If you’ll please turn within your Bibles to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 4, beginning at verse 21. Paul writes, ‘Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. Now this may be interpreted allegorically. These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Si bearing children for slavery. She is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Si in Arabia. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free and she is our mother. For it is written, ‘Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear. Break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor. For the children of the desolate one will be more than those of the one who has a husband.’ Now you brothers like Isaac are children of promise. But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the spirit, so also it is now. But what does the scripture say? ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son. For the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.’ So brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free.
And from Paul, we turn back to John chapter 8 beginning at verse 31. So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you abide 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 are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say you will become free?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever. The son remains forever. So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are offspring of Abraham. Yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my father and you do what you have heard from your father.’ They answered him, ‘Abraham is our father.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did. But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are doing the works your father did.’ They said to him, ‘We were not born of sexual immorality. We have one father, even God.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for how your word explains and illuminates other portions of scripture. How it may teach us to understand it, to better know what it is that you mean for us, to find the hope and encouragement we need as we trust in you for our whole lives and our entire being. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So soon after the feast of tabernacles, after Jesus had just declared, ‘I am the light of the world,’ after Jesus declared that many within his audience are of this world, and immediately after he prophesied, ‘when you have lifted up the son of man, then you will know that I am he,’ Jesus directly addresses the Jews who had believed him. And he spoke another famous and often quoted declaration, another statement which is meaning gets subtly shifted away from what Jesus intended whenever it’s quoted outside of its specific gospel context.
Jesus told those who were believing in him if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. With this verse is usually quoted as a person implying two things. First, that truth is the highest and most absolute ideal. And second, that the truth and forthrightness are the foundation of human freedom and liberty. And while those statements are objectively true and the truth of them can be inferred from the words of Jesus, that is not what Jesus intended or had in mind when he spoke them. Instead, Jesus was describing the true offspring of Abraham. He was speaking about himself, everyone who possesses pasto in him and their respective relationship to sin.
Considering just the first half of the quote, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples. By my word, Jesus means both his word as the scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, and his word as his present teachings and commandments. And if we abide in them, meaning if we heed, pay attention to, keep, follow, and obey them, then we will prove ourselves as Jesus’ disciples, as followers of Jesus’ way, and so be identified with him and be identified as belonging to him.
Considering the second half of the quote, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. By truth, Jesus means himself as capital T the capital T truth and the truth that is inherent to and within God’s word. The truth of his commandments and promises and the truth of the history that this contains. Jesus is the Lord. Therefore, he is true. And therefore, what he speaks is and must be truth because God cannot lie. Following God, following and obeying the truth is what truly sets a person free. It is the true and real source of freedom.
But freedom from what? Or is it freedom from who? Jesus will answer that question shortly. But before we get to that, we must consider how another similar, related, and older passage may better help us to understand what John has written. And when we read our Bibles today, it is near impossible for us to not think about the Bible as one single and unified book because that is how it’s packaged and how we receive it. We forget that the Bible is one unified whole with one single and ultimate author, God the Holy Spirit, and that scripture presents one single narrative from creation to recreation of our fall from perfection and leading to our restoration, telling us of all God’s promises and how he has, is, and will continue to keep and fulfill those promises throughout human history.
However, the Bible is also a compilation of individual texts that were written by many people over a period of about 1550 years from 1450 BC when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt until the death of the disciple and evangelist John around 100 AD when the canon was closed, and that all 27 of the New Testament texts were written over a period of only about 50 years between 45 AD and 95. The first texts written were Paul’s letters, not the Gospels, with his letter to the Galatians being first. But thinking of the Bible as only one book causes us to forget that each of these texts are deeply connected and interrelated, especially the texts of the New Testament.
We know from the two letters to Corinth that Paul’s correspondence often built upon itself. And we know that Luke wrote his gospel and the acts of the apostles for a patron called Theophilus recounting events in Jesus’s life and the formation of the early church. The Apostle Peter mentions Paul’s letters as having been accepted and used as scripture alongside the other older Jewish scriptures in his second letter. Still, scholars, historians, atheists, critics, and even orthodox believers, we all recognize that while there is a degree of similarity, probable awareness, and influence between and among the three synoptic gospels, they will all disagree about the scope, degree, and direction of that relationship, but they are still connected. That relationship is there.
