Gen. 3; John 8
THE same great moral is continually exhibiting itself in the great action of human life. Distance of time makes no difference. The energies at work are still the same. There is the way of God, and the way of Satan; the principles of light and of darkness.
It is instructive to mark this; to notice how the most distant scenes of action in the book of God are quickened by the same instincts and energies. Thus, in John 8, we find Gen. 3, again; the great opposing elements of the garden of Eden taking their several course, and doing their different work, in the temple at Jerusalem four thousand years after.
The serpent, or the serpent’s seed, is in this solemn scene, and exactly in the old character. The serpent had found a pure creature in the garden, and had corrupted and destroyed her; and then, did what he could to destroy the One who had undertaken her cause. He had murdered the woman, and conceiving enmity to her Seed, was to bruise His heel. After which pattern his seed in John 8, seek the full ruin of the poor adulteress, and then also the life of Jesus, because He had taken up her cause, and the cause of all such ruined sinners. He had done the works of the Father,—healing the poor cripple at Bethesda; He had now spoken the words of the Father, by His pardoning voice shielding the adulteress from the fiery anger of the law; but on these accounts they hated Him, and sought His life, accomplishing in themselves the way and character of the serpent.
And still further. The serpent who entered the garden had worked by a lie. The weapon in his murderous hand was a lie. And so here: the serpent’s seed are found utterly destitute of truth. Jesus was speaking the truth, as He tells them again and again. (vss. 14, 37, 45, 47.) Just as the Lord God was speaking it, when in the garden, He told of death upon the eating of the tree. But the Jews do not understand Jesus. They have no faculty to comprehend the language of truth. “Why do ye not understand My speech? even because ye cannot hear My words.” So deeply, so thoroughly, so awfully were they departed from the power of the light and truth of God.
Thus do they indeed take the place of the seed of the serpent in his two characters expressed at the beginning, so that the Lord has only to say to them, “Ye are of your father, the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do; he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him; when he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar and the father of it.”
But again. In the garden man destroyed himself, and then hid away from the presence of God. But the voice of promise, the glad tidings about the woman’s Seed, drew him forth; and Adam walked again is “the light of life,” calling his wife “the mother of all living;” and receiving from God’s own hand the pledge or seal of righteousness by faith. And so in John 8. The poor adulteress is a self-ruined sinner. She is detected and sentenced to death. She is silent; but she hears, like Adam, the voice of the Son of God, the woman’s Seed; and she is at peace, and walks forth again in “the light of life.” That voice bad again overthrown the serpent, or the serpent’s seed. There was enmity between it and them; between the woman’s Seed and the serpent’s seed, according to the promise. And, like Adam in the garden, the poor adulteress finds life, where she deserved and might have expected death.
In this, also, the scene in the garden of Eden stands revived or reflected in the scene in the temple at Jerusalem. Four thousand years have made no difference. The moral energies, the principles of light and darkness, are the same in the world’s infancy or age, in the earth’s eastern or western borders, I may say. These similitudes are very exact. But so also in Jesus, the Son of God, the Seed of the woman. As we read of Him, so we see Him, “the same yesterday, and today, and for eves.”
In Gen. 3, the promised Seed of the woman is evidently from God, for the sinner, and against the serpent. And such are, most blessedly and most dearly, the relationships which the Lord Jesus fills and assumes in all the action and argument of John 8. He is God’s provision for dead and ruined slayers, in defiance of all the malice and wrath of the many.
And further. He is this, at all personal cost. The serpent was to bruise His heel, according to Genesis 3; and the serpent’s seed, according to John 8, was “to lift Him up,” ―the very same thing as bruising His heel. (See vs. 28.)
But, further still. Though bruised, He was to get the victory, and bruise the head of the serpent, according to Gen. 3. And so in John 8, He lets the Jews know, that the continual resistance of Him would be their doom and final destruction; that it would prove, as another scripture expresses it, a kicking “against the pricks,” or a bringing of utter ruin on themselves by the very enmity they vented against Him.
And, finally. He was their only hope, (see vs. 24;) as, in the garden, fig-leaves were insufficient, and there was no return to life by the way of the cherubim and their flaming sword, but all rested in the promised Seed of the woman. But that one hope was enough, for Adam and the convicted adulteress walked again in the light of life, or the presence of God.
One other thing suggests itself from vs. 52, a secret of the deepest interest to our souls, that the Seed of the woman is none less than the “I AM,” Jehovah Himself; God, though manifest in the flesh; God, though as son of man, born of a woman; God and man in the same promised Christ. “Verily I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am.” And thus, at the close of a long and trying conflict with the Jews, the Lord announces His high personal glory as Jehovah. And they so understand Him, for they immediately deal with Him as they would with one who had dared to blaspheme the unutterable name. “Then took they up stones to cast at Him.” But that was not the way or the moment for the heel of the woman’s Seed to be bruised; and, therefore, “Jesus hid Himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by.”
What a tale of His grace and glory!