John 8:31–47

Read the passage.

Knowing how this conversation ends, I was surprised when I noticed that at this pointt Jesus is addressing the Jews that started to believe what He was saying. “Believe in me and you will have living water,” “I am the light of the world,” and even “I am from above.” They understood what He meant by these claims and thought He was telling the truth about Himself. So it seems strange that Jesus turns around and starts lumping them in with the disbelievers who are trying to kill Him. It may be that their belief was so fragile that as soon as Jesus implied that they were slaves, they rejected Him right then. Jesus explained that He meant slavery to sin, not slavery to other people, but these Jews were no longer really listening.

Jesus maintains that He is in accord with His Father, and they are doing as their father, the devil, has done. This angers them further because they believe that the Lord God is their Father; they aren’t illegitimate children. However, it is their anger at Jesus that proves Him right. If they were truly children of God, they would accept Jesus’s words, even the ones that were uncomfortable or confusing. Because they don’t like hearing them, much less to follow them, they respond in anger and malice, just like Satan.

This shows that belief in Jesus isn’t a simple binary decision. The very people Jesus is talking to at this moment were just described as having believed in Him. Yet they didn’t fully believe in Him, because they did not accept everything He said. Over and over Jesus made the point that true repentance and belief requires action on God’s part, working in someone’s heart. Mere intellectual assent isn’t enough. It’s as fundamental as being born into a family. One can change the legal answer to “Where are you from?” through adoption, immigration, etc. but that doesn’t change the facts of history. We are all born enslaved to sin, bound to doing the works of the evil one who owns us, but God purchases our manumission, adopts us as His own, and transforms us so we want and are able to do His will instead.

Replace our cold, dead hearts of stone with warm, living hearts that love and believe You.