John 8:12-20

I am not a pilot, nor do I claim to be one. In fact, I know there are a couple of pilots in this congregation who can probably correct me on this, but there's a phenomenon called spatial disorientation. Essentially, from what I understand, it is a feeling that you are going in a direction that you actually aren't. You can be going straight, or you can feel like you're going straight, and yet be turning. Or you can feel like you are maintaining the same altitude, or even going up, when you're actually descending. There's danger in this, and that's why, as a pilot, there are so many instruments — and there's actually a lot of regulations on the instruments you need to have in your instrument panel. Pilots will tell you that you shouldn't take off if any of those are malfunctioning, because at some point you're going to have feelings while you're in the airplane that aren't true based on what you're seeing on your instruments. And in that moment, you have to ask yourself this question: do I trust what I feel, or do I trust something outside of myself? Because when you're in the middle of flying, especially over water, the horizon and the water can blend into one.

Sincerity doesn't mean anything when you crash into the water. And I wonder if that's a good picture for us as Christians, as people. Our hearts tell us things contrary to what's actually true. We hear this all the time in our lives — follow your heart, make your own path, trust yourself. But almost no one in our world will stop you to ask a question like this: What if my heart doesn't know the way?

Big Question

How do you know you're headed in the right direction?

Oftentimes we make kind of arbitrary metrics for our lives — things that can serve as a compass showing us that we're headed in the right direction. For kids it might be a little easier: you can look at your report card and ask, do I have all A's? Maybe it's popularity — how many friends you have, or what people think about you. As an adult it's harder. We make metrics like: am I succeeding in my job? Do I have enough money in my bank account? Is my marriage successful? Do I have the right kind of friends? Are people saying the right things about me? Maybe it's whether or not you're happy enough, or how your family is doing, or whether you're healthy enough. But the more and more I talk with people, the more and more I'm convinced there is no metric that we can manufacture that actually gives us a compass, that actually points us or helps us answer this question. We can say things about ourselves — I took this vacation, I got this promotion — but at the end of the day, none of us really know if we're headed in the right direction. I used to look at people more advanced in age than me and think they'd gotten everything figured out, until I started talking to them about this question and realized: nobody knows. Nobody has a good compass on this.

This can even be dangerous when it becomes spiritual — when we try to apply emotionalism to our own spirituality. A lot of churches will say things like, you need to experience God; have you felt God in your life recently? I'm not against having mountaintop experiences with him, but I am against saying that feeling is the metric for our spiritual journey. What that becomes is a kind of spiritual works righteousness: I feel that God loves me, I can sense his presence, and so therefore I'm a good Christian. That's not how it works. Nowhere in Scripture does it promise you that every day you're going to feel God, or that feeling is a metric of how spiritually healthy you are. There are times I pray and don't feel brought to my knees before our heavenly Father. There are times I read Scripture and I'm not moved the way I've been moved before. So what do we do when even our emotions can't be our compass spiritually? How do we know we're headed in the right direction? Well, fortunately, this passage has a great answer for us. So would you keep your Bibles open to John chapter 8 with me? Because we're going to see our compass, the way in which we're supposed to be led, and how we know that we're headed in the right direction. We're going to see three sections in this passage: the pillar that stands in the temple, the Pharisees argue with the light, and to reject the Son is to confess you do not know the Father.

Outline

1. The Pillar Stands in the Temple (John 8:12)

2. The Pharisees Argue with the Light (John 8:13-18)

3. To Reject the Son Is to Confess You Do Not Know the Father (John 8:19-20)

1. The Pillar Stands in the Temple (John 8:12)

To understand what we're talking about today, we have to come back to the festival Jesus is at. He's still at the Festival of Booths, or Tabernacles. This is a festival where people would pour water during the day to symbolize the Holy Spirit coming, but at night they would light enormous lamps — lamps that would be three or four to five stories tall. These lamps would be so luminous, so grand, that they would actually illuminate all of Jerusalem. They were there to represent and remember the pillar of fire that led Israel in the wilderness, that led them to the Promised Land. At night there was this pillar of fire that would lead Israel. It's at this moment, when the lamps are lit, when people are singing and dancing around these giant lamps — oil-based lamps that would be lit all night — that the pillar stands in the temple. And Jesus stands up and says the second "I am" statement in his ministry in the Gospel of John. Previously he had said, "I am the bread of life," and now he's going to be talking about how he is the light. Verse 12 says this: "Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Jesus is talking about the light at a festival, at a feast where there are lamps lit. It's about lighting; it's about remembering a pillar in the wilderness. Remember, that's what they're celebrating — this moment where Israel was led by God himself. In the Old Testament it talks about how God went before them and led them; wherever this pillar of fire went, so went Israel. Jesus is standing there, and he says, "I am the light of the world." When he says that, they would have known exactly what he was talking about — that he's the pillar of fire. He's saying something audacious if he were just a man. The light in which you're celebrating, the lamps that you're dancing around, represents this pillar of fire — but it's only a shadow of what it truly was, centuries ago. Jesus was essentially telling them it's like holding up a candle to the sun. The Son of God is standing in the midst of them. The pillar of fire is standing in the midst of them, and they're dancing around lamps.

And Jesus stands up and says, "I am this light." Not only is he this light — the pillar of fire led Israel — he's saying, I am the light, not of Israel, not of your fathers, but the light of the world. When Jesus comes, he's not only saying, I'm here to replace this festival you've been celebrating, that you've been waiting for, that you've been anticipating — I am he. I fulfill all of that. Not only does he fulfill it, but he fulfills it in abundance. He is the light, not just of Israel, but the light of the world — the light that would redeem all kinds of people, not just for one nation, but for everyone. When Jesus says, I am the light of the world, I am the pillar of fire that led you through the wilderness, what he's saying is, I am your right and true leader. You've been looking for the Messiah, this king who would come and lead you, and I am that king. Just as you were led in the wilderness, I will be the one to lead you from now on. He's saying: I am the glory and the power of the pillar of fire made flesh. I am God. All throughout the Old Testament, light was associated with God himself — as in Isaiah 49:6: "I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth." Everything they're celebrating — the water pouring, the lamp lighting — is all pointing to him. Every part of the Old Testament, everything the prophets had prophesied about, was here, standing in their midst.

Not only is he the light, but he's calling them to do something. Look at the last part of verse 12: "Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." Jesus tells the people to follow him, just as their forefathers did wandering through the desert. He does not ask the people to weigh their options — if you like the light I'm providing, go with that one, or if you find a better deal, go with that one. He's not saying try your best to follow this light, or that if you just aim at the light and miss, you'll be close. He's saying follow, because there wasn't another option for Israel. When they wandered through the desert, when they were being led at night, there wasn't another option — to miss, to go in a different direction than the pillar of fire in front of them, meant death. This is a time before flashlights, before headlights, before streetlights. To wander at night without the light meant that you were vulnerable, that you were not going to have much life left. And that's true for us today: if we do not follow, we will also die. This call to follow, against our own hearts, is something we naturally want to revolt against. Our base desire is to say, follow your own heart, go after the things you want; you don't need to follow Jesus. But the truth is, when we revolt against our Creator, we revolt against ourselves. We choose to follow our own heart rather than submitting to someone else, and we're leading ourselves to our own destruction.

That desire to follow our own heart is exactly the opposite of what Jesus is calling us to do in this passage. Jesus is calling us to follow him because he knows we have no light within us. We cannot manufacture it; we cannot make light. We physically cannot become luminous in the middle of the night when there is no light — we don't produce it. And spiritually, we do the same. We often forget that Jesus does not call us to himself because he wants to take life from us, but because he is where life is found. That's what the pillar of fire did in the wilderness — Israel wasn't being led somewhere aimlessly; they were going to the Promised Land. The pillar didn't just illuminate the desert; it showed them the way. That's what Jesus is saying here: whoever follows me will have the light of life. This light leads to life. To follow him doesn't just mean that you're no longer lost — to follow Christ means that you are on your way back to your true home.

2. The Pharisees Argue with the Light (John 8:13-18)

That's what we see in this next section — the Pharisees cannot accept that Jesus would be the way, that he would be the light himself. The Pharisees object to Jesus saying that he is the light. They understand the claim he's making, and they object to it, saying: you haven't met the Old Testament requirements — the Old Testament says you need to have two or three witnesses, especially to make a claim like this. On the surface, this looks like a pretty good rebuttal. But this is their way of trying to call him out of order — to say, your motion doesn't follow the right format — rather than looking at whether it's true or not.

So Jesus answers in verse 14: "Even if I do bear witness about myself, my testimony is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going, but you do not know where I came from or where I am going." Jesus says: you want a witness? I will produce a witness. I was there — I was there when your fathers followed me through the desert. I was the pillar of fire. But also, light itself does not need a witness. You don't need someone to tell you that a light is on; you know because you can see it. Light attests to itself. No one needs to tell you whether it's day or night. Light attests to itself, and that's what Jesus is saying: I can say that I am the light of the world because I was there. He can bear witness because no one else was there except the Father — the Father who had received their offerings, who had heard their prayers, who had delivered them out of exile, who had led them through the wilderness with a pillar of fire. He bears witness about Jesus.

But the problem was never the number of witnesses. No one ever really has that objection about Christianity, about our faith — that there isn't enough evidence, that there aren't enough witnesses. It's about the hardness of our own heart; it's about the numbness of the jurors themselves. I see this a lot in some of the apologetic content I consume, especially with Muslim apologetics — they'll say our Bible isn't true, or that our faith isn't true, because Jesus never claims to be God. Show me, they say, where in the Bible Jesus says, "I am God, worship me." The answer is, obviously, there isn't a passage in the New Testament or Old Testament where those five words are strung together in that order. And yet that doesn't mean it's any less true. All throughout the New Testament, Jesus is proving, saying, and showing that he is God. We don't need more evidence. What we need is a new heart.

3. To Reject the Son Is to Confess You Do Not Know the Father (John 8:19-20)

Their hardness of heart shows this next point: to reject the Son is to confess that you do not know the Father. These Pharisees come to Jesus and totally reject him, and by doing so, Jesus says, they are rejecting the Father himself. I love how this section starts off — in verse 19, they ask a question so moronic, so stupid, that it shows they don't understand what is going on. Verse 19 says: "They said to him therefore, where is your Father?" Jesus has just said, my Father bears witness about me, and they say, you have a dad? Show us your dad! They've totally missed it. And Jesus says: "You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also."

These are the religious experts — people who have spent their entire lives getting to know the Scriptures, going through every line, memorizing the first five books of the Bible, able to recite it from memory. They knew what God's word said, and they cannot recognize the one it is about when he's standing right in front of them. They ask a question so moronic, so beyond explanation, that it shows they don't understand the overall picture — where Scripture is pointing, the movement and trajectory in which God has set Scripture to go. It's like a mechanic going into an auto parts store asking for blinker fluid — you're supposed to be an expert in this, and you clearly don't understand what you're talking about. They have missed it entirely. It's why Bible memory, why fun facts about our faith, aren't enough. We need to understand what God's word says as a whole, where Scripture is pointing us.

They'd spent their whole lives trying to understand God, and here he is standing in their midst, and they're completely befuddled. They had gone to this festival year after year, decade after decade, celebrating the light, dancing around it, anticipating a leader who would come and lead them to their true home. They'd spent decades dancing around the light in order to miss the light of the world.

So coming back to our big question — how do you know you're headed in the right direction? Jesus' answer here is remarkably simple: don't look within yourself, look to him. We have no answer within ourselves; we have no metric, no compass, nothing we can manufacture that shows us we're moving in the right direction. The only way to know is to follow the pillar that led his people through the wilderness — the light of the world that leads us now. Our feelings will change, our circumstances will change, our sense of direction will feel uncertain more often than not. We can try to manufacture it with emotions, but nothing manufactured will lead us. The light doesn't change, and we don't need to see the whole road ahead — we need to follow the one who knows the way.

And that leads us to our main idea: receive the light that exposes and leads everything, and follow him — or stay in the dark. This call to follow is one that goes against what we want. So many of us want to command our own destiny, but Jesus is saying we were never meant to make our own light, we were never meant to manufacture our own way. We need the source of light — not just the light, but the one who said, "Let there be light." Otherwise we will wander aimlessly, we will stumble again and again in the darkness, and the darkness that comes with following the desires of our own heart will lead us to our own destruction and despair.

