Bible Study series: John 8:31-36. Jesus and his gospel is the truth. Know them and you will be free.
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Scripture: John 8:31-36
31 So Jesus said to the Jews who believed in him, “If you remain in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will free you.” 33 They answered him: “We are Abraham’s descendants, and we have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say that ‘we will become free’?” 34 Jesus replied to them, “I tell you the firm truth: everyone committing sin is a slave of sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the household forever; the Son remains in the household forever. 36 If therefore the Son frees you, you will be really free. (John 8:31-36)
Comments:
31:
“The Jews” who believed in him are probably the religious establishment of Jerusalem, distinct from other ordinary Jerusalemites who believed in him. We are about to find out that the establishment soon fell away and quarreled with him. More probably, they were ordinary Jews.
So discipleship is conditional. The disciple has to remain in his word. It is the Greek noun logos (pronounced log-oss), and it has a variety of meanings. I usually go for “message” in a context like this.
As I do in this entire commentary series, let’s explore this noun more deeply. It is rich and full of meaning. It always has built into it rationality and reason. It has spawned all sorts of English words that end in –log-, like theology or biology, or have the log– stem in them, like logic.
Though certain Renewalists may not like to hear it, there is a rational side to the Word of God, and a moment’s thought proves it. The words you’re reading right now are placed in meaningful and logical and rational order. The Bible is also written in that way. If it weren’t, then it would be nonsense and confusing, and we couldn’t understand the gibberish. (Even your prophecies have to make logical and rational sense on some level.) Your Bible studies and Sunday morning sermons have to make sense, also. Jesus’s words also have Bible-based logic and rational argumentation built into it. People need to be ministered to in this way. God gave us minds and brains and expects us to use them. Your preaching cannot always be flashy and shrieky and so outlandishly entertaining that people are not fed in the long term. Movements like that don’t last over the years without the Word. I have observed this from firsthand experience in certain sectors of the Renewal Movement.
People have the deepest need to receive solid teaching. Never become so outlandishly supernatural and entertaining that you neglect the reasonable and rational side of preaching the gospel and teaching the Bible. It is very orderly and rational and logical.
On the other side of the word logos, people get so intellectual that they build up an exclusive Christian caste of intelligentsia that believe they alone can teach and understand the Word. Not true. Just study Scripture with Bible helps and walk in the Spirit, as they did in Acts. Combining Word and Spirit is the balanced life.
We must allow his message or logos to penetrate our souls so we can be built up and remain in him. If we don’t we may fall away.
Remaining a Christian or Falling Away?
Possible Apostasy or Eternal Security?
But I like what Klink and Mounce say here. “Remain” is used forty times in the Gospel of John, and it speaks of existence in the Son. Klink: “The term communicates the sense of ‘presence,’ a permanent residing in a specific location. Just as the Father ‘remains’ in the Son (14:10), so also the Spirit ‘remains’ upon Jesus (1:32-33), so also must believers ‘remain’ in the Son and he in them (6:56; 15:4). The term is depicting a coparticipatory existence, where the ‘being’ of the believer is determined or regulated by Jesus. It is the depiction of an intimate relationship … To ‘remain’ in ‘my word’ is ultimately to remain in ‘the Word’ (comment on v. 31).
The theology of remaining will become more pronounced in John 15.
32:
Biblical truth is not only an abstract truth floating out there but makes no impact on us. Instead, it is the truth that we know. We can know this proposition theoretically: “God exists.” (Or, better, we can believe it.) But in Christ, we can know God personally. “I know God.” So knowledge of God, the highest and greatest being in the universe, is personal, according to the Bible.
“truth”: it is a major theme in the Johannine (John’s) literature: 45 times. We must depend on God’s character and his Word. That is the meaning of the first definition. God is true or truthful or dependable or upright. Everything else flows from him.
“It would be beside the point, then, for Jesus, who is truth, to provide a secondary witness in support of his claim to be who he says he is. Truth stands alone. Those who have by faith established a personal relationship with Jesus are not at all in the dark as to who he is—the recognize him as the truth, and this revelatory experience sets them free from the bondage of sin” (Mounce, comment on v. 32).
