John 8:33-36 (Covenantal Freedom)

Covenant Faith, False Freedom, and the Cart Before the Horse

Growing up, my grandpa had a lot of different phrases that he would use, like, that dog won't hunt, which I think I know what that means. Meaning whatever you're doing right now is not working. A bird and the hand's worth two in the bush, have you ever heard of that one?

Yeah. What about putting your cart before your horse? Yeah. It kind of conjures up these ideas of the ridiculous. You see this, in your mind, you see this kind of old dullard of a man who's busy packing his bags and getting his suitcase ready, and he's running around, tying the horse up and getting it attached to the cart, and his wife's looking on with confusion, like, what is this man doing?

He's getting ready to go on this long journey, he kisses her goodbye, she's staring there with bated breath, watching to see when he's going to figure out that his horse is actually behind him. And you're like, how could this possibly survive the English language?

How could this be a metaphor? How could anybody put their cart ahead of their horse? And yet this metaphor has had lasting power in the English language, not because we've messed up in horse-drawn carriagery, but because we often do things very similar to that, indeed.

For instance, you think about marriage. Marriage is a covenant between one man and one woman in an eternal type of bond, here on earth at least, it is a forever sacred bond between a man and a woman, and yet often, even in the church, we get the cart called sexual union ahead of the horse, which is marriage, and then we end up going nowhere, and we end up introducing pain and suffering into our marriages and into our relationships because we've gotten the cart before the horse.

There's many other examples of things that we have done or things that we can do, but I use that one because it's covenantal. And I think that in John chapter 8, the Jews have gotten their covenantal carts before their theological horses.

Now, if you remember, we have a chapter that is filled with confusion about who Jesus is. And it should not surprise us that in a chapter that is thoroughly saturated with the Jewish confusion of who Jesus is that they would also be confused about their law, they would also be confused about their standing between them and God, and they would also be confused about covenants.

I think at the heart of John 8, especially in this argument that is happening between Jesus and the Pharisees or in the Jews, there's a misunderstanding about covenant and where they actually stand in relationship to God.

Now, this is a specific kind of confusion. There were people in the crowds who hated Jesus. There were people in the crowds who wanted to kill Jesus. This group that we're talking about in John 8 believed in Jesus, and yet they had a false faith.

They had a false belief. Their belief did not cause them to be in right standing with Jesus. It caused them actually to reject Jesus. It was a belief that was masquerading as true when it was false, and I think the reason that it was false is because they didn't understand their covenants.

John records this in verses 28 through 30 when he says, When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on my own initiative. But I speak these things as the Father taught me, and He who sent me is with me.

He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to Him. And as He spoke these things, many of them came to believe. So again, we see this false belief is happening here. A group in the crowd is starting to believe in Jesus, and we don't know exactly what their false belief is.

We just know that it's false. Maybe it's like in John 2 where they had a false belief because they wanted Jesus to do signs and miracles and wonders. Maybe it was like John 6 where they had a false belief because they wanted Jesus to be a political savior and a king.

Or maybe it was something else. We're not quite sure what kind of false faith that they had. We just know that it was false. And the reason that we know that it's false is because the way Jesus defined what true faith is.

That's really the heart of what this debate actually is all about. Jesus is telling them, If you continue in my word, then you will be my true disciples. If you do not continue in my word, then you will not be my true disciples.

So He's laid out the terms already of what true belief is, and true belief is a belief that continues with Him. Now in this passage, they reject Him about as fast as He can get the words out of His mouth.

Before He finishes His last breath and He's inhaled another one, they're already rejecting Him. They didn't continue with Him. That's the point. That's how we know that they had false faith. Because as soon as they got the opportunity, they were abandoning Him.

This is what they say in verse 33. We are Abraham's descendants, and we have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say that you will become free? Jesus has promised them that if they will continue with Him, they will be His true disciples.

And if they're His true disciples, then He will lead them into true freedom. And because they're not believing in Him, they don't have true freedom. So this is the crux of the argument. They believe with all of their heart that they're already free, and Jesus is saying, no, in fact, you are a slave.

They've got their covenantal carts before their theological horses. They don't understand what true freedom is. They don't understand why they're a slave. They don't understand the covenants. It's like a child.

This example is relevant to me because we just went on vacation. About 15 minutes into a 1 ,000-mile journey, you hear the child say, are we there yet? Like, we're not even out of Merrimack County. No, we're not there yet.

And then another 15 minutes later, you hear the same thing, and then the child doesn't realize the distance between where we are and where we're going. They don't understand that we still have six states, 12 pee breaks, four gas fill-ups, one hotel, a surprise Slurpee machine in Indiana, six fast food meals, and a few arguments to go before we get there.

They have no clue. Well, the Jews didn't either. The Jews had no clue the distance and the gap that existed between them and freedom. They were children of Moses. They were under the Mosaic Law. They didn't have freedom like they thought they did.

There was a chasm between them and the freedom of Abraham that they could not pass. It would be like trying to pogo stick across the Grand Canyon. It's impossible. They had their covenantal carts before their theological horses.

Abrahamic Lineage Is Not True Sonship

Now, what I want us to do today is I want us to examine three things, and it's in light of what we talked about last week. I want us to understand first why they were confused about their covenant status before God or how they were confused about their covenant status before God.

Then I want us to understand how the two covenants, David and Moses, that Jesus had not yet fulfilled were actually holding them captive, and they didn't realize it. And then I want us to see at the end how true freedom comes from Jesus Christ and Christ alone.

So with that, will you turn with me to John 8 as we examine these verses together. They answered him, We are Abraham's descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say you will become free?

Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you. Every time Jesus says truly, truly, it's really true. Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever. The son does not remain forever.

So if the son makes you free, then you will be free indeed. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, in the midst of this debate that you were having with those of false faith, Lord, I pray that we would be able to see what it is that you were teaching.

Lord, I pray that as we examine the underpinnings of this conversation and the covenant theology that's underneath it, Lord, I pray that it would be clear. I pray that we would get a chance to see a deeper glimpse of what your covenant people Israel saw and what they believed and what they held to, and that we would be able to see kind of the whole Bible being held together in a verse like this.

Lord, I pray that we would see how these covenants actually held your people captive. Lord, I pray that we would see how in Christ, in Christ alone, may we have true freedom. Lord, I pray for us as Gentile believers that we would get a glimpse of all that Christ has done in making us free.

That he didn't come on a whim just to save his people. He came intentionally to fulfill specific covenants and promises so that we, his people, could be free. And that means something for why we're saved.

Lord, I pray that we would understand that today. And it's in your name we pray. Amen. Again, before we can get very far along, we need to understand why this debate was actually happening. We need to understand what they were misunderstanding.

And they were misunderstanding the covenants. Now, the first thing I want you to know about that is that there was a certain pride that existed in the first century on being a Jew. If you were a Jew, you had an ethnocentrism about you.

You had a pridefulness about your ethnicity. And it was so much so that you looked down your nose upon other societies and other peoples and other cultures. Like, they looked down upon the Samaritans.

They looked down upon the Gentiles. I've said this before. I think in John 2, there was a sign inside the temple that said if you're a Gentile or Samaritan, you cannot enter beyond this point under the threat of death.

That was not, hey, welcome, we're glad you're here. That was, we don't want you here. And the only reason that you are here is because God said we have to let you be here. So we're just going to fill your area full of stuff so that you don't want to come.

They had an ethnic pride about them because they were descendants of Abraham. That's really the point. Because they were descendants of Abraham, they thought that they were better than all the rest of the world.

But yet the New Testament begins to carve out a theology that being a child of Abraham is not a genetic thing. And it's not a physical thing. Being a child, a true child of Abraham is a spiritual thing.

It's not about your bloodline. It's not about your chromosomes, it's not about your DNA. It's about a spiritual reality that God is working that we will get to see over the course of this message. That begins in Matthew 3.

John the Baptist is speaking. The Pharisees who loved their Abrahamic lineage ran to John. They were wanting to understand things from John. They wanted to know what John's purpose was, why he was there, what he was doing.

They wanted to investigate John. And this is what John says to them, to the Pharisees. He says, bear fruit in keeping with repentance. He's not impressed by them. He says, bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Do not suppose that you can say to yourselves, we have Abraham for our father. For I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children of Abraham. So he's saying that the Abrahamic line and the Abrahamic family is less to do about genetics because God could raise up stones to be children of Abraham.

And what has he done for the church? For those of us who have hearts of stone, he has given us hearts of flesh. He has raised up children of Abraham from stones. It's not about your genetics. It's about your proximity to Christ.

