It’s very rare for me to read something that is both Theologically solid and emotionally riveting at the same time. So often, the stories we hear about Jesus are expressed in two ways: A feltboard-style Jesus, or a transcendent Christology. The first makes us feel that Jesus is something more appropriate for six year olds, and the second makes Jesus seem incomprehensible.
Neither of these is appropriate. Certainly, there is mystery to the nature of Jesus, being fully God and fully man. But just as part of the reason God the Son became a man was so that He could legitimately relate to us (Heb. 4:14-16), it is also so that we can relate to Him, and to the people and events surrounding His life, death, and resurrection.
In this light, I am very grateful for John Bloom’s reflections on John 8:2-11
“Shame on you, Whore!”
She was married, but not to the man in whose arms she had been laying. Suddenly the door had burst open. Oh no! Instantly she was in the grasp of angry men who dragged her — and her forbidden secret — out into the street.
“Adulteress!” The name pierced her like an arrow. Scandalized, loathing looks bored into her. Her life was undone in a moment, by her own doing.
And it was about to be crushed. They were talking about stoning! O my God, they’re going to stone me! God, please have mercy!
But God’s verdict on her case clear:
If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman and the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel (Deuteronomy 22:22).
“Both shall die!” She was going to die! But where was he? Why hadn’t they grabbed him?
No time to think. She was being half pushed, half pulled through Jerusalem. She was despised and rejected; as one from whom men hide their faces.
The temple? Why are we entering the temple? Suddenly she was thrust in front of a young man. A man behind her bawled, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery.” O God! O God! she begged silently. “Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?”
Keep reading at the Desiring God blog.
