinitely better than saying, no, no, no, I'm good. I'm good. I believe in Jesus. I've got this baptism I can point to. That's foolishness.

It's so much better to know where you stand and so that we can, as a community, pray for you and care for you and teach you and talk to you and pray like crazy that God would redeem you. If you reject Christ, however that works itself out, if you act like Satan instead of acting like God and you don't ultimately in the bottom of your heart love Jesus, then you're not a member of the family of God.