John 8:56-59 - I am

8:56

This is was one of the many cases in John where faced with opposition Jesus makes his statements even stronger. There is no backing off here. He now tells them that Abraham was looking forward to Jesus coming. Then says that he saw it and was glad. Hebrews 11 talks about Abraham and his faith, and those men in faith looking ahead. So Abraham looked ahead with faith, he was relying on God. The Jews, in contrast, were relying on their own wisdom.

8:57

The Jews continued to interpret things with the eyes of human wisdom. Jesus was nowhere near old enough to have seen Abraham. The specific mention of fifty years old maybe that fifty years old was just a key age. Anyway, following their purely human wisdom there was no way that Abraham could have seen Jesus, or that Jesus could have seen Abraham (though Jesus does not actually say that He had seen Abraham).

8:58,59

Now we get the strongest statement of all, “before Abraham was, I am”. And this is prefaced with the “Truly, truly ...”, to leave us in no doubt that Jesus had not “misspoken”. He knew what He was saying and He meant what He said. “I am” was the title that God used of Himself when he met Moses in the burning bush. Jesus is God, and there can be no doubt about this.

The Jews were able to take no more. When faced with the truth, those who reject the truth will at some point react with violence. There are some who quibble asking where they managed to find stones from. This is a rather pathetic question to ask, demonstrating how people can so easily completely miss the important features of what is being said, ie demonstrating a lot of commonality with the Jews of the day! For what it is worth there are at least two plausible explanations. Perhaps the most likely is that the building work was not actually complete at this stage, so there would have been some stones around. Alternatively, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the stones were immediately available. Maybe they had to look for them? What ever the case the key point is Jesus claiming to be “I am”.