The Dead Line

Scripture Reading: John 8:21,22,24

So [Jesus] said to them again, “I am going away, and you will seek me, and you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come.” So the Jews said, “Will he kill himself, since he says, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come?’” He said to them… “I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.”

This terse, direct statement by Jesus to the Jews is a stark contrast to the way He spoke about His departure to His disciples. Read through John chapters 13 through 17 and you see that there he spoke at length and communicated comfort and hope to them. There He prayed for them to be kept safely and sanctified fully. There Jesus promised the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, would come to them. They would not be left as orphans. And these promises and prayers of the Lord encompass not only the first disciples but all believers throughout the ages.

But to the unbelieving Jews, Jesus’ message was brief. It was a warning. He told the disciples that He was going away but would come again and receive them unto Himself. He was going to prepare a place for them in His Father’s house. To these unbelieving Jews he said, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” He told them, “You will die in your sin.”

It is revealing how they responded to this. They reasoned that what Jesus said somehow implied he would commit suicide. It shows how little they thought of His character. What is even more astonishing is the way they completely ignored or dismissed the fact that Jesus said that they would die in their sin. Their sole focus was on finding fault with Jesus and they weren’t even considering their sin problem and what that meant for their eternal state and what could be done about it.

Almost as a way to shake them out of their spiritual stupor, Jesus ignores their cutting comments about suicide and repeats His charge, “You will die in your sins.”

But why? And is there a way to escape that horrible fate?

There are two kinds of people who die. Those who die in their sins and those who die without their sins. What separates the two is not that one group has never sinned and the other has sinned. What separates them is one group believes in Jesus and the other has not.

In this passage, Jesus said it this way: “Unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins.”

Unless you believe that Jesus is the Savior, you will die in your sins. The gospel of John begins with John the Baptist pointing to Jesus and declaring, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”  It famously tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” It ends with John explaining why he wrote it: “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

Jesus' statement here to these obstinate unbelievers is the flip side of those promises. If you do not believe you will die in your sins. You will not be where Jesus is. You will not have eternal life. Instead, you will have eternal death.