Hey Andy, when the “woman taken in adultery” was brought to Jesus, why wasn’t the man taken with her since both were guilty (John 8:3)?
EXACTLY! Yes! I’m glad somebody finally noticed that!
Yes, the Law (Leviticus 20:10) says that if a woman has committed adultery (or caught in the act of it), then both, SHE AND THE MAN, must be brought out and stoned to death. But you’re right. In John 8:3, the man’s not present, just the woman.
This just shows how (deceiving? contradicting?) the Pharisees were when they tried to trick Jesus into making a judgment. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was why Jesus kneeled down and began drawing in the dirt. As if to say, ‘(sigh), really?’
The point is, Jesus didn’t even need to mention what they got wrong about the instructions of the Law, and anybody who knew their mistake would’ve mentioned it there anyway (yet notice that nobody mentioned it? Scripture illiteracy was just as much an issue then as it is now). He just said something that made everybody think and realize what they were doing.
I saw something once, and also taught it to some students once, of how God sees sin.
We sin like buildings, or a bar graph – all different heights and measures.
But God sees sin like one from above looking down at the buildings (if all the buildings were round cylinders): OO OOO OO He doesn’t see the different heights and measurements of sin because all sin leads to death, and the Law says that if you’ve broken any part of it, even the smallest part of the law, then you’ve broken it all. So it didn’t matter if you broke the smallest sin, for your punishment was now the same as the person who broke the largest part of the Law.
I wonder if the rabbis had preached on that recently, and that was why everybody recognized the point of what Jesus was saying when He said, “He with no sin, cast the first stone”?
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