31 So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you abide in My word, then you are truly My disciples; 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33 They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s seed and have never yet 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 commits sin is the slave of sin. 35 And the slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. 36 So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are Abraham’s seed; yet you are seeking to kill Me, because My word has no place in you. 38 I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father.”
39 They answered and said to Him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus *said to them, “If you are Abraham’s children, you would do the deeds of Abraham. 40 But now you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God. This Abraham did not do. 41 You are doing the deeds of your father.” They said to Him, “We were not born of sexual immorality; we have one Father: God.” 42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come of Myself, but He sent Me. 43 Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word. 44 You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me. 46 Which one of you convicts Me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe Me? 47 He who is of God hears the words of God; for this reason you do not hear them, because you are not of God.” John 8: 31-47
John 8: 31-47
V. 31 If you abide in My word, then you are truly My disciples - This, Jesus is saying to those, who in the last segment, "came to believe in Him". I got kind of excited when I saw that they believed in Him, but remembering also that I read ahead for context, that excitement was short lived. I grew up in the time of mega churches, the continuation of the Jesus movement, the word Christian used as an adjective before all manner of things. We had big Christian book stores with lots of books, but mostly by people who had terrible theology, who believed more in the wisdom and psychology of this world, who played to people's earthly, temporal wants. We had so called Christian music by people who turned out to be not so Christian, with words that had little to do with sound doctrine. We had a lot of Christian theatre, Christian entertainment, youth groups, parties, even the pizza and tacos were Christian, but by whose definition? Many of us were apostate in our understanding of Christ and the gospel, many of us turned to the allure of the world, and walked away, not sure what we were walking away from. I didn't have a love for God's word or His people, only for "Cool Christians" who were actually just enablers. Jesus is in no way eliminating Justification by Grace alone, through Faith alone, In Christ Alone, according to Scripture alone, but what He is saying is the same as saying, "a tree is known by it's fruit." Those that are truly His will continue with Him, hating what He hates and loving what He loves.
…22But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy, unblemished, and blameless in His presence— 23if indeed you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope of the gospel you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant. Colossians 1: 22-23
…15Be diligent in these matters and absorbed in them, so that your progress will be evident to all. 16Pay close attention to your life and to your teaching. Persevere in these things, for by so doing you will save both yourself and those who hear you. 1 Timothy 4: 15-16
V. 32 And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free - Here is a beautiful selection from J Mac on this:
And oh, by the way, most of the philosophers and psychologists and cynics would agree that there is no real, absolute truth. Truth is whatever you want it to be; there’s no objective, absolute truth. Truth is whatever you want to be truth for your well-being. Be true to your own truth, and you’ll be free from the kinds of things that torture your own psyche.
The problem with objective truth and the problem with absolute truth is it’s very uncomfortable, because absolute truth and objective truth raises your moral responsibility. And you really don’t want that, not in a hedonistic culture. Increasing your moral obligation, increasing your moral responsibility doesn’t feel like freedom.
“The truth shall make you free” has also found its way into academia. It is the statement of California Institute of Technology—Caltech. They adopted “The truth shall make you free” back in 1925. And since 1925, that really hasn’t worked out too well in the scientific world, because if you read recent articles written by Caltech scientists, they will tell you that no longer is science driven by a search for the truth, it is basically driven by a grant from the political party in power. And consequently, science has given way to politics. So whatever the search for truth once was, back in 1925, it is now completely compromised by politics.
And then there is the government itself. If you were to see the original building of the CIA, you would see carved on the front of that building, “The truth shall make you free.” And we all are pretty convinced that the CIA would not be a good place to go to find the truth. They have been so utterly compromised by the politics and the ideologies of our culture. They would be assumed to be, at one point in our history, the protectors of all that is true and right and good. But they have been corrupted by the rest of the corruption that they can’t escape.
There’s, then, political and social freedom. “The truth shall make you free.” How does that work out in our society? I’m not a social critic, as you know, but I think there might be a perspective that will help you, as we talk a little bit about these sort of temporal, earthly perspectives on freedom.
