2.01.04. Liberty
IV. LIBERTY.
"If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” John 8:36.
REE indeed I Really free! There must, therefore, be a freedom which is imaginary, unreal, delusive. I know not a feature of our fallen world that is more frequently displayed, or more melancholy to look upon, than this. A whole family or a whole nation in bondage is a sad sight; but the measure of its sadness is multiplied tenfold if the cruel conqueror has put out the eyes of the captives, so that they do not see their prison walls, and fondly dream themselves free. Examples of persons who, being enslaved, foolishly imagine themselves free, instead of needing to be discovered and picked out, are strewn on the surface of the world as green grass in summer or as withered leaves in autumn.
Ask the visitor of a mad-house what was the saddest sight he saw; he will immediately describe to you the patient who had contrived to plait a crown out of rags and tinsel, and strutted about with the toy on his head giving orders right and left, as a king, to imaginary fleets and armies; casting all the while stolen and startled glances toward the iron bars of the window, and trembling when the stern look of the keeper met his eye. This man is an object of pity even among his fellow-captives, who rave some degrees less wildly than himself.
You have lain down to sleep, perhaps more wearied than your wont, and have dreamt that, free from the law of gravity, you soared at will in all the upper air. But when you awoke your limbs were stiffer and heavier than heretofore; you could scarcely trail them along the ground.
Flying was a dream; the cold reality scarcely amounted to a walk on the earth; it was only a painful dragging of benumbed limbs. In literary and political circles liberty is plentiful as a profession but scanty as a power. In those departments, freedom and independence are frequently employed as terms of sarcasm when men desire to make sport of the bondage. But the cases which are at once most characteristic and most numerous are those in which a man loudly boasts of his liberty, while vice, like a possessing spirit, rules in his heart and lashes him to diligence in his degrading task.
I need not describe in detail the miserable drudgery of the slaves. The description, like the public exhibition of a cripple’s sores, would be both repulsive and unnecessary. When a drunkard has been tormented, body and soul, by the demon that possesses him — tormented as cruelly as the martyrs in ancient persecutions — the poor victim’s resolution under the compulsion of his keeper is. When I awake I will seek it yet again. Apart from the redemption by Christ and the renewing by the Spirit, the struggles of a sinful race to shake off their bonds are like those of Samson when his locks were shorn and his eyes out, with the Philistines making sport of the giant’s pain. The Jews of that day took it ill that Jesus should propose to make them free. The offer of liberty implied the imputation that they were slaves: this they rejected with disdain. “We are Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man;” and this at a time when the Romans held the province with their legions and made their own will the law. We can see through the flimsy pretexts under which they attempted to cover their pride and poverty; and’ other onlookers may perhaps as easily see through ours. Slaves, in very deed, we all are, held helpless in a tyrant’s grasp, unless and until the Son of God make us free. Our inherited and actual bondage has two sides, and there are two corresponding sides in the liberty wherewith Christ makes us free. The two sides of the spiritual slavery may be designated. Guilt on the conscience, and Rebellion in the will. These are distinct and yet united.
They are wedded into one spirit, and become helpmeets to one another in offending God and destroying man. Guilt unforgiven on the conscience makes impossible a holy obedience in the life. While God’s wrath lies on your soul, your life is not obedience to God’s law. The greater the weight that lies on any object, the more difficult it is to move that object along the surface of the earth. If it is weighed heavily down, it will not move easily forward; if you lift off its load, you draw it easily after you. like the relation between the perpendicular pressure of a weight and the difficulty of horizontal motion is the relation between guilt and rebellion. Sin, and the wrath which it deserves, constitute the dead weight which presses the spirit down; and the spirit so pressed cannot go forward in duty. As in the material department it is the weight pressing sheer down that causes the» difficulty of moving forward, so m the spiritual department it is the conscious want of God’s favour that hinders a human being from obeying God. When his anger is removed from me, I will yield myself a willing instrument of his righteousness. When the Son, by redeeming me from the guilt and the power of sin, has made me free, I am free indeed!