And so since our method of interpretation considers this influence of all the many texts upon each other, we are led to conclude that because John’s gospel was one of the last New Testament texts written, the writer John had a degree of familiarity with many of those other earlier writings, especially those of Paul. Since John spent the last years of his life in Ephesus where he would have had close contact with Paul’s protege and successor Timothy, John’s gospel will contain the most mature and best-developed Christian theology, belief, and thought of the first century.
Bearing all of that in mind, Jesus’ explanation about being set free should be considered in light of the Apostle Paul’s allegorical use of the conflict between the women of Abraham’s household, Sarah and Hagar, as found in Galatians. And when Jesus told the Jews that the truth will set you free, those were probates took offense, and they responded to him saying, ‘We are offspring of Abraham and we have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say you will become free?’ because they were only thinking of themselves and their present generation. The descendants of Abraham had been enslaved countless times in their history by the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and Persians, and most recently the Seleucids only about 200 years before. And while they were not presently enslaved by the Romans, they were definitely being exploited and oppressed by them.
But they didn’t consider themselves to be enslaved to anyone or anything. Rather, they understood themselves as being generally free despite being a nation and people and faith that had to operate under some restrictions imposed by Rome’s external control. Therefore, while they were not presently enslaved, they were also not as free as they could and should be. They were blinded and unable to see or know of their dire need to become free. And this is why Jesus was calling attention to the spiritual shackles that bound them, calling attention to the spiritual enslavement to which they were being subjected.
And like them, those first-century Jews, until the Holy Spirit works within our hearts, we are also blind to the spiritual fetters that bind us. So Jesus explained, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. And the slave does not remain in the house forever. The son remains forever. So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.’ Because sin is the chain that binds us, restrains us, and restricts us from choosing to do the good, to have the faithfulness to give the obedience that Jesus is owed as the Lord God. And all of humanity is enslaved to sin from the cradle to the grave except and unless God acts upon you.
Now, the Apostle Paul, we know he spent a lot of time describing and explaining the insidiousness and the universal prevalence of sin, writing in Romans, ‘Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. And I was once alive, apart from the law. But when the commandment came, sin came alive, and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.’
See, Paul argues that Torah, the written law and moral authority given by the Lord through Moses and possessed by the Jews alone out of all peoples, was given not just to restrain our sinful natures by giving prohibition, but to also increase our awareness of sin so that we might better recognize sin and ultimately so that we can avoid sin. But instead, in our weakness, we become even more liable to succumb to the temptations of sin when our sinful nature deceives us by asking, ‘Did God actually say?’ Therefore, we all became servants and slaves to our sinfulness, bound and restrained against the light of life, unable to ever even choose the good.
You know, Jesus takes and applies this metaphor of the slave and son through using the contemporary first-century Roman culture’s understanding of a household where there were three major categories or classes of people within this family. You had the master of the house who was the principal owner or father. You had slaves and servants. And then lastly, you had the offspring, both those that were natural and those who were adopted. And the father, he had near absolute authority within the home and over the lives of both children and slaves. It was regulated and limited only by the Roman civil law.
Meanwhile, servants and slaves, being the lowest members of a household, they had no personal rights, whether legal or natural, but their time of service could be contractually definite, or individual slaves could purchase their freedom if they somehow gained the means and opportunity. Therefore, their membership within the house was temporary, limited by their terms of service or by death. Meanwhile, all of the legitimate offspring within the house, but especially the eldest son, were heirs and inheritors, meaning they belonged to the house in perpetuity.
And these were the social elements that Jesus was having in mind when he said, ‘The slave does not remain in the house forever, but the son remains forever.’ Yet under the system, there’s only one way for a person to receive true freedom, and it was not by release from service. Instead, it was through adoption by inclusion as a fully inheriting member of the family as a son or daughter, thereby gaining all of the rights and responsibilities that that entailed.
