John 7 53 thru 8 11 pub

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1 “Neither Do I Condemn You,” John 7:53-8:11 (March 8, 2015) 53

[[They went each to his own house, 1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.” ]] We are working our way through the gospel of John this spring – it is customary for Christian churches to take time in the weeks leading up to Easter to teach from one of the four gospels of the New Testament and do some disciplined thinking about Jesus, his life, and his death. Now, Jesus did a lot of famous things over the course of his life, but in our text for today we see what might be the most famous (other than his death and resurrection). This is the place where the Pharisees bring a woman to Jesus who has been caught in adultery, threaten to kill her for doing so, and Jesus says to them, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” What can we learn from this text? Obviously, Jesus is merciful to people who sin in a way that the Pharisees weren’t. They want to kill this woman caught in adultery, yet Jesus sets her free. But is that all we can learn from this text? No, believe or not, what we can learn the most about from this text is the Bible, how we should understand it and how to use it in our lives. We believe that the Christian Bible is the inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God. Put another way: we believe that every verse, every phrase, every word – every jot and tittle, as Jesus puts it in Matthew 5 – contained within this book is completely and perfectly inspired by God. And I hope to show you three things about the Bible from this text: first, why we can trust the Bible. Second, how easy it is to misuse the Bible (a warning about the Bible). Third, what happens when we submit to the Bible. First, why we can trust the Bible. I’m sure that in this room we have people using at least half a dozen different versions or translations of the Bible –ESV, NIV, NASB, King

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

2 James. But all of them should have our passage for today set apart from the rest of the book of John by brackets – and in the ESV, the version we’re using, you can see that the editors of the Bible include a note that says, “The earliest manuscripts do not include 7:53-8:11.” What’s that about? Here we need to talk for a few minutes about how the Bible came into existence. And we must, we must, talk about an area of biblical studies known as text criticism. A few facts we must know first: the Bible was not written all at once, and published from the first as a complete book. Rather, the Bible is made up of 66 books, and these 66 books were written by dozens of different men over a period of 1500 years or so. In other words, the people of God had access to parts of the Bible before other parts of the Bible were written. For example, by the time of Jesus, the Jews had put together what we call the Old Testament – the 39 books from Genesis to Malachi. But none of the New Testament books were available during the earthly ministry of Jesus. They hadn’t been written yet. Soon after the time of Jesus all 27 of New Testament books had been written and by the third or fourth century A.D. the church officially recognized that these 27 books were the Word of God (though almost all of them, like the gospels and the writings of Paul, were recognized as Scripture upon their publication because they were written by men who had been with Jesus). But these 27 books of the New Testament, from Matthew to Revelation, were, like all books in the ancient world, written by hand. These are called “autographs”; it’s a the technical term which means “self-written”). When copies of these books were written, they were copied by hand. The printing press was not invented until well over a thousand years later, in 1516, by Erasmus. Further, we do not have the original books written by Paul, by Matthew, by Mark, by Luke, nor do we have the original Gospel of John, the book of the Bible we are studying this spring. Instead, we only have access to handwritten copies of the original handwritten Gospel of John (these are called manuscripts, which literally means “written by hand”). We can discern how old these copies are by the type of paper used, by the style of writing used, where they were found. This is the science of text criticism – studying these manuscripts with great care and making these determinations. Here’s how all this applies to what we’re studying this morning: the story of the woman caught in adultery is not in the oldest handwritten copies we have of the Gospel of John. In our oldest copies, the gospel of John goes from John 7:52 straight to John 8:12. It’s not until the fifth century or so (more than 300 years after John was first written) that we start seeing this story pop up in the manuscripts – all the manuscripts that we’ve determined are older than that do not have this story in them. What does all this mean? It must mean this story was not in the original gospel of John, but instead that someone or some people added it in hundreds of years later. You may ask, “If that’s what has happened, if we know John did not write this story into his