Look to these two sides of the primary bondage and subsequent liberty, — look to them separately and successively, as well as in their actual union.
I. The main element of the bondage consists in guilt and the consequent apprehension of judgment. The book in which the debt is registered lies far above, out of our sight.
Although a man’s account in that book were hopelessly heavy, he might not in point of fact be greatly troubled by it, if there were no counterpart or duplicate of the liabilities transferred to a ledger nearer at hand. The charge against a man is led, by an electric wire, from God’s secret book right into the man’s own bosom; and fiery throbs from the distant judgment-seat are ever and anon generated in his conscience, disturbing his rest and blighting all his joys.
What we call conscience is a mysterious, tenderly susceptible instrument in the midst of a man’s being, bringing the man and keeping him in close and conscious relation to the great white throne and the living God.
Here on earth, at one extremity of the connected system, the needle quivers and beats quickly, significantly, terrifically. The still, small tick of that needle, moved by a touch in the unseen heaven, is more appalling to the man than the thunder over his head or the earthquake under his feet. The pain is in practice deadened more or less by a hardening of the instrument, so that it loses a measure of its susceptibility; but mysterious beatings sometimes thrill through all the searings, and compel the prodigal to realize the presence of the living God, We sometimes speak of distance being destroyed by the telegraph. A sovereign and his ambassador in a distant capital may whisper to each other across seas and continents, as if they were separated only by a curtain drawn across the room. By the communication which is kept up between God’s law and man’s conscience, the distance between heaven and earth is practically done away; and the criminal must rise up and lie down in the presence of his Judge. A man is compelled to eat, and drink, and speak under the eye of the King Eternal, It is natural that the slave, weary of such complete and constant inspection, should cast about for the means of becoming free. To quench this burning in the unclean conscience, all the bloody sacrifices of the heathen were offered. To the same object all the efforts of self-righteousness are directed; they are so many blows dealt in order to sever the connecting rod, so that the anger of the Judge may not be felt even now burning like fire in a sinner’s breast. But these efforts do not avail: “ There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.” But a real liberty is possible; God in his infinite mercy has opened a way by which it may be reached. If the Son make you free, you shall be free indeed. He is able to open the seven-sealed book and to blot out the reckoning that stands against us there. We have an advocate with the Father: the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanseth us from all sin. The Mediator — the Daysman who lays his hand upon both — has placed himself in the line of communication between the Judge and the culprit. When I am in Christ, all the throbbing messages that rise from me to God, or descend from God to me, pass through the heart of Jesus. The frown of justice due to sin is changed into love as it passes through the Mediator, and from him descends on me, no longer a consuming fire, but the light of life. On the other side, my sins, rising up to stir the wrath of the righteous God, are absorbed in the suffering Saviour as they pass, and his righteousness ascends as mine and for me.
It is this that explains the agony in the garden and the cry on the cross. Man’s sin passing up demanding judgment, and God’s answering anger coming down, met in the well-beloved of the Father, and rent him: “ My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Am I free from condemnation? Then with a great price obtained I this freedom. I was not free-born, but redeemed from bondage by the precious blood of Christ.
II. In the department of life and conduct also there is a false freedom wherewith men delude themselves, and there is a real freedom which Christ bestows upon his own. The essence of slavery, in as far as work is concerned, lies in the terror of the master, that sits like a heavy, cold, hard stone on the worker’s heart. After the slave has spurred himself on to duty, and accomplished his task, something still occurs to his memory that he ought to have done; he trembles lest he should be punished for the defect. “ What lack I yet?” is the dreadful question to the worker who is striving with the load of unpardoned sin on his conscience — striving without love and reconciliation to fulfil all the law o£ God. There may be a good deal of work without reconciliation, but there is no liberty in it, and no love. The man is hunted forward in his toil by the lash of a master. Even to prayer the slave runs trembling, driven by the fear lest he be punished for not praying.
