I want you to picture something that is essential to proper judgment about these things. When those people are resurrected in the second resurrection—(I am talking here about the second resurrection because we are considering the Last Great Day)—they will come up out of their graves with the same kind of mind with which they went into the grave. They are going to have to be converted. They are going to have to accept Jesus Christ. They are going to have to repent of their sins. They are going to have to turn their lives around. They are going to have to quit sinning during that period of time because they are going to be judged according to their works, are they not? We read that earlier in the sermon.
But God is going to create in them the same kind of things that we are having created in us. There is going to have to be a change of mind, of attitude and spirit. Let us feed that right back into this woman.
In Scripture a woman is almost always pictured as the Church, or as Israel. I will say, more broadly, "Israel." The reason I am saying it more broadly "Israel" is because, by this time—the time of the Last Great Day when the second resurrection occurs—the Church will have already been resurrected and will have had one thousand years with Christ.
But the Israel of the Old Testament—(and right on up into and through the Tribulation, and then they die)—was she not married to Christ, and did not God have to divorce her? What did He accuse her of all this time, beginning at least about the time of Jeremiah onward? Adultery.
So guess who the woman in John 8:1 represents. Tie that into the Last Great Day. God's wife, guilty of adultery, is brought up. Immediately she is beginning to receive the brunt of the accusations of the nations. I am talking nations in the Old Testament. (We are doing this symbolically.) They are accusing her of committing adultery before the Savior, Jesus Christ.
What does Christ do? The lesson is right here. He says to them, silently, "Oh, you guys, you are just as guilty of sin, and maybe worse than My people Israel." She represents Israel coming up in the second resurrection. The accusations in the Old Testament about Israel are very clear. So what did Jesus say? He told her to repent. He told her to go and sin no more. Is that not what He told us? You bet.
We are beginning to see in the things of which He spoke had to do with the Last Great Day. He of course was a couple of thousand years ahead of His time when He was doing that, but He knew what He was doing. I would imagine that those nations, those men, are going to have to repent as well.
John 8:3-11 illustrates what God wants to see. Stated in a simple phrase, Jesus Christ says, "Go and sin no more."
Repentance means to quit sinning, and sinning is the breaking of God's spiritual law. Therefore, repentance means to begin living according to God's Commandments. God's Commandments are God's laws enforced by His government—His Kingdom. This means that we must be obedient to His laws, which are His will, instead of our own self-will.
Repentance is something begun and required by God before baptism, and it is something that we must do for the rest of our lives. Romans 3:23 tells us we are all sinners. And we know from experience that we have constant need of this attitude of repentance.