Back in 1932 a devout atheist by the name of Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World. Brave New World was a dystopian novel that looked at the future and assumed that it wouldn’t be very long before the West was completely captive to totalitarianism—that is rule by a dominant force, where you have only two classes: the ruling class and all the people who are subjected to them. In Brave New World, he portrayed what life would be like.
It was about seventeen years later that George Orwell, another devout atheist, wrote 1984, another dystopian novel that looked at the future. And just examining those recently in my own thoughts, I drew out of those two pictures of totalitarianism in the future of the West, what are pretty amazing, prescient insights from a couple of atheists. Totalitarian rule, both of them say, is essentially the absolute political-social slavery of everyone. We are used to what is called chattel slavery. C-H-A-T-T-E-L. Chattel slavery is when one person owns another person; political slavery is when the state owns everybody—but the effect on the individual is identical. We have come to the place in American history where we hate chattel slavery. In fact we’ve created a massive movement, racial movement, now, based upon past chattel slavery. People rise to noble heights to condemn chattel slavery, while at the same time they are willingly becoming slaves of the state. And the end is exactly the same: Somebody owns you, and you give up your freedom.
Now what elements of society and politics produce this willing kind of state slavery? Drawing from both Orwell and Huxley, this is what they say totalitarianism would look like. Here are the necessary elements. One: a crisis. A crisis puts freedom in danger because a crisis elevates government control. And the more severe the crisis, and the more control the government gets, the more freedoms begin to disappear.
Secondly, the collective is more important than the individual. The greater good is the good of society, not your good. “We don’t care what you want or what you think, we’ve got to stop global warming. We don’t care what your freedoms are, the things that you desire and you want, you can’t say that; you can’t believe that; you can’t do that.” Because the collective is far more important than the individual. “The advance of the LGBTQ is far more important on the social side for the good of society than anything you think about that.” So the collective dominates the individual. Everybody is forced into the collective.
Thirdly, you need a mass psychosis. You need a mass psychosis, something that makes everybody afraid—like a plague, like a pandemic, like masks—that create a greater threat than the giving up of freedom. People rushed into giving up their freedoms when there was a threat that created a mass psychosis. Keep up the deception so they continue to believe the lies, and you escalate control.
Number four: Control information. Control what people hear, what they therefore believe. And the way to control information is the following: Create confusion, send out all kinds of diverse signals so that nothing is really clear. So you’re creating a kind of acceptable irrationality, a kind of madness. Censor what you don’t want; control people by technology and media.
Number five—and this is a dominant feature of both of these novels: hedonism. Turn loose all kinds of immorality everywhere. Create a situation of unhindered sexual lust. Let people be completely lost in pleasure, no boundaries on any kind of sexual behavior. Fill the culture with pornography, because as long as they are unhindered in their sexual lusts, as long as they are lost in hedonistic pleasure, they’re not thinking.
Number six: Feed them mindless, accessible, irrelevant, distracting, nonstop entertainment—so they live in a world of fantasy and emotional stimulation rather than thought. Number seven: Make drugs available to everyone because drugged people, or drunk people, are harmless. And number eight—this is critical: If you want to take over an entire population, isolate them from each other—because when you isolate them from each other, you control the narrative. You take them away from the examples of something different. That is what atheists came up with as the pathway to dystopian totalitarianism, in which people distracted, dumbed-down, drugged, give up their freedoms.
Now what is the biggest threat to this? The biggest threat to this is pretty simple: Some other authority than the government. And by the way, don’t look to politicians to fix this; they’re the problem. They’re the powerful; they’re not going to fix this. One non-politician tried to fix it, but he couldn’t get any help from all the politicians. You can’t turn to them to fix it, they’re the powerful; they’re the elite, power-hungry people who just want more power.
What is the threat to them? Another authority—in fact, another authority that is a greater authority, that is a transcendent authority, that is an eternal authority, and that has revealed Himself clearly on the pages of Holy Scripture. So who is their greatest enemy? God. What is the book that they most fear? The Bible.
