What greater love is there than to offer a slave their freedom?
What greater love is there than to offer a slave their freedom?
Only the truth from Jesus can set men free. In John 8 we learn that freedom is wholly available to anyone who is willing to trust in and listen to Jesus.
In this account, the Jews who had historically been enslaved by many nations, spoke defiantly to Jesus claiming they had never been slaves to anyone. Their inaccuracy was not the result of misinformation but rather a willful decision to ignore the obvious. Infact so great was their desire to not admitt to this truth that they ended up accusing Jesus Himself of being posessed by a demon.
The enormity of this error cannot be overstated. When men are determined to reject truth, they are darkened (in some cases irrepairably) in their thinking to a point where they even confuse God with Satan.
Many of us know a lot about darkened thinking, since in the course of our own addictions we became insulated from the reality of our enslavement ,something that was entirely obvious to everyone else around us. It wasn't until the overwhelming weight of negative consequences crushed even the very appetite to get high that we were willing to admitt to the truth about our own enslavement.
Needless to say then, it's sad indeed when we who have been rescued from addictions to drugs and alchohol and moreover an enslavement to sin, forget ourselves, by no longer being willing to reckognize our present afflictions. The Jews in this passage failed to reckognize their enslavement, and in so doing missed the very One who would have rescued them. Let us then not miss our rescuer even now, though once we saw the grim truth about our need and were saved, we cannot now afford to loose sight of our fallen nature. Hopefully we'll have no problem remembering the time when we ourselves were enslaved.