Your True Parentage

JACK BARRY

“...If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here..”
- John 8:42

We all want to know where we come from. The desire to know our origins shows itself in the growing popularity of researching our family history through Ancestry.com. It’s become increasingly common to hear people, with some measure of pride (or surprise), announce that they are 55% German, 36% Scandinavian, and 9% Polish. Suddenly, bratwurst and pierogies are on the weekly dinner menu. 

Knowing our origins can feel like knowing who we are. But we don’t always love what we find. We all remember the floor dropping out at the conclusion of “The Empire Strikes Back,” when Darth Vader reveals the truth about Luke Skywalker: the villain Luke’s been fighting is his own father. What if something like that were true of us? What if our true parentage, or what we thought was our true parentage, cost us not just our reputation, but our lives?

This is the exact question Jesus presses on the crowd at the end of John chapter 8. During the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus had been in the temple and his teaching had sparked a long and increasingly heated exchange with the Pharisees. Among the crowds were many who had ‘believed in him.’ But as the conversation intensifies, Jesus’ focus shifts to the crowd as their belief turns into hostility. The reason? Their true parentage gets exposed.

John 8:42-44

Jesus’s challenge of the crowd’s true parentage hit at the heart of the people’s pride and security: their  national identity as God’s chosen people and children of Abraham. Their biological inheritance was so central to the way they saw themselves, it blinded them to Jesus. So much so, that when Jesus identifies himself as the one whose day Abraham longed for (in fact, as God himself - the “I Am” who was before Abraham), the crowds want to kill him. It’s evidence that neither Abraham nor God is their Father, but the devil, “a murderer from the beginning.”

How do you know your own parentage? “Like Father, like son,” is an old adage, but it rings true. If God is your Father you will ultimately know and love Jesus. You will submit to him. However, there’s a cost to that spiritual lineage. For the true Son, Jesus himself, his status as the beloved Son ultimately cost him his life, crucified as an enemy of Rome and a heretic to the Jews. For me, the parentage I was born into cost me very little. When I surrendered my life to Jesus as a college student almost twenty years ago, however, my new spiritual parentage cost me a lot: relationships, social status, my version of the future. There’s a family resemblance in the call to sacrifice everything. It’s how you know your true parentage.

True sons and daughters willingly lose in order to gain. Luke Skywalker discovered that his birth father belonged to the dark side. Apart from Jesus, that’s our story too; we are children of what the Bible calls “the kingdom of darkness.” But we don’t have to stay there. Jesus gives us a new home and a new parentage. We are “no longer slaves but sons,” and that means our future is secure. “The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever” (v. 35). Everything that belongs to your Father now belongs to you. His house is your house, forever. That means that no matter what cost comes with that, you can embrace it with joy and hope.

STUDY QUESTIONS
REAP: READ, EXAMINE, APPLY, PRAY
Now, take some time to work through the REAP pattern as you approach this week’s text. As you do, know that these questions are not designed to be completed in one sitting. Instead, their purpose is
to help you to meditate on our text throughout the week, preparing your heart for our Sunday together.

READ

• Notice all the places you see the word father (along with offspring and children) in the passage. How many different fathers get named? Who is claimed or tied to each?
• What does the crowd claim about themselves in vv. 33, 39, and 41? How do the claims escalate?
• How many times, and in which verses, does the passage mention the crowd trying to kill Jesus? What does that repetition tell you about where the conversation is heading?
• Read vv. 56-58 slowly. What does Jesus claim about himself in relation to Abraham? What is significant about his claim (especially v. 58)?
• How does the scene end in v. 59? What does the crowd do, and what does Jesus do? How does this connect back with John’s summary in v. 20? 

EXAMINE

• In v. 33, the crowd insists they have "never been enslaved to anyone." What is the irony in their statement? What slavery is Jesus actually talking about in vv. 34-36, and why do they miss it?
• Jesus says Abraham's true children "do the works Abraham did" (v. 39). What is his test for real parentage — biological lineage, or something else?
• Why does Jesus point to loving him (v. 42) as the evidence of whether God is truly a person’s Father? What does that reveal about the relationship between the God the Father and Jesus the Son?
• Verse 44 is one of the sharpest things Jesus says anywhere in John’s gospel: "You are of your father the devil." What two traits of the devil does he name? How is the crowd displaying both of those traits in this conversation?
• When Jesus says "before Abraham was, I am" (v. 58), the crowd immediately reaches for stones. What did they understand him to be claiming? (Compare Exodus 3:14)
• Some of the people who try to kill Jesus are the same ones who "believed in him" back in vv. 30-31. How does belief turn into hostility here? How does this story warn us?

APPLY

• Jesus ties freedom to abiding in his word (vv. 31-32). What does that abiding look like? What does it look like in your life when you don’t abide? How do you experience freedom in abiding and slavery when you’re not? 
• The crowd's security was in their heritage. What are you tempted to put your security in apart from Jesus? Your background, your morality, a church upbringing, a reputation?
• Jesus says love for him is the family resemblance of God's true children. Look honestly at yourself - does your response to Jesus’ authority over your life look more like love, or more like resistance?
• Belonging to Jesus would cost the crowd everything they had put their trust in up to that point. What has it genuinely cost you to follow Jesus? Are there places you are unwilling to let it cost you?
• It is easy to want a Jesus who only comforts and never confronts. Where in this passage does Jesus refuse to be the more comfortable version of himself you might prefer?
• In v. 51, Jesus says whoever keeps his word "will never see death." If you truly believed that, how would it change the way you face loss, cost, or death itself?

PRAY

• Thank God that in Christ he has made you his child -  not by heritage or effort, but through the work of the Son.
• Confess those things you have rested security in instead of Jesus, whether it’s religious heritage, reputation, self-image, or something else.
• Ask God to deepen your love for Jesus that you would more truly bear the family resemblance.
• Pray for anyone you know whose belief seems to be hardening into resistance. Ask that God would soften them. 
• Praise Jesus as the great "I Am,” God himself, before Abraham, who holds your future secure.
• Ask for courage to follow Jesus no matter the cost.