“know”: Word Study: Knowledge
Judaism taught that study of the law makes a man free (e.g. Pirke Aboth 3:5); the Fourth Gospel insists that the law points to Jesus (5:39, 46), himself the truth (14:6) and the one who is full of grace and truth (1:14), if true freedom is to be enjoyed. (Carson, comment on v. 32)
33:
The Jews in this passage have set their confidence in the ethnic heritage. They have an illustrious ancestor: Abraham. They are his descendants, so they have not been enslaved to anyone—never mind that they were slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. God liberated them. And never mind that the Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Media-Persia, Greece, Syria conquered them. Most of all, never mind that the Romans ruled over Israel and Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. However, their point is that they were not enslaved in the same sense that the pagan world, the Gentiles, were enslaved, without a holy law to keep them in check, behaviorally and outwardly. Nor is their point historical or political. They were instead slaves to monotheism, never inwardly bowing to oppression. They were free sons and daughters of Abraham. They also had the most illustrious beginning from God himself as revealed in their Torah! How can Jesus say that they would become free when they had never been enslaved in the first place, in this ethnic and moral and spiritual sense?
All of this is parallel to the religious leaders who thought they did not need a physician: “Then Jesus, hearing this, said to them, “The healthy have no need of healing, but those having sickness do. I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17). Jesus is using irony here, as well. The ones who were the sickest—the leaders—were most in need of a doctor, but they could not see it.
34:
“I tell you the firm truth”: It could be translated as “Truly, truly I tell you” or “I tell you with utmost certainty.” (Bruce has “indeed and truly I tell you”). Jesus’s faith in his own words is remarkable and points to his unique calling. It means we must pay attention to it, for it is authoritative. He is about to declare an important and solemn message or statement. The clause appears only on the lips of Jesus in the NT.
So now here is Jesus’s solemn pronouncement. They may be descendants of Abraham, but they are slaves because they commit sin. They commit sin continually (the verb is in the present participle).
This reminds me of 1 John 3:4-10:
4 Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. 5 But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. 6 No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.
7 Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. 8 The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. 9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. 10 This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister. (1 John 3:4-10, NIV)
Paul also agrees with this practical theology about behavior and enslavement to sin:
15 What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! 16 Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. 18 You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
19 I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. 20 When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. 21 What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in[b] Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 6:15-23, NIV)
Whose slave are you? A slave of God and righteousness or a slave of sin?
35:
So a slave does not live in the household forever, but the Son does. He is talking about himself, but can we expand it to include his listeners? A slave does not inherit, but the Son is the true heir. He is the legacy. He is talking about himself, but can we expand it to include his listeners? Do these Jews want to become children of God? If so, then the next verse is relevant.
36:
So if the Son frees them, then they are really free because he has the power to free them from their bondage or enslavement to sin. If they do not remain in him and his word or message, then they will not be free from their sins. “True freedom is not the option of doing whatever you might want to do, but the privilege of opting to do what is right. Jesus is the Son of God who opens the door to real freedom … Note that in v. 32 it was the ‘truth’ that sets a person free; here it is the Son. The Son is that truth which releases the sinner from the bondage of sin. He not only speaks the truth; he is the truth” (Mounce, comment on v. 36).
Klink: “By this statement, Jesus declares to his opponents that there is freedom that does not yet belong to them. It is a freedom that belongs to the Son and that only he can give. It is a freedom that is unknown not only to the world but even to the descendants of Abraham—a freedom from the tyranny of sin. The freedom that Jesus offers is liberation from enslavement to self-interest and the devil; it is a freedom that turns slaves into sons and those of the household of the devil into eternal members of the household of the Father” (comment on v. 36).
“Son of God”: Let’s look into some more systematic theology (as I do throughout this commentary). Jesus was the Son of the Father eternally, before creation. The Son has no beginning. He and the Father always were, together. The relationship is portrayed in this Father-Son way so we can understand who God is more clearly. Now he relates to us as his sons and daughters, though, surprisingly, in John’s Gospel we are not called “sons,” but “children.” Only Jesus is the Son. In any case, on our repentance and salvation and union with Christ, we are brought into his eternal family.
6. Titles of Jesus: The Son of God
When Did Jesus “Become” the Son of God?
GrowApp for John 8:31-36
1. How has the Son set you free from your practice of sin, your lifestyle of sin?
RELATED
14. Similarities among John’s Gospel and the Synoptic Gospels
12. Eyewitness Testimony in John’s Gospel
4. Church Fathers and John’s Gospel
3. Archaeology and John’s Gospel
SOURCES
For the bibliography, click on this link and scroll down to the very bottom:
Dr. Jim's Essential Bible Teaching 