Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – John 8:31-59

Sermon text today is found in the Gospel of John chapter 8. We’ll begin reading in verse 31 and read to the end of the chapter. John 8:31-59. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. John 8 beginning in verse 31.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”

Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now, a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So, if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know you are Abraham’s descendants, yet you are ready to kill me because you have no room for my word. I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you do what you have heard from your father.

Abraham is our father,” they answered. “If you are Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do the things Abraham did. As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the things your own father does.

We are not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only father we have is God himself.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your father, you would love me. For I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own, but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say.

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.

Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.

The Jews answered him, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?” “I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus. “But I honor my father and you dishonor me. I am not seeking glory for myself, but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. I tell you the truth, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.”

At that, the Jews exclaimed, “Now we know that you are demon-possessed. Abraham died and so did the prophets. Yet you say that if anyone keeps your word, he will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?”

Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My father whom you claim is your God is the one who glorifies me. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day. He saw it and was glad.

You are not yet 50 years old,” the Jews said to him. “And you have seen Abraham?” “I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered. “Before Abraham was born, I am.”

At this they picked up stones to stone him. But Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.

—

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the identity of the two seeds identified here for us. Father, it is our desire to bless you, Lord God, and to praise your holy name now and forever. It’s our desire to please you, Lord God, not with our words or with our profession only, but in our actions, what we do.

Help us, Lord God, to be transformed by the power of your Spirit, by your word. We thank you that word is your breath upon us, bringing us to further manifestations of life, the life of our Savior, which is joy and peace. Help us, Lord God, to be illumined by your Spirit to the end that we would understand this word and be transformed by it. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Jesus says, “We shall know the truth and the truth shall make us free.” Truth shall put us at liberty. And it is a glorious liberty that the children of God possess through the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We talked about that liberty last week as we celebrated the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Every Lord’s day is a proclamation of the resurrection power of Jesus and the freedom, the glorious liberty of the children of God.

We come to a place in John’s gospel of heightened tensions, nearly outright war between the two seeds. Jesus representing, of course, the true son come down from the Father to reveal and execute him to us, and the Jews representing the children of men. We come now to very plain-spoken words on the part of our Savior and a very clear battle that goes on in terms of words, which will become, of course, actions six months from when this takes place as we move to the final Passover of our Savior’s life and the hatred of these Jews, the murderers, the followers of the devil, whose father is the devil, will, of course, strike out at the very Son himself, a picture of life and goodness, blessing and peace.

So there’s a great heightened tension here. We are coming to this text in the midst of a situation that exists where we have warring factions right now on this very day. No doubt has been for the last week or more. Warring factions of people who claim to be the children of Abraham, do they not? Both the Muslims and the Jews regard themselves as true children of Abraham. And we have pitched warfare, violence going on in this tremendous struggle that’s been going on for many a year and will continue unabated until people come to the truth that only those in the person and work of Jesus Christ are true children of Abraham.

We come to a text here that identifies the Jews of Jesus’s day, those who believed on him, as those who are children of the devil, those who are liars and murderers. This is a text that has been used in the church in times past to promote anti-Semitism. When we do that, when we look at this text as an indictment of Jewish people apart from other people, we miss the whole point of the text, I believe, and we miss the tremendous warning and exhortation that this text brings to us today.

We come to a text in which certainly the Jews here in John’s gospel are identified as children of the devil and murderers. No doubt about that. But this has been used, as I’ve said, to scapegoat the Jewish religion in the context of world history for many a century. You know, we always want a scapegoat to take the part of our punishment. Blame somebody else for what’s going on. The Jews and the Israelis are locked—or the Israelis rather than the Palestinians are locked in a scapegoating controversy that continues to manifest itself in trying to murder and kill each other off, locked in a cycle of violence and a desire for each other’s possessions that it will be impossible to stem apart from the grace of God.

These Jews that Jesus identifies, however, as the children of the devil were not some sort of lowest form of humanity at the time of the coming of our Savior. Just the reverse. Jesus in this text manifests himself to the best and the brightest, to people who saw their identity as children of Abraham and as children of God, people who saw their identity in the context of the word of God, who took the word of God as the basis for what they were doing in the context of their lives.

Who had a worship system that was essentially formulated and given to them by God. Who went through the external rituals of much of that system, adhering to them in precise detail to what God had told them to do, who tithed every little bit of their income. People who knew the word of God, who practiced religious discipline, who were at the height, as it were, of the children of men in terms of their closeness to God’s word and apprehension of it, being given stewardship of that very word.

This was the priestly nation. This was not, you know, some dark, deepest corner of Africa where people had no knowledge of the word of God. These were people who tried to form their lives in the context of that word, at least from one perspective. These are people who were good upstanding people. Jesus didn’t come and have these kind of dialogues with people that were totally alien from this. He referred to the Samaritans as dogs, taking the crumbs from off the table, as it were, of the real people that he came to address, which were the best and brightest of humankind, so to speak, at that particular stage in world history.

And not only that, but Jesus addresses people here that the text explicitly tells us had believed in him. It says, “Now they believed on him then.” And then he tells them, “Well, if you continue in my word, you’ll know the truth and the truth will make you free.” He’s addressing those who believed in it. So, not only are these people who have had themselves their essential identity in life framed in the context as being children of Abraham, adherents of Moses, sons of God, who declare that God is their father in this text, but we come to people here who even have some form of belief in the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

And Jesus says to them that the truth will make them free. And they reply right they answered him and say, “We’re children of Abraham. We’ve never been enslaved. What are you talking about?” And the battle is off and running.

