John 8:31-38--The Truth Will Set You Free

John 8:31-38
English Standard Version

The Truth Will Set You Free​
31 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”

34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. 38 I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.”

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Here's another set of verses that are often quoted out of context, and therefore misapplied and misappropriated.  Jesus is still in the context of talking to the crowds while debating with the Pharisees about His identity and the eternal life that can only be received by believing that He is who He says He is--the Son of God.  He has already used the comparison of light and darkness when He said above that He is the Light of the World and that those who do not believe in Him stumble in darkness, but those who believe in Him will never walk in darkness and see clearly.  Now He's going to shift metaphors and will say that He is the one who sets us free from our slavery to sin and death.  (See Psalm 146:7, Zechariah 9:11, and Isaiah 61:1 for a few places where God says that He sets the captives or the prisoners free).

This is not talking about head knowledge that you gain from books, this is about the knowledge of who the Son of God is, and putting your whole faith and trust in Him and the work that He has completed on your behalf.  Don't let academics misquote this to you and redefine the words "truth" and "free" in this passage without the context of what the lies are the the Pharisees and people were deluded by and the bondage that they were in and the real consequences that they were facing because of this.

The Pharisees take offense to Jesus implying that they are enslaved, and they of course immediately go to physical slavery because their minds are of this world.  Their statement is funny here that they say that they have never been slaves to anyone.  Let's give them that they might be talking about their own generation and that they are not talking about the generations beforehand who were enslaved by Egypt and Babylon and the other nations and that event though they were being occupied by Rome at the time and were forced to pay tribute and taxes and had garrisons of soldiers in their mist and tetrarchs and puppet kings ruling over them in the name of Rome, they didn't fell enslaved because they had never left their land--yet we know that the people are longing for Messiah to come to set them free from the occupation and to overthrow these enemies.  The Pharisee's reason for why they believe they will never be slaves to anyone is funny because they think that being children of Abraham will somehow protect them, though it didn't protect those generations before them who were slaves in Egypt, were occupied by several groups of people in the book of Judges, and the divided kingdoms ended up being enslaved to two different kingdoms--the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, and the southern kingdom of Judah to the Babylonians and the Medo-Persian empires.  We also know that during the 400 years of silence that the Greek and other empires (such as the kingdom of Antiochus IV Epiphanes who was a foreshadowing of the anti-Christ).  The Pharisees had been born out of this time when the people knew they were being judged for their disobedience to the Law, and the Pharisees became a legalistic sect of the Jews that said, "Never again."  They took their duty seriously to teach the people the Law, but also went too far in making their own rules and regulations and holding their traditions to be equal with the Law of God and making it out as if the Law was somehow able to save you.

The Pharisees don't understand that they need to become free because they don't understand that they are enslaved to anything.  It's like the first step in a 12-step program--the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.  If they continued to refused to believe they were enslaved, then they are never going to be seeking the freedom that God the Son is offering to them.

Jesus spells it out for them that He's not talking about slavery to a nation-state, but to to sin.  "Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin."  Jesus then contrasts the slave to the Son and how they have different status and privilege.  The slave has no status and no privilege and serves only at the will of the master and as long as the master is owner of the home and the estate.  If the master dies there is no guarantee that the one who inherits the estate will keep the slaves.  However, the Son is the one that inherits the estate and His position as Son is never in doubt and is unchanging because of His relationship to His Father.

Then Jesus said that it is the privilege of the Son to set free those whom He desires and that everyone whom He sets free is truly free.  Again, Jesus is talking about setting people free from the Curse and the slavery that is part of the Curse of sin that entered the world through Adam in Genesis 3.

Jesus then returns to their silly statement of being children of Abraham, as if Jesus didn't know that every Jewish man and woman was a child of Abraham (as was every child of many other nations that Abraham fathered, but they didn't believe that blessing applied to anyone other than them).  Jesus returns to the fact of this is not an issue of ethnicity or heritage or pedigree, but one of faith and trust in the person and work of the Son of God, and these Pharisees have not only rejected Jesus' words and work, but they have set out to murder Him.  The people don't know of this plot yet and still think this is crazy-talk from Jesus, but the Pharisees know that Jesus knows what's in their hearts and minds.  They have been plotting this from nearly the beginning of Jesus' ministry from the time that He healed the man at the Pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath.

Jesus again comes back to the fact that He knows the Father and about heaven because He came from the Father and from heaven, and that's where He's returning to.  No one has seen God the Father other than God the Son.  He knows what He has heard from His Father, but then Jesus implies that they don't have the same father as He does not say "You do not know what you have heard from our Father" (which is how the Jews would talk about God the Father), but He said, "You do not know what you have heard from your father," implying that Jesus and the Pharisees had different fathers.  They did not miss this and this is going to be the next section of The Great Paternity Debate where the gloves are going to come off (figurative) and what has been said in veiled innuendo will be said said directly in a way that won't be mistaken.  You can sense the tension and that anger and emotion are probably getting the best of the Pharisees and Jesus is embarrassing them in front of the people and the "shock value" of the things that Jesus is about to say is extremely high, yet it still does not break through their hard hearts.  We'll talk about that next time, Lord willing.