<p>8:43 <i>Why do you not understand my speech? Because you cannot hear my word</i>- They could not, it was not in their power Gk. to hear His <i>logos,</i> and so how He spoke, the language He used, was as it were foreign to them. They were not empowered to hear His<i> logos</i>, which according to the prologue was Him, His life and spirit, because they did not allow the movement of the Spirit in their hearts. And this is why people today cannot understand the Lord's teaching; it is because they refuse to accept His<i> logos</i>, His life and person coming into their lives as the light of their thinking and practice. And so His words / speech remain a jumble to them. Interpretation fails them, because they were refusing to hear Him as a person, His<i> logos</i>. <i>&nbsp;</i></p><p>Intellectual failure to understand the teaching of Jesus is rooted in a resistance to having our lives disturbed in a moral sense. How many have started studying true doctrine, only to draw back, perhaps unconsciously even, because they sense that this stuff is life-changing, and altogether too demanding for them to handle in practice? This inextricable link between doctrine and practice is brought out by the Lord in Jn. 7:17: &ldquo;If any man willeth to <i>do</i> his will, he shall know of the doctrine&hellip;&rdquo;. My expanded paraphrase of this would be: &lsquo;If you want to do right before God in practice, then you will discern between right and wrong doctrine, because true doctrine leads to true practice. If you really want to be <i>doing</i> the right thing, then God will lead you to true doctrine&rsquo;. And not long afterwards, the Lord hammers home His point: &ldquo;Why do you not understand my speech teaching? Even because you cannot hear i.e. accept my word&rdquo; (Jn. 8:43).</p><p>That refusing to believe or understand truth has a moral basis is brought out by the Lord's comment in Jn. 8:46: &quot;If I say the truth, why do you not believe me?&quot;. He surely implies that it's not hard in itself to believe and accept His words as true- but He explains that the Jews didn't believe because they preferred to believe the words of the &quot;devil&quot;. The &quot;devil&quot; speaks his own language (Jn. 8:44 NIV), the Lord says, and the Jews preferred to hear <i>that</i> language because it was actually their own language. They did not &quot;understand my word&quot; because they preferred to do 'their own lusts' (Jn. 8:43). Those 'lusts' are paralleled with the language of the devil- which is exactly what 'the devil' refers to in so many Biblical contexts. The point of all this is that misunderstanding God's word is because we prefer to hear the language of our own self talk, our own lusts, the Biblical 'devil'. &quot;The lusts of the devil it is your will to do&quot;, the Lord commented (Jn. 8:44 RV). This was their &quot;language&quot;, and therefore any other language which was not of their own self talk was 'foreign' to them. And in this we have the essential basis for why people misunderstand the Lord's words today.</p><p>The Lord's cryptic manner of speaking at times yielded &quot;hard sayings&quot;; and yet He utters most of them in conversation with His critics. Thus having said that &quot;If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death&quot;, and the Jews predictably responded with misunderstanding and confusion, He goes straight on to utter an even harder saying: &quot;Your father Abraham... saw my day, and was glad&quot;. And they again come back at Him with the anger born of misunderstanding. And so He rounds off the episode with a yet harder saying: &quot;Before Abraham was, I am&quot; (Jn. 8:51-58). In all this He was using &quot;hard sayings&quot;- which have come down to us as 'wrested scriptures, 'difficult passages'- in order to drive the unbelievers further down the downward spiral. And He does the same today, with the same passages. Because the Jews didn't &quot;hear my word / logos&quot;, therefore they couldn't understand His speech, i.e. the words as individual words which He spoke (Jn. 8:43). They stumbled over each word, as a child struggling to read a text way too advanced for her. Because they didn't hear His logos, the essence of Him. This is why the simplest minds which firmly understand the logos, the essential idea, the bigger picture, don't find the &quot;hard sayings&quot; to be hard for them, they aren't stumbled by them. But the word-by-word theologian does stumble at them, if he doesn't believe the simple logos of Jesus.</p>