Freedom
FREEDOM
Our Freedom Complicates God’s Game
John 4:34; 1 Corinthians 16:13; Galatians 2:21
In this freedom of ours lays God’s problem and possibility. Our freedom is a problem to God. Someone has put it this way: “Here is a chessboard, and all the figures on the board, instead of being made of wood, are flesh and blood with wills of their own. The game for God would be simple if the figures would go where God desires them to go. But suppose, when God makes a move in the game against evil, that the figures balk and refuse to move, and instead move on their own, to other positions, without reference to the Player-God. That would complicate the game and mess it up badly.” That has happened, and that is God’s problem.
But our freedom is also God’s possibility. Suppose those figures should learn that failure and mix-ups come through moves on their own and refuse to cooperate with the Player, and should thus be chastened into choosing cooperation with the Player. Then, suppose God and humanity should play the game in cooperation—and win! How much finer that would be than to win against evil with only wooden pawns to play with!
You and I can cooperate with God, can align our wills with God’s will, can make God’s wisdom our own, and in the end can make the victory a joint victory. What a possibility for God and us!
Abundant Living
(Week 3, Wednesday)
Evil Is a Parasite upon the Good
Genesis 18:23-32
We must spend one more day on the self-destructiveness of evil, for many have the idea that goodness is bondage and that evil is freedom. But we know that evil is freedom only to get into trouble with ourselves.
Abundant Living
(Week 50, Wednesday)
The Kingdom of God Is Totalitarian
1 Corinthians 15:24-28
The kingdom of God is a completely totalitarian order, demanding a total obedience in the total life. It was presented to the individual will; it was presented to the collective will: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it” (Matt 21:43). “But,” cries my reader, “we are getting rid of one totalitarianism, and you are introducing us to another, even more thoroughgoing and absolute.” True. But there is this profound difference: When you obey the kingdom of God, you find perfect freedom. When you obey other totalitarianisms, you find perfect bondage, for they are not the way you are made to live. When you obey the kingdom of God, you find perfect self-fulfillment.
The Way
(Week 9, Thursday)
Romans 6:1-6
Consider this passage: “The grace of God . . . schools us to renounce . . . and to live a life of self-mastery” (Titus 2:12 Moffatt). The grace of God schools us! Here free grace puts us to school! And the severest of schools. It disciplines the inmost thought and the outmost act and everything between. You accept the grace of God, and by that very act, you accept self-control—rather, self-control through God-control. You are free to act within God’s control, which is perfect freedom.
The Way
(Week 28, Tuesday)
From Frustration to Fruitfulness
Acts 8:6-8
O God, I thank you that your dominance is my freedom. I’m free to be myself since you have me. I’m grateful, so grateful. Amen.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 6, Tuesday)
Lost through Deliberate Choice
Thessalonians 5:9-10
The prodigal son was “lost” through his own deliberate choices. He decided to leave his father. Why? He was under the illusion that his father’s will was bondage and his own will was freedom. The central illusion in life is this: we think our way is freedom and God’s way is bondage. That is hell’s cleverest twist: “No,” said the serpent to the woman, “you shall not die; God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods” (Gen 3:4-5 Moffat). “Like gods”—free to do as you like! No bondage, no direction from another! Free! But from that day to this that freedom is the freedom to leave paradise, freedom to hide in fear from God and yourself, freedom to tie yourself up in knots, freedom to be a problem to yourself and others. God’s will is our freedom; our will against God’s will is our bondage; and there are no exceptions—none. . . .
God’s will alone is freedom. That is the deepest lesson of life. If you don’t know that lesson, you don’t know how to live.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 16, Wednesday)
The Central Revolt
Luke 15:13-14
I am amazed beyond words that the father acceded to the request [for his son to receive his share of the father’s inheritance] and “divided unto them his living” (Luke 15:12 KJV). Why didn’t he refuse and thus protect the son against himself? This granting of human freedom is a mystery, but was there anything else to be done? If he had refused, the son would be revolting still, would be in the far country even while still in the father’s house. For the far country is a condition before it is a place, just as hell is a condition before it is a place.
God gives us the awful power to ruin ourselves. On what condition? The condition is that God gets into the whole transaction, suffers in Godself the consequences of our wrong choices, makes them God’s own and redeems us through that identification. The cross is the acute point of that identification where the continuous fact comes to light in history.
The decision once made, the son “gathered all together” (v. 13), and went into the far country; he would put outer distance between him and his father as the outer expression of the inner distance. The outer and the inner sooner or later become one. Life becomes all of a piece.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 17, Monday)
The Mastery of Prejudice
2 Kings 5:10-14
“All belongs to you; Paul, Apollos, Cephas, the world, life, death, the present and the future—all belongs to you; and you belong to Christ, and Christ to God” (1 Cor 3:21-23 Moffatt). Never was there such absolute freedom to possess and appropriate. All things belong to you: all great teachers—Paul, Apollos, Cephas; all great facts—the world, life, death; all time—the present and the future; all things belong to you! What was the secret of this freedom of spirit? Strange enough, it was found in a complete narrowness: “you belong to Christ.” Then belonging to him, everything belongs to you! Strange way to make us free, isn’t it? Christ binds us in complete submission to him and then turns us loose! With one point of the compass resting in him, the other point could sweep as wide into truth as it could go! Sure of the center, you are free to appropriate the circumference.
