From a Christian point of view, man was created in subjection to his creator. In fact, after He blessed man and woman, the next thing He said was a command (Genesis 1:28). So where does the concept of freedom originate and is it appropriate for a Christian to desire it?
Like so many words in modern vocabulary, freedom means different things to different people. In a Bible dictionary, there are three infrequent Hebrew words for it, hopshi, which means freedom from bondage, dror, which means moving rapidly, and derore, which means spontaneous behavior. Depending on the subject matter, any of these meanings could apply but in this essay, derore is the word. Likewise, in the New Testament, there are seven Greek words that translate to freedom in the sense of remission, relief, release, authority, and liberty. It is the last one, the Greek word eleutheria, that has focus here.
If you asked a person on the street what freedom is, he would say the right to do what he wants within reason. The trailing qualifier would be to exclude acts like murder and drug addiction that society must oppose in order to be stable. Otherwise, modern freedom is the right to do anything that the people in charge don’t oppose, things like abortion, fornication, and telling lies. These are behaviors that the Bible condemns so a Christian should not desire the kind of freedom most people want. By today’s standard, if Christians were in charge, government would be very restrictive and that is why Christ told his followers that the non-believing world would hate them, not for the good they do or the gospel message, but for the evil they oppose.
If you think about it, the perfect reign of the Messiah in the thousand years after Christ returns to earth is a totalitarian government, a repressive rule of absolute and centralized control over subsequent rebellious generations. Yet believers are told it will be wonderful because the one in charge will judge all men correctly. Nobody will be able to kill the unborn, cheat on a spouse, or lie without punitive consequences because nothing they do is hidden from or excused by the one in charge. Having grown up in a world of injustice and ambiguity, we struggle to imagine what life will be like then, or even if we would enjoy it. A day wouldn’t pass without everyone, including believers, being corrected for transgression.
In that atmosphere, it would be tempting to excuse lawlessness in others in exchange for freedom to commit our own secret sin. But that isn’t the way it will work in the millennium and shouldn’t be how we react to lawbreakers now. With Biblical authority behind us, sin is always sin and crime is still crime. Changing these definitions by governments of men will not change their consequences in Christ’s courtroom, it merely delays punishment.
So on the question of the origin of freedom, the obvious answer is that personal liberty to do what seems right to man comes from the mind of man and not from the creator of man. We were created to be in subjection to God’s commands and without that oversight, we make choices that lead to less than wholesome lives and in many cases, ruination.
If you are a believer, remember what your life was like before you put Christ in charge of it, compared to your existence now. In many cases, a clear improvement is obvious but for some, suffering is still the hallmark of their existence. Sometimes, these believers will put themselves in charge of their life, hoping to minimize suffering by claiming God doesn’t exist or care about them. But this decision doesn’t change that they were created to be in subjection to God and without it, their choices will be inferior and potentially harmful.
Of course, we can’t discount the possibility of doing something we think God wants when it really isn’t His will. History is full of believers who did horrible things in the name of Christ. The blame for those actions should rest squarely on them for failing to know the God they serve. God is not the author of evil (I John 1:5) and this attribute is clearly revealed in the Bible as immutable. James 1:17 says his nature is without variation, meaning he cannot change. So when we do wrong, it is because we are exercising a liberty we are better off without.
Secular thought says happiness is found in having freedom to do whatever we want but history has shown the long-term effect of our desire is often to the detriment of someone else. Therefore, in order to have a society where the happiness of all men is optimized it would take Godlike wisdom in its rulers. And contrary to what men say about their abilities, we will never get that with men in charge. That is why, by design, the totalitarian reign of Christ is the bright hope for our future. It won’t be a dictatorship, where every action we take is instructed from on high but rather a society where laws established by God are allowed to run their course. If you commit a crime, there will be swift and unavoidable justice designed to correct your future decisions and behavior. By this process, outward society will improve even if the heart of man doesn’t. For an inward change, man would need to believe the gospel and obey Christ from a heart of thankfulness. And we know that most people will never do this because they have accepted man’s idea that they have a right to freedom. When Abraham Lincoln said in his Emancipation Proclamation that man has a God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the liberty he was referring to was freedom from slavery, not freedom from God’s oversight. God hasn’t given us that right.
