Choosing
So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free. John 8:36 NASB
Free – Jonathan Sacks offers some insight into the Hebraic understanding of freedom; insight that we must embrace if we’re going to avoid reading the words of Yeshua as if they belonged in the Greco-Roman culture of the West. Sacks writes:
“Judaism is supremely a religion of freedom—not freedom in the modern sense, the ability to do what we like, but in the ethical sense of the ability to choose to do what we should, . . “[1]
“At the heart of God’s threefold call is a summons to a life of radical freedom . . .”[2]
“Freedom is not an either/or. It is a process. It begins with dependence and only slowly, gradually, does it become liberty, the ability to stand back from the pressures and influences upon us and act in response to educated conscience, judgment, wisdom, moral literacy. It is, in short, a journey.”[3]
Notice the clearly defined difference between doing what you wish and doing what is right. While the first is based entirely on the justification of desire, the second assumes an ethical framework as a standard. While the first leads to the idea that freedom is the ability to choose whatever I wish with perhaps only the minimum of restraint for the good of the whole, the second means that the welfare of others and the righteousness of action is the guiding principle. What matters is the ethical value of the act, not the restraint or lack of restraint concerning the act. To do what is right is the essence of biblical freedom.
Apply this to the words of Yeshua. “If I set you free.” What does that mean? “If you follow the teaching and example that I set for you, if you embrace my way of life, you will find that learning from me releases you from the weight of tradition and expectation, then . . .”
“Then you will really be free.” And what does that mean? “You will be free to act righteously without regard to the expectations of the culture, to act ethically and do the right thing regardless of the implications or consequences. You will be free to do what God asks without worrying about the outcome. Just as I show you.”
The words of John 8:36 have often been used to justify liberty without ethical structure. That is not Yeshua’s Jewish background. Now let’s read these words through the Hebrew framework and recognize that they are a splendid endorsement of the Torah.
Topical Index: free, liberty, Jonathan Sacks, John 8:36
[1] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Genesis: The Book of Beginnings (Maggid Books & The Orthodox Union, 2009), p. 68.
[2] Ibid., p. 70.
[3] Ibid., p. 71.
I had read George MacDonald’s chapter entitled “Freedom” in “Unspoken Sermons” the previous night and woke up to Skip’s post on the same verse. It was like icing on the cake 😋
Here are a few snippets of MacDonald, (I hope it’s not too much, it was hard to pare it down):
“The words of the Lord here are not that he who sins is the slave of sin, true utterly as that is; but that he is a slave, and the argument shows that he means a slave to God…
…Those to whom God is not all in all, are slaves. They may not commit great sins; they may be trying to do right; but so long as they serve God, as they call it, from duty, and do not know him as their father, the joy of their being, they are slaves—good slaves, but slaves.
It is his sin makes him a slave instead of a child.
…(The child would say),’Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?’ the answer will not tarry. ‘Give yourself to me to do what I tell you, to understand what I say, to be my good, obedient little brother, and I will wake in you the heart that my father put in you, the same kind of heart that I have, and it will grow to love the Father, altogether and absolutely, as mine does, till you are ready to be torn to pieces for him. Then you will know that you are at the heart of the universe, at the heart of every secret—at the heart of the Father. Not till then will you be free, then free indeed!’
…I can make you free only by making you what you were meant to be, sons like myself.
Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves;
He has shown us the Father by the absolute devotion of a perfect son. He is the Son of God because the Father and he are one, have one thought, one mind, one heart. Upon this truth—I do not mean the dogma, but the truth itself of Jesus to his father—hangs the universe; and upon the recognition of this truth—that is, upon their becoming thus true—hangs the freedom of the children, the redemption of their whole world. ‘I and the Father are one,’ is the centre-truth of the Universe; and the circumfering truth is, ‘that they also may be one in us.’ The only free man, then, is he who is a child of the Father.”