Everything, you will perceive, turns upon this relation of a Son to a Father--upon their eternal distinctness, upon their eternal unity. The word '_Father_' was now, as before, that which at once confused the Jews, and filled them with horror. '_They said therefore to Him, Where is thy Father?_' 'What dost Thou mean? Dost Thou mean that the God there in those heavens is Thy Father?' No! Surely the _Jupiter tonans_, whom they worshipped under the name of the Jehovah the God of Abraham, was _not_ the Father of whom He spake. He said therefore, '_Ye neither know me, nor my Father: if ye had known me, ye would have known my Father also_.' It was a fuller, bolder assertion than was contained in the words, '_My Father worketh, and I work_.' It affirmed that they could know the Father of all in a Man; that they could not know Him except in a man. This was the answer to their '_Where?_' This overthrew their notion of Godhead--the frightful intellectual idol to which they were bowing down. But if He had spoken blasphemy before, He had spoken it more clearly and terribly now. St. John felt this; for he thinks it necessary to explain why Jesus was not stoned for using such language:--'_These words spake Jesus in the treasury, as He taught in the temple: and no man laid hands on Him; for His hour was not yet come_.' Then He repeats the words which He spoke before at the feast, but with an addition which deepens their force. '_Then said Jesus again unto them, I go my way, and ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins: whither I go, ye cannot come._' He would go away from them, and they could not follow Him. But how is that departure and that incapacity connected with their dying in sin? I believe the sense will become clearer as we read on in the chapter; but we shall not understand what follows, if we leave this question unconsidered. Throughout He has been teaching that the coming to Him with the feet, that the seeing Him with the eyes, was not that coming and that seeing which could do them any good, which could make them truer men. That belief which is not dependent upon sight--that belief which was in Him as the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever--that belief which would be in Him when He had gone away from the world--that, and that only, would raise them above themselves, would unite them to the Father, would make them partakers of His true and eternal life. Sin, the separation from God, must be the state of their spirits,--those spirits must gravitate to earth, and claim their portion with the flesh,--unless they could look upwards, and assert their share in their Lord's ascension, in His victory over the grave and hell. The next verses will show, I think, that this is the force of the one upon which I have been commenting.