You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Does that sound familiar? If it does, I’m not surprised. But – do you know who was the first to say it? If not, you’ll be shocked as to who it was and what it meant back then. It’s not at all what pop-culture makes it out to be. Not in any of its incarnations. (Big hint there.)
A high-quality, cinematic digital illustration depicting a powerful biblical scene inside a dark, ancient stone dungeon.
- Foreground Figures: A man with a beard and a distressed expression is kneeling on the stone floor, wearing simple, worn tunic clothing. His hands are open and facing upward. Directly behind him stands a glowing, semi-transparent, spiritual manifestation of Jesus Christ.
- The Action: The spiritual figure of Jesus, radiating a soft blue and white light, gently places His hands over the man’s wrists. The heavy iron shackles and chains binding the man are breaking apart mid-air, dissolving into small sparks and light smoke, symbolizing liberation.
- Background Setting: The setting is an old stone prison cell or catacomb with moss-covered walls. In the background, an arched wooden door with iron bars lets in a warm, faint light from the outside. A small oil lamp burns on a stone ledge in the left foreground, adding a flickering warmth to the otherwise cool, dimly lit room.
Rather than call out the misuses and times this has been coopted for another purpose, let’s just look at what Jesus actually meant when He said the words below.
Let’s set up the scene first. Jesus is addressing a group of Jews who believed what Jesus said, prior to the moment that follows. However, they now have a problem with something that was important to them – being children of Abraham. And so, we read:
The Children of Abraham – John
Jn 8:31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Jn 8:33 They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”
Jn 8:34 Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. 35 Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are ready to kill me, because you have no room for my word. 38 I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you do what you have heard from your father.’”
Jn 8:39 “Abraham is our father,” they answered.
“If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do the things Abraham did. 40 As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. 41 You are doing the things your own father does.”
“We are not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only Father we have is God himself.”
Even on its face, this is fascinating on a couple counts.
First – Jews and Christians both trace their faith from Abraham. Note – While Islam makes the same claim, the reality is they trace their faith through Ishmael, who was born through Abram (before God changed his name) and Hagar ( Sarai’s maidservant). In effect, the genealogy is the same as far Jews and Christians are concerned, at least as far as that goes.
Second – there is a difference in terms of how they view “God”.
But – the not so obvious meaning is very much lost to us today. It is included in the overall context of John’s Gospel, and in the New Testament overall. But with our Bible reading patterns today – a verse here or there in a devotion, a handful of verses every day on a schedule, make out the interpretation on your own, etc., we often don’t see the bigger context.
In other words, we miss the forest for the trees. We focus so much on a handful of trees that we don’t realize the full extent of the forest.
What does truth mean?
Before we can begin to understand what Jesus meant by “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” – we need to know what He meant by the word we read as “truth”.
So, let’s see how “truth” is used today.
✏️ Truth
- the true or actual state of a matter. He tried to find out the truth. Synonyms: fact Antonyms: falsehood
- conformity with fact or reality; verity. The truth of a statement. Synonyms: veracity Antonyms: falsity
- a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like. mathematical truths.
- the state or character of being true.
dictionary.com
That’s all well and good. However, it doesn’t work well with what ἀλήθεια (aletheia), the Greek word in John’s Gospel meant when Jesus made His statement.
That’s not surprising. Looks like we need to dig deeper. Before we do that though, I need to straighten out a misperception some Christians may have about the word “Logos”. By itself, it does not mean truth. The key thing there is: By itself. With that in mind, my research entailed a series of questions to gather resources to understand what Jesus meant by the word we read as “truth”. I’ll take you through the questions I asked my Logos eLibrary AI agent, its responses, and then “translate” them into something more understandable.
I’m doing this here to accomplish three purposes:
- For those who may be interested, you can learn a bit, by example, of how to interact with AI.
- If you want the more technical analysis, with sources, it’s there.
- If you just want the more readable/non-churchy version, it’s also there.
Please note – the formatting of the questions, responses, and my version of the responses is formatted in a way to make it easy for you to skip either the AI response or mine, depending on which one you want. Of course, feel free to read both.