It is the heavy weight of sin not forgiven lying on the spirit and pressing it into the dust in dull despair — it is this burden that prevents the man from bounding forward fleetly, gladly on the errands of his Lord. When that load is lifted, the spirit, free to rise, is free also to move onward.
It is when condemnation is taken away that obedience begins.
Take your stance on the margin of the ocean, on the western coast of this island, where the shore is a bold rugged rock, and when a long blue ground-swell is rolling towards the land. I know not any aspect of merely inanimate nature that tends so strongly to make one’s heart sad. I have stood and gazed upon it until I was beguiled into a painfully tender sympathy with a mute struggling captive.
Slowly, meekly, but withal mightily, the sea-wave comes on in long, regular array, and striking with its extended front at all points simultaneously against the pitiless rock, is broken into white fragments and thrown on its back all thrilling and hissing with expiring agony. Sullen and sore the broken remnants of the first rank steal away to the rear, and hide themselves in the capacious bosom of the mother sea. Anon, you perceive another long blue wave gathering its strength at a distance; with gloomy, unhopeful brow, as if warned by the fate of its predecessor, and hurried onward to its own, it rushes forward and delivers another assault against the rocky shore. It shares the fortune of the last. Again, and yet again, the water wearily gathers up its huge bulk, and again strongly but despairingly launches itself upon its prison walls, to be again broken and thrown back in utter discomfiture. You weep for the great helpless prisoner, who cannot weep for himself. Year after year, century after century, era after era, that prisoner toils and strikes upon the walls of his prison, but never once succeeds in clearing the barrier and flowing across the continent free. That mighty creature, with its sublime strength, and dumb, patient, unceasing labour, never succeeds in breaking its bonds — never leaps into liberty. Here you find a picture, such as no artist could ever make, of a sinner, or a worldf ul of sinners in the aggregate, as they lie in their prison, ceaselessly striving for enlargement, but never attaining it. “ The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest.” And can this water never get freedom? Is it doomed to lie weltering for ever in its prison? Cannot the prisoner by any means be ever set free? The captive may be set at liberty; the captive is set at liberty day by day. Above the firmament are waters, as well as in the hollow which constitutes the ocean’s bed.
They are higher up — nearer heaven — as you see, these aerial waters; but being high in heaven, they are therefore free to move across the earth. Nothing conveys a more lively idea of quick, soft, unimpeded motion, than a flying cloud. Here is none of the effort visible even in the flight of birds. Absolutely free they are; and sweetly swiftly do the free run on the errands of their Lord. In this respect there is a sublime contrast between these waters that have been made free and those that are still enslaved — held down by their own dead weight within their prison walls.
It is thus that human spirits advance in fleet, gladsome obedience, when the weight is lifted off, and they are permitted to rise. It is when you are raised up into favour that you can go onward to serve. “ Lord, truly I am thy servant.” That is a great attainment, David; how did you reach it? Hear him give the reason: “ Thou hast loosed my bonds” (Psalms 66:16).
Those who are strangers to the liberty of dear children, often fall into great mistakes in regard to the obedience which true disciples render to their Lord. Here is a man who lives for present pleasure, and lives without God. He is good-hearted, in the ordinary acceptation of that word.
He lays himself out for happiness, and he would like to see all his neighbours happy as well as himself. If he would not suffer much to promote the happiness of others, neither would he spontaneously do anything to injure them. As soon as one source of pleasure is exhausted, he puts his wit on the stretch to invent another. He denies himself nothing that is pleasant to his taste. Be it eating and drinking; be it luxury in things more elevated; be it the midnight dance or play — whatever pleases his palate he tastes in turn. He knows another man, a neighbour in residence or business, who denies himself all these indulgences, and prosecutes some difficult and disagreeable line of benevolence. The free liver looks on that neighbour and studies him, but cannot understand him. If the Christian were a morose and gloomy natured man, he thinks he could explain the reason of his conduct; but his character is precisely the reverse. He is diligent in business, cheerful in company, affectionate and sprightly at home, literary, it may be, or patriotic. With all this he lives strictly as a Christian. He never turns night into day in any species of revelry; he neither reads newspapers nor attends to business on the Lord’s day. He refuses to associate with any who dishonour the name and day and word of God, however profitable the association might seem. The man of the world — called and counted free and easy, although he is neither free nor easy — wonders how his neighbour, being not a morose and gloomy but a cheerful man, can consent to lie under such grievous restraint; how he can deny himself so many liberties, and bind himself so steadily to a round of dull duties.
