If the Jews failed to understand the expression lifting up,' which might mean His Exaltation, though it did mean, in the first place, His Cross, there was that in His Appeal to His Words and Deeds as bearing witness to His Mission and to the Divine Help and Presence in it, which by its sincerity, earnestness, and reality, found its way to the hearts of many. Instinctively they felt and believed that His Mission must be Divine. Whether or not this found articulate expression, Jesus now addressed Himself to those who thus far - at least for the moment - believed on Him. They were at the crisis of their spiritual history, and He must press home on them what He had sought to teach at the first. By nature far from Him, they were bondsmen. Only if they abode in His Word would they know the truth, and the truth would make them free. The result of this knowledge would be moral, and hence that knowledge consisted not in merely believing on Him, but in making His Word and teaching their dwelling - abiding in it. [4078] But it was this very moral application which they resisted. In this also Jesus had used their own forms of thinking and teaching, only in a much higher sense. For their own tradition had it, that he only was free who laboured in the study of the Law. [4079] Yet the liberty of which He spoke came not through study of the Law, [4080] but from abiding in the Word of Jesus. But it was this very thing which they resisted. And so they ignored the spiritual, and fell back upon the national, application of the words of Christ. As this is once more evidential of the Jewish authorship of this Gospel, so also the characteristically Jewish boast, that as the children of Abraham they had never been, and never could be, in real servitude. It would take too long to enumerate all the benefits supposed to be derived from descent from Abraham. Suffice here the almost fundamental principle: All Israel are the children of Kings,' [4081] and its application even to common life, that as the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not even Solomon's feast could be too good for them.' [4082]
Not so, however, would the Lord allow them to pass it by. He pointed them to another servitude which they knew not, that of sin, [4083] and, entering at the same time also on their own ideas, He told them that continuance in this servitude would also lead to national bondage and rejection: For the servant abideth not in the house for ever.' [4084] On the other hand, the Son abode there for ever; whom He made free by adoption into His family, they would be free in reality and essentially. [4085] [4086] Then for their very dulness, He would turn to their favourite conceit of being Abraham's seed. There was, indeed, an obvious sense in which, by their natural descent, they were such. But there was a moral descent - and that alone was of real value. Another, and to them wholly new, and heavenly teaching this, which our Lord presently applied in a manner they could neither misunderstand nor gainsay, while He at the same time connected it with the general drift of His teaching. Abraham's seed? But they entertained purposes of murder, and that, because the Word of Christ had not free course, made not way in them. [4087] His Word was what He had seen with (before) the Father, [4088] not heard - for His presence was there Eternal. Their deeds were what they had heard from their father [4089] - the word seen' in our common text depending on a wrong reading. And thus He showed them - in answer to their interpellation - that their father could not have been Abraham, so far as spiritual descent was concerned. [4090] They had now a glimpse of His meaning, but only to misapply it, according to their Jewish prejudice. Their spiritual descent, they urged, must be of God, since their descent from Abraham was legitimate. [4091] But the Lord dispelled even this conceit by showing, that if theirs were spiritual descent from God, then would they not reject His Message, nor seek to kill Him, but recognise and love him. [4092]