This act of adoption is what Jesus meant when saying, ‘So if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.’ Because while it is the father who adopts, the son also must affirm and practically accept and not oppose the adoption because he’s the one who risks losing or having his inheritance reduced. So the servant or slave that is set free through adoption becomes fully free within the household because they are no longer under any authority except that of the father who always remains the absolute authoritative head of the household.
So what Jesus describes here is, from the Christian perspective, our having been released from bondage to Satan and sin. The service which has restrained us and kept us from obeying God’s law, the father’s law, and our being adopted by God as his children of promise, as being Abraham’s true offspring and co-heirs with Christ. And once we’re adopted, which is an applied status coinciding with regeneration, we then become free, and we become able to abide in his word and truly be his disciples.
And Jesus returns to addressing those disbelieving Jews, continuing by saying, ‘I know that you are offspring of Abraham, yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you,’ before he accuses them of wanting and trying to kill him because they do not believe in him. Jesus admits and agrees that these disbelieving Jews were also offspring of Abraham, but in a limited sense. He does not mean it in the same sense that scripture uses the expression to describe him or the elect.
The Greek term for offspring is used throughout scripture in two different related ways. The most common is as offspring as children by natural generation. And the other is as offspring or the children who are heirs. This is the word and this use is how the Septuagint handles the stories in Genesis about Ishmael and Isaac, as well as the protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15 regarding the woman’s offspring. And this word is how Paul handles Christ’s inheritance of God’s promises made to Abraham.
But meanwhile, Jesus uses it in both senses but applies it differently to the two groups. Regarding those set free by the son, he uses it in the sense of inheritance and a covenantal sense where Abraham acted as the representative for all of his future inheritors, but especially for Christ and his disciples. Where Abraham received God’s promises on their behalf, where Abraham believed and trusted God on their behalf and Abraham obeyed God’s commands as his faithful response born out of trust and loyalty to God on their behalf.
But when Jesus redirected his discourse towards the unbelieving Jews, he used it only in the plain natural sense of descent. When he said, ‘I know that you are the offspring of Abraham,’ he meant it in the same way that the Samaritans were offspring of Abraham, in the same sense that the Edomites of the time, like Herod, were considered offspring of Abraham because they were descended from Jacob’s brother Esau or in the same sense in which our present-day Arabs are all offspring of Abraham, claiming descent through the elder yet illegitimate line of Ishmael.
See, Jesus used the term offspring to imply that being descended from Abraham was not enough to be his heir. You needed to be descended along the legitimate line, the line of Isaac, the line of Jacob, namely the line of faith and obedience. This leads us back to the argument Paul makes in Galatians. Paul writes, ‘Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. The son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free was born through promise.’ Now, this may be interpreted allegorically. These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Si bearing children for slavery. She is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Si in Arabia. She corresponds to the present Jerusalem for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free and she is our mother.
See, Paul uses these historical facts of a story from Israel’s ancient past. Facts that describe and define two exclusive categories or classes of people: those who are the legitimate heirs to Abraham’s legacy and those who are not. He applies the historical circumstances of this pair in an allegorical manner to describe the similarly exclusive division between the two principal covenants that God chose to make with humanity: the covenant of works made with Adam and the covenant of grace made with Christ and promised through Abraham.
The covenant of works is fundamentally a covenant of law and obligation. The covenant of grace is a covenant of promise and unmerited blessing. And Paul relates this covenant of works through Hagar to Mount Si and the first-century Jews’ present understanding of the Mosaic law’s absolute requirement commanded by Leviticus 18:5, ‘You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules. If a person does them, he shall live by them.’
Whereby the Jews made themselves slaves to sin through a vain hope to gain life by obedience only earning death through their inability to keep God’s law perfectly instead. But in contrast, Paul relates the covenant of grace through Sarah to the heavenly Jerusalem and our Christian understanding of God’s pre-gracious promise where the elect receive redemption, justification, and adoption through the sovereign mercy of Christ alone, according to God’s freely made condescension and promise to Abraham to be God to you and to your offspring after you, only requiring faith and trust, fidelity and obedience as our response to God’s grace.