It's about repentance and faith, which is far more important than lineage. In the Old Testament, God says that to obey is better than sacrifice. I desire mercy as opposed to your sacrifices. It was always about a spiritual reality with God, not a physical reality of your bloodline.

Jesus says roughly the same thing. We'll get in this verse next week in verse 39 of chapter 8. They answered and said to him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, if you're Abraham's children, then do the deeds of Abraham.

But as it is, you're seeking to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God. This Abraham did not do. He's saying, you Pharisees are the illegitimate children. We'll see that the Pharisees accused Jesus of being an illegitimate child, which is a dig because they say that Jesus didn't have a reputable mother because she got pregnant as a virgin.

They made a story up that said, yeah, yeah, she got pregnant as a virgin. That's kind of what they said. And this sort of criticism of Jesus pops up a couple times here and there in the Gospels that he's the child from a sinful relationship.

That's what the Pharisees accuse him of. Of course, that's not true. The Pharisees are always twisting things to try to manipulate the situation. When Jesus rose from the dead and there was an empty tomb, they spread a lie and a report about it that the gospel writer says has existed until this day.

The Pharisees are constantly taking what Jesus does and they're lying about it. But the point that Jesus is making is that genetics is less important than obedience. He's saying, if you really were children of Abraham, then you would obey like Abraham obeyed, and you would believe like Abraham believed, and you would walk like Abraham walked.

And as a result, you are not children of Abraham. Paul defines what a real child of Abraham actually is in Galatians 3 .7. He says, therefore, be sure that it is those who are of the faith who are the sons of Abraham.

He's not saying it's those who were born physically in the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. He's saying that it's those who believe who are the children of Abraham. So that if you're here today and you believe in Jesus Christ, you now are children of Abraham.

Again, in verse 29 of chapter 3, if you belong to Christ, then you're Abraham's descendants, heirs according to the promise. Isn't that a breathtaking statement? That if you believe you're children of Abraham, and if you are children of Abraham, then you are heirs of the promises of God that God made to Abraham.

They're yours. That he would make you into a blessed people, a blessed nation, a people who had a great name, and a people who would bless the entire world with the spreading of the gospel. You and I are children of Abraham and heirs of the promises of God, not because of our lineage and not because of our obedience, but because of Christ.

Paul clarifies this in Romans 9. It's not as though the word of God has failed, because a lot of promises were made to Abraham about his family, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.

He's saying that in the history of the Jews, there were some who were genetically Jewish, but who were not spiritually Jewish. If you remember, the word Israel is not an ethnic title at all. Israel was the name given to Jacob when he wrestled with God.

The name Israel means to wrestle with God. So when you and I grab our Bible, when our eyes barely open in the morning, we've got a cup of coffee, and we're trying our best not to spill the coffee on the Bible, because that would be bad.

Maybe that's just me. But when we're wrestling through the text, and when we're studying the word of God, we are doing what Jacob did. You and I are true Israel if we wrestle with God. Not just because we have a bloodline.

There's many men all throughout the lineage of Israel in the Old Testament who abandoned their faith, abandoned God. They weren't true Israel. We are heirs according to the promise. If we're in Christ, we wrestle with God.

And it's not just us. Paul says in Galatians 3 .28, There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ. That means that the definition of Israel in the New Testament has expanded beyond just the Jews.

It has expanded to male, female, Jew, Greek. All who are in Christ Jesus now are a part of the family of Abraham. True Israel according to the promise. The Jews had no category for this though when Jesus was talking to them.

As he's communicating these things to them, they had no idea what he was about. They actually, right in front of him, rejected the fact that he said it was going to be a future freedom. He says that you will become free.

That's future tense. They said, we already are. They rejected the fact that they needed something future to themselves in order to make them free. They rejected the fact that they needed something external to themselves in order to make them free.

They didn't believe that they needed any help in obtaining the reward. They didn't believe that they needed anything, almost like an ancient version of a participation trophy. They get the prize just because they showed up, which is not true.

Jesus offers them future freedom in him, and they reject it based off of their faulty understanding of the covenants. They say to him, we are Abraham's descendant. We've never been enslaved to anyone.

That's ironic. They were a nation born out of slavery. They were a nation most of their time subjugated to another nation. Most of their entire existence was in captivity to someone. It's clear they're not understanding this rightly.

The Covenants of Moses and David Held Israel Captive

For a moment, I want us to briefly go back over what we talked about last week, and I think it's important because we need to understand how covenant works. Last week, we talked about this idea called progressive covenantalism.