I don’t know what freedom in this Western culture in the future looks like. But I see all of this shaping up—and this is from, as I said, back in 1930 to 1940s. But we certainly have managed to check off all the boxes—right?—to create totalitarianism. And here we are, so nobly upset about the freedom that was taken away from slaves in the past, while at the same time—dumbed down, stupidly, mindlessly, lustfully—we give up all our freedoms and become slaves of the state, and the end is exactly the same.
But when we talk about “The truth shall make you free,” psychology fails, psychology fails. You’re just playing mind games with yourself. Philosophy fails, because the truth is not in you. There’s no value in being cynical and believing that truth doesn’t exist because no objective, absolute truth exists. The educational system in the universities fail. Science fails because it gets corrupted. And the government, the government—when the government fails—and the government does fail—then the tale is told, because they’re in charge. So whatever it means, “The truth shall make you free” has nothing to do with any of these things I’ve been talking about, because they’re all corrupted. We’re talking about something different. J Mac Sermon "The Truth Shall Set You Free"
V. 33 We are Abraham's seed and have never been enslaved to anyone - Well that's pretty inaccurate, so delusional, and exactly what we would expect a lost person to say. Physically they had been slaves to Egypt where God had brought them out of bondage from. The northern kingdom became slaves to Assyria, Judah to Babylon, then Persia, Greece, and now Rome. Jesus is talking to them of spiritual matters, those things bearing eternal weight, that they are slaves to sin. Some may even get that He is saying that, but it's offensive to them. Pride always says you are in the right and plays down the truth. My pride told me that I could be an atheist when I was young, and to not worry, because if that turned out to be wrong then I had walked the aisle at church when I was young, had said a prayer and was baptized. I had a "backup plan", so to speak, but that was also lost and delusional.
Answered Him, "We (present tense - continually) are Abraham's descendants (sperma) - The assert their spiritual superiority as children of Abraham. They are likely thinking of OT blessings of being Abraham's descendants like Ps 105:6 "O seed of Abraham, His servant, O sons of Jacob, His chosen ones!" Or Isa 41:8 "But you, Israel, My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, Descendant of Abraham My friend" Their descent from Abraham was the source of their pride and their confidence regarding their salvation. John the Baptist had warned them not to place their confidence in their physical heritage (Lk 3:8). The implication is that they have no need of a Savior since they consider themselves children of Abraham. They had no sense of their bondage to sin, so had no need for a Savior! - Precept Austin
V. 34-38 Everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin - This is the reality, not your truth, not my truth, but the truth as God states it. It's simple, you belong to what you serve. They called God their Lord, Abraham their Father, but they served their flesh, the beckoning of the devil, "hast God said?" If Jesus is Lord the evidence is that you do what He says, and the reverse is also true. Plenty of people had Abraham's genetics but not his relationship with the Lord. You can actually see this grow in Him over time, that he came to believe the God he believed in. Others, like Ahab, were even kings to the Jews, descending from the same lines, but being slaves to sin, believing lies rather than taking God at His word. You would think Christ is giving them some new teaching, but it is an old one.
25(Surely there was never one like Ahab, who sold himself to do evil in the sight of the LORD, incited by his wife Jezebel. 26He committed the most detestable acts by going after idols, just like the Amorites whom the LORD had driven out before the Israelites.)… 1 Kings 21: 25-26
…21For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD, and the LORD examines all his paths. 22The iniquities of a wicked man entrap him; the cords of his sin entangle him. 23He dies for lack of discipline, led astray by his own great folly.… Proverbs 5: 21-23
…5For if we have been united with Him like this in His death, we will certainly also be united with Him in His resurrection. 6We know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin. 7For anyone who has died has been freed from sin.… Romans 6: 5-7
V. 39 If you were Abraham's children you would do the deeds of Abraham - Yikes, with God one can't just say, "I am a son, a father, a brother, a mother", no, you have to reflect that. I have a godly mother, but I was in no way a reflection of that for most of my life. She was repentant and hurt over sin, I justified mine. She read the word of God and prayed every day about what she read. I figured I knew enough from my years of Sunday School, and I was baptized. God looks at the heart, He looks for fruit, and He is not buying what these people are selling.
