Why Pharisees hated Jesus

In John 7, Jesus Christ is teaching in the temple and answers the disbelieving Pharisees by informing them, “Ye both know me, and ye know whence I am: and I am not come of myself, but he that sent me is true, whom ye know not.
[29] But I know him: for I am from him, and he hath sent me.”

“Christ is saying, ‘I used to be up there in heaven with Him and He sent me down here,’ ” explains Jordan. “When He says, ‘I know Him for I am from Him,’ that is Christ relaying His absolute certainty based on an intimacy of knowledge.

“He tells them, ‘I know the Father, and by the way, no man knoweth of the Father unless I reveal it to him.’ Christ’s saying, ‘Anybody who knows anything about the Father is indebted to me because you can never know the Father except through the Son.’

“Now, THAT’S why they hate Him and that’s why they want to kill Him! It had nothing to do with a bunch of ceremony-breaking incidents because they themselves broke the Sabbath! They didn’t care about that and they would have easily excused Christ if they had wanted to support Him.

“The reason they wanted to kill Him is because He said, ‘You can’t get to God except through ME. Your religion won’t get you anything; you got to go through ME.'

“He’s taking away all they had and replacing it with Himself. What’s He’s done is He’s gone to Jerusalem and stuck the ice pick right in their eye!

“You remember how He did that back in John 5? He healed that guy on the Sabbath knowing He was going to get a reaction from them. He was demonstrating the difference between religious and ceremonial external performance and Him—the life.

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“In John 7:27, the Jews say, ‘Howbeit we know this man whence he is: but when Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence he is.’ There’s the spiritual ignorance they’re trying to display.

“They’re trying to say, ‘We know where Jesus came from; He was born in Bethlehem. We can go check the tax records from where Joseph was, but when the Messiah comes, nobody’s going to know where He comes from.’

“The implication there is, ‘Jesus can’t be the Messiah because we know where He came from and we’re NOT going to know where the Messiah came from.’ Now, is that right?

“They're shut down in verse 42 with, ‘Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?’

“They know He’s going to come from Bethlehem! When He was born, the wise men went to Jerusalem looking for Him--you know, that’s the city of the great king--but He wasn’t there. He’d already settled in Nazareth.

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“When Herod the king was asked where the Messiah was going to be born, he got the rabbinical scholars together and they gave a testimony to the deity of Christ without even knowing it!

“They quoted Micah 5:2, saying, ‘Look, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago, Micah said He’s going to be born in Bethlehem,’ yet not knowing that He’d already been born there and that they were, in fact, giving historical testimony to the validity of the prophetic statement about where He was to be born.

“I mean, here’s a bunch of rabbinical Jews giving testimony to the trustworthiness of God’s Word, and the fulfillment of it in the birth of Christ, and they don’t even know about it yet!

“The Lord’s got that sense of humor to do that kind of thing, so this is all just a bunch of hypocrisy. It’s just pride of heart. They’ve rejected Him.”

Personal info:

When my parents first came back from being missionaries we lived for a year at my grandmother’s house in Akron, Ohio. One weekend afternoon, me and my brother and sister were all playing in the basement as my dad sat in a comfy chair in the basement’s finished party room (complete with a fireplace, fully-equipped bar and piano) reading a book while the sitcom “McHale’s Navy” played in the background on a portable black-and-white TV.

Without warning, my dad got angry and started yelling for us to “Shut up!” He came after us, threatening to hit us with his belt he’d just taken off and was flapping around. All I remember was crouching down underneath a telephone table to avoid him (not having any idea where my brother and sister were). My grandmother, who was cowering in the corner of the laundry room, shouted to my mother who was somewhere upstairs, “Mary Ann, you better get down here!”

Just like that, my mom was running down the steps, yelling, “Stop it, John!” My dad, turning to aim his belt at her, responded, “Maybe you’d like some of this.” She proceeded to tear a piece of hair out from his scalp and then he scrambled up the steps, leaving the house and not returning until the end of the next day.

During the time he was gone my mom contacted a lawyer and was fully contemplating divorce (The first time she thought of divorcing him, I just recently learned, was while we stayed for a month at HCJB headquarters in Quito, Ecuador, waiting to return to the States after my dad was suddenly asked to leave our missionary compound in Shell).

In recent years, my mom has said to me regarding that Saturday afternoon in the basement, “I realized, 'I know how somebody could kill another person.' "