‘He said therefore again to them, “I am going away, and you will search for me and die in your sin, for where I am going you cannot come”.'

‘He said therefore again --'. We do not know how long after the previous verses He spoke these words. There is a strange pathos to them. Jesus was going away, as He knew, to Heaven via the cross. And they would go on looking for Him in vain. They would go on searching for eternal life and for a Messiah from God (‘for Me'), and they would fail in their efforts and would die in their sin, because unknowingly they had rejected the One Whom they were pretending to seek, the true Messiah Who was the only source of eternal life. And because they would not come to Him their search would be blind and futile, and they could never go where He was going.

The word for ‘sin' here is in the singular. It sums up their whole sinful attitude of heart. They were rooted in sin.

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