I looked this up on Google this week, and there's a book titled that. I don't know if they agree with what I'm saying or not, but don't take what they're saying. I'm saying that this is what I mean by progressive covenantalism.

Progressive covenantalism is that God writes the story of history through progressive covenants. He starts with Adam. He ends with David. Then God fulfills history and draws history to a close, not through human obedience because we could not obey, we could not believe, we could not do the things of God.

He brings history to a close through the obedience of Jesus Christ. That's what the covenants are all about. If you look at the covenants, you can see the entire story of Israel in the Old Testament. And if you look at what Christ is doing, He's fulfilling those covenants in successive order in the New Testament so that the entire Bible is a story of covenants.

We can go through this really quickly. God made a covenant with Adam for his people to be fruitful, multiply, and live with God in a garden, but they sinned. They weren't fruitful. They ate the wrong fruit.

They didn't multiply faithful people. They multiplied sinful people until the whole world was filled with sinners and God destroys the world. And out of that, He saves one family named Noah. He repeats the same promises that He repeated to Adam.

He says, I'm going to bless you and you're to be fruitful and multiply and spread out to the ends of the earth. What does Noah do? Does he obey God and everything goes good and well and the rest of human history is wonderful?

Absolutely not. The Bible tarnishes every single person except for Jesus Christ. Every single person, all of their sins are listed out in a way so that we can understand that humans cannot do what God has called us to do.

It is only Jesus Christ. So like Adam, Noah's a man of the soil. He drinks from the vine. He gets naked and ashamed. His son is cursed. It's the same thing all over again. His ancestors or his descendants, excuse me, I mixed up that word last week, forgive me.

His descendants gather together at this little plain called Babel and they build a mud tower to their own dim glory and God has to come down in order to see it. It's that in spectacular. Now, out of that, God scatters them.

God sends them to the ends of the earth just like they were supposed to be doing in the first place. But this time, instead of just a vertical break between them and God, they have a horizontal break with them and man and humans are struggling under the weight of their own sin.

They are alienated from God, alienated from one another. They speak all of these different languages and it looks like a mess after just two covenants. God gives a third covenant. The third covenant is when he picks one family, the family of Abraham, and he pulls them out and he calls them into his land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Isn't that interesting? It's like God is bringing them out of the death and dust and brokenness and putting them in a garden. That's kind of the point. And he's bringing them into a garden to have continuity with what he did with Adam.

He's bringing them into a garden to make them fruitful and multiply. All of these covenants kind of work together. And Abraham, unlike Adam and Noah, was not required to do anything for this covenant to be successful.

Abraham believed God. It was credited to him as righteousness, and that was it. Everything else is on God. God himself does this beautiful covenant ceremony in Genesis 15 that's really strange and really weird to our modern sensibilities where God shows up as a smoking fire pot that goes between these broken pieces of animal parts.

And as modern readers, we're like, what is going on? It's like some kind of peyote moment or something. I mean, I don't know. It's weird. And yet, in the ancient world, we understand and we realize that when animals are split apart like that, it's an act of judgment.

To walk in between the animal pieces is to show that if I don't fulfill my covenant, I will be judged. And normally, the two partners in the covenant walk through together, but God leaves Abraham in a deep sleep.

That word deep sleep is the same word that came upon Adam when God knocked out Adam and made his wife. So here you have Abraham sleeping while God is doing this covenant ceremony showing that if I fail to bless you and to make you a blessed people and to do all of the promises that I gave to you, then let me be ripped apart and let me be cut apart and torn apart and ripped to shreds.

Abraham has no skin in the game in this covenant until Genesis 17, but that's a different story. Circumcision. After this, this family is supposed to be faithful as they wait on the promises of God. And as they wait on the promises of God, God writes the fourth covenant.

He allows them to move down to Egypt to 70 people. They are fruitful. They multiply. They become millions. And then he rescues them out of slavery, brings them through the parted waters of the Red Sea, brings them to Mount Sinai, and at Mount Sinai, he gives them the fourth covenant, which was the covenant of the law.

And that covenant was to help them live in relationship to a holy God because God was not ready to send his son. As we learned last week, the Abrahamic covenant is all about Jesus and the coming of Jesus.

So God wasn't ready to send Jesus in the Old Testament. So the Israelites had to live in relationship with God for about 1500 years. And how do you live in relationship to a holy God unless you have a holy law that's going to keep you in holy status with him?

