John 8:31-38

00:00:00:50 – 00:00:28:59
Clint Loveall
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.

00:00:29:04 – 00:00:57:22
Clint Loveall
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.

00:00:57:27 – 00:01:16:27
Clint Loveall
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.

00:01:16:31 – 00:01:41:57
Clint Loveall
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.

00:01:42:01 – 00:02:08:11
Clint Loveall
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.

00:02:08:16 – 00:02:32:04
Clint Loveall
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.

00:02:32:09 – 00:02:59:52
Clint Loveall
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.

00:02:59:52 – 00:03:09:49
Clint Loveall
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.

00:03:10:12 – 00:03:38:15
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:03:38:15 – 00:04:05:33
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:04:05:33 – 00:04:31:33
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:04:31:33 – 00:05:07:26
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:05:07:26 – 00:05:31:22
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:05:31:33 – 00:06:03:18
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:06:03:18 – 00:06:28:54
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:06:28:58 – 00:06:52:26
Clint Loveall
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.

00:06:52:39 – 00:07:21:47
Clint Loveall
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?

00:07:21:52 – 00:07:55:21
Clint Loveall
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.

00:07:55:21 – 00:08:22:27
Clint Loveall
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.

00:08:22:31 – 00:08:47:38
Clint Loveall
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.

00:08:47:38 – 00:09:00:18
Clint Loveall
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.

00:09:00:23 – 00:09:22:39
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:09:22:39 – 00:09:45:05
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:09:45:05 – 00:10:07:39
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:10:07:53 – 00:10:33:38
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:10:33:43 – 00:10:55:13
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:10:55:13 – 00:11:31:33
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:11:31:33 – 00:11:54:27
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:11:54:27 – 00:12:00:01
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, I think this text is a way that John shows that in the story of Jesus.

00:12:00:14 – 00:12:29:56
Clint Loveall
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.

00:12:29:56 – 00:13:01:45
Clint Loveall
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.

00:13:01:49 – 00:13:44:52
Clint Loveall
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.

00:13:44:52 – 00:14:08:47
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:14:08:54 – 00:14:27:58
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:14:28:03 – 00:15:04:28
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:15:04:28 – 00:15:31:15
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:15:31:15 – 00:16:00:34
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:16:00:39 – 00:16:23:04
Michael Gewecke
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.

00:16:23:04 – 00:16:28:00
Michael Gewecke
But I do think there are connections to our faith as we seek to live it out.

00:16:28:04 – 00:16:52:21
Clint Loveall
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.

00:16:52:26 – 00:17:16:20
Michael Gewecke
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. Give it a like helps others find it in their own study. Comment if you have questions, thoughts, or encouragements. And of course, subscribe so you can stick with us and we would love to see you tomorrow as we continue along in the Gospel of John.

00:17:16:22 – 00:17:17:07
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.