Servants - John 8:33-36

The Jewish leadership that is listening to Jesus is not pleased with him telling the people that the truth will make them free. And I guess it makes sense because they desire power, and they can’t have some guy coming to tell the people they intend to rule over that they are hypocrites and they will be happier listening to another way. They respond, “We be Abraham’s seen, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be free?” This can be take two different ways, first, it could be understood physically, where they are saying that the people of Israel have never been in bondage to any foreign powers, to which JTC responds, “In their unbridled fanaticism they had forgotten the bondage of Egypt, and were oblivious of their existing state of vassalage to Rome.” Clearly, Israel as a nation had been in bondage before and not only to the Romans and Egyptians, but to the Assyrians and Babylonians as well. The other way that this could be interpreted is spiritually. If they are asserting that they are Abraham’s seed and therefore worship the only true and living God, then they could not be in spiritual bondage to anyone else because there was no one else with the truth. But they misunderstood Him, it is not enough to have the truth as a collective people, but to be made free by the truth is an individual effort. Jesus corrects them, “Verily, Verily, I say unto you, whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” A servant is one who is bondage, and if one is in bondage to sin, they are unable to move forward in the race of life we talked about yesterday. We can be servants to sin because they are habit forming and we have to break an addictive cycle, or simply because committing sin, which we all do, separates us from God and makes it impossible for us to return to him after we die. Therefore, we can be set free from the bonds of sin by accepting the truth, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ. I feel like that is a strong summary statement.

The IM makes an interesting point saying that the Jewish leaders asserted “they had never been in spiritual bondage to any nation because they were the seed of Abraham. They were, in essence, asking how they could possibly be enslaved spiritually with this pedigree. Jesus then taught, ‘Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.’ The Greek verb translated as ‘committeth’ implies continuting in sinrather than a single occurrence of sin. Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles described a pattern of enslavement that can inhibit the full use of our agency, a pattern that can also result from continuing in other kinds of sin: ‘From an initial experiment thought to be trivial, a vicious cycle may follow. From trial comes a habit. From a habit comes dependence. Enslaving shackles of habit are too small to be sense until they are too strong to be broken… Agency, or the power to choose, was ours as spirit children of our Creator before the world was. It is a gift form God, nearly as precious as life itself. Often, however, agency is misunderstood. While we are free to choose, once we have made those choices, we are tied to the consequences of those choices.”

Jesus makes a statement that I find difficult to understand, he says, “whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the son abideth forever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” The IM says, “The Savior then declared that a servant – a ‘servant of sin’- remains in a house only if the owner so desires, but a son- especially ‘the Son’- has a rightful place and ‘abideth ever.’ Through His Atonement, Jesus Christ extends that rightful place to each of His followers and makes them ‘free indeed’- free from humankind’s greatest enemies, which are physical and spiritual death.” I think that an important distinction to make here is that when he says that the servant doesn’t abide in the house forever, but the son does, there is a different context than what we are used to. In our society, the son probably wouldn’t stay in his father’s house forever, but his father’s servant would because the servant works for the dad. In this context, I feel it’s more like who inherits the house from the father. The son, of course, will receive the estate from the dad at some point, whereas the servant will be awarded no possessions or status or security at any point. In Jesus’ example, the son of the father, the rightful inheritor of his father’s estate frees the servant or forgives the debt, then that servant is able to receive an inheritance just like the natural born son.