Jesus will spend this dialogue alluding to the Jews' father and then He will outright declare the truth of their paternity. They are in some respect, the seed of Abraham and yet they are not his children. Faith descent, spiritual descent is more real and valid to Jesus than physical descent. He says His word has no movement, no effect on them. Jesus puts them on an opposing side from Himself: they do the deeds of their father while He does the deeds of His Father. They claim their father is Abraham. But Abraham was sensitive to the words of God. He had a heart for God. They don't. Their actions betray the heritage they claim they possess as they seek to kill the One Abraham looked forward to. Jesus denies this paternity for them and therefore makes them out to be like spiritual bastards. They respond they are not illegitimate children and go a step further by saying God is their Father. But their deeds don't correspond with the righteousness of the heavenly Father; they correspond with another. Jesus confirms this as He says if God were their Father, they would love the Son. To hate and reject the Son is to hate and reject the Father. And so the paternity test comes in: they are of their father the devil. The slanderer, the accuser, the liar, the adversary, the Satan, the serpent, the evil one. This is a damning judgment against them. Jesus is life, truth, and divine while the devil is murder, death, lies, falsehood, fallen, and finite. In the garden, our first parents chose to make the devil their father and forsook the LORD our Father which affected us all. It's not that only the sinful Jews had the devil as their father, it's that all of us need God's adoption. |
