DEVOTION
THE GOSPEL
OF JOHN
START A NEW
LIFE
John 8:1-11
8:1 But
Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple
courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach
them. 3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in
adultery. They made her stand before the group 4 and said to Jesus,
"Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 5 In the Law Moses
commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" 6 They were using
this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus
bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 7 When they kept
on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them,
"If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone
at her." 8 Again he stooped
down and wrote on the ground. 9 At this, those who heard began to go away one
at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman
still standing there. 10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" 11 "No one, sir," she said. "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus
declared. "Go now and leave your life of
sin."
NIV
Although
there is a lengthy debate among the greatest scholars from times of old to the
present day regarding whether this section of text is part of the original record
John penned as inspired by the Spirit or it was added by some scribe in some of
the latter copies but not all has no answer. There is none who have the
absolute solution but rather only their opinion from their research. So with
that in mind we still cannot just ignore it as if it were not there. Yet if we
were to read the narrative up to verse 7:52 and then immediately read verse 8:12
it does seem to flow in the style John writes. But again should we just ignore
this? Without going into the details of the narrative, there still is a truth
with stands out for us to learn from. Surely if God did not want any of this to
be there for us to learn from he would have kept these words from being written
at all, whether by John or a later scribe. The truth is simple in that Jesus
does not condemn her, but he also does not pardon her as if she had not sinned.
By his words he instructs us that there is not a single one of us who has the
right to pass judgment on any other person. There is not a single one of us, no
matter how righteous we think we are, that is without sin. For us to say that
we have no sin is blasphemous, as we are calling God a lair. This is one of the
points Jesus makes here. The other is that he does not pronounce the woman
innocent of sin, but he does not condemn her for her sin. He does not condone
her sin but we do see grace and truth in his words. Jesus does not condemn us because
of our sin for it is our own sin that condemns us. But the grace of God prevails
in Jesus, giving forgiveness while also instructing this woman and us to leave
the life of sin behind and start a new life. Some translations use the phase, “Go
and sin no more” but that would imply that we could in fact live a life without
any sin at all, which simply will not happen because of our human condition.
But it does imply as Jesus was instructing this woman to leave her life of
adulterous behavior and start to live a new type of life, following his ways, loving
God, and being what would be called, born again. This woman surely could not
live a life completely free of all sin, but she could turn her life around and
follow after Jesus. This too is our state of affairs. We have left that life of
sin and we have turned to follow Jesus.
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