Mastery
(Week 46, Sunday)
Openly and Unhindered
John 15:18-25
The thing Paul lived for was not physical freedom but freedom to preach. If the gospel was free to be uttered, he was free. The end of his life was accomplished. So this tame ending was a triumphant ending. He came through “not somehow but triumphantly.”
Paul had one purpose in life. He utters it in these words:
And now . . . I am going to Jerusalem, bound in the Spirit, not knowing what shall befall me there; except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may accomplish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. (20:22-24 RSV)
Mastery
(Week 48, Tuesday)
Micah 6:6-7—We Try to Restore Fellowship
Michah 6:6-7
This is a universe that is not indifferent to your virtue or your vice. It takes sides. You are free to choose, but you are not free to choose the results or the consequences of your choices. They are in hands not your own. You do not break these laws written into the nature of things; you break yourself on them. And these laws are color-blind, race-blind, and religion-blind. Break them and you get broken.
Christian Maturity
(Week 14, Monday)
“Primary Nature” and “Secondary Nature”
Romans 7:18-20
Though love is the basic urge in us, why do we do unlovely things and land in unlovely messes? We find the answer in the fact that freedom lies in the self. And that self can throw the switch, turning love toward the self and producing a self-centered person, toward the herd and producing a herd-centered person. The choice is always ours.
But the question still arises, why do we make such senseless choices and land ourselves in such senseless miseries? Can freedom of choice account for it all? Is there something within us, innate or acquired, which leans toward evil?
In a quotation by Montagu there is this suggestion:
It is primary, and it also should be sound nature, for human beings to love one another. As it is, primary nature remains striving to love and be loved, while second nature often puts calculated restraints upon such striving and erects barriers deliberately designed to prevent its expression. All this because the true meaning of love has not been understood. (Ashley Montagu, The Meaning of Love [New York: Julian Press, 1953], 18)
Here he makes a distinction between “primary nature” and “second nature.” Primary nature wants to love; second nature often wants to block it because it hasn’t “understood.”
Have we, as a human race, built up a second nature through ages of contact with and the freedom to choose evil? And does this second nature have a bent toward evil? Is there then a conflict within us between primary nature, which is agape love, and second nature, which is perverted love? Religion answers by calling this second nature “original sin.” Note that it doesn’t say “original nature,” but “original sin.” Sin is not nature; it is an alien introduction into nature. God made us in God’s own image, hence good. But we, by our freedom of choice, have built up a second nature. That second nature is really not “nature”; it is an acquired, unnatural imposition on nature. It is the unnatural becoming seemingly natural.
Christian Maturity
(Week 24, Sunday)
Can “Second Nature” Be Wiped Out?
Romans 7:24-25
We are considering whether we can be free from this “second nature,” and then become single-natured, and hence a unified person? The answer is yes! Paul, after describing the two natures in the seventh chapter of Romans, proclaims his freedom in the eighth chapter: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death” (8:2). The “law of sin” in his “flesh” has been canceled, and he is under a new law: “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”
What had been built up—the second nature—had been torn down. The primary nature remained intact, but that primary nature is now controlled by “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” The primary nature is created by God; the second nature is created by humanity. In redemption, the original abides and the imported [or secondary] goes.
Christian Maturity
(Week 24, Tuesday)
With Liberty and Justice for All
Luke 3:5-6
[Someone said]: “It is impossible to enslave a Bible-reading people.” The ideas of freedom, of the dignity of a child of God, of equality before God and therefore before people, are bound to make slavery of any kind impossible. Maybe not today, not tomorrow, but the third day, Yes! “I saw thrones, and [people] sat upon them” (Rev 20:4 KJV); the people will rule, and it doesn’t say which people, but just people!
Christian Maturity
(Week 30, Monday)
We Are Not Independent
Galatians 5:13-14
It is only a question of time when all people, everywhere, will be free, free to determine the course of their own national lives. And I want everyone, everywhere, to be free, since I am free only in the freedoms of all people. I am bound in the bondages of all.
Christian Maturity
(Week 31, Thursday)
Why Did God Create Us Free?
Genesis 1:26-27
We continue our meditations on the cross as the revelation of the heart of reality. I have often wondered why God dared to create us and to create us free. It was a risky business for God and the creatures created. To make us free would mean that God would have to be limited. God would have to step back and allow that free will to operate. God could not coerce it; if so the will would not be free. And the will would have to be free in both directions; it must be free to choose evil as well as good or it would not be free. To be able to choose in one direction only is not freedom. But suppose that free will should go wrong; it would break its own heart and the heart of God too. For God would have to live alongside that straying, rebellious will as love. And it is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sins and sorrows of the loved one and make them its own. If love stays out of the sins and sorrows of the loved one, it is no longer love. But if it gets in, it bleeds. All love has the doom of bleeding upon it as long as there is sin in the loved one.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 14, Tuesday)
God’s Totalitarianism = Freedom; Human Totalitarianism = Bondage
Romans 14:17-19
If we obey totally God’s totalitarianism, we find total freedom. Bound to God, I walk the earth free; low at God’s feet, I stand straight before everything else. This is an essential difference between God’s totalitarianism and ours. If you obey totally human totalitarianism—Fascism, Nazism, Communism—you find total bondage. This is then its final doom, for people are inherently made for freedom and will finally revolt against chains.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 45, Wednesday)
You Can Love and Like a Christ-Centered Self
Matthew 20:25-27
The highest freedom—the freedom to surrender yourself to God, results in the highest freedom—the freedom to know God and yourself and life and everything. You are free indeed, free to live.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 47, Tuesday)