So – here we go!
John 8:32 does not use the word “LOGOS”. Why not?
I kind of already gave away part of the answer, but that was more of a tease than a full explanation. So please, go through this part. Ot sets the foundation for everything that follows.
❓ In John 8:32, Jesus didn’t use logos for what we read as “truth”, but was He in any way referring to Himself – or more generally, knowledge of God – meaning the Trinity?
A bit of explanation here: Of course, Jesus most likely spoke in Aramaic – but the meanings we’re about to go through would have been known whether it was Aramaic or Hebrew, and they do carry through with the appropriate interpretation – in context – of the Greek in John’s Gospel.
🤖✨ In John 8:32, the “truth” Jesus references extends beyond abstract knowledge to encompass his own person and God’s self-revelation. While the Greek word aletheia (truth) doesn’t carry the specific metaphysical weight of logos, the immediate and broader Johannine context strongly suggests Jesus is directing listeners toward himself and divine reality.
Yes, the “truth” Jesus references extends beyond abstract knowledge. We’re going to see later that it extends further than that as well. Yet again, as I often write, our Western culture’s insistence on “one best” answer or “one best” meaning is causing problems for us. As we work through this study, we’ll see just how wide of a concept of truth Jesus expresses. Honestly, that shouldn’t be surprising. I mean, we are talking God here. If we’re going to put God in a box, it’d better be a box with infinite length, width, and height.
We also see here the beginnings of finding out that aletheia and logos are indeed different. One difference is that the Christian view of Logos – with a capital L – automatically points to God, as opposed lower-case logos, which is a universal thought but is not related to God.
Put these together, and the context of what Jesus said is leading to God. So far, He hasn’t literally said it. But the context is going there. Context does matter.
🤖✨ The passage addresses true disciples of Jesus, who will come to know the truth1—but this knowledge proves inseparable from Jesus’s identity. Truth functions as a defining mark of Christ2, and Jesus explicitly identifies himself as “the truth” (John 14:6) in his later conversation with Thomas. The freedom Jesus promises flows from recognizing who he is and what he accomplishes, not merely from intellectual understanding.
1 Got Questions Ministries, Got Questions? Bible Questions Answered (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2002–2013). [See here, here.]
2 A.T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1933). [See here.]
Specifically, the passage addresses true disciples of Jesus who were Jews prior to following Jesus. That doesn’t mean we can remove ourselves from being part of His audience today. It does, however, point to our need to look at where in our lives we are holding onto something from our past that’s functionally equivalent to the Jews thought at the time that they were children of Abraham – which they were, but that didn’t mean they did what Abraham would’ve wanted them to do. Further, their beliefs about the God of Abraham, who is Jesus’ Father – prevented them from realizing what Jesus was actually saying.
Part of the problem is something Jesus said multiple times, when He spoke about having eyes to see and ears to hear. In other words, to understand, we need the Holy Spirit. If our past, incorrect beliefs keep us from the Holy Spirit – we’ll never understand.
We’ll get to John 14:6 a bit later. The reference to it here is another example of extending the meaning of aletheia. However, I intend to take it even further – but it’s too early for that here.
🤖✨ More broadly, all three members of the Trinity are described in John’s Gospel as true: the Father as “the only true God,” Jesus as “the Truth,” and the Spirit as “the Spirit of Truth”3. Jesus embodies God’s revelation—he “narrates” God and is a perfect reflection of God’s reality3. Truth in John is not merely teaching about God but God’s very reality revealing itself in Jesus3. This means that knowing the truth in 8:32 fundamentally means encountering the Trinitarian God through Christ.
3 Edward W. Klink III, “Light of the World: Cosmology and the Johannine Literature,” in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. Jonathan T. Pennington, Sean M. McDonough, and Mark Goodacre, Library of New Testament Studies (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 355:79–80.
This refers back to Jesus pointing to God without actually naming the Three Persons of God in John 8:32.
