Freedom. As Americans, we don’t just value freedom, we practi-cally worship it. We celebrate it, we sing anthems to it, and we feel genu-ine sorrow for people who don’t have it. People write, fight, bleed, and die for it. We get nervous when it is threatened, whether by foreign or domestic enemies. The U.S. Constitution, one of the greatest documents in history, is great because of how it asserts and delineates our freedom.
Speaking of the Constitution, John Adams wrote that it was “…made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” A later iteration of the same essential truth is “you cannot legislate morality.” No matter how good, or even how Godly, the basis for government or laws are, government and laws cannot make people good.
And in a society that celebrates immorality and is increasingly irre-ligious, the very concept of freedom becomes a recipe for disaster. Why? Because the freedom that so many celebrate today is not the idea of es-caping the bondage of England, but of individual liberty. We have elevated that to the highest ideal in the land, and now consider our autonomy, our self-determination, our INDEPENDENCE, to be the fullest expression of freedom.
Here’s the thing, though. That’s not the kind of freedom the Bi-ble promises or celebrates. What we call autonomy, the Bible calls sin. The book of Judges tells, among other things, about the deterioration of order and morality in Israel in the first few centuries after the death of Joshua. It ends with this, in chapter 21, verse 25: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
That word “wait” is best understood as “serve; attend to”; think of someone who “waits” tables, and serves customers. It is as we attend to the things of God that we will be strengthened and energized for what He’s calling us to do.
More famously, Isaiah puts it this way: “All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way… . “(53:6). The freedom that God has given us is NOT the freedom to do as we please. Free will is something we already had as sinners, yet we were in fact slaves to sin. Our bondage to sin is what prevented us from serving, loving, and enjoying God. God, in His infinite love, purchased us, like slaves at auction, at the price of the blood of His son, to free us from that. Not so we could be independent, but so that we could, in faith, be dependent on Him. “In those days there was no king in Israel…” but there IS a King over those of us who are saved. We are not freed from sin to sin all the more, we are freed from sin to walk in the light that was unavailable to us as sinners. Freed FROM something and freed TO something.
So while we, as Americans, celebrate our Independence Day, let us, as Christians, even more celebrate the awesome privilege of being part of the royal household of the King of Creation.
