by Fr. Jonathan H. Cholcher
Jesus said to those Jews who believed in Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free…Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” (John 8:31-32, 34-36)
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:2-4)
Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord us, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of Lord. (2 Corinthians 3:17-18)
Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage…For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. (Galatians 5:1, 13)
For this is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men – as free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God. (1 Peter 2:15-16)
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Liberty, or freedom, has never been an absolute concept. Liberty must always be qualified by some definition, for instance, as from the Lord’s words above: “free indeed,” that is, “true freedom.” The Lord’s definition of freedom means liberty from sin and death, freedom to live truly as a child of the eternally abiding God.
In our liberal, western culture, people have come to imagine the concept of freedom to be synonymous with complete independence (lit., dependence on nothing else), or autonomy (lit., a law to oneself). Thus people imagine freedom to be the ability to do and say whatever they want. To quote the words of the Rock song “Tom Sawyer” (by the band Rush, based on the Mark Twain character): “His mind is not for rent to any god or government.”
But even here, freedom is not an absolute. The conventional rejoinder is that you’re free to do and say whatever you want as long as you don’t harm someone else, however one defines “harm.” The anarchists throw off all definition of harm – unless it brings harm to themselves(!) – and justify their violent “freedom of expression” by claiming the harm they do to life and property results in the ultimate good of society by destroying its oppressive norms. Still, all would probably agree that a person living upstream from others should not be free to dump toxic chemicals into the stream polluting everyone simply because that part of the river is his to do with as he pleases.
And no human being is ever free from natural laws like gravity, weather, and aging (suffering and bodily death), a realization bringing us closer to the true, Christian definition of freedom explained by our Lord and His apostles. To this natural conundrum confronting the quest for freedom, non-Christian and atheistic systems inevitably succumb to notions of fate, fortune (luck), and chance, and how to appease and/or control these mysterious forces through philosophy, magic, and worldly religion.
Perhaps the epitome of this thinking is the system of Friedrich Nietzsche who, on the threshold of the twentieth century, proposed two fundamental doctrines: the revaluation of all values, and eternal recurrence. According to the revaluation of all values, the individual is free to determine good and evil for himself, whatever he chooses to do despite any collateral damage to anyone or anything else; this is the right of the superman (Ger., übermensch) who dares such truth. Eternal recurrence refines the old notion of reincarnation in that the superman’s existence is not the fruit of progressively living again until one gets it right (conversely cleansing oneself of whatever is wrong, thus eventually freeing oneself from death). The superman’s life is the only life of the individual repeated eternally according to one’s own choosing. The superman creates his own life which survives death in this eternal cycle. The superman has only to recognize and enact his place within this universe.
We know Jesus Christ to be the “perfect man” (Eph. 4:13). “He Himself likewise shared in the same [flesh and blood], that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Heb. 2:14-15). “And you know that [the Son of God] was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him there is no sin. Whoever abides in Him does not keep on sinning. Whoever keeps on sinning has neither seen Him nor known Him…For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:5-6, 8; literal translation).
Mankind gave up its proper understanding of freedom when the first parents misused their God-given liberty and sought to become a law unto themselves, disobeying God in favor of their own choice to be god (see Gen. 3:1-7). Subsequently, “All flesh corrupted their way on the earth…the mind of man is diligently involved with evil things from his youth” (Gen. 6:12; 8:21).
The process of repentance (Gk., metanoia; lit., change of mind) is a complete re-orientation of life away from sin and its inevitable end in death to the way of God’s commandments in the fulfillment of God’s promised Savior, Jesus Christ. “For as one man’s (Adam’s) disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s (Jesus’) obedience many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19). “’Behold, days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will raise up for David the Righteous Orient (lit., Sunrise; Lk. 1:78), and a King shall reign. He will understand and bring about judgment and righteousness on the earth…This is His name by which the Lord will call him: The Lord Our Righteousness’” (Jer. 23:5, 6); “’Behold, days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…I will surely put my laws into their mind and write them on their hearts. I will be as God to them, and they shall be as My people’” (Jer. 38:31, 33; see 2 Cor. 3:4-6; Heb. 8-10).
“For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father’…For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly awaits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:15, 18-21).
True freedom consists in knowing the Lord and God Jesus Christ and following His commands. Faith in Christ is a living relationship with the God-Man and the one God in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bringing us back into everlasting life freed from bondage to sin and death. Though we still struggle against sin and death, and frequently fall into sins by our own choice, in Christ we are “work(ing) out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12), seeking above all things in mercy and humility to please God rather than ourselves.