It is a mistake. This man is not capable of understanding his believing neighbour. His standpoint is low, and his range of vision limited. He counts that liberty which the Christian counts bondage, and that bondage which the Christian counts liberty. The Christian before he was converted entertained the same views; but his world has been turned upside down by the gospel. The disciple of Christ has changed — he has become a new creature; but his neighbour, who is not changed, cannot understand him now. He applies carnal measurement to a spiritual nature, and is out of his reckoning at every point.
It is as if he were told that a certain vast quantity of water has been in a very short space of time removed a distance of a thousand miles over mountains and valleys, from one continent of the earth to another. Forthwith the thought arises of the heavy, sluggish, gurgling mass enclosed within vessels innumerable of vast capacity and strength, and of these being dragged by mechanical power up steep mountain sides and precipitated into the valleys beyond. It is all a mistake. If the water could only have been transported in this manner, it would never have been transported at all. The water in inconceivable quantity was lightened — was set free: being free, it rose into the heavens, and softly sailed away to its destiny.
Thus one who has not entered into peace through the blood of Christ, having no experience of liberty, cannot understand liberty as enjoyed by another. He counts that it must be a dreadful dragging to follow the Christian life.
It would be uphill work for himself, if he should attempt it; and he thinks it must be uphill work for his neighbour too. In reasoning from the capacities and habits of his own physical frame to those of his neighbour’s, he reaches a just conclusion; for in bodily constitution, notwithstanding minor differences, both are essentially the same. But in reasoning by analogy from his own spiritual state to that of his believing neighbour, he errs fatally j for the one is the old man, while the other is the new: the one soul is in bondage; the other has been made free by the Son of Gk)d. The Christian obedience is not the dragging of a heavy weight over the rugged ground by the sheer force of fear; it is the easy, fleet movement of the cloud, after its constituent waters have been set free from earth and raised to heaven. “ Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power.” A ship outward bound has struck on a sunken rock ere she has well cleared out of the harbour. There she lies in the water, a mile from land, with the ocean all clear before her from that spot to her journey’s end; but she moves not. What will make her move? The mechanical resources of our time could bring an enormous accumulation of force to bear upon her, but under all its pressure she will remain stationary. If you increase the dragging power beyond a certain point, you will wrench her asunder limb from limb, but you will not win her forward on her voyage.
No; not this way — not by any such method can the ship be set free to prosecute her voyage. How then? Let the tide rise, and the ship with it: now you may heave off your hawsers and send home your steamers. Hoist the sail, and the ship will herself move away like a bird on the wing.
It is thus that a soul may be set free to bound forward on the path of obedience. Dragging will not do it. A soul cleaving to the dust is like a ship aground, — it cannot go forward until it be lifted up; but when it is lifted up, it will go forward without any violent drawing. Further, the soul cleaving to the dust is lifted, as the ship was, by a secret but mighty attraction in the far-off heaven.
Elevated by a winning from above, it courses over life with freedom. “ I will run in the way of thy commandments, when thou hast enlarged my heart.” But there is no time to be lost. If that ship be not lifted up by the tide to-day, she may be broken to pieces by the waves to-morrow. Yield to the mighty but gentle upward drawing which God’s mercy now exerts upon the world, like the sun-heat winning water from the sea, lest you should be obliged to yield to iihe tempest in which the wicked are driven away in their wickedness.