Jesus has just spoken of a bondage which can only be alleviated by gaining knowledge of the truth. This is obviously a spiritual and not a physical bondage, and yet the Jews completely miss His point. Characteristically, their boast is in their relationship with Abraham. This carried with it the accepted benefits that “All Israel are the children of Kings” and that for “the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not even Solomon’s feast could be too good for them.” (qt’d in Life and Times…, by Edersheim, II, 172) They were dependent upon their physical descent, which does not greatly impress God. (Mat 3:9) Do we ever let our salvation and our relationship with God rest on anything besides His grace?

Mat 3:9  And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.

The Jews highly valued their freedom and for Jesus to regard them as slaves was an insult. Josephus records this attitude when he was speaking of the followers of Judas the Galilean who “have an inviolable attachment to liberty; and they say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord.” (Antiquities 18, 1, 6) The Jews boastingly reply to Jesus that they have never been in bondage, but their memory is very short, indeed. They forget that they had worn the yoke of slavery to their neighbors, the Moabites, Ammonites, and Philistines, until God had raised a series of judges to briefly deliver them until their next term of slavery. They also forget that they were conquered and ruled by Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Alexander, the Ptolemies, and the Syrian (Seleucid) kings, and that they were even at that present time in servitude to Rome. But, above this, they totally miss the point of Jesus that even if they had been free from these oppressors, they had never been free from the iron rule of sin.

In reference to this Ryle comments that “The power of self-deception in unconverted man is infinite” and Morris states that “a proud assertion of self-sufficiency is itself evidence of the bondage of which He speaks.” (457)