John 8:21

Vv. 21 admonishes the hearers of the importance of the present hour for the people and for each individual: Jesus, their only Saviour, is to be with them only for a little while longer. When once they have rejected Him, heaven, whither He is about to return, will be closed to them; there will remain for them nothing but perdition. This declaration is a more emphatic repetition of John 7:33-34. As Meyer says, the seeking of the Jews will not be that of faith; it will be only the longing for external deliverance. The words ἐν τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ ὑμῶν, in your sin, indicate the state of inward depravity, and consequently of condemnation, in which death will overtake them; Jesus alone could have delivered them therefrom. Hengstenberg and others translate: by your sin. This sense of ἐν is possible; but the former sense is better suited to the singular substantive. Sin is here the wandering of the heart, the estrangement from God, in general; in John 8:24, it will be the particular manifestations of this disposition. In John 13:33, Jesus speaks to the apostles, in the same terms as here, of the impossibility of following Him; but for them the impossibility will be only temporary (ἄρτι, at this hour), for Jesus will return to seek for them (John 14:3). For the Jews, on the contrary, there will be no longer a bridge between earth and heaven; the separation is made complete by the rejection of Him “without whom no one comes to the Father” (John 14:6). In their turn, and as if by a sort of retaliation, the Jews go beyond the answer which they had made to His preceding declaration, John 7:35. “Certainly,” they say, “if it is to Hades that thou meanest to descend, we have no intention of following Thee thither.” This ridicule may be explained without the necessity of having recourse to the idea that a special punishment awaited in Hades those who took their own lives (Josephus, Bell. Jud., 3.8. 5). The following words are intended to explain to them the: you cannot, which irritates them: