When Certainty is Not Arrogance, But Incarnation
God Blows My Mind. Again.
Have you ever experienced a moment so overwhelming that your neural circuits just cannot work fast enough to grab onto what is unfolding right before your aging eyes in God’s magnificent Word?
Today, May 31, 2025, is one such moment. Dots so inextricably linked that only a Divine Author, my Dad, could knit them. Unbelievably. Undeniably.
It began with a coffee-and-cream moment of revelation. A wave of awe broke through as I saw how Scripture, memory, language, identity, and Jesus converged in a way that made me feel like a five-year-old child again. This time, safe, seen, summoned. This wasn’t sentimentality. It was the Spirit witnessing with my spirit that I am a son. God, not me, chose the day. I only showed up for it.
The God I worship is not a construct of culture, nor an abstraction of philosophy. He is the LORD, and there is no other. As Isaiah proclaims, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me” (Isaiah 45:5).
That verse is not metaphor. It is how I interpret my entire life.
The Woman and I. Oh wait, was that positional absolutism?
Regaling my thesis to a person of interest, I was intrigued by how quickly the populist narrative emerged to dismantle anything resembling a truth claim. Over the course of our conversations, I began forming a psychological and ideological profile, not out of malice, but as an exercise in critical observation. She is brilliant, yes. But she wielded her intellect like a scalpel designed to slice through conviction. There is always that subtle but unmistakable smugness: the smile that tolerates you only because you’re not yet evolved. “Why, thank you, Ma’am. How kind.”
At one point, she had remarked with great certainty, “There are no absolutes.” I gently smiled and replied, “Can an eye be a kidney?”
In our latest discussion, she again challenged my premise: that authentic identity, if it is to be most coherently, accurately, and ethically grounded, must be rooted in Scripture. I explained that a sweeping diagnostic analysis of autobiographical literature suggests that most humans are shaped by dysphoric influences, trauma, culture, social projection, far more than they realise, or dare to examine. But she dismissed this as religious bias, perhaps unaware that even her rejection was shaped by ideological formation.
She took a position, yet claimed there were none.
In a culture where subjective experience has become the final court of appeal, what MacIntyre described as “emotivism,” the belief that moral judgments are nothing more than expressions of preference, has rendered serious discourse almost impossible.¹ Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman observed that in our “liquid modernity,” commitments are avoided in favour of endlessly shifting identities.² The denial of absolutes is not moral liberation. It is epistemic sabotage.
Light, Witness, and the Divine Gaze
John 8:13–16 is one of the most striking passages in all of Scripture regarding Jesus’ authority and self-awareness. The Pharisees accuse Him, “You bear witness of Yourself; Your witness is not true.” Jesus responds not with argumentation, but with divine self-possession: “Even if I bear witness of Myself, My witness is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going.” His confidence is not arrogance, but ontology. The Light does not need validation from the blind to prove it shines.
The cultural weight of Jesus’ statement is staggering. In a first-century world bound by communal honour, rabbinic tradition, and patriarchal power structures, declaring divine self-origin without external testimony was unthinkable. Jesus speaks from a position not granted by systems, but rooted in eternal Being. His words are not mere theological poetry. They are ontological precision. “I know where I came from and where I am going” is not just a statement of confidence, it is a declaration of divine authorship.
Leon Morris reminds us that light “establishes its claim… not by arguments, but by shining.”³ Jesus was not seeking validation from the systems of men; He was revealing what men could not see without divine help. He stood before those who judged by appearances (κατὰ σάρκα), offering them not just doctrine but epistemological healing: the possibility of seeing truly, by standing in the Light.
This moment, though historical, reverberates across centuries and cultures. When Jesus asserts His right to bear witness to Himself, He does what no prophet, priest, or philosopher dared, He asserts absolute, uncreated self-knowledge. Augustine noted that we can know the soul only in part; only God knows it in full.⁴ Christ, as the Logos, knows fully because He is from beyond the veil of temporal ignorance.
In the relativistic chaos of postmodern discourse, this claim shatters the illusion that truth must be crowdsourced. The idea that no one can speak with final authority has become the cardinal dogma of our time. But Christ subverts it, not with tyranny, but with self-evident illumination. His “I know” is not a guess, nor a hypothesis, it is light itself breaking into blindness.
Cultural Context – Ancient Worlds and Dysphoric Realities
To fully grasp the power of Jesus’ statement in John 8, we must first step into the ancient world He confronted, a world riddled with anthropomorphic gods, occult systems of initiation, inherited trauma, and sociopolitical manipulation. In Greco-Roman culture, gods mirrored human vice and frailty. Zeus, Mars, Aphrodite, each deified impulse cultivated identity confusion rather than clarity. How can one build a coherent sense of self in a cosmos where gods seduce, lie, and betray?
Jesus’ assertion, “I know where I came from and where I am going,” breaks into this disorder like lightning. His declaration is not born from mythic lineage or esoteric knowledge, but from divine unity with the Father. This was radically different from the mystery religions of the day, which promised enlightenment through hidden rites, ritual initiations, and secret “gnosis.”⁵ In these systems, truth was a commodity of the elite, often gender-exclusive and caste-bound. Jesus, however, made the Light accessible to all, woman at the well, leper in the street, tax collector in the tree.
Gnostic tendencies would later hijack even Christian thought, divorcing body from spirit, and knowledge from incarnation. Jesus’ incarnational knowing, rooted in being, not performance, directly opposed this. His words demolish the illusion of selfhood built on either inner enlightenment or social positioning. He offers a knowing that is relational, not conceptual; rooted in eternal love, not tribal hierarchy.
The African continent also knew systems that blurred clarity. In African traditional religion, identity was often inherited through lineage and cosmological order, but frequently manipulated by those in power. Initiation systems could both affirm and control, granting status while reinforcing dominance. As Credo Mutwa noted, “You cannot cheat the ancestors without losing the soul of the people.”⁶ Into this world, Jesus offers something astonishing: not ancestry, but adoption. Not lineage, but lordship.
His divine self-awareness is not elitist; it is liberating. It lifts identity from confusion into clarity, not by erasing history or culture, but by fulfilling them. By stating where He came from and where He was going, Jesus recovers the possibility of coherent identity in a world fragmented by myth, superstition, empire, and trauma.
οἶδα vs. γινώσκω
In John 8:14, Jesus says, “Even if I bear witness of Myself, My witness is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going.” The verb translated “I know” is οἶδα (oida), a word deeply rich in semantic value. Unlike γινώσκω (ginōskō), which refers to knowledge gained through process, experience, or discovery, oida refers to intuitive, full, or complete knowledge, often innate or self-evident.
This is not epistemology by exploration, but by essence. Jesus is not discovering Himself as He journeys. He knows who He is from eternity. As one scholar notes, “οἶδα reflects an immediate and comprehensive grasp, unlike ginōskō, which points to progressive knowing.”⁷ The distinction is crucial. Postmodern identity frameworks prize ginōskō-style formation, knowledge shaped through context, experience, and self-experimentation. But Jesus offers something more stable: the identity that comes from the oida of divine self-awareness.
The use of oida in contrast to ginōskō also affirms Christ’s ontological unity with the Father. John’s Gospel often associates oida with divine knowledge, complete, unerring, and relational. In John 10:15, Jesus says, “I know (ginōskō) My own and My own know Me,” suggesting mutual relational discovery. But in John 8, His self-knowledge as the eternal Son is not mutual, it is authoritative, exclusive, and divine.
This destroys the cultural narrative that no one can be trusted to define themselves. Jesus is not trapped in self-deception. He is not an evolving product of sociological factors or neurodevelopmental stages. His oida stands as a rebuke to epistemic nihilism. He alone possesses unbroken self-awareness, unchained from trauma, untainted by sin, untouched by social performance.
Theologically, oida aligns with the Hebrew concept of yada, often used of God’s covenantal knowing. It is knowledge wrapped in relationship and purpose, not merely cognition. Jesus doesn’t just know facts about His identity, He knows His origin, destiny, and mission. In Him, the fractured self finds restoration not through discovery, but through revelation.
Lessons from Ancient to Modern Identity
Jesus’ use of oida in John 8:14 not only stands out as a theological claim but also as a psychological and anthropological mirror, revealing the instability of every other identity formation project. In antiquity, Greco-Roman culture offered a plethora of identity scripts shaped by mythology, fate (moira), and civic hierarchy. Selfhood was not rooted in internal coherence, but in external role performance. You were what your polis, family line, or gods said you were. The person was defined through status, not substance.⁹
Enter Jesus, not as one among many gods, but as the Word made flesh who knows where He came from and where He is going. His oida slices through the fog of human confusion with incandescent clarity. He speaks in a world full of mystical epistemologies, including Gnostic sects that claimed secret enlightenment through progressive initiation. Against these, Christ’s oida is not esoteric, it is declarative. His knowledge is not accessible to a few, but offered as light to all who would follow (John 8:12).
Today, the modern West mirrors ancient Gnosticism in surprising ways. Identity is viewed as hidden truth to be discovered deep within the self, often through pain or marginalisation. The body is no longer a given, but a problem to be solved. In postmodern anthropology, the stable self is viewed with suspicion, and self-definition is the highest moral good. But Jesus’ oida shows a radically different pathway: the self is not discovered, it is revealed by God.¹⁰
This has profound implications for identity dysphoria and cultural confusion. If Jesus truly knows Himself, and if His Spirit is given to those who believe, then identity is no longer a solitary excavation, it becomes a shared inheritance. To know who we are, we must be known by Him. In this light, the ancient world’s longing for certainty, the modern world’s hunger for authenticity, and the postmodern world’s confusion about coherence all find their answer in the self-aware One.
Surrender and the Identity of the Redeemed
What if the reason so many cannot find themselves is because they are trying to name themselves from within themselves? Jesus’ declaration, “I know where I came from and where I am going,” offers not merely a divine epistemology but a profound invitation: Let Me tell you who you are. To modern ears, such a claim sounds oppressive. But to the broken, weary, and fragmented, it sounds like home.
The journey of surrender is not a passive resignation but a volitional act of trust. To surrender identity is not to erase selfhood, but to receive it. “Whoever loses their life for My sake,” Jesus said, “will find it” (Matt. 16:25). That paradox sits at the heart of redeemed identity: what feels like death is actually the birth of coherence.¹¹
Across the Gospels, Jesus demonstrates that naming is divine prerogative. He renames Simon as Peter (Matt. 16:18), calls Levi from tax booth to apostleship (Luke 5:27), and restores Mary from weeping to witness with one spoken word: “Mary” (John 20:16). Each identity is conferred, not constructed. This is not the tyranny of religion, it is the intimacy of divine knowing.
The Stoics spoke of eudaimonia, a flourishing life aligned with rational order. Ubuntu speaks of personhood through community: I am because we are. But Christ unites both, He offers inner peace and relational belonging, because He does not just know the way. He is the Way (John 14:6).¹²
Practical Application
In a world where the curated self is applauded and the examined self is avoided, how can we reclaim the slow work of identity rooted in divine witness? The answer is neither digital detox nor psychological introspection alone, but a return to the Gaze, the steady, knowing, unchanging presence of Christ who sees truly.
Begin each day not with social media but Scripture. Replace the question “How do I feel about myself?” with “What does God say about me?”¹³
Commit key identity verses to memory. Pray Psalm 139 aloud. Allow your conscience to be shaped, not by public opinion or trauma-scars, but by the loving scrutiny of the Holy Spirit. “Search me, O God, and know my heart…” (Ps. 139:23).
Second, practice the discipline of confessed identity, speak truth over yourself before you feel it. The world says, “You are what you desire.” Christ says, “You are who I declare you to be.” Identity is not found in indoctrinated information but in God’s authorship.¹⁴ Say aloud: I am known. I am seen. I am named. I am being restored.
Finally, surround yourself with others who pursue God’s naming. Community that walks in the light (1 John 1:7) not only heals shame but mirrors the Gaze of Christ back to us. True belonging is not affirmation of what we claim, but surrender to what God reveals.
Prayer
Lord Jesus,
You who knew where You came from and where You were going, anchor me in Your gaze. Not in fleeting feelings, not in public applause, not in mirrored wounds. I surrender my curated self. Name me again in the voice that spoke galaxies. Heal the parts I hide, dismantle the masks I wear, and remind me daily that I am not my past, nor my performance.
I am Yours.
In Your Holy Name Messiah King Jesus,
Amen.
Benediction
Beloved,
You are not your wounds.
You are not your fears.
You are not your history.
You are not even your dreams.
You are who Christ calls you to be.
So rise, examined and known,
Not to impress a crowd,
But to walk in the Light of the only One
Who never guesses who you are.
Footnotes
1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 12.
2. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 3.
3. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 385.
4. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 94.
5. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), 43.
6. Credo Mutwa, Indaba, My Children (Cape Town: Struik, 1998), 355.
7. William Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 184.
8. D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Leicester: IVP, 1991), 337.
9. John M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy and the Imperial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 91.
10. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 25.
11. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 89.
12. N. T. Wright, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship (London: SPCK, 1994), 22.
13. John Mark Comer, Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2021), 87.
14. Timothy Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness (Epsom: 10Publishing, 2012), 21.
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