21 So he continued, “I will be going away and all of you will be looking for me, but you’ll all just die in your sins and won’t be able to go where I’ll be going.”

22 This puzzled the Jewish teachers, “Surely he’s not going to commit suicide! What else could he mean about ‘you can’t go where I’m going to be going’?”

23 Yeshua explained, “All of you are from the world below, but I’m from the world above. You all are part of this world, but I’m not part of it. 24 That’s why I said that you’ll be dying in your sins, because if you refuse to believe that I am God, you will indeed all be dying in your sins.”

25 “So who are you?” they asked.

And he answered, “Still just the same as I’ve been telling you from the beginning. 26 I have a lot that I need to tell you all and to judge many of your actions, because the one who sent me is true, and it’s what I hear from him that I speak to all people.”

27 (They didn’t realise that he was talking to them about the father in heaven.) 28 So Yeshua told them, “When you all lift up[fn] humanity’s child on a pole, then you will know that I am God, and that I don’t do anything by myself, but I say all this just as the father told me to. 29 And the one who sent me is with me—he didn’t just leave me alone—because I am continually doing what pleases him.”

30 After he’d said all this, many people believed in him.