…28A man is not a Jew because he is one outwardly, nor is circumcision only outward and physical. 29No, a man is a Jew because he is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise does not come from men, but from God. Romans 2: 28-29
6It is not as though God’s word has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. 7Nor because they are Abraham’s descendants are they all his children. On the contrary, “Through Isaac your offspring will be reckoned.” 8So it is not the children of the flesh who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as offspring.… Romans 9: 6-8
V. 40 This Abraham did not do - The guy you say you are from, that you are like according to the flesh, well, he didn't go around killing people for telling the truth.
12 not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s were righteous.
13 Do not be surprised, brethren, if the world hates you.
14 We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death.
15 Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. 1 John 3: 12-15
V. 41-42 If God were your Father you would love Me - He also says, "I and the Father are One", He is the eternally begotten Son of God, and He has come from the Father. It is interesting in verse 41 that they mention that they weren't born of sexual immorality because that is exactly what their Scribes will say about Jesus in later writings, accusing His mother of sexual sin. They will do this, but since so many witnessed His miracles, they will also have to make up a story for that as well. The story is that He basically went to sorcery school in Egypt, that's how He learned the art of raising people from the dead, making thousands of pounds of food from a few fish and loaves, healing countless multitudes of everything from fever to being paralyzed. The blind see, the death hear, but these people do neither. Like He said before, they are going to die in their sins, but their answer back is that this is not possible because they are genetically related to Abraham.
David Thompson - “We were not born of fornication.” They are actually implying that Jesus was born because of an immoral relationship between Joseph and Mary. This verse changed the life of one of the great Bible teachers. He said he used to believe that it was possible for a person to be saved and not believe in the virgin birth. He said - I do not believe that anymore. If a person is really right with God, he will embrace all truth about Jesus Christ.
Steven Cole - There could be a couple of things behind that comment. It could be a subtle slur against Jesus’ birth, alluding to the fact that His mother conceived Him out of wedlock. Rumors about Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus had circulated for decades. So the Jews may be putting Jesus down by saying, “You’re illegitimate because Your mother was immoral, but we’re not!” Or, it could be an assertion that they were not like Gentile idolaters. Often idolatry in the Old Testament is described as spiritual adultery. So the Jews’ retort here could mean, “We were not born like idolatrous Gentiles; rather, as Jews, God is our Father.” (True and False Children of God)
Bob Utley - This may be connected with the accusation of v. 48 (“you are a Samaritan”). It seems that the Jews were asserting that Jesus was an illegitimate son, not a full blooded Jew. Later rabbinical sources would say Jesus was fathered by a Roman soldier. - Precept Austin
45The good man brings good things out of the good treasure of his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil treasure of his heart. For out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. 46 Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do what I say? 47I will show you what he is like who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them:… Luke 6: 45-47
V. 44 You are of your father the Devil - This would be infuriating to them. The reason they want to kill Him is because that is what the Devil has always wanted; he was a murderer and they emulate him. Here again we have the fruit defining what tree it is, not what it says it is, but what it actually is.
14So the LORD God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and every beast of the field! On your belly will you go, and dust you will eat, all the days of your life. 15And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” Genesis 3: 14-15
1And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and crying out in the pain and agony of giving birth. 3Then another sign appeared in heaven: a huge red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven royal crowns on his heads.…
…4His tail swept a third of the stars from the sky, tossing them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, ready to devour her child as soon as she gave birth. 5And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was caught up to God and to His throne. 6And the woman fled into the wilderness, where God had prepared a place for her to be nourished for 1,260 days.… Revelation 12: 1-6
V. 45 But because I speak the truth you do not believe Me - They really had no desire for the truth because it would contradict the very essence what they were and wanted to believe.
…3For your hands are stained with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, and your tongue mutters injustice. 4No one calls for justice; no one pleads his case honestly. They rely on empty pleas; they tell lies; they conceive mischief and give birth to iniquity. 5They hatch the eggs of vipers and weave a spider’s web. Whoever eats their eggs will die; crack one open, and a viper is hatched.… Isaiah 59: 3-5
…3For the time will come when men will not tolerate sound doctrine, but with itching ears they will gather around themselves teachers to suit their own desires. 4So they will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 5But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.… 2 Timothy 4: 3-5
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