I am going away and you will look for me,
but you will die in your sin.
Where I am going you cannot come.
Those who belong to what is belong cannot ascend to that which is above by their own power. We need the help that only the one from above can give. The default condition of human beings is to belong to this world. But this condition is limited. If it is not interrupted by grace it is destined to come to the end of dying in sin. This is something worse and more terrible than mere death, for it is a death in which the things above remain closed to us, in which we cannot follow where Jesus went. That this sort of destiny is the default for humanity was the consequence of Adam and Eve ignoring God in the garden when he said, "From that tree you shall not eat; when you eat from it you shall die" (see Genesis 2:17). They died a spiritual death of sin in that moment. Those who did not avail themselves of God's mercy would go on to a physical death that was a confirmation of that condition, of that self-imposed separation from the divine.
You belong to this world,
but I do not belong to this world.
That is why I told you that you will die in your sins.
The diagnosis is hard to hear, and perhaps even chaffs against what we consider to be fair. But life abundant and eternal were always unearned gifts to which we had no legal claim. As parents, Adam and Eve were meant to bestow the gifts as a blessed inheritance on the human race. But having squandered them, their children had no recourse but to hope in the mercy of the one who had given them in the first place. And such a hope was not misplaced. For if he had been so generous to those whom he had called into being from nothing, who could do literally nothing to earn his favor, might he not be generous even to those ensnared in sin and in the power of the world, the flesh, and the devil?
For if you do not believe that I AM,
you will die in your sins.
Indeed though the diagnosis is difficult to hear God did not leave us without recourse. God allowed his people to confront the ugliness of their sin of complaining against God and Moses, manifested in the desert as poisonous saraph serpents. But he himself also provided the cure. They had acted, had sinned and transgressed, but to be healed all the would need would be to look upon the saraph on the pole. All they would need to do would be to agree with God about the ugliness of the problem and turn toward him for healing.
For us, the only way to be free from the domination of sin is to come to faith in Jesus, to believe him when he tells us that he himself is the great "I AM", the same God who spoke from the burning bush to Moses. When Jesus was lifted on high on the cross he exposed the ugliness of sin even more the the serpents in the desert, and at the same moment revealed and even greater love that would not abandon his people to die with that poison in their veins.
We are often slow to believe Jesus about who he is because it means we must agree with him about his diagnosis about ourselves and the world. But the love poured out on the cross makes accepting that message palatable as we realize just how precious is the love we behold. It is a love so great that we could never be so presumptuous as to ask for it or imagine ourselves to earn it.
When you lift up the Son of Man,
then you will realize that I AM,
and that I do nothing on my own,
but I say only what the Father taught me.
Because Jesus didn't eschew the hard truths some were polarized against him. But we shouldn't miss the fact that "many came to believe in him". He was not speaking to gain favor or tailoring his message to make himself popular. But his unvarnished truth is what made his message of love believable. It was not merely a fairytale fantasy designed to make everyone feel good and for that reason it was all the more trustworthy.
The LORD looked down from his holy height,
from heaven he beheld the earth,
To hear the groaning of the prisoners,
to release those doomed to die.
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