Bible Lesson 57
YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH
John 8:31-32
In this lesson, we want to look to the Bible, God’s inspired Word, and grasp as much as we can from what Jesus Christ meant when He preached these words over 2000 years ago as He walked here on the earth, as God in the flesh. How many people can there be on this earth today that have never really known freedom? Incidentally, what exactly do we mean when we say the word freedom?
I expect that most of us have no real conception of what we mean when we say, that we are free! We, if we are serious thinkers, know that the idea of freedom seems to say, that we as individuals are free to do whatever we want to do and say whatever we want to say and go wherever we want to go; but think for a moment about that, are we free to do all of that?
We have to know better than that because freedom means different things to different people; however, most people understand that freedom is only possible within a system of laws that guides all who live under that law to have some form of freedom. If we were all free to do whatever we wanted to do, we would be a nation of anarchists.
What do you think?
Could that have been what our omniscient God and Creator, knew when He placed Adam and Eve in the garden and granted them almost literal freedom; however God gave them one law, or command, they were not to disobey; and when they disobeyed that law they were severely punished by God. Were they free? Yes, they were created free, and innocent and perfect but they had a free will, and that required them to have certain limits that they had to observe.
Jesus Christ tells us in our scripture for this lesson that if we know the truth, the truth will set us free. (John 8:31-32). Now, does that freedom “In Christ” set us free to do whatever we decide to do?
Absolutely not! If we know the truth, and we have acted on our knowledge and submitted our lives to Christ, have been born again, and are obedient to God through Christ, then we are free from the fear of death, hell, and the grave. We are free to serve God both here on the earth and in heaven for eternity.
Freedom in Christ and freedom in our secular lives has never meant that we are free to do anything and everything that we want to do. We said before that God gave the first couple a certain rule that they had to obey if they wanted to please God and live forever.
God chose the descendants of Abraham, the nation of Israel, to be His special people; but He gave them the Ten Commandments to guide them in a path that would be blessed for them, and glorifying to God. We who live in these last times, and are Christians, have liberty in Christ; however, we have been commanded not to use that liberty as an occasion to the flesh.
In other words, we are not at liberty to sin. We know that God hates sin, and although He sets us free from many things that weigh on others, God never sets us free to sin; because sin separates us from God (Isaiah 59:2). The great old warrior of God, Vance Havner said of Freedom. “In God’s Will,”.
We can do anything we ought to do, anything He wants us to do. And that leaves plenty of room for miracles! There is wide latitude within the limits of God’s will. We shall not feel cramped?. Think about that! How wonderful our God is, He sets limits for His children; but there is more than sufficient latitude for us to live more abundantly. Someone has said of freedom, that The runaway horse is not free. He runs into bruises, exhaustion, beating, and subjection. The locomotive leaping the track is not free. It leaps only to wreck and the scrap heap. The cowboy shooting up a town is not free. His quick finish is a rope over an outspreading branch of a near-by tree.
The horse is free which pulls an honest load and then goes home to find kind treatment, good food, and warm quarters. The engine is free which keeps on the track and steams triumphantly with the loaded train into a terminal. The man is free who does his work, respects the rights of his fellow-men, and honors God. Freedom is obedience to law?! Freedom and liberty are the only things that we cannot have unless we are willing to give it to others.
Our Savior Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, preached one time in Nazareth and He chose for His text, Isaiah 61:1, which says “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me Because the Lord has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed” To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
Then Luke tells us in the fourth chapter of the gospel of Luke and verses 20-21, that Jesus closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed upon Him. And He began to say to them,?Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing?. Jesus Christ read a prophecy from Isaiah chapter 61 and then told those who heard him?.that they had just witnessed the fulfillment of that prophesy, in Him!
Had He sent all of the prisoners in that country free? Had he given sight to all that was blind? Had He healed the broken-hearted? No, what Jesus Christ was talking about was a different kind of freedom. The normal rule is that when we or the Bible speaks about freedom, what we mean is liberty. The liberty of the truly saved person is Spiritual liberty, it is supernatural liberty that frees the mind and the heart and the spirit of men even while their physical bodies are locked away in some dark and dank cell.
Think about the Apostle Paul, who spent many days and months in bondage to the Romans, but was free to write to us the word that God inspired him to write. Even in Colossians 4:3-4, Paul asked for prayer for himself from the Christians at Colosse; but he did not ask for prayer that he would be released from prison; rather he desired that they pray that “a door would be opened for the Word and for his being able to preach the mystery of Christ”.
Humans have an ever-present problem; and that problem is that we define and understand most things that we read, even the Word of God, as relating to the flesh; but the Bible is different, it speaks, at least in the New Testament, of Spiritual things. When we understand that, we find that our previous understanding (fleshly) gets stood on its head. We must die to live, be a slave to God to be free, surrender to be victorious, and obey to have freedom.