Jesus as “the Truth” goes to John 14:6 again, so we’ll hold off on all three of these:
only true God – John 17:3
the Truth – John 14:6 (again)
Spirit of Truth – John 14: 16-17
🤖✨ This knowledge removes alienation from God—the state of sin and slavery to the devil—and places one on the path of friendship with God and grace4. The freedom Jesus offers is spiritual freedom from the bondage of sin1, which becomes possible only through relationship with Christ himself. The truth that sets free is therefore not merely propositional; it is personal—the self-disclosure of the Triune God encountered through Christ.
1 Got Questions Ministries, Got Questions? Bible Questions Answered (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2002–2013). [See here, here.]
4 Saint John’s Gospel, The Navarre Bible (Dublin; New York: Four Courts Press; Scepter Publishers, 2005), 106.
We’re beginning to see more of the extension of the meaning of “truth” here, although it’s not called out as such. So, let me get into it here. Jesus offers freedom from the bondage of sin. That gets into salvation and the price paid by Jesus on the cross. But remember, that requires a transformation of the believer. It’s not just a case of believe in the brain and be saved. It’s belief in the heart, as well. And when we reach the belief in our hearts, we will – in fact must if the belief is real – act on what we believe.
And so, we begin to see how the change from alienation from God, due to sin, means we must be in the process of being transformed. That requires not only belief – but action.
Already – with just this one question, we’ve moved away from thinking that Jesus meant we could merely believe what He said and we’d be set free.
More on Logos
The next question was asked to draw out more on why Jesus as speaker / John as author didn’t use the lord Logos.
❓ Do scholars write about why “LOGOS” wasn’t used?
🤖✨ Yes, scholars do address this question, though their focus tends toward explaining why John chose aletheia (truth) rather than examining the absence of logos specifically.
John drops the use of Logos after the prologue but clings to aletheia throughout his Gospel1, suggesting a deliberate rhetorical shift. The search results offer insight into the reasoning behind this choice.
By using aletheia, Jesus steers listeners away from truth as an intellectual preoccupation and toward truth as action—a perspective that recovers the Hebrew understanding where truth is something one does rather than merely thinks, even though the Greek word aletheia is employed2. Rather than assuming the Greek term imposes its presuppositions on the text, one might recognize that Jesus’s declaration that he himself is the truth gives aletheia new meaning—“evangelizes it,” as one scholar puts it2.
1 A.T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1933). [See here.]
2 Michael Edwards, Untimely Christianity: Hearing the Bible in a Secular Age, trans. John Marson Dunaway (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2022), 170–172.
This addresses the beginnings of the change I pointed out above – moving from belief to action.
If you’re a regular on my sites, you may remember other articles point out the same thing with the concept of belief, for example with John 3:16, when Jesus said the words below:
John 3:16 – John
…
Jn 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”
…
Yes, the famous John 3:16. Here’s the key: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”.
If we don’t change, that offer of salvation doesn’t take place. The meaning of what we know now as “believe” was very different back then. Belief like this implied, insisted, that action based on that belief must follow. It makes sense, really. At least it used to. What’s the point of believing something if we aren’t going to act like that thing is true? (I included “true” on purpose.)
We’re not talking something as simple as 2+2. Although, if someone asked you to go to a store and buy two apples each for two people, wouldn’t you buy four apples to fulfill that request? Would you buy 7 apples, and expect the requestor to pay for all of them? Of course not! So, when it comes to something as important as the salvation of our eternal soul – why would we expect that belief but not acting on that belief is acceptable?
We see then, another extension of the word truth – that Jesus (actually God) is truth. And that when we believe God is truth, if that belief is real, we will act on it.
🤖✨ The early Church appears to have borrowed heavily from Hebrew roots and infused the Greek word aletheia with new qualities—reliability, stability, faithfulness, and especially conformity to a transcendent pattern that is God himself3. John’s usage presents truth as personal rather than merely intellectual, acquired through God’s revelation rather than mental application, and concrete rather than abstract4.