You see, so I think that if we look at this text as showing the best of humanity apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, that’s what the text wants us to identify with here in the context of the statements of Jesus that these people are sons of the devil. Now, when we understand that, we won’t fall into the great sin of scapegoating Judaism over the last 2,000 years. Now, we won’t have a higher opinion of them either.

We’ll say that whether you’re a Jew or whether you’re a Muslim or whether you’re a follower of Anton LaVey and the disciples of Satan, no matter who you are in the midst of all those efforts to live a life in relationship to some God that’s pleasing to him, apart from the truth, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, Jesus Christ, no matter what you’re trying to do, you’re children of the devil, and you’re going to reflect the nature of the devil who was a murderer and a liar.

Is it any wonder then that we have the Jews and the Muslims murdering each other in the context of the Middle East? No. This is not surprising. The chickens are coming home to roost. So, it doesn’t really, you know, raise Israel up in our eyes. It just lowers all the world down to that same understanding that ultimately apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit and ultimately apart from the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, mankind are all children of the devil.

They all reflect the image of their father. They all murder and they all lie. And we see that in the context of our newspapers every day. I saw it also in the context of an internet story this last week which was astonishing to me. And yet I don’t know why, because as this country leaves its moorings in the personal work of Jesus, it inevitably moves in terms of curse and death. “All those that hate me love death,” God says.

And there was a story posted by the Traditional Values Coalition, picking up an internet story or a newspaper story rather from the Washington Post, dealing with a lesbian couple. This lesbian couple are both deaf. So you have a couple of deaf lesbians and they desired to bring a deaf child into the world and they accomplished that. They went to sperm banks first and of course sperm banks don’t do that kind of thing yet, so they went to a friend of theirs who was a deaf man, obtained the necessary materials from him, then conceived a child and bore a son. I believe it was a boy who’s totally deaf in one ear and mostly deaf in the other.

Now, we’re looking at the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ here in John and I’m comparing, you know, lessons for Roger W.’s class going through Matthew’s gospel. And after the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus comes down and does all these miraculous healings. Jesus is the one who gives hearing. Jesus is the one who rolls back the curse of deafness upon the world and gives people hearing. And this culture as it moves to redefine what truth and goodness and all that stuff is moves in terms of the father, the devil, who wants curse and death and damnation upon the human race.

And these people in radical rebellion against the God of life and against the Lord Jesus Christ manifest this murdering, lying, horrific nature of fallen mankind by bringing a deaf child into the world. Very incredible story.

I’m 50, 51 now and this world is galloping. This country is galloping away from the Lord Jesus Christ. And as it gallops away from the truth that is Jesus, it gallops toward a relativism that then is replaced by an actual seeking after manifestations of the curse and death in the context of our world.

So we come to a text here that’s quite important for us. It’s important because we come kind of like these believers in Jesus came. We want to acknowledge him, but we want to hear his words to us. We want to understand what he has to say to fallen mankind. We do not want to fail to understand the nature of what he is telling us here in this text.

And what I want to do is just move through the text and quickly make some probably fairly obvious points, but points that are essential to understanding the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ.

You will have noticed that in our liturgy so far, we’ve made various references to Abraham, and that is because this story is a story identifying the seed of Abraham, who the true seed of Abraham are, as opposed to those who are not, and identifying those outside of the faith as those who are actually children of the devil.

You know, Jesus actually tells him at one point in this message that, yeah, I know you’re children of Abraham. I know you’re Abraham’s descendants. I don’t know what he meant by that exactly. Could be physical lineage, could be covenantal insertion as well. I know that you’re part of the covenant. But I know also that you have denied the terms of that covenant. You’ve broken covenant and are not really of the covenant-keeping people that the sons or children of Abraham are defined as.

And so there are these people who see their total identity from a perspective that we sort of do too. The identity of the Christian church is one also. We see ourselves as the same faith of our father Abraham. “Father Abraham had many children.” We see ourselves as part of that group. And it’s important that we hear the words of the Lord Jesus Christ to those who had believed on him, that they would hear his call and saw their identity in that way and helped to drive out the wickedness that we have.

Jesus Christ is the greater Abraham, of course. And this comes about in the text. The Jews say, “Well, are you greater than Abraham?” And if we’re remembering the flow of John’s gospel, we also remember that the woman at the well in Samaria said, “Are you greater than Jacob?” So part of what’s happening in the gospel, of course, is that all the Old Testament history is seen as finding its fulfillment in the personal work of Jesus. He’s the greater Jacob. Of course, he’s greater than Jacob.

Of course, he’s greater than him and he’s also the greater Moses. Chapter five of this middle section of John’s gospel where the Jews are combating him, there was a big debate about the law, right? And they said, “Well, you’re not keeping Moses’ law.” And he said, “No, I am keeping Moses’ law. You’re not, okay, in terms of the Sabbath.” So, he had identified himself with the law and Moses.

Now, he identifies himself with being true children of Abraham. So, these people were people who had their worldview comprised of a law system. They were theonomists from that perspective, also from a grace system. Increasing evidence in the last 20 or 30 years in New Testament scholastics shows that the Pharisees were probably not primarily a group of people who believed in works righteousness. They knew that it was the grace of God.

They knew that Abraham—the whole thing of Abraham—was the grace of God was the way to salvation. It wasn’t that they rejected grace. It wasn’t that they rejected the law. It wasn’t that they rejected having their whole identity wrapped up in the context of grace and law. That was not the problem with the Pharisees.

