The next discourse turns on our Lord's announcement of His departure—a truth of the most solemn import, especially for Israel responsible to receive Him as their Messiah.
“He said therefore again to them, I go away, and ye shall seek me and shall die in your sinwhere I go away, ye cannot come. The Jews therefore said, “Will he kill himself because he saith, Where I go away, ye cannot come? And he said to them, Ye are of the things beneath, I am of those above; ye are of this world, I am not of this world. I said therefore to you that ye shall die in your sins; for, unless ye believe that I am [he], ye shall die in your sins.” (Ver. 21-24.)
The departure of Jesus after His coming is the overthrow of Judaism and the necessary condition of Christianity. We must not be surprised then, if our Lord again and again recurs to it, to its moral associations and consequences, and above all to its bearing on Himself personally, ever the uppermost thought of our evangelist. He was going, and they should seek Him and die in their sin. They sought amiss and found Him not. They sought a Messiah that they might gratify their ambition and worldly lusts; and such is not the Messiah of God, who is now found of those that sought Him not, after having spread out His hands all the day to a rebellious people that walked in a way anything but good after their own thoughts. But God is not mocked, and he who sows to the flesh reaps corruption: if it be not public judgment, it is none the less the recompense of evil into the guilty bosom. “Ye shall die in your sin.” They were rejecting Christ and cleaving to their own will and way. There was no fellowship between them and Him. “My soul loathed them, and their soul also abhorred me.” The issue would make it still more apparent: “Where I go away, ye cannot come.” They could not follow Him.
The Lord was going to heaven, to His Father. Their treasure was not there, nor therefore their heart, as both were on His part. So too as grace attracts the heart of the believer to Christ, faith follows Him where He is; and He will come and bring us there in due time that, where He is, there we may be also. Unbelief clings to self, to the earth, to present things; and so it was and is with the Jews: “Where I go away, ye cannot come.” They were rejecting the only One who could wean from earth or fit for heaven, meeting them in their sin that they might not die in it but live through Him. But Him they would not have and are lost, and proved it by their utterly false estimate of Him and of themselves, present or future, as we see in what follows. “The Jews therefore said, Will he kill himself because he saith, Where I go away, ye cannot come?"
But he tells them out more. “And he said to them, Ye are of the things beneath, I am of those above; ye are of this world, I am not of this world. I said therefore to you, that ye shall die in your sins.” Here the Lord solemnly unveils the sources of things. To be of this world now is to be not merely of earth but from beneath. Such is the Jew that rejects Jesus who is of the things above. Therefore should they die in their sins: their nature and their works evil, and they refusing the only light of life, how else could they end? “For, unless ye believe that I am [he], ye shall die in your sins.” The truth shines out fully from a rejected Christ—not only His personal glory, but their subjection to Satan who employs them to dishonor Him. But His rejection is their everlasting ruin. They die in their sins and have to judge them Him whom they refused to believe in for life eternal.
“They kept saying therefore to him, Who art thou? Jesus said to them, Absolutely that which I also am speaking to you.” (Ver. 25.) Jesus is not merely the way and the life but the truth. He is, in the principle of His being, what He speaks. A less expected answer could not be, nor one more withering to their thoughts of themselves and of Him. He alone of all men could say as much; yet was He the lowliest of men. His ways and words were in perfect accord; and all expressed the mind of God. It is not merely that He does what He says, but He is thoroughly and essentially what also He sets out in word. The truth is the reality of things spoken. We cannot know God but by Him; nor can we know man but by Him. Good and evil are displayed or detected only by Him. Such was the One the Jews were then rejecting. They have then lost the truth. Impossible to have the truth apart from Jesus, who adds “I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you; but he that sent me is true, and I, what I heard from him, speak these things unto the world.” He was a servant though Son, and uttered what the Father pleased as needed truth, not according to the affluence of what He had to say and judge respecting the Jews. “They knew not that He was speaking to them of the Father. Then said Jesus [to them], When ye shall have lifted up the Son of man, then ye shall know that I am [he] and from myself am doing nothing, but, even as the Father taught me, thus I speak. And he that sent me is with me: he left me not alone, because the things pleasing to him I do always.” (Vers. 26-29.) It is the actual truth presented by God which tests the soul. A former testimony, however true, does not provoke opposition in the same way. Often indeed unbelief avails itself of the past to strengthen its present antagonism to what God is doing. Thus the Jews avail themselves of the unity of God to deny the Son and the Father, and they knew not of whom Jesus was speaking. His cross might not convince them divinely or win their heart to God; but it would convict them of deliberate and willful rejection of the Messiah, and prove that what He spoke He spoke from the highest authority. As He was sent, so was He taught. The Father was with Him too, for Christ was doing always the things that pleased Him. If we know this in our measure, how much more fully and unwaveringly was it true of Him who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth!