John 7:53-8:11

Pray

Group Question 1:

To begin tonight, I want you to take a second and make sure you know the names of each of the folks at your table and then take a few minutes to talk about your highs and lows this week.

My high was hearing the testimonies of folks last night in preparation for this weekend’s baptism celebration

My low was coming back after a week out of the office to a boatload of emails and meetings.

Introduction

Have you ever been caught red handed doing something you know you weren’t supposed to be doing? Maybe you have a childhood memory of something like this.

We can all picture the classic example of a little kid getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

To be clear, I don’t think this phenomenon is isolated to little children. This very same thing happened to my grandpa a few years ago.

Papa Story

Ring Camera (Wandering)

You can talk to people through the camera

Diabetes

While we were testing it out we caught him red handed.

We called him out over the mic and he reacted like he thought it was the voice of God.

Set up Passage

Tonight, we’re going to be looking at a similar story of someone caught red handed in their sin and the ensuing interaction. The difference is that instead of being caught in the cookie jar, this person was caught in the bedroom. We’ll be looking at the famous story of the woman caught in adultery and the amazing grace of Jesus on display in it all.

If you have your bibles, turn or tap with me to John 7:53, the last verse of chapter 7.

This will be the shortest passage we’ll look at all semester and yet we’ll get to see one of the clearest pictures of the Gospel in the whole book.

Textual Issues

Before we dive into the passage, I want to point something out. As you turned to the passage, unless you have a King James Version of the Bible, you probably noticed that our passage tonight has brackets surrounding it probably has a note next to it saying something like, “The earliest manuscripts do not include John 7:53-8:11.” Some of your Bible may not even have this passage in the main text and may have it relegated to a footnote. You may have never even noticed that before. Before that note causes any concern, I want to take a second to talk about it because I think it’s important.

The reality is that the vast majority of scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, don’t believe that this passage was a part of John's original Gospel.

There are a number of reasons for this, chief of which is that the earliest manuscripts of Scripture we have don’t contain this passage. In fact, this passage doesn’t show up in our manuscripts until about 300-400 years after the originals were written. It’s even later in the Eastern orhtodox copies.

Not only is there difficulty in it’s lack of presence in the early manuscripts, but when it does begin to show up it’s placed in different places depending on the manuscript. Some manuscripts put it here, but others put it at the end of John’s Gospel and others still put it at various points in the Gospel of Luke. Finally, the vocabulary used in this passage doesn’t match the vocabulary used in the rest of John’s Gospel.

So what are we to do? Why are we talking about this?

I think it’s important for us to be honest in this conversation. If we never discuss this, Satan will use uncertainty and questions to sow deep seeds of doubt to question all of the Scriptures, when actually, I think the passage we’re looking at is an opportunity for us to see just how deeply we can trust the Bible.

If we had more time tonight, I could talk to you for hours on end about why we can trust the Bible. In fact, just last week I spoke for several hours in multiple sessions about the evidence for why we can trust the Bible. But for our purposes tonight, let me just touch on one or two reasons.

The only reason we know that this passage might not even be a part of John’s original Gospel is because we have so many manuscripts of the Greek New Testament available to us. We can cross check the manuscripts that date right back to around the time of the originals and compare them. This cannot be said of the vast majority of ancient writings in any way. Take Plato for example. When you read Plato in freshman philosophy class, you’re not questioning the accuracy of the text. You and your professor and the world’s leading scholars take our edition of the text to be reliable. But we only have 210 manuscripts (either partial or full) of his writings and the oldest manuscript we have dates 1,350 years after the originals were written. Now take the New Testament for example. We have 5,800 ancient manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and our earliest manuscripts date back to within 40 years of when the originals were written. You can’t even compare those numbers! We could run this test with every ancient text and the Bible would win every single time.

What’s more, when we take those 5,800 manuscripts of the New Testament and stack them on top of one another to see how they compare the numbers are jarring. When you account for punctuation and spelling differences, the manuscripts there is a 99% percent agreement across them all. And the less than 1% difference doesn’t impact any doctrine or element of practice at all.

If I were to give you all a page worth of writing to copy down and we were to compare them, I doubt we would see this kind of accuracy. Even we would have more errors amongst us and we’re in the same room. These 5,800 ancient manuscripts come from all over which makes it even more incredible.