And their problem really wasn’t that they didn’t know the word of God. Why Jesus is always arguing with the Pharisees is they had respect for the word of God whereas the Sadducees didn’t. And certainly the rest of the Romans had no use for the truth or law or anything else. So as I said, Jesus is going to the best and the brightest here.

And the people who really probably had down salvation is by grace through faith delivered unto the law. What was their problem? And you know, some people say, “Well, their problem was they wanted political deliverance.” And there’s an element of truth to that as well. But Jesus, as he gives the message of the gospel, does it with very definite application to the political arena. He doesn’t claim to be just lord of the church. He claims to be lord of the state.

And so Jesus’s gospel has the same political implications the Pharisees knew as well. So they were sort of like us in a way. But what was their failing then? Their failing was a rejection of the law or the covenant of grace, theonomy or you know postmillennialism or the application to the state. All that stuff was in place. The problem was a rejection of Jesus. The problem was a rejection of the truth that he brought to them about their fallen condition and who he was.

So let’s attend to this text as we move through the text itself, reminding ourselves that at the center of our faith is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have this glorious liberty that he has brought us into and that is the subject of much of what he has to say.

So I’ve written the outline in that way.

**Jesus declares liberty the result of obedience and truth to his followers in verses 31 and 32.** Again he says to the Jews who had believed him, “Jesus said if you hold to my teaching you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

Well this sort of is a summation of what else is going to follow. It’s kind of a header for the whole section. He’s going to talk about liberty. He’s going to talk about who that liberty is extended to. It’s to people who accept the truth of who they are apart from the work of Jesus, who we are in our Adamic situation. It’s given to people who not simply believe for a short period of time, but continue and persevere in the faith.

Now, this isn’t new if we’re remembering John’s gospel either. Remember in John 2, people believed on him, but he wasn’t entrusting himself to those people, right? And then people believe on him. Great number of disciples following in John chapter 6 and after he gives the bread of life discourse most of them leave, right, so we’ve seen this evidence of temporary belief, external belief that doesn’t manifest itself through perseverance through really uniting to the person of the work in Jesus Christ in changing who we are at the center of our identity in terms of who, what we, what reality is and who we are in the eyes of God.

When it doesn’t make that kind of change evidenced by perseverance and obedience to the truth, then we form the we see then those people are being described as children of the devil. People believe and confrontation increases. People think that’s odd. It’s not odd. It’s what happens throughout the scriptures.

Plummer, in talking about this statement about who gets this freedom, paraphrases this verse in this way: “If you abide in my word so that it becomes the permanent condition of your life, then are ye my disciples in truth and not merely in appearance after being carried away for the moment.”

We can get carried away for the moment or for a year or so. But Jesus says it’s only if you become permanently identified with who I am that you have your whole reality, your system of reality brought back to truth and through following the Lord Jesus Christ. Only those people really are the ones who have come to the freedom, the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

There are a whole group of people as our culture continues to go insane through a rejection of the only form of sanity, the Lord Jesus Christ, who defines reality and truth. He brings this truth to us and this truth is a watershed in this section of the gospel. Right? If you hold to this truth, if you believe this truth, then you have this glorious liberty. The truth shall set you free.

This truth of the Lord Jesus Christ is an exclusive truth. The claim here is, you know, that this is the truth in opposition to all other truths. Today in our culture, as we continue to move away from the reality of Christ truth, we have a culture that says, well, reality is what we sort of make it to be. There is really no true truth. There’s no way to really know anything about what we have around us.

So, what our job is to construct realities that are pleasing to us and beneficial to us. The ultimate goal is to have a truth that is not, you know, ultimately truth, ultimate truth that is the standard by which all things are judged, but truth for us, what is truth for me? What is truth that makes me live my life in a little better way? What is truth that makes me feel a little better about the way things are going?

And people are explicit about this. They’re explicit in terms of trying to redefine reality in terms of a truth that is one of a multiple system of possible truths. You’ve seen the episodes on Star Wars or Star Trek, whatever it is. You got these different possibilities of reality everywhere and you sort of decide to live your life in whichever reality it is.

Now, they’re still somewhat Christian. There is a reality and they always come back to that reality. But the idea is that there’s all these possibilities. So, what’s real is only real for me and it’s real in the sense of meeting my requirements to make my life feel and be better.

But Christianity isn’t like this. Christianity has an exclusivity to it. And that’s why warfare increases as the gospel of Christ is proclaimed. The gospel, the good news, of Christ is that he comes to restore us to a true understanding of what reality really is and to a world that has decided to construct realities that meet its particular needs that make it feel good about whatever it is they’re trying to feel good about their lives.

When we claim an exclusive truth, this is true truth. This is the only truth. We’re talking to a culture that is sort of like Pilate when he told Jesus, “Well, what’s truth?” He wanted to avoid the significance of truth that this situation has no significance. Our truth in other words makes every other system a lie.

And Jesus explicitly says that I bring the truth and if you don’t accept my version of what reality is, you are—that’s because you’re choosing to love the lie. There’s no political correctness in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We gathered together for a worship service in our nation’s capital end of last year or middle of toward the end of last year and we got various ministers up preaching or leading the worship. Now we got, you know, Christian guys, you know, speaking the truth. Now we got children of Abraham, Jewish rabbis. And we’ve got children of Abraham, Muslims. We all have a shared faith. We’re all children of Abraham. Right? Wrong.

