I’m a pretty good guy.
I haven’t sinned as badly as that other person.
I’m doing better…
Well, actually, I’m doing worse, but I’ll do better…
We tell ourselves a lot of stories about who we are. We tell ourselves that we’re actually pretty good. If we look around us, it isn’t very hard to find someone else to whom we can compare ourselves and come up with a determination on our own that we are pretty good.
But we should ask ourselves about the standard that we are using. If I say that I am pretty good, what exactly am I basing that upon?
Jesus was having a long back-and-forth conversation with the Pharisees and the Jewish leaders in the temple courts as the Jews attempted to figure out who Jesus claimed to be. They were certain that he was not the Messiah, but they tried to understand if Jesus himself claimed to be.
Through the course of the conversation, Jesus talked about the difference between the free man, the one who listened to him, did what Jesus said, and then would be, as a consequence, set free.
But the Jews thought that they were in no way slaves. This was interesting, of course, because they were living under Roman rule and were waiting for the Messiah that would come to lead them in overthrowing the Romans and taking back their nation, but this isn’t the tact that Jesus takes. He leads the Jews in a completely different direction:
Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
John 8:34-36
Jesus doesn’t speak about slavery from the perspective of being ruled by someone physically in this world. That existed in that time, of course, even in addition to the oppressive government that was imposed by the Romans. But instead, Jesus was referring to a spiritual enslavement. He was saying that, if they are sinning, they were slaves to sin.
Everyone that I speak to will acknowledge that they are a sinner. “Nobody is perfect. We’re all sinners,” we might say without reservation.
But not everyone will therefore recognize that we are, therefore, slaves to sin. We become ensnared, caught in the lie that we are OK…enough. Sinners: yes, of course. Slaves: no, never. Not me.
And so that deception prevents us from understanding our need for rescue. We don’t realize that we are enslaved. We think that we can get out. We think that we can handle it. We think that we can choose. After all, I’m not really that bad, am I?
Well, in fact, we either are slaves to sin, or we have been slaves to sin and have been rescued from that slavery by the Messiah who has come to lead us out of our slavery. Sin is our Egypt and it is holding us. God has come to lead us out, just as he did with Moses and the Israelites who were enslaved in Egypt, but we have to recognize in the first place that we are enslaved so that we can understand that we need to be freed.
It is easier for us to see slavery with chains or with bars and holding cells. It is even easier for us to see slavery with addiction.
But for many of us, or maybe for all of us, it is very difficult to see our slavery to sin. We believe that we can do it. Especially us in the western world. We believe that we have agency over our lives. We believe that we are in control. We believe that we can start something and end something when we want.
But the truth is that we are slaves to the sin that we commit. We can only do that which we are commanded to do, and that is exactly what we do.
We must wake up. We must recognize that we are in slavery so that we can recognize our need to be set free. We need to be freed by the one who can make us free. Jesus is the Son and the Son came to set us free.
Do you realize that you are a slave to sin? Do you want to be free? These are important questions for each of us and there is one way in which that can happen: By doing what the Son, what Christ himself says to do, we will know the truth and that truth will set us free.