And then Paul concludes his argument by quoting scripture, ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman,’ emphasizing the social division between these two categories in relation to those two boys, Ishmael and Isaac, where Ishmael, although he was the older child, was also a slave by status because his mother Hagar was Sarah’s slave and apart from Abraham’s legal recognition he should rightly be considered an illegitimate son without any right of inheritance.
But Isaac, younger, had the true and greater claim for the inheritance because he was the eldest legitimate son of Sarah, Abraham’s principal wife. Therefore, the first example of Hagar, Mount Si, and Ishmael relates to the slave in Jesus’s metaphor. Because within the first-century Roman household, a slave held no right of position, of place, or even retention, but was subject to the fullest weight of the master of the house’s authority. While they might have some freedom of choice or action, it was always constrained by the master’s rule.
The second example of Sarah, the heavenly Jerusalem, and Isaac relates to the son in Jesus’s metaphor because within that household, the son and heir possessed the same degree of authority as the father, delegated and subject only to the father’s override. Therefore, since Jesus is the father’s son, the son of man and God the son and the logos who is Theos and Andros, and since Jesus is the son of David and the true heir of David’s throne, and since Jesus is that true offspring of Abraham and the ultimate inheritor of all God’s promises, Jesus is the one and only true son who can free any and all of whom he chooses, adopting them as sons and daughters within the household of God.
And we be reminded, ‘But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, but of God.’ For, if the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
So finally to answer the question of who are the true offspring of Abraham, it becomes clear that they are those who abide in Christ’s word as the truth. Those who trust, obey, and follow Jesus. Those who live, work, and love as disciples of Jesus, following him in his way. The true offspring of Abraham are those who believe God, trust God, and depend entirely upon God, having confidence that he will always keep his promises, especially those he’s made for the good of his family.
And since scripture teaches us that Christians are the true offspring of Abraham and the children of promise, how then should we best respond to the work of the son and his heavenly father in our lives after they have set us free from our bondage to sin? Knowing and believing that we are God’s children, adopted by his sovereign grace alone through our given faith in Jesus Christ, we have become co-inheritors with Christ and equally receive the right to all of God’s promises.
And so we are better encouraged to trust in his promises, being confident that the father will do all that he has said he will do. We are confident that God loves us. He is our father and we may and should turn to him for all of our needs. And we are certain that he defends and protects us. We know that he is our strength and our shield, our refuge and strength and a very present help in trouble. Truly, we can say in regards to all things, in God we trust.
Knowing and believing that we are God’s children, we may rightly live with childlike faith. Not that our faith is childish, but that we know and believe that we can go to our father in heaven with anything and everything, certain that he will take care of it and make everything right. Just as we did and do with our earthly fathers when we were young, our heavenly father is our papa, our daddy.
And even when we might think that we do not need him anymore, the truth remains that he is always there for us. Knowing and believing that we are God’s children and that he loves us, we want to live obediently and faithfully, keeping our father’s commandments. And we know that as his children, when we do fail and when we do disobey him, if we earnestly repent and ask for forgiveness, then he is certain to forgive us.
However, we will also not want to intentionally upset or disappoint our father because we love him. We will not want to intentionally break his commandments or continue to live in our past sinful ways because we do not want to cause him grief and sorrow. Thus, we will work and live and strive to make him glad and proud of us, wanting to bring him glory and honor instead of shame and disgrace.
Knowing and believing that we are God’s children, loved by God and loving God, we will especially work to love God through our obedience by loving our neighbors through evangelism and discipleship. We will all evangelize and we will all make disciples because since we love God so much, we will want to tell everyone about him and his great love. And because God loves us so much, we want to bring as many others as we can into the light and fellowship of his love.
As many as we can see, we should all be like teenagers that Jesus once brought home to the father, and ever since that group just continued to grow until God’s house is feeding every kid in the neighborhood. So, we need to live as God’s beloved offspring of Abraham, abiding in God’s word and lovingly following his commandments.
So, be a true disciple of Christ and imitate him in all that you do. Know him as the truth. Believe him and his word as the truth. Follow him and the truth of his way and know that God the Son has surely set you free. Amen.
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