<p>15:24 <em>If I had not done among them the works which no other man did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father</em>- This parallels the statement in :22 that it was because the Lord had &quot;spoken&quot; to them that they &quot;had sin&quot;. His spoken words were paralleled with the works He did amongst them. As John especially makes clear, all those miracles were &quot;signs&quot;, were a word to men. This confirms our earlier suggestion that the references to &quot;my words&quot; in John are talking about the essence of the Lord's self-declaration and declaration of the Father, rather than literally referring to His recorded lexical items, the sentences printed in red letters in some Bibles. The &quot;works&quot; were so that they could see the Son, and thereby the Father. The miracles were not therefore random acts of kindness to meet human compassion; for the Lord walked past many cases of human need without responding. They were specifically designed to enable men to see / understand / know / believe in the Son and Father. We also learn from this that the Jews through the miracles did in fact perceive who the Lord was, hence the hatred for Him which arose from a bad conscience. Throughout the Joseph record there is the unwritten sense that the brothers had a niggling conscience that Joseph might be alive. This typifies the underlying Jewish conscience towards the Lord Jesus. They knew Christ as Messiah, but blinded themselves to the fact (Jn. 6:36; 9:41; 15:24 cp. 14:7).</p>