Today, I am reading and commenting on John 8-9.

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I love the story of the woman at caught in adultery.  I think it tells us something about how we should live as followers of Christ.  It tells us that we are not to condemn sinners.  However, we are to tell them to go and, from now on, sin no more.  Having said that, as I read the passage today it was clear to me that the story was not in the original Gospel of John.  If you go back and read John 7 then skip forward and start reading at verse twelve of chapter 8, you see a continuity of style which is missing from the story of the woman caught in adultery.  I believe that God intended for us to read and learn from that story, but it was not originally in the Gospel written by John.

Going on in today’s passage John uses an interesting choice of phrase.  He writes that Jesus said to “the Jews who had believed in Him, “If you abide in my word. you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  Before I start looking into what Jesus meant there, I want to look at what John wrote.  At this point I am confident that all of Jesus’ disciples were Jews.  Yet John seems to be making a distinction between Jesus’ disciples and the Jews who believed in Him.  I think that John is saying that all of those whom Jesus was addressing here considered themselves His disciples, but not all them actually were.  This is something which crops up repeatedly in the Gospels…not everyone who proclaims themselves a disciple of Jesus truly is a disciple of His.  And I think Jesus’ answer to them when they questioned what He meant by them being set free tells us how we recognize whether we are HIs disciples, or just “Jews who had believed in Him.”  Have we allowed Jesus to free us from our slavery to sin?

That point is clarified at the end of the account of the man born blind.  After the man said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe,” and worshiped Jesus, Jesus said that He came so that those who do not see may see and that those who see may become blind.  The Pharisees who were nearby (whom I believe are some of the “Jews who believed in Him” from earlier), asked if He was saying that they were blind?  Which brings us back to how we can tell if we are the “Jews who believed in Him”, or if we are His disciples.  The men who brought the woman caught in adultery were sure that they could see what was right and what was wrong and thus sought the woman’s death.  The woman was told to go and sin no more.  The Pharisees who confronted the man born blind declared that Jesus was a sinner.  The man born blind said, “I don’t know about that.  I know one thing. I was blind, and now I see.”  I want that to be my statement.  All I know is that Christ came into my life and now I see His glory.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.