Jesus, if what we’re to believe his version of truth is—this is the hard part about it. Jesus says that those other ministers are ministers of lies, murder, and damnation. They’re encouraging you to follow the lie that you can be a child of Abraham, please God somehow apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. And when we explicitly put the Christian faith in the context of that view of reality, you see, we’re moving toward the lie, are we not?

When we get up and say the gospel of Jesus is one truth among many, one group of children of Abraham among many, that is a lie according to Jesus from the pit of hell. It’s a lie from the devil. It is the great lie of all lies that truth is somehow relative and there’s various paths to get where we’re going.

Christianity is true and we should believe it whether it is good for us or not. C.S. Lewis put it this way: “If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be. If you love truth and this is untrue, then why would you follow it? You wouldn’t, no matter how good it makes you feel.

On the other hand, he said, ‘If it is true, every honest man will want to believe it even if it gives him no help at all.’” Well, that’s right, isn’t it? Even if it gives us no help in the short term, we’re going to believe it because it is truth.

Jesus makes that kind of truth claim to exclusivity and to the primacy of his version of reality. Not what’s healthy for us. We don’t look at truth and determine what truth is in terms of how well it benefits mankind, although it does do that, of course, how well it helps me. You don’t come to church primarily to hear the proclamation of what is useful to you today.

You come here primarily to worship the giver of truth and to have your mind changed and transformed to be put into categories of truth that come from the throne of God to know true truth and to acknowledge and bow the knee to what Jesus has declared himself to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And it is to those people that Jesus says that you’ll know the truth then and this truth shall make you free.

He defines true liberty in response to the Jews assertion that they were never enslaved. So this truth has this relationship to liberty which makes them say, “Hey, we’re Abraham’s children. We’ve never been slaves to anybody.” That’s an interesting statement because of course they’re slaves to Rome and you know some commentators sort of mock at them and show how stupid they were because they were actually enslaved by an oppressing power and you know the Jews had been slaves in Egypt and you know all kinds of periods of time.

Well, I don’t think they read it right. See, it’s it’s giving these Jews too little credit for their system. Again, if we think that this is just somehow the lowest point of human existence to Jews, which leads to anti-Semitism, we fail to understand the text. They say this the way we would say it. We would say that true children of God, Jesus tells us that if we’re true children, then we have liberty.

We have been ushered into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, right? And while there may be oppression in the context of our culture now, and if you’re living in Palestine as a Christian, and there are many Christians there, you’re under the oppression of a Muslim mind view or world worldview there or mindset. And if you’re a Christian living in Israel, you’re under oppression from an Israeli government that at least last I knew wouldn’t allow you to proselytize, to bring people to the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Still, you would recognize and we would say with you that ultimately you are not slaves to anyone that you have been ushered into the glorious liberty of God. Well, that’s what these guys are saying. You see, Jesus doesn’t argue with them in terms of that. But he’s saying your problem is that you don’t understand what slavery is and you don’t understand what freedom is.

They say, “We’re Abraham’s descendants and never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”

As soon as they question the giver of truth instead of submitting to his wisdom, they show themselves to be in ethical rebellion against him. And so he replies in verse 34, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”

Now, this is part of that system of truth that our Savior is delivering here. And he says that ultimately slavery is not a political issue, okay? Slavery is a moral or ethical issue. That ultimately slavery defined by our Savior is slavery to sin as a result of giving self over to do the works of sin. And we talked about that last week, Romans 6 and 7. That’s what it’s all about is that we’ve been set free from the exercise that sin from the dominion rather that sin exercises over us.

So Jesus tells these people that the glorious liberty of the sons of God is the same thing we talked about last week. We have liberty not to hand over ourselves and who we are to sin to be its captives.

Secondly, he says freedom liberty is to have a permanent place in the Father’s house. Verse 35: “Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.”

So God says that if you’re going to understand your freedom or lack of it, then the question is what is your relationship to God? Are you at one? Are you have union and communion with the Father through the Son or are you instead the servant?

And Jesus says part of the definition of what true liberty is to have the liberty of being sons. Beautiful Old Testament picture of this. Of course, in the laws, the case laws in the Old Testament, a slave, a bondservant to a man could at the end of a particular period of time, make a covenantal declaration that he loved his master. And he no longer wanted to serve him as a bondservant, but he wanted to serve him as a son.

And the master then could take him to the door of his house, the place of birth and opening up, an entrance into the family, take an awl, nail his ear, the lobe of his ear through, make a hole in his ear, put a ring on that and say, “You’re my son now.” And this was a movement from being a bondservant in the house to becoming a true son of the house, adopted in.

And the picture, the covenantal symbol of that adoption was on one hand the declaration of the servant that he loved the master and on the other from the master that he had opened the ear of the servant to his work. And Jesus talks about how the Jews were needing their ears circumcised. These Jews that are listening to Jesus, they can’t hear a thing he’s saying. I mean, they can hear, but they cannot hear.

They’ve got earplugs on. Their ears aren’t circumcised. They need to understand that to be brought into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, Jesus intends to bring those people into the family relationship of father and son. And he does that by opening our ear to the Father’s word. You see, that’s what that hole in the ear is—a picture of the circumcision of the ear.

