The Truth Shall Make You Free

John 8:32, And  you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
The conjunction “and” requires us to know what verse 32 is linked with, so... John 8:31,
If you continue in My word, then are you My disciples indeed.




Verse 32 is conditional on verse 31. If  you continue in My word... That’s a whole study in itself! Then  you will know the truth, Jesus said. “Continue” means – abide, remain, not depart. So, we might paraphrase it as... if   My Word is your spiritual food, then  it will be Truth to your soul.

The Truth makes us FREE, meaning (according to the Greek Interlinear): to liberate, to exempt from moral, ceremonial or mortal liability; to deliver, to make free from bondage. (Mortal liability? Is that a euphemism for death?)

Free from the bondage of sin; the bondage of corruption; the bondage of the Law. Free from  the bondage of lies. satan is the father (originator, author) of lies. He who believes the lie has not the Truth. It is the bondage of a lie, the prison of ignorance, that keeps us from the spirit of service to God.

The Gospel according to John is what made me believe all the things that I refused to believe about God, Jesus, heaven, hell, eternal life, and the entire Bible back in 1977.

In John 14:6 Jesus said to Thomas, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”
He just got done telling His disciples in verse 2, in plain language, “I go to My Father’s house to prepare a place for you.” And Thomas asks Him, “where are You going? How do we get there?” We’ve all seen Perry Mason shows, I’m sure.  We’ve all heard the “swearing in” of witnesses before they testify... “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” Takes on a whole new meaning for me.
Do you think Thomas knew the truth? Or even the rest of them... did they have any part of the truth?

Jesus is the Way to the Father. Jesus is the Truth Who gives us our freedom from the captivity of sin and lies. Jesus is Eternal Life.

To be fair to the disciples and many of the Jews, here’s the “truth” about the truth. IT WAS VEILED! We know this. As when Jesus told His disciples in Luke 18:31,  “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished. For He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.”
But they understood none of these things; this saying was hidden from them, and they did not know the things which were spoken.

So we must earnestly seek to tear the veils down. It is already “done” in the revelation of Jesus Christ, but we must seize it to appropriate it in our lives, and the only way to do this is by studying and meditating on the Word of God.
Man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, Matt. 4:4.

We have a most blessed advantage living in this time, as Paul said in his letter to the Hebrews about all those men and women of faith who did not receive the promise,
God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us, 11:40.
Does anyone have a clear understanding of what “something better for us” is?

Do we want to know about TRUTH? The discourses of Jesus in all four gospels are miraculously layered with truth upon truth, inside truth, wrapped in truth. His sermons are not rhetorical. Even His metaphors or allegories and parables are not abstract. THEY ARE TRUTH! But as we might struggle with some of those, perhaps it is because it is a higher truth... or a mystery.

In Matt. 13:10-11 some disciples came to Jesus and asked Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” He answered and said to them, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.

None of us know the WHOLE truth. All the more necessary to eagerly dig it out. It is the pearl of GREAT price.

In Matt. 13:45-46 we read, The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

That merchant was not just collecting oysters. He was earnestly SEEKING the beautiful pearls... and he found ONE, a singular pearl worth more than all the others... of GREAT price! As Paul wrote in Phil. 3:8, I count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ. That I might gain that GREAT  pearl.