John 8:21-24 ²¹Then he 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 are not able to come.” ²²Then the Jews said, “Will he kill himself, because he says, ‘Where I am going, you are not able to come?” ²³And he said to them, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. ²⁴Therefore, I said to you that you would die in your sins, for if you do not believe that I am, you will die in your sins.”

The confrontation gets more serious in these verses. The themes of Jesus’ authority and origins continue. These themes seem to be what was bothering the Pharisees and other Jews who had gathered to listen to Jesus. They could not accept that Jesus somehow represented God or had divine origins, even though the evidence was clear in the miracles and the profound teaching.  Jesus’ next statement in verse 21 gets right to the point. There are a series of opposites comparing Jesus to the Pharisees, with an inclusio in the form of a warning about sin, which is the consequence of taking the route of the Pharisees.

The first comparison is that Jesus would soon be going away. The opposite is that would be looking for him. There are several possible meanings of this statement. It could be interpreted in a historical way, meaning that Jesus would soon be leaving Jerusalem and returning to Galilee, and the Pharisees would not be able to catch him. The statement could also be interpreted prophetically with a theological connotation. Jesus would soon leave Earth, and the Pharisees would continue to look for the Messiah but not find him because he had already come and gone. The second option has more support from Jesus’ response in verse 23. With either possibility, because the Pharisees refused to believe in Jesus, they would die in their sins. They were blinded by their sin. They would not be able to follow him into resurrection life. Sin has serious consequences, and the most serious of all is not being able to go with Jesus to heaven.

The Pharisees and other Jews (John expands the audience in verse 22 to include the crowds gathered in the temple precincts) continued to struggle to believe and thus understand Jesus. Starting with the wrong premise and refusing to believe the claims of and about Jesus lead to the consequences of a hardened heart. Jesus responded to them with two more opposites that say basically the same thing. The Jews were from below referring to this world. Their thinking was worldly, fleshly, and humanistic, even though they claimed to be the spiritual leaders of the people. Jesus was from above and not of this world. The Jews were stuck in the fallen world of rebellion and sin. Jesus came offering the way of escape and the route to eternal life. He came from the Father full of grace and truth (1:14).

In verse 24, Jesus then repeats twice the warning of the inclusio about dying in sin but adds the crucial condition of believing in him. The way to escape the consequences of sin is to believe in Jesus. John has already written what that means: accepting that Jesus is the Messiah and Son of God and trusting in his teachings through faithful obedience. The way Jesus states the conditional sentence is significant. In the protasis (if), the condition to avoid dying in one’s sins is to believe Jesus to be the I am (egō eimi). It is unclear if this should be taken as a direct reference to God’s statement to Moses in Exodus 3:14 with the significant claim that Jesus was God in the flesh, or if it is just a grammatical way to say, “I am the one,” meaning Jesus is the promised Messiah. Either interpretation is profound. The repeated use of “I am” in John’s Gospel suggests that the first option may be in mind. The context of this chapter shows the link between Jesus and God the Father. Jesus sets out the crucial condition of believing in him in order to be saved from sin. To die in sin means to face judgment and condemnation. The Jews needed to make a decision, and this would be the most important of their lives. The most important decision anyone can make is what to do with Jesus.

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