So they had sacrifices and they had temples and priests and all of these various things to help keep them in relationship with God, but they did not obey. You see the theme. Four covenants. Three are on human beings and all three times they fail.

They don't even fail after they get to the land of Israel. They fail before. An entire generation's bodies are laid out on the border of Israel because they can't obey. Their leader, Moses, doesn't even get to enter into the promised land because he has an anger problem and he strikes this rock with a stick and God says no.

So the sinfulness of human beings are so deeply rooted in their own psyche that they can't get out of their own way. Things don't get better when they get to the land. The book of Joshua, they're supposed to conquer the Canaanites and if you look at the language of that passage and if you look at the covenantal structure of that passage, it's almost like the people of God are going back into the garden land to cast out the serpent peoples who worship the enemy.

There's a covenantal continuity. It's almost like they're reclaiming the promised land. And yet, they don't. They don't conquer the people they're supposed to conquer. They don't cast out the people they're supposed to cast out.

They end up infected by their sin, worshiping idols. The book of Judges is no different. They don't rule over the land or subdue it. They are ruled by the Philistines. Judges is a dark and awful book for a lot of reasons.

The main thread is sin. By the end of the book, it says that they don't even know their left hand from their right hand. They don't know right from wrong. They are so morally compromised that they're anti-Eden, anti-God.

God's not finished though. We have Ruth and Samuel. And in the very beginning of the book of Samuel, David, the king, is prophesied that there would be a king who God would put over his people and that king was supposed to help his people live according to the law.

The king was supposed to write his own copy of the law. The king was supposed to memorize the law. The king was supposed to praise God for the law. Why? So that he could help the people live according to the law.

And Saul did not do that. David, for most of his life, did that. But David failed egregiously. Solomon, his son, this high point of Jewish history, the temple is built. The presence of God descends down for the people.

Everybody's excited. The nations are streaming to Israel to hear what's happened of this great God and king. By the end of his life, Solomon's bowing down to idols. He's married a couple thousand women and he himself is an idolater.

His son, born in Solomon's late age, saw the idolater dad and not the faithful dad, and he became an idolater just like his dad. The kingdom itself was ripped in half. Northern tribes, southern tribes.

The northern tribes were completely and utterly decimated in the 700s B .C. 586 B .C. The southern tribes were exiled. And they never returned to their former glory. By the time you get to Malachi, the people are so morally confused they don't know up from down.

The book of Malachi ends with a promise of judgment that the sun is going to come. And who can endure the day of his coming? And then the Old Testament closes 400 B .C. with 400 years before Jesus gets there, silent.

There's no word from God after the book of Malachi all the way to the book of Matthew. And if you think about the contrast here, Genesis begins with God speaking. Malachi begins with God being silent.

Genesis begins with God living and dwelling with his people. Malachi begins with his people abandoned. Genesis begins with a garden. Malachi ends with this desert, anti-Eden abandonment because of covenantal unfaithfulness to God.

Every covenant tells the story and pushes the story forward. And the main part of the story is that human beings are unfaithful to God. And had the story ended there, the whole thing would have come crashing down into chaos, which is another anti-Eden theme.

God made the world orderly. Malachi, it's very chaotic. So what is God going to do? He's going to send his son. Five covenants human beings could not themselves fulfill. Jesus Christ, in perfect order, will fulfill them all.

The first thing that the New Testament says is that Jesus comes as king. That's Matthew 1. He comes as king from the line of David, born in the city of David, because he's going to be heaven's true king who's going to fulfill the covenant of David.

He dies on a cross. He's buried in a royal tomb. He rises into heaven sitting on the right hand of God. He's the king that was promised in 2 Samuel 7. So he fulfills that one. Because he's king, he also fulfills the royal law of Moses.

He's the true temple, the true sacrifice, the true priest, the true mediator. He's the true festival and feast. Every part of the law, Jesus Christ fulfills. So that thing that's standing between God's people, that chasm that's standing between God's people in relationship with him and inheriting the blessings of Abraham, Christ fulfills.

He went down into the chasm. On the cross, Jesus fulfilled every aspect of the Mosaic law so that freedom could come to the people of God. That happened in the first century. Right after that, like God chose Abraham and his family, Jesus chooses a church.

And he chooses that church to be a family and a nation. And he sends that family out to be fruitful and multiply, spread out to the ends of the earth. And when that has happened, when all the families of the world have been blessed by the gospel of Jesus Christ, like God destroyed the world in Noah, he'll destroy the world again.