In fact, even the world’s leading non-Christian New Testament scholar, a professed atheist and skeptic Bart Erhman would say that even in the incredibly small 1% variation we have, that our wealth of manuscripts is so good that we can reconstruct the original text in the differences with virtual certainty.

The Bible is far and away the most historically reliable source of writing from antiquity in all of the world. If you choose not to trust the Bible, you must reject every other writing from all of antiquity which would be a bold and ridiculous position to hold.

You can trust your Bible with total certainty. This truly is the Word of God. Like I said, there’s so much more we could say in defense of Scripture, but I’ll stop there for tonight. If you have any more questions about this topic, I’d be glad to talk to you about it after group. Or you can bring your questions to our upcoming Q&A/Ask Anything night in a couple of weeks.

But at this point you might be saying, “Ok, I believe I can trust my Bible, but either way, if we don’t think this passage was part of the original Scriptures, why are we spending tonight looking over it?”

The reason is because virtually all scholars, whether Christians or non-Christians, think this story actually happened. They believe this was a real story from Jesus’ life. All of the early church fathers affirm this story happened and there is evidence of an extremely strong oral tradition of this story dating right back to the time of Jesus. Many scholars think that the reason we see this passage appended to Scripture is because the early church loved this story so much and thought it was true that they wanted people to know about.

Everything about this story matches everything we see in the rest of Scripture, and as you read the story you will find that this sounds exactly like the Jesus we see in the rest of the Bible.

This story really happened and therefore I think we can learn from it. So let’s dive into this passage and see why the early church and Christians throughout the ages have loved it so much.

John 7:53-8:11

“They went each to his own house, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

Explain the Situation

Summary

To summarize what we just read, Jesus is teaching before a large crowd and the scribes and Pharisees bring before him a woman caught in the act of adultery. The Pharisees are trying to trap Jesus between the Jewish and Roman laws, between mercy and justice, so they can get rid of him. By the end of the interaction Jesus has defeated the Pharisees and has shown unspeakable grace to the woman.

In order to learn from this story we’re going to look at it from two angles: first the angle of the Pharisees and then the angle of the woman caught in adultery.

Pharisees

Let’s begin by looking at the perspective of the Pharisees. This is where we’ll actually spend the bulk of our time, because while it’s easy to focus on the woman, I actually think the Pharisees teach a number of lessons we can learn from.

Group Question 2:

At your tables want you to briefly talk about this question: what actions and sins do you see the Pharisees partaking in in this story? And what is their attitude towards Jesus? Talk about that at your tables for a moment and then we’ll continue to dive in.

Trapping Jesus

One of the most obvious things we notice about the Pharisees is that they are trying to trap Jesus in this encounter.

Verse 6 even tells us this explicitly.

Already we can see that the Pharisees don’t care about justice, they care about tripping up Jesus. Already we can see their wickedness. If the Pharisees truly cared about justice, they would have brought the adulterous man as well. You can’t commit adultery by yourself. Adultery can never be committed alone. It takes two people. By only bringing the woman it’s clear that this is set up. The Pharisees, and probably the man, were in on this whole thing.

What’s worse is that because of the incredibly strict rules for the qualifications for witnesses according to Old Testament law, in order for the Pharisees to say they caught her in the act doesn’t mean that they saw the woman leaving the man’s bedroom or even that they saw the woman in bed with the man. It literally means that they caught the couple in the act of adulterous intercourse. This was absolutely set up. The Pharisees don’t care about justice. They just care about trapping Jesus. And trap Jesus they have.

The Pharisees hate Jesus and have been trying to trap him for some time now to no avail. But this trap looks to be unbreakable. It’s an ingenious trap, to be honest.

They are trapping Jesus between the Jewish and Roman law. In both Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the Mosaic law is clear that adultery is to be severely punished. If Jesus says that the woman shouldn’t be punished then He would be contradicting the Mosaic law and would be committing a serious crime while also showing He wasn’t from God because He would be going against the laws God had set forth. On the other hand, if Jesus tells them to stone the woman, he would be in trouble with the Roman law. The Jews were not allowed to enact capital punishment at this time, only the Romans. So if Jesus calls for the prescribed punishment from the Jewish law then He would be perceived as usurping authority from the Roman law and would be severely punished or even put to death. The Pharisees know this and are shrewd in their tactics. Jesus is a remarkable man, but it seems like there is no way for him to evade this trap. That’s what makes Jesus’s response so astonishing.

