John 8:31-38

Hey everybody. Welcome back.

Thanks for joining us as we start the week together and the Gospel of John.

Continuing through chapter eight.

Long chapter, lots of stuff in this chapter today, Jesus

is sort of continuing a philosophical theological

discussion argument with, some religious leaders.

And, today we jump in verse 31.

Let me read this little section here, and we'll come back and and talk through it.

Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him,

if you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples,

and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

They answered him, we're descendants of Abraham

have never been slaves to anyone.

What do you mean by saying you will be made free?

Jesus answered, very truly, I tell you,

everyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin.

The slave does not have a permanent place in the household.

The son has a place there forever.

So if the son makes you free, you will be free indeed.

I know you are descendants of Abraham, yet you look for an opportunity to kill me,

because there is no place in you for my word.

I declare what I have seen in the father's presence.

As for you, you should do what you have heard from the father.

So, but a little bit of a,

I don't know if I want to call this confusing, Michael, but,

there's a little bit of a two track thing, I think, happening here.

So it's very interesting that we begin with this sentence

Jesus said to the Jews who believed in him.

But by the end of the passage, it seems like there's

argument happening or disagreement happening.

And I think again in the gospel of John, John's going to use those occasions

where Jesus speaks to kind of deal with some of the controversy

and some of the conflict that surrounds what Jesus said.

I don't know if we are to infer that somehow

these believers stopped believing and argued with Jesus instead.

I don't think that's at all the way to read it.

I think it's just John is never very far away

from the pushback that Jesus gets as he preaches.

And so

having said

that, I think this is one of those.

There are a couple of verses in here that I think are those kind of verses

that people know

they may not know, that they know them or they may not know where they're from.

But this side, this line, you will know the truth,

and the truth will set you free. And,

whoever the son makes free is free indeed.

I think these are well known passages.

I think they're they're very, meaningful, packed passages.

And I think that.

I don't, you know,

I, I think maybe we're better served and tell me feed.

Truth is, I think maybe we're better served

if we read this passage not as a conflict story,

but perhaps a little more in line with a teaching story.

Yeah, I actually do agree with that.

I don't think that this is, this hard the conflict story,

but I, I want to tease out some nuance in that because

one of the things that John takes very seriously

as a gospel writer is one of the major conflicts

in not just Jesus's encounter with the Jews, but later the church's

conflicts, was the reality that Christians

for decades worshiped in synagogues.

There was this hope that the church,

would would ultimately grow as more

and more Jewish people came into faith in Jesus Christ, that

that it would become sort of an inside out kind of transformation and renewal.

Well, as that doesn't happen, there's substantial controversy

in the early church about what you do about when

you're being kicked out of the synagogue and where you worship and how you worship.

And the church begins certainly after 70 A.D.,

when Jerusalem is destroyed, there's a whole history there.

There does become this, this pivotal moment, the life of the church.

And the reason that this is relevant for this text

is because here, as Jesus is sharing this teaching with the Jews

who are believing, no, this the thing that he turns to do

is immediately address the response in verse 33.

And what's the response?

We could not have been rightly described as slaves because we are free people.

There's a pride.

We are sons of Abraham.

We stand in the lineage of Abraham.

Well, Jesus, as he's been doing throughout the entire gospel,

is not talking about physical sonship and actual descendants.

He's not talking about genealogies, but he's talking about

is the spiritual generation that comes from being from the father

being connected to the life of the father, and that not being father Abraham.

And I think Clint,

this is not a

conflict story in the sense that these are unbelieving people

who Jesus is counteracting and showing in, in how far off from the truth is.

I think what he's exposing is a kind of faith based bias.

And the bias is if you're a Jew,

Abraham is the source, the center, and the first order.

Everything flows from am I in Abraham's covenant or not?

But what is Jesus make clear here that it's the son who makes you free,

not the father of the fathers of the fathers.

Abraham. It's it's the son who does it.

And this is a spiritual inversion of what any believing Jew would have believed.

They would have, just ever since they were on their mother's knee,

they had been taught, you know, we are here,

we circumcise, we we follow these rules.

We have this covenant because we stand in the lineage of Abraham, Moses, Isaac.

And I think what Jesus is doing here is he's teasing out

that spiritual transformation that the kingdom shift

that happens from that conception of what it means to be in the family

to a new one which finds its way through the truth.

Who is a person, and that is Jesus Christ.

We've said before that John likes to take moments of misunderstanding,

or maybe a literal understanding, and use them as a springboard for Jesus to teach.

And we see that again here.

They hear the words slave and they take them literally.

In other words, we haven't been slaves.

We we are descendants of Abraham and never been slaves to anyone.

Which is it is in itself an odd thing to say, given that at the time, right.

The Israelite people live under Roman occupation and Roman authority,

they're not slaves.

But I'm not sure that they would have called themselves free either.

However, Jesus takes as he often does,

that moment of misunderstanding and uses it to teach.

So, in other words, what does Jesus mean?

If you commit a sin, you are a slave to sin.

And this is the thing that Jesus does consistently in the Gospels.

Jesus changes the paradigm.

Jesus changes the mechanism of the conversation.

We're not talking about physical slavery.

We're talking about spiritual slavery and who holds us as spiritual slaves.

Sin does.

Sin has dominion over us, has sway over us, has ownership over us.

If you want to use those kind of terms

and the slave Jesus says doesn't have a place in the household,

it doesn't belong there, isn't naturally engrafted into the family.

And so what is what is the answer?

What is that?

What is the solution to this dilemma?

To be, in my word,

because there's no place in you for my word.

