Then said the Jews Showing at once the great perverseness of their disposition, and their contempt of his declaration; will he kill himself? &c. Thus they made a jest of his threatening, and instead of trembling at his word, turned it into ridicule. He said, Ye are from beneath The slaves of earth, and the heirs of hell; I am from above I am from heaven, and shall quickly return thither; ye are of this world And your treasure and hearts are here; I am not of this world My thoughts and affections are set upon that celestial state and place from whence I came, and I incessantly labour to conduct men thither. But, as to you, I labour in vain. I said, therefore, that ye shall die in your sins
And it is really a great and awful truth, and deserves another kind of regard than you give it; for if ye believe not that I am he Greek, οτι εγω ειμι, that I am, that is, the person whom I have represented myself to be, namely, the bread of life, the heavenly manna, the light of the world, the Messiah. For there is evidently an ellipsis in the words, to be supplied by comparing them with John 8:12. See John 13:19; Mark 13:6; Acts 13:25, where exactly the same phrase occurs. Ye shall die in your sins And therefore will be, in effect, the murderers of your own souls. What follows shows this to have been our Lord's meaning; though he did not express himself fully, having handled these matters before at great length, in this and other discourses. It is justly observed by Dr. Doddridge here, that “the repetition of the threatening from Joh 8:21 is a very awful rebuke to the folly of their answer, John 8:22: as if our Lord had said, It very ill becomes you to trifle and amuse yourselves with such silly and spiteful turns, when your life, even the life of your souls, is at stake; and to talk of my killing myself, when, by your unbelief and impenitency, you are plunging yourselves into eternal death! Thus do those passages in our Lord's discourses, which to a careless reader might seem flat tautologies, appear, on an attentive review, to be animated with the most penetrating spirit, and to be full of divine dignity.”