Everyone likes the concept of liberty, but the seeming hectic nature of life and the pressures associated with mere existence and survival can make it seem as though it is an elusive quality.
The truth is that no one will find true liberty without a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Thankfully, though, there is a place where liberty does have the ascendancy, and all we have to do is find it.
Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
2 Corinthians 317
The context here is the difference between the Old Testament and the New. Paul is reminding us that the glory of the Old Covenant was great, but that of the New Covenant is greater.
Removing the veil
The Old Covenant, the agreement between God and Israel, was delivered to Moses to introduce to God’s chosen people. When he came down from Mount Sinai where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, the basis of the Law of Moses, his face shone with the glory of God so brightly that Israel begged him to put a veil over his face.
The reason for this was their sin being exposed by the very presence of God reflected from Moses’ countenance. It shone on their waywardness and they were naked and exposed before him, and of course before God.
The intensity of the New Testament, however, is even greater. The veil is removed and we have been gifted with the very Spirit of God.
The new birth has given us permanent access to the presence of God and we will not be wiped out by His power because He has poured out His grace and favour and deemed us not guilty in His sight.
We have been made free from sin. That is the liberty of the Spirit that has been granted to us, that is, those who accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour.
The Spirit of the Lord has come and made His abode with us. He is with us, and in us, and upon us when we are born again and baptised with His Spirit.
All shame and guilt has been removed from our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. We have been made sons and daughters of righteousness in His sight. We are overcomers, more than conquerors, victorious over sin and death through the blood of Jesus.
Standing in liberty
You see, before we were saved we were all slaves to sin. We sinned because it was in our nature to do so. Sin is falling short of God’s high standard of love. We may have loved in a natural way, but we fell short of the true agape love that comes only from a relationship with Almighty God.
That level of love comes through the Holy Spirit when He comes to live with us and lead us and empower us. God is love. His Spirit is love. He brings true love into our lives.
He anoints us to become all God wants us to be.
Paul warns us, though, to stand in this liberty, and not be led away from the freedom won for us by Jesus.
Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage.
Galatians 5:1
That yoke of bondage is a return to the Old Covenant which we could never aspire to because of the old sin nature. It brings us back to that veil that hid the glory of God from the sinful world.
We are told to put on the new man which is fashioned after Christ, by putting off the old which was a slave to sin.
The truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.
Ephesians 4:20b-24
We are called the ‘children of the free’, and the ‘children of promise.’ The free is the New Covenant written in Christ’s blood. He was sent to release the captives, that is, those who were slaves to sin and called the ‘children of disobedience.’
Now we live by the perfect law of liberty. We are led by the Spirit and trained by the Word.
But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.
James 1:22-25
That law of liberty is written for us in the New Testament. The Old Testament is good for types and examples and to give context to the New, but we live in the glory of the New, not the Old.
The law of liberty is God’s law of love, the two commandments to love God with all our being and to love our neighbour as ourself. The law of liberty is the Word of God through the love of God by the Spirit of God.
Earthly freedom is not were we will find true liberty. It is in Jesus, first of all, and in His Spirit, and discovered through His Word, in study, in practice and in love.
