Consider Christ

John 8:31-59

“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin...So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” John 8:34-36

I don’t believe His audience really understood how Jesus’ words applied to them. I wonder. Do we?

Jesus has been speaking to the Jews, declaring to them that He can set them free. As we look at the conversation between Jesus and the Jews, they really didn’t have any sense of how they had been enslaved, and what being made free would look like. Little has changed in the 2,000 or so years since His time. We still have little sense of how we are enslaved ourselves.

Christ talked about being a slave to sin, and that He and He alone can set us free from that bondage. When we process what He meant by sin, it goes much deeper than ethics or morality. The specific sect of Jews He was addressing were a people who strove after moral excellence rather fiercely. They even made up more rules to follow than what was found in the scriptures themselves. I’ll hear atheists say that you don’t have to believe on God to be a decent, moral person. And they are quite right. Consider this in light of the fact that Jesus is directly confronting a people group who were known to be among the ethical and moral elite of their time, and still He calls them the spawn of Satan. vs 44.

Sin goes much deeper than the dirty little acts that we keep from mom and dad, and off of social media. Neither does the freedom He speaks of imply that we won’t be tempted to do that naughty thing again. PLEASE get that!!!! I meet different people who tell me that they tried to follow Jesus, but He didn’t magically stop their temptations. If that’s what you think faith in Christ is supposed to do, you’re headed for disillusionment.

Sin is the defiance towards God Himself and it shows itself in different ways. It reveals itself when we push back against what He wants for us. We fight against His commands, and resist any suggestion that we take His Word seriously. We use reason and argument to defend why His Word doesn’t apply to us today.

The way we feel about and respond to Jesus Himself is probably the best indicator of whether or not we are living under the kind of slavery that Jesus is talking about. It’s acceptable in some settings to talk about God in a general sense or even about going to church. As for ethics, I believe the bulk of humanity prefers to believe they are good and decent people. Yet if you bring up Jesus at work or at school, the conversation gets real, very fast. Try it sometime.

There are many people who are fine with and even embrace their aversion towards God. They look at their slavery as their prize and crown. If that describes you, I don’t know what to say. I guess I hope you can enjoy your defiance for as long as it lasts, but it won’t last forever. Do you want to come out from it? There are many more who live under this kind of oppression, whether they have sensed it or not. Perhaps you have had a sense of it, a weight of sorts, but just couldn’t put a name on it. Why fight so hard against the One who made you? Consider giving up the rebellion. Consider Christ.