John 8:21-24 (NIV)
Once more Jesus said to them, “I am going away, and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin. Where I go, you cannot come.”
This made the Jews ask, “Will he kill himself? Is that why he says, ‘Where I go, you cannot come’?”
But he continued, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am [the one I claim to be], you will indeed die in your sins.”
Jesus was speaking perfectly clear Aramaic to the Jewish leaders, but they couldn’t understand what He was telling them. His words didn’t seem to make any sense. The problem was not with vocabulary or syntax, but with frame of reference.
Jesus spoke from the standpoint of heaven. He spoke of heavenly things as someone with first-hand knowledge. But His words about even earthly matters were spoken from that same heavenly standpoint. So, His words didn’t add up in the earthbound minds of the religious leaders. (Compare with John 3:10-13.)
So, when Jesus was trying to communicate that these leaders had only a limited widow of time to hear and believe what He was trying to teach them, that He was then going to go away so that they would not be able to find Him (and that they would end up dying in their sins because they had not taken advantage of the opportunity while it lasted), they didn’t understand. To their earthbound minds, the only people who knew that they were going to die within a predictable timeframe were those who were contemplating suicide.
But Jesus ignored their erroneous inferences, and simply continue to teach. These leaders, despite their dealing with sacred things on a daily basis, were truly creatures of the world. They were so locked into a worldly mindset that the things of heaven seemed like nonsense to them. Jesus, on the other hand, was a being who had come from heaven. He could communicate even heavenly things to the people of the world, but only if they were willing to release their iron grip on worldly things and risk having their entire worldview transformed by the glimpses of heaven that He gave through His teaching, His parables, and His miracles.
Unfortunately, these leaders were passionate about the control that they exercised in their own spiritual lives. (The Pharisees especially were all about control.) They were unwilling to open their carefully orchestrated lives and carefully orchestrated spirituality to the chaos they felt would come from giving Jesus’ teachings serious consideration. That was tragic. Because, in the end, by rejecting Jesus and the deep truths that He was relating, these most spiritual of men were going to end up being condemned by the very God they claimed to serve.
Father, we are still prone to this serious error today. We can get so locked into a worldly mindset that we misread, misunderstand, or simply refuse to believe what You clearly say in Your word. We reinterpret the hard truths to make them more palatable, and we paint an entirely different picture in our hearts of Your kingdom and our place in it than You paint in the Scriptures. Forgive us, Lord. Open our eyes so that we truly see what You are trying to show us. Open our ears so that we can not only hear Your words, but also hear the truths You are conveying through them. And most importantly, open our hearts, shatter the chains of worldliness that block out and distort Your truth, and help us to really receive in the deepest part of ourselves what You want us to understand. Amen.