What now is “the truth” that can bring freedom from enslavement to sin? Jesus identified it in his next words: “If the Son sets you free, you will be actually free.” (John 8:36) That freedom-giving truth was regarding “the Son,” Jesus himself, the only-begotten Son of the God who is the source of all freedom. (2 Cor. 3:17)

How can Jesus Christ as “the Son” set people free from sin? The ‘shadows’ of the Mosaic law included sin-atoning sacrifices. (Lev. 4:20, 26) Concerning the reality that those sacrifices foreshadowed, the apostle John writes: “He [God] loved us and sent forth his Son as a propitiatory sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:10) Jesus could offer his human life as a sin-atoning sacrifice because he was perfect, sinless, and a Son of God. Since sin entered the world by the disobedience of one perfect man, it could be removed by another perfect man who pursued a course of full obedience to God, his Father. The apostle Paul writes:

“If by one man’s trespass many died, the undeserved kindness of God and his free gift with the undeserved kindness by the one man Jesus Christ abounded much more to many.” (Rom. 5:15) “So, then, as through one trespass [that of Adam] the result to men of all sorts was condemnation, likewise also through one act of justification [by Jesus Christ] the result to men of all sorts is a declaring of them righteous for life. For just as through the disobedience of the one man many were constituted sinners, likewise also through the obedience of the one person many will be constituted righteous.”—Rom. 5:18, 19.