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

3 original book, then why is this story in our Bibles now?” And the answer is that when the King James Bible was produced in 1611, the brilliant men who put that Bible together did not know that John did not include this story in his gospel. The King James translators did not have access to the oldest Greek copies of the Bible (like we do now); they only had access much later manuscripts. The oldest copies of the gospel of John that show us that it wasn’t in the original weren’t discovered until the last 100-200 years or so, when scholars ransacked libraries and monasteries and churches all over Europe and Africa and the Middle East looking for all the copies of the Bible they could find. But because the King James Bible made this story so famous, the editors of our modern English Bibles (the ESV, the NIV, the NASB, even the NKJV) feel like they must include it (because the readers will expect it), yet they rightly bracket it off to let the readers know there are real questions and concerns behind including the story as a part of God’s Word. Now, some people hear this and are tempted to, frankly, flip out. They are tempted to think, “Oh my goodness, I can’t trust the Bible. I mean, J.D. is saying we don’t have the original documents that Paul and John and Peter and Moses wrote, and the copies that we have don’t agree. Does that mean the Bible I have is the result of a really long game of telephone?” You know what the game of telephone is? You have thirty fourth-graders in a room, and you tell the first fourth-grader something, like, “Monkeys love ripe, yellow bananas,” you get that fourth-grader to whisper it in his neighbor’s ear, then all the way around the room until you get to the thirtieth fourth-grader, and he says the message is, “My uncle wears tight, orange bandanas.” Some people hear this about the story of the woman caught in adultery and fear that the Bible is the result of a centuries-long game of telephone, and so we can’t trust it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from causing us to distrust the Bible, the woman caught in adultery should cause us to trust the Bible more. True, we do not have autographs. And that’s probably a good thing. If we had those, Christians would fight over who could possess them, we’d charge money to see them, or turn them into idols and worship them, or all three. But we do have over five thousand handwritten copies of those autographs, found in libraries and churches all over the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. They’ve all been digitized, so if you are a scholar in this field you can access them all on your computer. Five thousand may or may not sound important to you, but it is because we have far more Bible manuscripts than any other ancient text. Just to give one example, Tacitus was a Roman senator and considered one of the greatest historians of all time. His works – the Annals and the Histories of ancient Rome – tell us much of what we know of that period of world history; in fact, there are many facts about that period of history that we wouldn’t know otherwise because Tacitus is our only source. Do you know how many manuscripts we have of Tacitus’ work? Two – one written around 800 A.D. and the other around the year 1000. That’s it – two, for this monumental work, compared to over five thousand for the Bible.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

4 Here’s why it’s important and why it’s wonderful that so many copies of the Bible have been preserved for us. It is true that all these five thousand handwritten copies don’t perfectly match. As we’ve seen, some of the later copies have the story of the woman taken in adultery, the earlier ones don’t. But that kind of variation in the manuscript trail is exceedingly rare – it only happens twice in all the New Testament. Here, in John 8, and at the very end of the gospel of Mark, Mark 16. Far, far more common are instances where these manuscripts over here use this word in this particular verse, and these copies over here use a different word instead. Or these two letters were transposed. That kind of thing happens all the time in the manuscripts. But, because we have so many manuscripts, and because through the science of text criticism we can know where they were written and when they were written, we can bring them together, compare them, and find out with almost perfect certainty what the original autographs, the original books of the New Testament, actually said. See, in the Bible, we have the best of all worlds: we don’t have the original documents that Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul wrote – which, as I’ve said, is a good thing. But we have so many thousands of copies that, by careful study by those trained in text criticism, by comparing and contrasting them, we can be sure of what the originals actually said. There is almost no doubt among scholars who study the manuscripts as to what the text of the Bible actually is. Friends, the Bible is trustworthy – you can be almost completely certain that every sentence, every phrase, every word, in the Bible you have in your hands accurately reflects what the biblical authors originally wrote, and in those very few, very rare instances where we aren’t 100% sure, no Christian doctrine is ever in any doubt whatsoever. Zero. You can trust the Bible. One last thing under this point: if the story of the woman caught in adultery was not in John’s original gospel, then why are we studying it this morning? If it wasn’t a part of the original gospel of John, then it’s not a part of the holy, infallible, inspired, and inerrant Word of God – why are we studying it? That’s a good question. John MacArthur, when he preached through the Gospel of John, refused to preach on this passage, for that reason – it’s not a part of the Word of God. John Piper, however, did preach on it when he covered John a few years ago. And while everyone agrees this story is not original to John’s gospel, the most respected Bible scholars out there believe it did happen. Men like D.A. Carson, Bruce Metzger, and Leon Morris, all who are profound Bible scholars, all believe that this event really did happen, it just wasn’t immediately written down in the Bible. But that does not give it the authority of Scripture. Therefore, the reason we are studying the woman caught in adultery this morning is because the main points in it are taught elsewhere in the New Testament. We don’t learn anything new about Jesus, about salvation, about man’s sin, or any other point of theology from this text – it is all confirmed elsewhere in the Bible.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

