Freedom

William Wallace made it all look so straight forward, however, freedom is notoriously difficult to define because it can mean something different in any given situation.  To one person it is the right to freedom of speech, to another the right to move and act without unlawful restraint (even here it depends on who is making the laws), and to another the right to be free of oppression and injustice.  Whichever way we view it, freedom does have the common thread of not being constrained from the ability to move, act, and speak.

And it is liberal democracies, failures not-withstanding, that maintain these possibilities, more than any other political system, except for the practical impossibility of a wise and benevolent dictator.  Most dictators turn into tyrants, because of the corrupting nature of power - their exercise of freedom (Power) becomes the loss of freedom (power) to others.  This should alert us to the fact that we are corruptible and therefore not to be soon trusted with power nor defining freedom.

The exercise of freedom without moral restraint, or plain old civility, is a bunfight – the likes of which we are watching right now in the Western world.  “But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.”  It never ends well.   

It is hardly unimportant therefore for God’s people to understand what sort of freedom are we talking of?  In many instances freedom has become conflated with political freedom, as though the political process in any country defines for us what freedom is.  We may come close to losing our identity as the community of faith if we take political processes as our standard of freedom.  Granted I’d rather live where I do, where the enshrining of freedom (by principle) has been established by law, but equally I would be naïve to suggest this will last without vigilance. 

Western freedom is simply not the same as biblical freedom as both are based on entirely different premises: one on power, consensus and faulty views of humanity, the other on an embodied cruciform lifestyle shown to us by a Saviour God that died in our place so that we could be truly free - free from sin, judgment and condemnation.  Until these are dealt with, we don’t know what freedom is, what being fully human is.  We are still in thrall to powers that diminish and dwarf us.  We mistake freedom as anything but what freedom is.  “For freedom Christ has set us free.”

Freedom is clearly defined for us by Paul when he states, “For you were called to freedom, brothers.  Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.”  This is the point of our freedom – to love and serve others – which at times translates as not expressing our freedom.  Writing to the Corinthians, Paul had to correct their erroneous belief that Christ’s freedom allowed them to do whatever they wished – essentially.  They mistook freedom for license, and liberty from moral and ethical constraints.  Freedom can be intoxicating but Paul was at pains to tell them that some of their choices only further made them the pawns of the very thing Jesus’ death had liberated them from.  

Real freedom has little to do with our place of domicile, our constitutions (French, English or American), or our political processes.  Real freedom is the freedom to love and serve.  Which doesn’t sound much like the conversation the Western world is currently indulging itself in.  Such rancour and invective in the exercise of freedom is no freedom at all.

God’s people are called out as an alternative.

We take our lead from the crucified and resurrected one.

We are set free to love and serve.

Freedom indeed.