Jesus Christ came to earth over 2000 years ago, leaving the beauty and glory of heaven for a time to live with us here on the earth. He came to give those who want to inherit heaven enough power to obey Him, the liberty and freedom that comes from having peace with God. There always has to be a succession of war before there can be peace. We all are born at war with God because of the nature that was passed on to us from Adam. We did not have to formally declare war against God, because our actions proved that we were. God had established at the very beginning, that there was a penalty or wages that come with disobedience toward Him. Adam and Eve suffered that penalty when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and disobeyed the only command that God had given them.
What Jesus Christ frees us from in salvation is freedom from the flesh. He does that by putting the old nature, the nature of Adam, to death and raising a new Creature, a Spiritual creature who is free from the things of the flesh, (Romans 6:1-6). Think about yourself before you were saved. What was your concern before that miracle of God (Salvation). The flesh was always concerned with the things of the flesh; and in Galatians 5:19-21, we are told that the things of the flesh are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envying, murders, drunkenness, reveling and such like.
You can in all probability find some of those kinds of sins in your life before you were saved. If you can?t then you are more than likely not being honest with yourself. Let’s look at how we would style those same sins in the newer versions and the language of our day. This is what the Tyndale life application Bible says about those same sins, and perhaps this will help us to see them in our pre-salvation lives. This is taken from Galatians 5:19-21. When you follow the desires of your sinful nature (flesh), your lives will produce these evil results: sexual immorality, impure thoughts, eagerness for lustful pleasure, idolatry, participation in demonic activities, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, an outburst of anger, selfish ambition, divisions, the feeling that everyone is wrong except those in your little group, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other kinds of sin?. If you find that you were never guilty of any of those, you probably fall into the group of those who Christ said that he did not come to save.
When people are bound up in the flesh, which is weak, according to Romans 8:3, they are controlled by their father Satan and they do whatever he tells them to do, (John 8:44). Any of the sins listed above become a part of our lives as we serve sin and Satan. We know in our very heart of hearts that there is a God and that He has warned us that we were going to die, and face His Holy and Just Judgment, (Hebrews 9:27); and we always walk around under the burden of that promise. My grandfather used to have a saying that went, ?too lazy to work but too nervous to steal?; and that becomes our situation, we are too sinful to go to heaven but afraid to go to hell.
As we said before, Jesus Christ did not come to empty prisons, or to wave a magic wand and cure all of the human race?s medical problems, He came to give us what we could never have otherwise, in a world that had been created perfectly by Christ in the beginning, but that sin had spoiled and ruined. What Jesus gave us was freedom, even in the darkest cells of pagan countries, a sight to see what most eyes are blinded to, the life that extends beyond death to eternal bliss, peace during turmoil and trouble, and the knowledge that we are never alone. God spoke to us through the Apostle Paul and assured us that nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ.
In Romans 8:35 God inspired the Apostle to write to us, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” Then in Romans 8:38-39, we find the answer to that question when God says to us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.?
That is where the peace that passeth understanding comes to us from (Philippians 4:7). It is a fact that we now have peace and freedom and liberty because we are in Christ and no man or anything else can ever take us from His hands (John 10:27-30).
Now the question becomes do we know Christ and have we experienced that “new birth” that comes with true salvation? Do you know Christ in that intimate relationship that comes only as we submit ourselves to His Lordship and follow in His footsteps as we take on the responsibility of being His Ambassadors,(2nd Corinthians 5:17-20)?
We must not be like many today, who join a church group, but never really become anything except a church member. They rely on their association with their group to be all they need to inherit heaven, and that is not just unfortunate, that is horrific; because those people are not Christians and they will go to hell for eternity.
Now, a lot of folks don’t like that kind of straight talk from the Scriptures; but that is what Jesus Christ said, it is not something that I have dreamed up (Read Matthew 12:30). Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, the only Savior of man, says in that verse of scripture that it is either/or with Him. There is no middle ground, no reaching across the aisle, no half-way service, we are either with Him and gathering into the kingdom, or we are against Him and scattering abroad. Jesus Christ does not allow for “shucking and jiving”, does not allow for talk without walk, and there is no neutral ground with Christ.
You or me or anyone else who is not actively following Him and doing the work that He left for us to do (Matthew 28:19-20), is his enemy and a child of Satan. It does not matter where you go to church or how often you go or how well thought of you are in some congregation, if you are not actively serving Christ you are not His.
Am I now become your enemy because I have told you the truth? I hope not, but my job is not to make friends for myself, my job is to preach and teach the Word of God, the full counsel of God, and depend upon God to reap the harvest. God is a God of Grace and if He were not, none of us would have a chance to stay out of hell; but God’s grace is always God’s grace, and only as He wills, will anyone ever know His grace and mercy.
You will never be saved by what someone else wants to tell you to spare your feelings or to make you feel good. Our Salvation is always, all of God, and when God saves any person He puts that person to work. The Bible tells us that “Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God” (Romans 10:17), so if you are interested at all in having a proper relationship to your creator, sustainer, and savior. Begin to read and study the word of God, the Bible.
Until next time,
may God bless and keep you
This is Bro. Bob