In his answer, Jesus provides possibly the only response that could escape the trap. He says, “And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Notice the beauty of this answer. Jesus upholds the Jewish law because he’s affirming that there should be punishment for the sin, but by calling for those without sin to throw the first stone, he knows none of the men will be able to meet the standard to carry out the punishment and is therefore intentionally not usurping the Roman law.

This answer is amazing and it leaves the Pharisees dumbfounded. So dumbfounded that beginning with the oldest and going to the youngest, they drop their stones to the ground and leave the interaction defeated.

Lessons from the Pharisees

So what can we learn from Jesus’s interaction with the Pharisees?

Justice

First, I think we can learn about what it does and doesn’t mean to care about justice.

It’s clear that the Pharisees don’t care about justice. They are the people who are supposed to know and love God’s law most and yet they are using it as a means to an end to take advantage of someone they dislike and to puff themselves up. It’s easy to judge them for it, but I think church folk in our day do this all of the time. I think you and I do this all of the time.

We can see it mostly simply in little kids. How often have you seen siblings tattle on one another to their parents? They don’t care about justice, they just like seeing someone else get punished because it makes them feel better about themselves as they think “Well I’m not like them and I don’t sin like them.”

But this phenomenon isn’t just isolated to little kids. Adults do it all of the time too.

For example, we’re in an election year this year with the Presidential election coming up in the fall. There will be people whose entire job it is just to find dirt on candidates so they could get them in trouble and puff themselves up. They don’t care about justice or the good of the individual they’re reporting against. Like the Pharisees, they just care about hurling rocks.

To keep the politics example going, we can even catch folks in our lives doing this same thing to a lesser degree. For example, we all have folks in our lives who are passionate about politics and who side more with one party or candidate over another. Over the course of this next year, we will surely hear accusations of some kind against every presidential candidate. For the politically passionate in our lives, they will be more tempted to give grace to the candidate they support we accusations arise, while they will be more quick to judge the candidate from the other party. In those instances, they don’t really care about justice or the good of the individuals involved. They just care about seeing those they dislike be punished and seeing their views justified.

We have a culture, particularly in social media, where people are always in the hunt to catch other in their sins and mistakes so they can cancel them. People don’t care about justice, they just care about feeling good about themselves and puff themselves up to the detriment of others.

And as egregious as all of that seems, you and I do the very same thing ourselves. We have all done this at some point. In fact we might be doing it now.

We each have individuals that we may not like or appreciate and when something goes wrong for them or they slip up, there’s a part of us that enjoys it because we feel justified in our frustration. We don’t actually care about them or justice. We care about puffing ourselves up and seeing them get punished.

Maybe for you this is a supervisor, a friend, a family member, a distant parent. Maybe it’s someone you’re jealous of or someone who has hurt you. Maybe it’s someone you’re comparing yourself to. Who is that person for you?

For me, I’ve even caught myself doing this in situations without realizing it. For example, I’ve had times where there has been a person or situation that I’ve been frustrated at. I’ll go to someone else to talk about the situation. And it feels so good to rant, doesn’t it? I tell them about how I would do things differently (and maybe even better). I justify it in my mind by saying I’m trying to be careful and I’m only hoping for what’s right to happen. But even though I keep going to that person or even several people to complain about the person or the scenario, I’m not actually doing anything about the situation itself. After a while it hits a point where it’s clear that I don’t actually care about justice or the good of the people involved. I just want to puff myself up and be justified in my views. Really, whether or not I’d admit it, I just like hurling rocks in the form of words. And at that point it’s clear that I’m no better than the Pharisees. You and I all do this. None of us can walk away without some measure of guilt. And if we can’t think of an example in our own lives of this happening we’re lying to ourselves.

So here’s the question we have to reflect on. Who are you hurling rocks at right now?