The first time it was for judgment. The next time it will be for purification. And then we, at the end of the Bible, will enter into the garden where we live with God forever. Five covenants of failure in the Old Testament.

Jesus, five covenants of fulfillment in the New Testament. That's the whole Bible. And they didn't understand it. They lived as though they were free right then and there. And they had no idea that the covenant of Moses and the covenant of David was still hanging over their heads.

Jesus says to them, rightly, you are in slavery to sin. Anyone who sins is a slave to sin. Therefore, you are slaves to sin. The reason that Jesus can say that is because they're committing sin. The reason they're committing sin is because sin has been defined in a law, and that law still hangs over their head.

It's a noose around their neck. And they've not experienced the freedom that Christ can offer. So the second point we're going to deal with today is that they're held captive under the law. They're held captive under the covenant of David.

They're held captive under the covenants that they themselves do not understand. First point, they don't understand the covenants. Second point, they're held captive to the covenants. Again, they say, we are Abraham's descendants and have never been enslaved to anyone.

How is it that you say you will become free? This is an ironic statement of epic proportions. Let's just start with Israelite history. In 586 B .C., God sent the armies of Babylon and burned Jerusalem to the ground and carried them away in captivity for 70 years where they lived in Babylon, imprisoned to a foreign empire.

The gold and the artifacts of the temple were stolen. The nation was reduced to rubble. They said they've never been enslaved to anyone. Eventually they return and Persia takes over. Persia conquers Babylon in 559 B .C.

And Persia rules over the Israelites. Now, Persia was a massive empire, but Israel never had a king sitting on the throne. So Israel's not free. They're under the auspices of the Persian Empire. And the Persians allowed them to build a temple, but they didn't allow them to have a king, so they weren't free.

So now this is several hundred years. Persia's conquered by Greece. Anyone heard of Alexander the Great? By the age of 32 years old, Alexander the Great had conquered most of the known world in an act of unbelievable military intelligence.

Then Alexander the Great died. His kingdom was broken up into four different kingdoms. In Judah, they were ruled by this group called the Seleucids. Forgive me if I'm mispronouncing that. This Greek empire lasted all the way until about the 60s B .C., 60 years before Jesus was born.

So now you have about 500 years of captivity right here and there. In the 60s, Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem, transferring Judah out of the rulership of Greece and into the rulership of Rome.

A few years later, Rome became, instead of a republic, it became an imperial empire with Octavius in 27 B .C., becoming the first Roman emperor. And by the time Jesus is born, the first Roman emperor is on the throne, Caesar Augustus.

That's Octavius. So they've been almost 600 years without a king. If you factor into that the 400 years of slavery that they had in Egypt, Israel spent 1 ,000 years in captivity and maybe 200 to 300 years in freedom.

And they said, we've never been enslaved to anyone! It's an impressive statement. The reason underneath all of that, that they were enslaved and in captivity and all of these things, is because they failed to uphold the covenant of David.

The kings were wicked. They sacrificed their own sons in the fire, and God sent the Babylonians to conquer them because they had gone so wicked and so bad that they were irredeemable. They had never been enslaved to anyone except for everyone.

And even that is not the full depth of their slavery. See, Jesus, when he says that they're a slave, he doesn't say that politically you've been a slave, although they had, which adds up to the irony of the statement.

Jesus says that you're enslaved to something greater than geopolitical forces. You're in slavery to sin. Sin is a far more menacing beast than any of the nations that they had ever served. Sin, under the tyranny of Satan himself, is a far worse kingdom to be a part of than the kingdom of Greece and Persia and Babylon and any of those.

They didn't realize not only that the vast majority of their history, they had been in physical slavery because of failure to keep the Davidic covenant. They had also been in spiritual slavery because of failure to keep the Mosaic covenant.

They were responsible ever since the mountain of Sinai for obeying the moral law. The moral law is, I am the Lord your God. Do this. Be holy as I am holy. Live like this because I am holy. And they didn't live like that.

Their entire existence, they failed in the moral law. They were responsible for obeying the ceremonial law, which is this is how you worship God. This is how you come into a relationship with God. And they failed.

At the book of Malachi, they're offering dead, sick, and diseased animals to God because they care so little about God. They were responsible for the civil law, which made them a nation among the other nations, a shining example of justice in a violent world.