And on our part, our obedience to the Father is not that of a bondservant. It’s that of a son. We are adopted into sonship. So part of the glorious liberty of the sons of God is a recognition of the love of God in bringing us into relationship with him and our desire not to serve him because we have to ultimately, but we want to serve him because we want to. We want to serve the Father because we love him, because He has brought us into his household. We’re not bondservants.

You know, from one perspective, the fullness, the glorious liberty of the sons of God as they’ve been brought into the home.

How about you today? Which are you? Are you those Jews who are still bondservants, don’t even realize it? Maybe they’re doing things because of obedience because they have to. Are you those who love the Father and love the Lord Jesus Christ? Are you members of the household of faith?

This is the wonderful picture last week in Resurrection Sunday with Eugene and Bobby being ushered into the faith. Baptism is that picture of being brought into the family of God. We have liberty to be part of the family now of God and to bask in the love of the Father for us and to be wonderfully motivated by those things to be brought into the family and under the Father’s instruction to have our ear open to hear his word with great love and dedication on our part to him.

Jesus says that’s what liberty is.

Third, he says we have freedom or liberty from manifesting the devil’s nature. And this is the point of course that we made is that ultimately we all reflect our father. And we have the great freedom to move away from reflecting the father in our Adamic nature, the devil, to move toward reflecting the Father, the Father in heaven. To move away from the one who caused us to embrace lies and death, murder. Satan was a murderer and Satan was a liar.

And God says that no, we’re supposed to move away from that now and we’re going to manifest the Father’s qualities, the Father’s image.

Verse 36: “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know you’re Abraham’s descendants, yet you are ready to kill me because you have no room for my word. They won’t accept the truth. They’ve got to be delivered from lies. And as a result, they move in terms of violence to mankind and violence to the Son.

I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you do what you have heard from your father.

Who do we reflect? Whose image do we portray in the context of our lives? And Jesus says that these people are reflective of the father who is lies and not truth and who is violence to other people and not love toward other people, not patience and kindness as love is defined in 1 Corinthians 13.

And we should ask ourselves how do who do we manifest? That this father and son relationship is inevitable. The son comes to execute the father. He tells us what the Father is like in this gospel. In three years, everything we see the Son do is a reflection of his relationship to the Father in the power of the Spirit. And he reflects that through everything that he does.

And as we move in the context of the glorious liberty of the children of God, being brought into his household, freed from sin, we reflect then the image of our Father in heaven and we put to death so to speak the image of our previous father, the devil.

And so Jesus says that we move in terms of that, that’s what true liberty means. Jesus’s purpose of his ministry was to reflect the character of the Father. And that is one of our central purposes as well is to reflect the sonship that we have now been given through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is central to our new identity as children of his.

Now when we do that, we truly reflect the image of father Abraham as well.

These Jews were right in wanting to see themselves as descendants of Abraham. But they didn’t reflect the worldview, the truth, the faith of Abraham. Abraham saw no tie to tradition or the past. Abraham looked for the city that was not yet there. Abraham wandered away, was cut off from his past that he might live unto God. Abraham had a life of trials and difficulties. Abraham had to go to Egypt. Abraham had to offer up his son.

Abraham had his reality, so to speak, challenged at various points in time and always responded in faith that followed the Father knowing the Father was loving him at every point in time.

I mean, it’s kind of a maybe a silly illustration, but as I was riding home the other night with George, he had this flu that many of us had this last week and he said that he was, you know, throwing up and waves of nausea were coming over him. Another one started to come and he said he thought he said, “Oh God, I just don’t need this.” Then he thought, “Maybe I do. Maybe I do. Abraham’s response when George says that when George thinks that when all of us think and say that in relationship to the difficulties of life that God give us that’s reflecting the nature of the children of Abraham the true children of Abraham who recognize that what God takes us through is the Father’s loving hand upon us for whatever reason he may have and many times we have no idea what the reason is but it is that kind of trust and these Jews didn’t manifest that kind of liberty.

What is what does it mean to do the will of the Father or to do rather what Abraham did.

Jesus tells them that their relationship to Abraham is to do true sonship.

**And point three in your outline, Jesus defines true sonship in response to the Jews claim to sonship.**

“Abraham is our father,” they answered. And so Jesus now will tell us what true sonship is. And he says this in verse 39: “If you were Abraham’s children, said Jesus, then you would do the things Abraham did. As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the things your own father does.”

So what is it to reflect this nature being true children of Abraham? Well, the first of all, it’s to do the will of the Father. To do the will of the Father and the will of the Father repeatedly that Abraham has identified as is in believing the Father. Having faith in the Father’s definition of what reality is, submitting everything in his worldview to the Father’s correcting truth.

Abraham believed God. And it was counted on him to as righteousness. In John 6, as Jesus is explaining the manna, they say, “What work can we do?” And he says that you’re supposed to believe. This is the only work to believe in the Father. And so, true sons believe in the Father and look for his identification of what they’re to do.

True sons don’t look ultimately to their pedigree or to their name. See, they the Jews are making the mistake of saying that our father is Abraham. Therefore, we have a resting place in the knowledge that we’ve come forth from a holy man. Their relationship to who they were, their paternity was to rest in the laurels of that paternity as opposed to applying it in greater work that God had given them to do.

Okay, my wife—I’ve mentioned this before—but she’s a Waller. And we found out several years back there were two fairly famous Wallers in English history. One was a man who was at the battle of Agincourt and captured the Duke of the French leader, brought him back and held him hostage and interesting stories about the first Valentine sent in that place and but anyway he was a great hero in this English war that’s I think shown in which version, Henry V I guess so there’s one of them and the other Waller who was real famous was during the time of Cromwell. Edmund Waller was the Poet Laureate of England and got in some trouble politically he kind of supported the king and also supported the Cromwell and the Puritans and kind of tried to forge a path between the two and got in difficulty and arrested and all kinds of interesting stuff.