3 Nigel Turner, Grammatical Insights into the New Testament. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1966), 10.
4 D. M. Crump, “Truth,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 861.
If you have any doubt as to what you’ve been reading, D. M. Crump makes it clear: this is personal rather than merely intellectual. This is action as a person who believes God is truth – not just memorizing something and claiming to believe it as truth.
🤖✨ The strategic choice of aletheia over logos may reflect John’s intention to emphasize truth as relational encounter with Christ rather than abstract cosmic principle. John emphasizes that knowledge of truth depends on being truly a disciple of Jesus—a “sublime tautology” where behaving according to truth allows one to experience truth2. This experiential, performative dimension aligns better with aletheia’s potential meanings than with logos’s metaphysical associations.
2 Michael Edwards, Untimely Christianity: Hearing the Bible in a Secular Age, trans. John Marson Dunaway (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2022), 170–172.
And now we have another clear statement of not only what we just looked at – but an acknowledgement of the difficulty we have with these concepts today. I mean, just look at the title of the book: Untimely Christianity: Hearing the Bible in a Secular Age. That’s us – today. The only difference is the order in which we present it.
The book says that John emphasizes that knowledge of truth depends on being truly a disciple of Jesus. It’s correct.
I just turned it around a bit, probably because of my math background: if we have the knowledge of truth then because of that, we will be a true disciple of Jesus. There’s no other choice. That kind of knowledge with the Holy Spirit – will drive us to be a true disciple of Jesus. Why? Because, if we don’t, then we also likely don’t really believe/understand.
We’re moving along nicely.
This may be a time for a quick reflection on what you’ve read so far. Then we’ll continue to look at the concept of knowing – believing – acting on what we know and believe.
OK – we’ve looked at some things that may be new to you. The idea that knowing leading to believing moves to action may be new. I went over some things I “believe”. Now, let’s take a look at what Christian scholars and authors have to say about that.
❓ This goes well with so many other things Jesus spoke of – including believe/belief – as requiring not just knowing something but acting on that knowledge.
🤖✨You’ve identified a crucial pattern. 1
1 J. Oliver Buswell Jr., “The Ethics of ‘Believe’ in the Fourth Gospel,” Bibliotheca Sacra (1923), 29.
Woah. If anything needs a translation into the people’s English – it’s this: Belief in John is not merely intellectual assent or unquestioning credulity, but a positive reaction of a person’s whole being toward Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
So let’s do it!
- “not merely intellectual assent ” – truly agreeing with an idea requires deep personal action, emotional commitment, or lifestyle changes, rather than just acknowledging that it is factually true.
- “unquestioning credulity” – based on the two words, this is someone who believes pretty much everything they’re told.
- a positive reaction of a person’s whole being toward Jesus Christ as the Son of God
The author here is contrasting shallow belief against what Christian belief should be.
He uses the passage in John’s Gospel where Jesus says He is the bread of life. That’s natural, since he’s writing about John’s Gospel already. It’s rather long, so I’ve chosen to go with a shorter passage from Matthew, that makes the same point. It also does it more concisely.
The Greatest Commandment – Matthew
22:34-40 pp — Mk 12:28-31
Mt 22:34 Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. 35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Mt 22:37 Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
And there it is: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
When considering the overall context of the New Testament, we find this idea of “all of us” involved when it comes to belief, trust, acknowledgment of God’s truth, including trying to allow God to transform our lives to be more like Christ. It’s not just the mind. It’s all of us. Everything.
That’s where this all goes to.
🤖✨ This integration of knowledge and action runs throughout John’s theology. Johannine belief involves a commitment to Jesus based on a certain degree of knowledge of God, requiring both cognitive perception and understanding of the truth present in Jesus’ revelation.2 The two dimensions reinforce each other—Johannine belief and knowledge stimulate and inform one another; knowledge of the divine is available to the believer through the aid of the Spirit, and this knowledge stimulates and informs further belief, which guarantees access to further knowledge.2
John deliberately emphasizes this through his linguistic choices. John wanted to stress the act of believing more than the content, viewing belief in terms of a relationship with Jesus Christ, which begins with a decision to accept rather than reject who Jesus claims to be.3 This explains why he uses the verb “believe” nearly 100 times but the noun “faith” only once.
