John 8:36 - Exposition

Therefore if the Son —who abideth ever in the Father's bosom, and fills the house with his glory, and is the Heir of all things— make you free, ye shall be free indeed ( ὄντως , "essentially," only here used by St. John, who elsewhere uses the word ἀληθῶς , verse 31; John 1:48 ; John 4:42 ; John 7:40 ; John 6:14 ). The Son is he who gives power to become the sons of God. "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus frees from the law of sin and death" ( Romans 8:2 ). Only by acquiring the true spirit and regenerated life of a son can any man be delivered from the bondage induced by ignorance of the actual truth about God, about man, and about the relation between God and man. This knowledge is produced by the Son of God, who is the Truth. A full and believing apprehension of the Son of God, a realization of what he is, confers a new life and reveals the wonderful possibilities and relations of human nature. The incarnation of the Son of God as a veritable Son of man emancipates the soul fettered by the tyranny of nature and baffled by the mastery of time and sense, inasmuch as it discloses the august majesty of its own origin. Essential freedom accrues to him who knows that sin is pardoned, that death is vanquished, that the prince of this world is cast out. The eager Jew might look through the battered walls of Zion and the charred fragments of its gorgeous temple, and still see the adamantine structure and its agelong triumph. But the disciples of Jesus, with John as their leader, when these words were recorded by him as they fell from the Lord in their true connection, saw the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven as a bride adorned for her husband, with its open gates, its crystal stream, and the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb as the Light of it. The freedom of a perfect service and the glorious liberty of the sons of God was theirs, in proportion as they accepted their emancipation from the Son himself ( 1 Corinthians 7:22 ; Romans 8:35 , Romans 8:36 ; 2 Corinthians 3:18 ). The sons are "free indeed," whatever the world, or the Hebrew Christians, or the philosophers might think or say.