Know the Truth and It Shall Set You Free
Jesus states in John 8, "And you will know the truth, and the truth will set yous free."
Information technology sounds nice with words similar truth and freedom, but there'due south an implication inside what Jesus says that confronts us at our very core. At the present, nosotros are slaves. We are spring. We aren't gratuitous.
What follows in John 8 is disturbing to our ideas about ourselves and our identity (as Jesus disturbed the Jews that originally heard it), which are the virtually difficult truths to address, yet Jesus is explaining what information technology takes to exist prepare costless. To be fabricated free and alive in freedom.
What Does the Truth Shall Ready You Gratuitous Mean?
Showtime in John 8:12, Jesus teaches in the Temple treasury, beginning with the proclamation that He is the light, and the people walk in darkness. Equally happens throughout the Gospels, the Jews question Him.
It'due south similar they're having 2 different conversations. We've all been in that situation, oasis't we? One side can't seem to brand out what the other is saying, their perspective, even though they are using the same language, and there's no communication.
This is what happens here. The education continues, and Jesus makes the ii dissimilar perspectives clear—"I'k from above and you're from beneath." (v.23) Jesus is from Heaven and they are from the Earth, this world of corruption and expiry.
Considering of the vastly dissimilar perspectives (tin't get whatever further autonomously), the Jews are more dislocated and ask an important question—Who are you?
Identity is the near fundamental and revolutionary truth we must wrestle with if we are to go from chains to freedom. All the same information technology is the most difficult to address considering nosotros cling to our identities more than than anything in this globe; our racial, national, political, gender, sexual, religious designations are the place from which nosotros empathise everything else. When our identity gets challenged, it offends us to the farthermost, and we are lost and hopeless. It is like death—it scares u.s.a.. We avoid it at all costs.
Jesus had already answered that question of identity—He is the Son of God. Jesus then tells them that they volition understand who He is when He is lifted up on the cross. When He is killed.
Or another fashion to look at it—they will empathize who He is when they impale Him. Because that'southward when they will understand who they are, too. That's when they will know the truth.
Many walked away at that point. Others, withal, began to believe in Him.
To those who believed, He took it a step further. "If you follow my teachings, y'all will know the truth and the truth will set y'all gratis."
Why Does the Bible Care and so Much about Truth?
In Western civilization, we frequently ascertain truth as a fix of ideas or beliefs, a philosophy. We are then educated in that philosophy and concord others to those perspectives. Nosotros are bailiwick to truth.
Ultimately, the scripture describes truth as a person, God. Truth or morality aren't things that God must follow or can be subject to. Nothing is above Him. God, as a person, is the foundation of reality and truth, what is right and holy. Therefore, nosotros can't know the truth in an intellectual sense. Nosotros must experience it, which is why the discussion used in "knowing" God is one of an intimate human relationship (much like Adam "knew" Eve and she had a child).
Since Truth is a Person, this explains why relationship is paramount, the source, and the goal of salvation. Because relationship is everything, what nosotros believe about God (doctrine, theology) becomes important, much like if I say I have human relationship with my wife and describe her as a brusque, blue-skinned man, others who know her would question whether I have a relationship with her at all. And they would be right.
The Bible is the story of the Father reconciling all of cosmos back to Himself through the Son. The focus of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation is the person of God. God is defined as life, the way, the lite, and more. Truth places u.s. in line with those things. We can merely take human relationship with God, and worship Him, in spiritual truth (John 4:24). Lies will practise the opposite —place us in darkness and death.
What we experience determines what we believe. What nosotros believe determines what we think and feel. What nosotros think and feel determine our behavior. The root of what needs to change, therefore, is an experience with God and what nosotros believe most Him and, by extension, about ourselves. Everything flows from that.
What Does the Bible Say about Truth Shall Fix Y'all Gratuitous?
The Apostle John writes in chapter 1 of his Gospel that Jesus is the "Logos," oftentimes translated as the Give-and-take, a philosophical term of his time related to truth and how people should live, against the Hellenistic culture, the roots of our modern Western civilization. Not to leave Jews out, John says that Moses brought the police force, but grace and truth came through Jesus. They need a different source, too.
Just earlier His death, Jesus declares He is "the style, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). The Holy Spirit is the "spirit of Truth" (John 16:xiii), James talks about how we are from the "Discussion of Truth" (James i:18). We can walk "in Truth" (Psalm 86:11). The Son of God reveals the Father (John 17:25-26) so we can know God and live in the God who is truth.
Only as God is known as the personal embodiment of Truth, the Devil is the "father of lies." His first interaction with humanity led them into action based on a prevarication, to death, and corrupted the whole of creation with that event. In that location are two fathers, and nosotros belong to either one or the other. That is where we become our identity. We have all been born in a world corrupted past the father of lies, and in participating and assertive those lies, we are bound to what lies produce—fear, pride, sin, hate, and death. No affair how we dress it up with luxury, entertainment, or religion, it doesn't affair. We are slaves to the prevarication with no hope of any mode out, no escape, our end determined.
Add together to this that everything nosotros meet is jump to the same corrupted world, temporary, doomed to destruction, like the Jews in John viii, we tin can't comprehend the Heavenly realm, the joys, the riches, the completeness, the love, the grace. We've had no feel with it. And nosotros are unable to become from here to there.