Our spiritual slavery is directly related

to not making a place for the words of Jesus,

as we deny Jesus, as we accuse Jesus,

as we argue with Jesus, the things that we see in this gospel,

those who do those things remain in their bondage to sin,

because they deny the very one who has come to set them free.

And so, while I also don't think I would call this a theological passage,

there is, I think, a lot of signs

that point us down theological roads here.

Well, and I think it's made explicit here, your point in verse 37,

Jesus, in fact, doesn't counteract, I know that your descendants of Abraham,

you can almost hear a parent's tone in that.

Yeah, I know, right.

I understand that, but there's no

they're looking for an opportunity to kill Jesus.

And he says, because there's no place in you for my word.

And then Jesus goes on to give the word, I declare what I've seen

in the father's presence.

And as for you, you should do what you've heard from the father,

that that's a transformational moment where Jesus says, hey, listen,

the reason why you don't get this is because you haven't

made space for the Word of God to renew and transform you from the inside.

In other words, there's parts of you that get it.

You know, there's this is a believing crowd, John says, but yet

you don't have a fully transformed, formed imagination.

So that when I talk about freedom, what you're talking about

is some kind of historical social freedom.

When Jesus says, no, what we have to talk about here is spiritual freedom.

It is a kind of connection

to the source of all freedom, the one who is capital F free.

God, the one who exercises perfect freedom.

That's the one that Jesus comes from.

And it's his Word that he proclaims.

And this is another classic Johannine example.

This is where John puts in front of us a teaching of Jesus,

which is simultaneously reflected back to us as a question.

So here he's saying to the Jews, right,

are you free?

Do you understand?

Have you heard my word as I proclaim it from the father?

Well, now that same question comes to us.

Are we free? Have we heard?

Have we been released of the bondage that we have, the bondage

that many of us, by the way, don't consider bondage.

That's the whole point that we get here, back when Jesus makes this case,

anyone who commits a sin is a slave to

the person who has done the thing that is most tempting,

the easiest past, that is, the person who stands in need of the son.

And so we have hearkening back to John 316 and John's

317 right here, the idea that Jesus Christ does for us

what we could do for ourselves, that it's God's love and grace that is extended

before our sinfulness that we now rest upon and our lives hinge upon.

I there's there's a lot of threads that that come through a text like this.

And so even though it may not be a classic kind of argument text,

I think Jesus is revealing to these believing Jews

how much more belief there is still for them to go, that

there's a lot more renewal, transformation of imagination

that lies ahead of them than even lies behind them.

Yeah, I think this text is a way that John shows that in the story of Jesus.

We'll see this continue tomorrow and perhaps the day after as we continue

through this text.

And it does get very conflictual at this point, though, I think

what one of the things Jesus is trying to communicate

is an answer to people

who equate righteousness with their status in.

In other words, we are Abraham's people.

We keep the law, we have the temple, we do these things.

Therefore we are righteous. And

and in many ways throughout this gospel, Jesus is going to address that split.

But specifically here, I think there's a sense in which we hear

Jesus begin to say to these people,

you know, it's not about who

you are, it's about who I am.

And when you don't understand who I am,

you will miss the truth regardless of who you are.

When you stand apart from me,

you stand under judgment and not under grace.

You stand under slavery to sin

and not under the freedom of redemption.

And nothing about your pedigree and your lineage

and your religion changes that inherently, because the only thing that changes

that status is to understand who I am

and to put your faith and trust in me

as deliverer and John's

not explicitly spelling all of that out here yet, in Jesus words,

but it's coming, and I think it moves us a step in that direction.

Clint, I think a careful reader here could push back on us and say, you know,

this does seem like a bit of a conflictual text, gentlemen,

and I think you would turn if you want to make that case to verse 37.

Yet you look obsessively Jesus talking

to the, the, the those Jews who believed.

You look for an opportunity to kill me, because there's no place in

you for my word.

By the way, that theme is going to come up again later.

So, you know, join us for the study later in this week, or move to the next video

after this one.

And the point here being that it's only going to ramp up as

Jesus is predicting, and the fact that his life is being sought

and ultimately will be taken.

But this is in the context of this conversation, and that's strong

language, right?

And I think the way that John includes it here actually does help,

not just exemplify.

I think it amplifies the extent

to which these folks are indeed slaves to sin.

In other words, though, they may be free

from the eyes of a lineage to Abraham,

they're not free and their ability

to restrain themselves from reacting to the revelation of God.

Jesus is very caustic in the way that he's received by the Jews.

That language that we have throughout this book.

And I think this is another example here, where even in a story

that doesn't start off with an image of instance or flashpoint,

the story does very quickly rise

all the way to use this language of looking for an opportunity to kill.

And I think Jesus is upfront about how that response

happens within us and what it reveals and teaches.

When when we respond violently

against the revelation, it has something to tell us about

what word we have allowed to live within us. It.

And it is always the world's word.

It's always a word other than God's Word.

And so this then becomes both, I think, a dashboard kind of measure in our lives.

It also becomes an opportunity as believers

for us to recognize those moments.

I think, where when our action diverts from our faith to to start looking back

and to start wondering, is Christ at the center of this area?

Or have I allowed another thing to occupy that place?

And that's not the point of this text, Clint.

That's a devotional way to see the text.

But I do think there are connections to our faith as we seek to live it out.

Always. Yeah, always in the gospel.

And and again, this is a step of a bigger conversation.

We begin with a little bit

of adversarial, and we're going to get a lot of it,

as we progress through the next couple of parts of this passage,

it is going to be less and less friendly

and downright unfriendly by the end.

So stay with us.

Continue along this study the gospel as a way of moving and flowing,

and don't miss the way that that continues to grow.

Certainly, I hope that you found this particular

part of the conversation helpful.

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Thanks, everybody.