What I what we didn’t know until last year we bought a couple of books on the internet about Edmund Waller and his poetry and a little of his history is that the reason he became a great poet and he really wasn’t known for his poetry as much at the time as he was as being a member of Parliament. This is what he really was. And so that’s how he got involved with Cromwell and the king and all that stuff. That was his real claim to fame was he’s always trying to bring about peace amongst warring parties and in Parliament.

Well, the reason why he did those things was that he had been raised by his parents with a knowledge of Waller who had existed several centuries before, who had or a century or so before or three centuries before who had done these great feats at the battle of Agincourt and who was a hero but he wasn’t raised just to reflect in that glory and say well isn’t that great. He was, and we have privilege. He was brought up saying that you’re a Waller now make something yourself in life, right? Do something important. Continue the family name by adding to it your own works, your own value to the culture in which God has planted you.

That’s the right relationship to the family name that we should have. We, if we’re, you know, a Lourette, a Tuuri, a Yeshua, a Paine, whatever it is, our children should want to take whatever it was good that we did, build upon that in the future.

And if we’re children of Abraham, it doesn’t mean so that we can stop and be slothful about the work that God has called us to do. True children of Abraham do the works of Abraham, right? They press the covenantal implications of the faith of Abraham, the view of reality that God says is true into their lives, into whatever situation they’ve been brought.

The Jews were focused on the past. We are children of Abraham. God says that Abraham’s whole deal was the future. He was brought away from the past. He has to press the claims of the covenantal God, Yahweh, into the future of the world. And that’s who we’re called to be.

The glorious liberty of the children of God is that we can build upon the accomplishments of the sons of Abraham from the past and move ahead. The Jews wanted to rest on the laurels of a family name. The Jews wanted to rest in tradition, in a heritage, in some group that they were part of.

We are collectively the children of Abraham and they wanted to rest in that knowledge. It’s like RCC, you know, when we began, I think we did important things. We spoke important truths into the broader arena of the social, cultural, ecclesiastical, and political economy of Oregon. We spoke the truths of God’s word, his law, optimistic view of the future. Isn’t that great? And our children raise up, and if that’s all they ever think about is what we did in the past, you see, they’re not exercising the glorious liberty of the children of God pressing new things into the future.

All they ever do is think about the past and not move ahead. Now, moving ahead doesn’t mean some momentous tremendous thing that everybody’s going to know about. Abraham did great things first half of his life. Last half of Abraham’s life, common life. We don’t know much about it. Had a second wife, had a bunch of kids that we know became Midianites and other things. Don’t really know a lot about it. So whether it’s flashy or plain is not the point, but the point is are we going to rest in the laurels of the past or are we going to press the claims of the glorious liberty of the children of God into the future?

We’re reaching an age, us older ones here, people that started this church. We’re moving up to our 20th anniversary last year. We’re getting to the place where we want to make sure that somehow the generations to come don’t let this just sort of fade, but build toward the future. Do greater things, maybe quiet things, but greater things than what we have done. We don’t want our children resting in the laurels of something that’s happened in the past, but rather taking the glorious liberty that they’ve been given as children of God and pressing the claims into the future.

One of the great truths that our church has trumpeted forth for the last 20 years is one that is central to these very verses. They claim to be Abraham’s children. Jesus says, “No, ultimately Abraham’s children are defended or are defined rather by those who do the work of Abraham, who had the faith of Abraham.”

One of the great difficulties of the American church is this view that somehow there is this Jewish group of people identified as children of Abraham and then there’s the Christian church and there’s this big division between the two. Jesus is saying that true Jews, true children of Abraham are those who have the faith of him.

And Paul says the same thing in various places in the New Testament including in Romans 2: “A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. A man is a Jew if he is one inwardly. Circumcision is circumcision of the heart.”

Dispensationalism has promoted the lie. Not intentionally, and you know, I don’t mean to be hypercritical here, but dispensationalism has helped to a certain extent build the difficulties in the world that we have today and the battles that are going on, the pitched battles between Palestinians and Jews in the promised land, so to speak, today by talking about the Jews as if they’re separate from the Christian church.

God loves his people, the Jews, the physical descendants or the whatever it is over there that they have some sort of special place in the mind of God. Jesus clearly says that apart from an obedience of accepting the truth of who he is, these Jews are children of the devil.

Now, no anti-Semitism. Muslims are children of the devil, right? You know, New Agers, children of the devil. They all manifest the image of the serpent in the garden lying and murdering. But we have done a horrific disservice both to the Jewish people and to the broader world by telling them somehow they’re still okay with God even though they don’t have an obedience to the truth, which is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, the scriptures say that we’re to do the things of Abraham. And the scriptures say secondly that we manifest this glorious liberty by loving Jesus.

Verse 42: “Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me.

Now this is another thing that’s very important. We have stressed in this church that Jesus has said, ‘If you love me, do my commandments.’ Right? And that’s what we know the scriptures teach us. And we said that love is identified by Paul as the keeping of the commandments.

There’s a great law: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might. Second, like unto it, love your neighbor as yourself.’ Ten Commandments flow out from those things. All of those things are true. All of those things are true to say that love is the keeping of the commandments. God tells us how we’re supposed to love him and God tells us how we’re supposed to love other people.