5

That’s my introduction – now, to the teaching; to the text itself. Second, a warning: how easy it is to misuse the Bible. Let’s re-read 2-6a: “2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him.” The Pharisees haul this woman before Jesus because she’s been caught in adultery. They tell Jesus that the law of Moses commands that such women be stoned – not by marijuana, but with rocks. It was a horrible way to die – to have hundreds and hundreds of individual rocks thrown at you until the life is slowly, steadily, painfully, surely beaten out of you. Now, it is true that in the Old Testament the punishment prescribed for someone caught in adultery – for having sex with someone not your husband – was the death penalty. The Pharisees were absolutely right about that. So, they haul her before Jesus. But, what’s the problem here? It takes two to commit adultery! Yet they only bring the woman before Jesus. Where was the man? Here’s the key to understanding what happened – verse 6: “This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him.” The Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus. Do you see what they had to have done? The woman was set up. The Pharisees got some man (maybe even one of their own) to seduce this woman, the Pharisees broke in on them in the act, they let the man get away, but they caught the woman before she could get away – the text is very clear about that. Then immediately – without any kind of due process, without any kind of trial – they drag her to Jesus all because they wanted to trap him. And the Pharisees have a good trap. If Jesus says, “No, don’t stone her – we just need to love one another,” the Pharisees could say, “Look, this man claims to speak for God, claims to be from God, but he doesn’t uphold the law of Moses.” Jesus would have been discredited in the eyes of the Jewish people. But, if Jesus says, “Yes, Moses says we must stone adulteresses, so she should be killed,” then the Pharisees could go the Romans. The Romans were the ones in charge in Israel, and they had taken the ability to sentence people to death away from the Jews. So the Pharisees could accuse Jesus before the Romans of being a subversive, and then the Romans would get rid of Jesus. It was a great trap. And it sounds just like something the Pharisees would do, we can confirm this elsewhere in the Bible, because later on in Jesus ministry they tried to do something very similar. We read in Matthew 22 and Mark 12 and Luke 20 how the Pharisees came to Jesus and asked him, “Teacher, should we pay the hated head tax to Caesar or not?” If Jesus says, “Yes,” the Jews will hate Jesus, and if he says, “No,” the Romans will kill him.

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

6 The Pharisees believed the Bible to be inspired, infallible, inerrant, God’s perfect rule for faith and practice. The Pharisees would have died rather than deny one jot or tittle of Scripture. Yet, they were using it here as a weapon to try and destroy Jesus. They were jealous of him; they hated how he called them out on their sins. They hated how he knew the law of Moses better than they did, and made them look stupid. They hated how the people loved hm. So, they used the Scriptures to try and trap Jesus get rid of him, destroying the life of this woman in the process. Friends, church-going friends, Christian friends, please be careful when it comes to Scripture. It is so easy to misuse the Bible for evil purposes. Unspeakable evil has been done in the name of the Word of God. One hundred and sixty years ago, it was not at all uncommon for white ministers in the South to take certain passages of Scripture such as 1 Corinthians 7, Ephesians 6, the book of Philemon, hold them up and say, “See! See! There it is in the Bible – slavery! So, it’s ok if we own slaves today. In fact, it’s for their own good that we enslave them, because if we enslave them, then when can make them come to our churches and get them to become Christians. And if they are enslaved in this life, well at least they’ll go to heaven in the next.” That was the argument, the horrible, demonic, misuse of Scripture many churches preached in the South in the 19th century. What were they doing? They were using the Scriptures to justify their economic system and their racial prejudices. Any time we take one part of the Bible and use it to justify our sin, our selfish ambitions and desires, then we are just like the Pharisees – and it’s so easy to do. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. 24 You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” Matthew 23:23-24. For example, wives are supposed to respect and honor their husbands, right? Absolutely – Ephesians 5:33. But how many times have believing husbands felt disrespected by their wives and used that verse to justify their bad attitude at home? “She doesn’t respect me, so I feel justified in being jerk to her.” What’s that? Straining a gnat and swallowing a camel. How many times have I heard someone quote 2 Thessalonians 3:10 in order to get our from under any obligation to try and help the poor? “For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” “There it is in the Bible – if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” Or how often have we in the church looked at the Bible verses condemning sexual sin, adultery, homosexual sin, as if they were in a class of sinners far beyond the ability of the gospel to save them. Straining a gnat and swallowing a camel. This may sound shocking coming from a preacher, but it’s true: the Bible can be a very dangerous thing. The Bible has been used to justify all manner of evil. Does that mean