Reflect and Repent:

Normally at this point I would have us go to our tables, but I doubt if many or any of us would want to share these answers. Instead I want us to use this time as a chance to reflect on who we are hurling rocks at and I want to give you a brief moment to repent before we go on. It’s easy to breeze through vague mentions of sins in sermons, but it’s a lot harder to do it when we can put a name and real situation to it. Use the next 2 minutes to reflect in silence and then ask God to forgive you for hurling rocks. This will prepare our hearts for what we’ll encounter shortly in the message.

Has Earthly Justice Been Annulled?

One of the questions you may have asked yourself related to this whole discussion is whether or not Jesus is getting rid of earthly justice when he says, “He who has not sinned can throw the first stone.” While that might seem like a clever answer in the moment, that’s not what Jesus is saying. It can’t be what he’s saying because that would take away the ability to carry out any earthly punishment and justice. And it would contradict many passages of Scripture, like Romans 13, where God gives governments the ability to carry out justice in the world for our good. What Jesus is actually saying to the Pharisees is this. You should search your heart for your sin and you should be the first witness against your sin so you can repent of it. Only once you have repented of your sin and are in that state of humility can you actually pursue justice and goodness for others without hating them and puffing yourself up. Jesus is saying that all of these Pharisees are sinning against the women by twisting the law the and using it for their own means and therefore they are unqualified according to their own law to bring a punishment against her. It is a good thing to point out sin to others, but only if we are prepared to walk alongside them to turn away from their sin and to turn to Jesus.

Church Folk Are the Worst at This

One of the most egregious parts of this story is that the Pharisees, the people who were supposed to love people and God’s law most, were actually abusing God’s Word, not to bring justice mind you, but to justify and puff up themselves.

This leads us to the curious case of Jesus writing in the dirt. Many have postulated theories about what he writes, but the truth is that we don’t know. The Bible doesn’t tell us.

What I think Jesus is doing is this. He is doing what you and I do when we are in a tense situation and we can’t even bear to make eye contact with those involved, so we fidget with things to ease the tension.

Jesus is seething in anger against them

Greatest form of hypocrisy.

They take God’s law which is to point people to God’s mercy and they use it to hurt others.

Seething in anger against them

One of the most discouraging parts about all of this is that often times church folks are the worst at all of this.

We twist the scriptures against others.

We are so legalistic about the sins we don;t struggle with and yet so lenient about the sins we don’t struggle with.

We compare ourselves to other Christians or our non-Christian friends who sin more obviously than us. It’s easy to think, “Look at them. How can they live that way. God thank you that I don’t sin like that.” But whether you sin once or you sin often and publicly, you have no greater ground to stand on. Any sin merits you an eternity of punishment in Hell forever.

When we compare ourselves to others like that and play Pharisee, Jesus seethes in anger against us

Seething in anger against us

In the end, the Pharisees dropped their stones meaning they acknowledged in some sense that they had sinned. If even the Pharisees could acknowledge their sin, can you acknowledge yours tonight?

Reflect and Repent on ways you puff yourself up against others.

I want us to close our section on the Pharisees with this quote from famous early Church Father Augustine who said this about the Pharisees in this passage:

“The one the snare was laid for was not caught; instead those who set it were caught, because they would still not believe in the one who could release them from the snare.”

The Pharisees refused to believe in Jesus his very own word against him. May we not do the same.

The Woman Caught in Adultery

Notice that she doesn’t justify herself or try to explain away her sin. She knows she has been caught and responds in humility because of it.

For many of us, we are so ashamed of some sin that we can even bring ourselves to bring it to God. But just like the woman caught in adultery, our sin isn’t a secret to Jesus. He already knows all of our sin, and he knows it better than we do.

I struggled to journal in the past because I was afraid that if I wrote down my deepest sins then someone would open my journal and find me out. Satan wants to keep us from acknowledging our sins and wants us to bring them to God.

Bring your sin to God.

Talk about Summerfest and how Joe Pelling opened up about his sin and the impact it had. Bring sin to light

For some of you, the most gracious thing God could do is have you be caught in your sin because that’s what it will take for you to cease and be repentant. Part of how we can tell that our repentance is genuine is if we are willing to accept whatever consequences and justice may come with our sins.