But if all we do is follow those explicit commands and think that somehow we are manifesting the glorious liberty of the children of God, I think we heir.

We began study of Proverbs with the 16 to 19 year olds today in Sunday school. And one of the first things that Greg Bahnsen said when he came to lecture on Proverbs at our family class years ago at our family camp years ago was the law is not enough. Here’s the guy that wrote the book “Theonomy and Christian Ethics.” The law of God is not enough. Proverbs says you have to have wisdom in how to apply that law.

The law is for babies. The law is memorizing a bunch of commandments. And wisdom is becoming mature in taking that law and applying it to various situations and interpreting them and moving them ahead. And the law also has this relationship to love.

We must never give our children the impression that if they fulfill the external commandments that somehow that is the extent of their love for their neighbor or for God. Jesus says that the glorious liberty that he ushers to those who believe the truth, the view of reality defined by him, if we are truly God’s children, then we would love him. We would love him. There’s an emotional component to that.

I would love at Festa’s day to see several people get up and sing songs or play songs of a simple devotional nature of their love for the Lord Jesus Christ. If all a husband does is follow the external commandments for his wife and doesn’t show emotional affection, love and commitment, covenantal faithfulness, all that stuff, I can’t define it, but it’s broader than just the simple obedience to the commandments.

We want our children to see themselves as brought into the glorious liberty of the children of God who manifest that sonship by doing the works of Abraham, by loving the Lord Jesus Christ, by having a love for him.

Now, the way that’s reflected is that they would have a love for the people of God. You know, you know, First John, we’ve said this over and over. Hopefully, you know this now quite well. You. So it’s easy to say you love God, but if you don’t love your neighbor whom you have seen, how can you say you love God whom you haven’t seen?

Jesus comes to you. Do you love me today? Do you love me? Do you love the person next to you in the pew? Do you love the people in this church, in this family that have been incorporated together as this household of God? Do you love each other? Are you involved in active service, patience, kindness, usefulness to each other?

I know that you are. I tell you this is what our children need to have is a love for one another that takes the commandments surely but adds an active component of patience and kindness of one another in loving them. We must have a love for the Lord Jesus Christ. This is how we’re identified as his children.

And third, hearing the Father’s word. Again, they are not able, verse 43:

“Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I have to say.”

This gets at the heart of man’s dilemma in the modern world. He is unable to hear the word of God. This demonstrates quite clearly that the sovereignty of God is what is necessary to open the ears of fallen man. Now, they’re culpable for their actions, but Jesus tells us quite clearly that the sort of God that we’re accepting the truth of here, right? He’s telling us what truth is.

And what is true is that fallen man is unable to hear the words of God apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. He says that God is sovereign. This God who we’re brought into relationship with and whom we love is absolutely sovereign in the context of the world. Jesus says that if you’re going to be true children of his, you’re going to do the deeds of Abraham, you’re going to believe my word, you’re going to love me, you’re going to love the people in the context of the church as well.

So Jesus tells us all of these things and instead of doing that, of course, they respond in disobedience. They manifest the will of their father who is a liar and a murderer from the beginning.

Jesus then defines the Spirit-filled life. So he’s told them now what it means to manifest being true children of God, true children of Abraham. And they then bring a charge to him that he is filled with a demon, that he’s demon-possessed and a Samaritan. And Jesus then goes about answering their charge by saying that I’m not possessed by a demon, but I honor my father and you dishonor me.

For I am not seeking glory for myself, but there is one who seeks it and he is the judge. I tell you the truth, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.

And we have reflected here and I give it to you both sets of verses, but in these two verses and in the following one, the Lord Jesus Christ describes whom he is. They’ve accused him of being demon-possessed. And we know if we’ve read John’s gospel that the anointing of the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus at his baptism, and it doesn’t leave him. His life is not filled with the demon. He is filled with the Spirit that proceeds from the Father.

Jesus gives us a demonstration of who the Spirit-filled person is. And he is the one here who does not seek his own glory but rather is honored by the Father. The Father seeks his glory. He says he will receive glory but not seeking his own glory. And he says that he tells them the truth. The Spirit-filled man speaks the truth of God.

And he says that if you keep my word, this truth, you’ll never see death.

Jesus repeats the three-fold pattern we’ve seen over and over again in this gospel and throughout the scriptures: Glory, truth, and life. Same movement of our worship service.

We had a parents meeting Wednesday night about a potential starting a school up or some sort of school or educational endeavor related to the church run by parents. And what we talked about was what do we want for our children? What’s the end game so to speak? What’s the goal of our education? And classical education says the goal is virtue. Virtue and wisdom. And we said that, well, we’d want to add a third thing to that: virtue, wisdom, and then a worship for their creator.

If you take virtue and wisdom, abstract those things away from worship of God, then you end up with selfishness, and you’re walking in the darkness. You’re going to manifest not virtue and wisdom, but foolishness, as Romans 1 says, and perversity. So, but these three goals then of what we’d want to do, virtue, wisdom, and worship are reflected in these truths here.

Jesus seeks glory not on his own but from the Father. Glory is what we fall short of because of our sin. Glory or to have glory or honor in the context of our life is to manifest the character, the virtue of the Father in heaven the way Jesus manifested the Father, executed him to us in the three years that the gospels record. So we want to have glory manifesting the glory of the Father that he gives to us.