2 Cornelis Bennema, “Chapter 6: Christ, the Spirit and the Knowledge of God: A Study in Johannine Epistemology,” in The Bible and Epistemology: Biblical Soundings on the Knowledge of God, ed. Mary Healy and Robin Parry (Milton Keynes; Colorado Springs; Hyderabad: Paternoster, 2007), 127.
3 Roy B. Zuck, A Biblical Theology of the New Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, 1994), 223.
Not only is it part and parcel of John’s theology, but it’s also integral to the totality of what Jesus said and taught. And everything in the New Testament.
🤖✨ The behavioral dimension is unmistakable. Faith obeys Jesus; disobeying is contrasted with believing in him, and John cannot conceive of those who believe in Jesus but fail to obey him.4 Those who trust in Jesus keep his word and his commandments.4 Similarly, Jesus’ disciples follow him, and those who refuse to follow Jesus do not truly believe in him and are not truly his disciples.4
This explains why truth and belief function identically in John’s framework—both demand transformation, not mere intellectual recognition. You cannot know the truth or believe in Christ without being remade by that knowledge and faith.
4 Thomas R. Schreiner, The King in His Beauty: A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 532.
I wholeheartedly agree with the statement above. I’m still working towards actually accomplishing them more completely, but I see where it comes from. As I come to have a better grasp of what God asked His Son to do for us – I continue to have a stronger conviction about when I consider, given what God did for us – how can we want to do anything less?
At first, this was the end of my research. But then, as I was putting in my comments on it, it occurred to me that there’s an important question to ask. One that may answer some questions you have – and that will also tie it all together.
You see, for those with enough knowledge of Christianity, its words, concepts, thoughts, etc. to be “enough” on this topic. But what about everyone else? No, one more piece needs to be added.
❓ Given the actual meaning of LOGOS and its ultimate implication of truth when it comes to God, can you give me a relatively simple (for non-Christians) explanation of how LOGOS comes to be tied with truth when the actual Greek word is aletheia?
🤖✨ This is a genuinely insightful question that gets at how John’s theology works—and it requires understanding what Logos actually means first.
What Logos means: The Greek term logos fundamentally refers to divine reason, rational principle, or the ordering intelligence of the universe. In Greek philosophy, logos was the rational force that structured reality itself. When John opens his Gospel saying the Logos “was with God and was God,” he’s identifying Jesus with this ultimate principle of divine intelligence and order.
The word formed by the letters l-o-g-o-s has a different meaning, depending on whether it’s capitalized. That is, of course, unless it’s only capitalized because it’s the first letter of a sentence. And since even the capitalization isn’t consistent, the meaning must be determined by context. Why? Because in Greek text translations, capitalizations depend on the translator. In all other cases, it depends on the writer. Here’s what I mean:
✏️ logos:
- (often initial capital letter) the rational principle that governs and develops the universe. (logos or Logos)
- Theology. the divine word or reason incarnate in Jesus Christ. John 1:1–14. (Logos)
So, while there’s a tendency, at least in American English writing, to capitalize Logos when writing about the God of the Bible – and not capitalize it in other instances – it’s just not consistent.
🤖✨ Why the connection to truth matters: In John’s framework, truth represents absolute divine reality as distinguished from all that is false or merely seeming. Jesus came from God’s presence, and truth came through him because as the Word (Logos) of God he embodied it fully. The truth is incarnated and personalized in Jesus, making him the Truth itself.1
1 James Hastings et al., in Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 951.
While we often seem to think we know everything, and that scientific “knowledge” is always true – we often find out it wasn’t really true, that such “knowledge” is a theory, and our “knowledge” changes. That doesn’t mean the actual rules by which the universe functions change. Only our understanding of them changes.
