Have you ever noticed that in today's reading from John 8 (ESV) that the Jews are content to simply disagree with Jesus and tell Him how crazy and demon-possessed He is until vs. 58, where Jesus says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am"?  It's after Jesus says this that things suddenly get ugly, and the Jews decide that they're going to wipe Jesus off the face of the earth with a shower of stones!

But why the big fuss?!?  I mean, most of these Jews already thought that Jesus was talking like a crazy person... So what if now He was saying that He was thousands of years old?  Would that really make Him sound any crazier to them?  Did that really make Him suddenly worthy of death?

The answer is "no".  It wasn't the fact that Jesus said that He was alive before Abraham that made the Jews so angry.  It was the the fact that He said "I AM" about Himself.  The problem with making this statement was that Jesus was clearly equating Himself with Yahweh - the God of the Jews - who had appeared to Moses in a burning bush almost 2,000 years before saying, "'I AM WHO I AM.'... 'Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" (Exodus 3:14)  The Jews most certainly caught the reference!  And they were furious that this simple man would be so bold as to not only say that He had existed before Abraham was born, but to equate Himself with Yahweh!  As if Yahweh, the "maker of heaven and earth", could possibly be confined to the body of a 30-some year old man...

Sometimes we think to ourselves, "Boy, if only I had been alive in Jesus' day... I would never have rejected Him!  I would've believed!"  Maybe so... but we can never know the answer to something like that for sure.  Would we have seen so clearly, if we had lived while Jesus was still walking this earth, teaching and living among us, that He was actually all-powerful Yahweh God - the "maker of heaven and earth"?

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