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

7 we get rid of the Bible then? Absolutely not. The problem is not the Bible; the problem is when we don’t submit ourselves to all of it. The problem is not the Bible; the problem is when we don’t fill ourselves completely with it. Therefore, it is not enough to know just know some Bible. That’s the problem. If you know some Bible, you will misuse it. Why? The Bible is a coherent whole; it all fits together. It contains one message. So if you only know some Bible, then you only know part of God’s message to man. And if you only know part of a message, then you don’t really know the message at all! Friends, we cannot be content with knowing just part of the Bible. We must be like Jesus. He was a Scripture-filled man. If you cut Jesus, he bled Scripture. He was constantly saying, “It is written,” gegraptai! Some ten percent of all the words we have of Jesus were Bible verses. Jesus was a man filled with the Scripture. We must be, too, or else we will, like the Pharisees, find ourselves using Scripture to justify our sin. Third, what happens when we are filled with the Bible. When we are filled with the Bible, we’ll be like Jesus. And from this text (and others), we can see three characteristics of Jesus that will increasingly become true of us. First, we will be unshakeable. 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. John 8:6. A lot of people have wondered, “What was Jesus writing?” And there are all kinds of theories about what he wrote, and they are all baseless. We have no idea. But it doesn’t matter – his life is at stake, this woman’s life is at stake, and yet, he’s calm. He’s cool. He’s collected. Jesus is not worried, he is not anxious, he is not upset. Don’t you love that about Jesus? He does not get rattled. He has no fear of man whatsoever. Yet there is one place in the Scriptures that Jesus loses his composure. More than that – he fell apart. It’s the last 24 hours of his life. We read that in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus got a preview of the wrath of God he was to experience on the cross, and when he did he went into shock, so horrific was what he saw. Then on the cross he bore the wrath of God itself. He cried out in fear and agony, he screamed in pain. Jesus was unshakeable everywhere but when he faced the wrath of God. But, friends, here’s the thing: if you believe that you deserve to be on that cross and that you deserve to have the wrath of God come down on you for your sins, but Jesus took it in your place, then you can be unshakeable. Because, really, if Jesus took that for you, if he felt apart for you, in your place on the cross, then what really bad can happen to you? Do you think that Jesus Christ would go through hell to save you but then accidently lose you some other way? Never! To the degree you know the Bible and to the degree you know what Jesus has done for you with his life and his death, to that degree you can be unshakeable. Not worried about what men or circumstances might do to you and those you love. Secure, safe, in the arms

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

8 of Jesus. Second, we will wisely and lovingly resist evil. Verses 7-9: “And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.” For years and years I’ve read these verses and wondered what exactly it was that Jesus said that made these men, who a few minutes more were ready to kill, walk away in shame. Have you ever wondered that? When Jesus said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” he wasn’t saying that only perfect, sinless people could serve in the judicial system. Not at all – if that were the case, there’d be no point in having a government at all. Rather, Jesus is appealing to the Law of Moses. We have in our American judicial system certain rules of evidence, to prevent people from getting railroaded by a rogue prosecutor or a frivolous lawsuit. Hearsay evidence, for example, is inadmissible. The accused have a right to be told the names of hostile witnesses, confront them, cross examine them. But the law of Moses had even more protections for defendants. It was a very progressive legal code. No one could be tried for adultery unless at least two witnesses saw them in bed together. In fact, the evidentiary standards were so stringent that it was just about impossible to ever convict someone of adultery, because when would you ever be in the position to have two witnesses to it who were willing to testify? Jesus is telling them, “Yes, this woman was caught in adultery, I know that. But I also know how you caught her. You hypocrites! I know why there’s no man here. You say you love the Law of Moses but you don’t love the spirit of justice and mercy and protection behind it. Your commitment to the law of Moses is a sham, a show.” So when he said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” he pricked their consciences. One by one, beginning with the oldest men, they saw that Jesus was right, and they left ashamed. Jesus shamed them, he pricked their consciences, but notice: he didn’t hate them! These Pharisees did real evil and were bent on more evil, but Jesus did not hate them. He wanted them to repent, he wanted them to change, he loved them. When Jesus is dying on the cross, he’s praying for the people killing him. He hates evil, but loves evildoers. How different are we? When we see evil, we want to see the evildoer destroyed. There’s a Liam Neeson movie, Taken. In that movie, the pretty girl who plays his daughter is on a senior trip to Europe, and she is kidnapped by sex traffickers while she’s on the phone with her dad. But it turns out these guys kidnapped the wrong guy’s daughter, because Liam Neeson turns out to be a super-duper assassin, Jason Bourne-type, and he kills half of Eastern Europe in order to get his daughter back. And I can say, as a dad with two

© 2015 J.D. Shaw

9 young girls, there’s a part of me that see that and says, “That’s about right – that’s a proportionate response.” No one watching that movie wants the bad guys to feel ashamed and repent. But not Jesus – friends, if all Jesus cared about was stopping evil, he would have pulled the curtain down on all of us long ago. He resists evil, but he loves the evildoer – and friends the more we submit to the Bible, the more we will too. One last thing: third, we will insist on holiness. Read verses 10-11: 10 Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.” Jesus never said what the woman did was okay. He does not tolerate sin. He says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And, friends, when we submit to the Word of God, we’ll find that becoming more and more true of us. We will find our hearts grieved when we sin, and when people sin around us. “O safe and happy shelter, O refuge tried and sweet, O trysting place where Heaven’s love and Heaven’s justice meet!” That’s what we see in the account of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. And we don’t just see that in John 8 – we see this about Jesus all over the New Testament. Jesus is about love and justice. Let’s go to the Lord’s table now and celebrate it. PRAY

© 2015 J.D. Shaw