And we want to speak truth. We want wisdom. We want our children to have knowledge. But it’s the truth not that comes from an independent analysis of the world, but submission to the Father’s word, to hear the Father’s word, to hear Christ’s word. And then the third goal that we want for our children is life. And in the Bible, life isn’t just sort of being alive as opposed to dead. It is rejoicing, celebratory life.

It is relationship with the Father that brings us into joy and worship.

We move through these same aspects every Lord’s day in our worship. We confess our sins and we get the reflected glory of the Father in assuring us he’s forgiven us our sins and he’s making us new people and our character reflects his honor and glory. We get the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ preached to us and our knowledge system moves away from autonomy to true submission.

We recognize that truth is not some kind of abstract intellectually obtained neutral thing. Truth is ethical. The reason why they couldn’t understand things is because they were in ethical rebellion against the Father. To know anything, we must submit to the Father’s will. And then we know everything. We have the unction of the Spirit who knows all things. We’re brought into knowledge and we move to the communion table where we rejoice together with wine and with good bread.

We rejoice in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ given to us in the context of community. This is the goal. This is how we want a school structure to have content producing character in the context of worshiping God and the joy of worship of loving the Lord Jesus Christ and the Father. And that’s what Jesus says the Spirit-filled life is all about in the context of these verses.

And he doesn’t say it just once. He says it twice again in verse 52.

They say, “Are you greater than our father Abraham?” He says, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My father whom you claim as your God is the one who glorifies me, gives me glory, weight, honor, virtue. Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and I keep his word. I speak the truth. I keep the word. I know the truth.”

This connection between truth and morality.

And finally, he says in verse 56 that your father Abraham rejoiced at my day. Do you rejoice at the day of the Lord Jesus Christ? Dear ones, do you rejoice when Jesus makes himself manifest in Lord’s day worship? Do you rejoice in the manifestation of the relationship and the have in a community that have been built up together? Do you rejoice when Jesus moves into your home in an heightened way at some particular point in time?

Do you rejoice when you hear dad saying, “Well, maybe I did need the flu after all”? Do you rejoice to see the work of the Lord Jesus Christ?

And it’s the same movement again: glory, knowledge, and rejoicing life in the presence of God.

And then our Savior finally tells us with a threefold affirmation of the basis for all of this. What is the glorious liberty of the sons of God? What is the essence of our knowledge? It is a recognition that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity and we have been brought into covenantal relationship through him. He is Yahweh. He is I AM.

They say you’re not 50 years old and you have seen Abraham. He says, “I tell you the truth. Before Abraham was born, I am.”

Now, that version, “I tell you the truth,” what it says is, “Amen. Amen. I say to you. This is important. In other words, he’s built to the whole climax of this entire chapter 8 when we’ve gone through all these things, this dialogue with the Jews, the culmination of the whole thing. What is life? What brings us into the glorious liberty of the children of God? What is the essence of that truth?

Amen. Amen. I say to you, do I have your attention? Before Abraham was, Jesus says, I AM citing Yahweh, the unspoken name—for reverence sake supposedly—from the Old Covenant when God goes to Moses and manifests himself as the one who will deliver his people, who will keep covenant for his people, who will bring them into that final household of faith through the work of the greater one to come, the greater Moses, the greater Abraham, the I AM the Lord Jesus Christ.

Certainly an affirmation of the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the essence of the truth that the Jews, the Muslims, and unfortunately many liberal Christians throw out today is the essence that Jesus Christ speaks the only truth because he is the only one to come in the flesh who was God incarnate. Not Muhammad, not other wise sages or other people or teachers. No, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Certainly, we see at the height of the affirmation of truth that Jesus is God. But secondly, he chooses a particular name for God that is one that is tied up with the covenant. The entire purpose of the history of mankind, the entire revelation of the Scripture from the beginning to the end is about God’s covenant with a particular group of people.

He tells Adam that he will come and he will remake covenant as it were through a redeemer to come who will suffer for his sins. God says that he will come in that way. God tells Moses, “I am that I am.” “I am the one who brings you into covenant relationship.” Yahweh is the covenant name of God to his people, people in the Old Testament.

God says that all of reality, what truth is about is God establishing covenant, bringing people into his household to have a relationship through the adoption of sons. The center of those first couple of outline points is entrance into the household, love for the Lord Jesus Christ.

And here at the height of our worship service, the rejoicing we have, we rejoice as the family of God have been brought into covenant relationship through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and we love one another and we love Jesus and we rejoice in the proclamation of his truth today.

Jesus says that the great truth is that he’s brought you forward to hear today again that he is God. He is the covenant-keeping God. He is the one that died for your sakes who has been raised for your life. Who has brought you into the glorious liberty of the sons of God at the middle of that liberty of seeing yourself as part of his family, loving him, loving the Father in the power of the Spirit and loving each other.

Let’s pray. Father, forgive us for our lack of love, for just for our lack of understanding. Continue to unplug our ears, Lord God, and help us to see the importance of these things to our lives, the life of our children, and the life of our world.

We thank you, Lord God, for manifesting to us that we are indeed the children of Abraham. That this is not something that we’re to take pride or boast in. We know that it was simply your sovereignty that opened our ears. But we do rejoice, Lord God, with love for you.

Now, as we come forward, Father, with our offerings and our tithes, bless us. Bless the money that’s collected to be used for the purposes of your kingdom, that we might indeed take this glorious message of the Lord Jesus Christ into all the world.

In his name we ask it. Amen.