So, when the Bible ties together logos and truth – and the word becomes Logos – as in God’s truth of the universe – as John does here, it means on multiple levels God is truth.
🤖✨Here’s the crucial link: The incarnation of God in the Logos is presented as the supreme disclosure of who God truly is. Jesus shows us God as he really is. Truth in John is personal rather than merely intellectual; it’s acquired through God’s revelation rather than mental application; and it’s not abstract but has been individually revealed in history.2
2 D. M. Crump, “Truth,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1wgs-indent1992), 861.
Therefore, Jesus is truth in the flesh – and also God. With Jesus, those who were here when He walked the earth back then saw Jesus – God and human. Since the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came in the upper room in Acts – we have the Holy Spirit, continuing the same work of revealing God to us.
And so, now we can put the two together and realize:
🤖✨ So Logos and aletheia aren’t competing terms—they’re describing the same reality from different angles. Logos emphasizes who Jesus is (God’s rational self-expression), while aletheia emphasizes what he does (reveals divine reality). In the incarnation, aletheia is not the essential nature of the Logos itself but a divine gift—the knowledge of truth communicated to human nature. Jesus possesses this truth in its fullness and reveals it, transmitting and explicating it as the supreme Revealer unveiling divine secrets.3
3 Ceslas Spicq and James D. Ernest, in Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 1:77.
If that doesn’t quite explain it simply enough, consider this approach instead. It removes the difficulty of understanding the Trinity and brings it down to a completely human experience.
🤖✨ For a non-Christian, think of it this way: if Logos is the cosmic blueprint, truth is that blueprint made visible and knowable through a person.
You don’t even have to think of a blueprint. Any kind of written of visual explanation of something that we cannot understand without that verbal/visual aid makes the point. The blueprint/verbal description/hand-drawn model that’s provided comes from God. God created everything, and so He knows how it works. But – we don’t. We aren’t even capable of understanding it.
Therefore, God presents it in a way that we can understand. Keep in mind, it was presented beginning about 5,000 years ago – up until about 2,000 years ago. Our understanding has advanced since then. But – that’s still the “plan” we have. Now – we must first understand the original plan in the context within which it was given. Then – we can, with all appropriate care, extrapolate it into what we know today. When our understanding doesn’t exactly match that of people thousands of years ago, it doesn’t mean they were necessarily wrong. It certainly doesn’t mean God was wrong.
To the extent we stay true to the original words/meaning/message – correctly bring it into today’s world. we should expect to and hopefully do have a correct modern interpretation. We won’t be perfect in that process. And yet, to the extent we’re off target, it still doesn’t mean God was wrong. It most likely means we veered off somewhere between understanding the message from thousands of years ago – and our understanding of what it means today.
Just think about when God asked Job all those questions about “Where were you (Job) when I (God) …. (did whatever)? There’s no way Job could understand what we currently think we know about, for instance, how rain forms – let alone how the universe got started. When God’s restricted to explaining something beyond the comprehension of the person listening – it has to be oversimplified.
We, humans, have to do the same thing. Can you imagine teaching physics to grade school kids because it’s more accurate than what their textbook says? Of course not! Neither do we blame the textbook writers or teachers for doing what they do – and then claim they’re wrong. So, why do we do that to God?
We see now, that when Jesus said, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free”, He meant something very specific.
Conclusion: You will know the truth and the truth will set you free
We should be aware of that, if we consider the context of even just the one line before it. But we often don’t do that. Instead, we pull out a line we like – strip it of all context – and then put it in the middle of our own wishes and desires.
“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
If we look at that entire thought, there’s a condition and a result for us when the condition is met. Given that the condition is learning, understanding, and following Jesus’ teachings – that should prevent us from a whole bunch of situations where we apply it to knowing the “truth”.
But – we do it anyway. Even though it’s clearly about God’s truth. The only truth that can “truly” set us free – forever.
“When Jesus said, ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,’ He wasn’t offering a slogan. He was inviting His listeners — and us — into a deeper reality. Not information, but revelation. Not facts, but relationship. Not a tree, but the whole forest.”
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