The beautiful part about the light is that it does not promise to show us the entire landscape, or the next mile ahead. God's Word says he is a light unto our feet and a lamp unto our path. John Henry Newman, in his poem "Lead, Kindly Light," writes: "Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on. The night is dark, and I am far from home, lead thou me on. Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene — one step enough for me." I hope that would be our prayer: Father, lead me today. I'm far from home; I feel despair; I feel alone. God, lead me. Show me how to be faithful today — I don't need to see next week or next year, just how to be faithful today. I had a football coach who used to say, do the little things right and the scoreboard will take care of itself. I think oftentimes we're so worried about the legacy we'll leave, so worried about the endgame, that we miss being faithful today — knowing that the path we are on, if we are following his light, leads us home. It's a trust that goes beyond ourselves, a trust that he will show us, step by step, the way to be faithful. And if we are faithful today, and tomorrow, and every day, we will find ourselves looking back at a path that led directly to him and his presence.

That leads us to our one point of application for today: let the light expose the brokenness. We need God to shed light into our souls and to expose the sin in our hearts. And yet we often revolt against this, we cower away from it, we run from it. I think about people I've known who have had red flags of different illnesses in their life — dementia, cancer — and they've chosen not to go to the doctor because they don't want to know the results. They believe that if they forgo the screening, they can pretend everything's fine, that they're healthy. But we understand that logic doesn't work — knowing or not knowing doesn't make us healthy, it just keeps us living as though nothing's wrong. And the truth is, we do the same thing spiritually. There are places in our lives where we would rather stay in the dark, because we believe the darkness would be more comfortable. We don't want Jesus to shed light on our marriage, because we might have to admit we've become selfish. We don't want the light shed on our anger, because we like the feeling of righteous indignation. We don't want God to shine his light on our finances, because it might expose something off in what our spending says about what we love. We don't want the light shone on our private thoughts, our bitterness, our lust, our pride — because once the light comes, we have to see what's actually there.

But the beauty in all of this — the beauty in Jesus being the light and exposing the darkness — is that he doesn't come in to expose in order to destroy you; he comes to expose because he was already destroyed for you. He exposes what's killing you. Jesus never exposes our sin in order to destroy us. He says: son or daughter, look at how you've been stumbling around in the darkness, look at how it's been destroying you, look at how your own sin has broken you. I hate that sin has run in your life — let's bring this to the light, let's kill this. Son or daughter, I love you. I went to the cross. I, the light, was extinguished. I, the light, was broken, so that you could be made whole. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, will not be banished into the darkness, but will possess the light of life. He doesn't expose you and leave you there — he leads you. He leads you home. He leads sinners out of darkness, out of death, into light.

Which raises our final question: how can a holy God give us this light, when we know the inside of our soul is riddled with sin? How can we still be called home? How can the light be with us? It's because the light went to the cross to be extinguished. This light is not temporary — it's not a light just meant for Jesus' time on earth, or until Jesus calls us home. This light is eternal. Revelation 21 says: "And the city has no need for sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light the nations will walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night." God himself will be the light for all eternity, the light that will lead us home. We can possess this light only through the power of the gospel. On the cross, Jesus was exiled — the light of the world was exiled into darkness. The light became extinguished.

The Gospel of Mark records: "When the sixth hour had come, while Jesus is hanging on the cross, there was darkness over the whole land. And in the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? — which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The darkness Jesus experienced on the cross was not just physical; the physical darkness was there to represent something even greater that was happening. Jesus went through the greatest darkness known to any human ever — the love of the Father totally withdrawn, and all the hate, all the wrath toward sin and evil, poured out. Not only was his life extinguished, not only was he put to death, but he was damned. He was cursed in our place. Jesus took our darkness so we would not have to experience it, so we could experience his light. He extinguished our night so we could be led into his day. And he entered the tomb, and three days later he rose again from the dead, because death could not hold him. Death could not hold him, because the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

We need this light. We need this light to expose us, we need this light to lead us, and we need this light to save us and keep us. So church, hear this: receive the light that exposes and leads everything, and follow him — or stay in the dark.