Information technology took a supernatural, sacrificial, and extravagantly loving human action to give united states another option at all. God came here.
Jesus.
How Can the Truth Set Us Free?
Back in John 8, Jesus tells the Jews that "believe in Him" that they will know the truth, and the truth volition gear up them complimentary.
These Jews that "believe in Him" start to argue. "Hey, what exercise y'all mean? We've never been slaves of anyone."
Prevarication number ane. The current state of affairs with the Romans (second-form citizens, many of the Jews literal slaves) and past history with Babylon (the Jews taken captive as slaves) are notable. Jesus doesn't deal with the obvious, though. Like always, Jesus is trying to make them free, so He goes to the root. "Y'all are a slave to sin. You're trying to kill me. I'm telling yous what I saw when I was with my Male parent. Yous are of a different male parent."
Their response: "Abraham is our father."
Lie number 2. Jesus explains that if Abraham was their father, and so they would obey like Abraham did, believe in Jesus equally he did. They don't, and so they have a different father. "Your existent father."
They continue arguing. "God is our father!"
Lie number three. Jesus reveals, "The Devil is a murderer, and you are doing what he did, trying to impale me. The Devil is your male parent."
At the cease of the affiliate, Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I am." I am—Yahweh. He declared himself as God. As confirmation on the difficulty in challenging someone's identity, the Jews (the "chosen people of God") picked upwardly stones to kill Jesus. Which is what He said they would exercise.
The words "gear up gratuitous" have an added meaning. It also means the truth will brand us complimentary. Make. Create.
"You must be born again," Jesus says to Nicodemus in the middle of the night (John 3:3). You lot accept to be built-in of the Spirit instead of this world (3:6).
Once we repent and are born over again, we are in Christ, and our identity has radically shifted from the lie to the Truth. Our fatherhood has inverse. We have died to the Devil as father, and at present we take been born from God.
We now take a new Begetter.
The trouble of chains is not solved with a new philosophy or a worldly government or religious tradition. It goes way deeper than that. The problem is our very nature, our very identity. Jesus says that while the religious tradition tells y'all non to impale or commit adultery, His commandment is to finish hating or lusting (Matthew 5:21-28). But who can do that? We intrinsically know that's impossible as we are.
Jesus also says, dealing with Jewish food requirements, that it'southward not what goes into the body that defiles usa only what comes out of the heart (Matthew fifteen:11). We're already unclean inside.
Even if we knew the correct thing to do, we couldn't practice it (Romans 7:fifteen). We aren't basically good people that need a slight mental attitude adjustment. The Bible is clear. Our source is one of rebellion and selfishness and all that extends from that. God gave His standard in the Law and the people were unable to keep information technology, not because the Constabulary was incorrect simply considering information technology depended upon the forcefulness of humanity to perform information technology (Galatians 3:19). We can't.
God knows that and didn't exit us in that location. He changes who nosotros are.
We need a different nature, which comes from a different source. Not an impersonal source simply a relational, intimate, loving Person equally a Father. A adept Begetter. We can't just be shown what free people do (that's faith), nosotros must be empowered to do them (that'due south the New Covenant, Ezekiel 36:26).
To intermission from the bondage of sin, detest, fright, pride, death, and devastation, nosotros must exist fabricatedgratuitous. We must be given a new perspective to meet the God who is Spirit too as the grace and ability to follow Him. We must die to our quondam life, lose our life for the sake of Christ to truly notice it.
Nosotros must exist born again.
Paul in Romans teaches it like this: we are born from the commencement Adam, a whole race of people bound to that corruption. Jesus comes as a Second Adam, a new race of people built-in of God (Romans 5:12-21). That's quite a change.
Nosotros were built-in of this world and could only make worldly choices. No thing how we mix it with wealth or entertainment or religion, information technology's withal corruption. Our righteousness was "filthy rags" and worthless (Isaiah 64:6). One time we are reborn from Heaven, nosotros can make Heavenly choices. We tin choose backbone over fear, humility over pride, beloved over hate, integrity over segmentation, peace over chaos, forgiveness over vengeance, generosity over greed, life over decease. It was impossible before. Now, with God and His Spirit inside u.s., it is who we are, our new identity, the New Creation (Galatians 6:15).
That'due south freedom.
We have been made free from inside (where it matters) to live equally Christians (literally, little anointed ones, little Jesuses) on the Earth, to walk with a loving Father Who is Truth, no longer bound to the things that will destroy united states, and declare His dearest and invite others into that freedom full of joy and peace.
Further Reading
"The Truth Volition Set Y'all Free" - What it Means & Why Jesus Said It
What Does 'The Truth Will Set up Y'all Free' Mean?
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This article is role of our larger resources library of popular Bible verse phrases and quotes. Nosotros want to provide easy to read articles that answer your questions near the significant, origin, and history of specific verses within Scripture'due south context. It is our promise that these volition assist you ameliorate understand the meaning and purpose of God's Word in relation to your life today.
"Be All the same and Know that I Am God"
"Pray Without Ceasing"
"Appallingly and Wonderfully Made"
"All Things Work Together for Good"
"Practice Not Fear"
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