Matthew Henry says it this way, “Better that our sin shame us than damn us”

The rules for witnesses in the Old Testament are strict. We touched on this earlier. You had to have at least 2 witnesses who saw the act itself take place and they had to be so certain of the crime that they would be willing to enact the punishment themselves. For many of us, most of our sins could make it past those rules because we’re good at hiding our sin so that no one sees it. It’s why we can be so slow to admit or see our sin. But in the final day of Judgement in Jesus’s return, even inanimate objects will serve as witnesses against us. Habakkuk 2 tells us that even man made objects will cry out against sinners. That means that there is no such thing as a private sin. All of creation will testify to our sin.Even our phones will serve as witnesses against us. Think about that.

Gossip, porn, jealousy, love of money (amazon shopping addictions), laziness (spending too much time on social media). and more.

We will all be without excuse.

One of the first things we can notice in Jesus’s interaction with the woman is that he doesn’t neglect justice. He doesn’t enact mercy to the exclusion of justice. He upholds both justice and mercy. He is not saying that adultery is ok. He’s saying that there is no one to accuse the woman so the case is closed.

We see the perfect picture of Jesus upholding justice and mercy at the cross. And we see the ultimate problem that Jesus solves.

How can finite sinful man pay for their sins when the punishment deserved for sin against an infinite God is infinite itself? Only God could pay the full price, but it is man that must be the one to pay it. Sure;y there’s no way to solve the issues, right?

Jesus, God-man. Truly God and truly man.

Our sin is punished

We are given mercy.

Until we see the weight and reality of our sin, we will never see the true beauty of the cross. If the cross and the Gospel seems boring to you it’s because you don’t see the depths of your sin and it's why you can’t sense the wonder of Jesus words to the woman, and ultimately, his words to us.

We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on our sins tonight. And that isn’t just to beat us up. It’s so that we can sense the beauty of the forgiveness Jesus offers.

Jesus mercifully did not ask the woman if she was guilty or not. If he did she would necessarily incriminate herself before the crowd. Instead he asks her if there were any accusers left, to which she could truthfully say no and therefore the case must be dropped since there were no witnesses.

Because of Jesus, Satan can no longer accuse us. The question is not whether or not we are guilty of sin, to which the answer is obviously yes. The question is whether or not we have any genuine accusers left. The answer, if we are in Christ, is no and therefore the case can be closed.

In verse 10 when Jesus asks the woman, “Where are they? Has no one condemned you?” we can hear echoes of Paul’s words in Romans 8 when he says, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus...Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us....No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”- Romans‬ ‭8:33-34

Imagine standing before Jesus on judgement day. Like this woman a crowd is looking on and they bring charge after charge against you for all of the countless sins you’ve committed in your life. There will be no question that you’re guilty. You will have no defense. And then as you’re bracing for the declaration of your punishment you will hear a very different decree. You will hear Jesus say, “I don’t condemn you. In fact, I was condemned so that you could go free. I faced death so you could have life. I faced sorrow so you could face joy. Go therefore and sin no more as you enjoy the joy and satisfaction of your father in Heaven forever.” and with that, you will hear rock after rock from your accusers fall to the ground as you walk away free.

No one will be able to bring a charge against you! In fact, if you are a Christian, even now, no one can bring a charge against you. Not even Satan. No matter how much he accuses you, you can point Him back to the cross. The only one who was sinless and qualified to throw the stone was the only one who advocated for mercy. Instead of throwing stones, Jesus was ultimately laid behind a stone on our behalf. He defeated sin so that we could be free forever. You don’t have to bear the weight of your sin any more!

Beauty of the baptism stories last night

So where is Satan trying to accuse you? Where is Satan trying to throw stones at you? Where do you need to embrace God’s forgiveness and the freedom he has given you in Jesus?

When you feel the accusations of the world, rest in Jesus and his gracious declaration over you. And hear the sounds of the stones of your accusers hitting the ground around you. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.

Lord’s Supper

We’re going to close by doing something a little different tonight.

We’re going to close taking the Lord’s Supper together.

In the Supper He calls us to remember the day He gave himself for us so that we could be free of our condemnation from sin.

Amazing Grace

Have them stand