THERE is a great outcry about intellectual and spiritual freedom at the present time, but it is quite apparent that most of those who talk so volubly on the subject have little real understanding of what it means. Truly, “freedom is a noble thing,” provided it be of the right stamp, a privilege more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. But, alas! as in the case of many other excellent commodities, there is the counterfeit as well as the genuine article—the apparent freedom as well as the real, the false as well as the true. We need not hesitate to affirm that it is the false liberty and not the true which our modern men of progress so devotedly worship and laud so loudly before Church and world. No doubt they boldly claim to be the successors of our honoured forefathers who fought for freedom in times past, but the hollowness of this claim is manifest to any discerning reader of the Church’s history. Our godly ancestors contended for a freedom regulated by the precepts of God’s infallible Word, but the present cry is on behalf of a lawless freedom—a licence that would set at defiance the laws both of God and men.
It may be profitable to notice in this connection a remarkable conversation that took place between the great Head of the Church and the Jews in reference to freedom. The Lord Jesus Christ is “the light of the world,” and whoso followeth Him “shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” At His feet we may learn something as to the true nature of intellectual and spiritual freedom.
We are told in the eighth chapter of John that on one occasion, as Jesus taught in the temple, “many believed on him.” As His custom was, He proceeded to instruct still further the new converts in the things of the kingdom of God. Thus the narrative runs: “Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” He impressed upon them two important facts at least—first, that it was by their continuance in the maintenance and observance of His word, they would prove themselves to be His real disciples; and secondly, that it was by the knowledge of “the truth” they would be made spiritually free. Some who professed to believe on Him, but vainly boasted of their liberty, resented His words, and answered, “We be Abraham’s seed and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?” They did not understand what Christ meant; they only thought of their external privileges as the seed of Abraham; and in their foolish haste to vindicate their possession of liberty they told a deliberate and palpable falsehood; they declared they “were never in bondage to any man.” How could they possibly forget that their ancestors had been in bondage to the Egyptians and the Assyrians, and that they themselves were at that very moment under the Roman yoke? But such is the kind of speech that often flows from pride and ignorance; under these unhappy influences men often pour forth lies like a flood. Jesus, however, went on to remind His hearers that there was another kind of bondage besides that of a civil nature, a more terrible kind of which they seemed entirely unconscious—namely, the bondage of sin. “Jesus answered them, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever. But the Son abideth ever.” These Jews lived in the daily practice of sin, and therefore showed they were the servants or slaves of sin. No doubt they were also members in the house of God, the visible Church, but it was not as sons but as servants, not as free children, but as bond slaves—destitute of the spirit of adoption and ruled by the legal spirit of bondage—and so were destined one day to leave the house for ever. “But the Son abideth ever.” Christ was the Son, the elder Brother, the first-born among many brethren, and it was His right and privilege to abide for ever in the house of God. Through Him alone could any obtain the freedom of the house. Thus He adds, “If the Son therefore make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” If they got His freedom, they would be free in reality as well as in name—free in the highest and noblest sense as spiritual sons of the living God.
In the subsequent part of His discourse Jesus brings home to them the unpalatable truth that while they were the natural seed of Abraham, they were not his spiritual seed, otherwise they would do his works, and would not seek to kill a man who had told them the truth which He had heard of God; “this did not Abraham.” Christ asserts that they had another “father” whose deeds they did, and this parent at once they claimed to be God, “We have one Father, even God;” but He told them plainly that, if God were their Father, they would love Him who had come forth from God, while the fact remained that they were of an entirely different descent. In words of fire He flashed the light of truth upon their sinful condition; “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe not.” With all their profession and privileges, with all their boasted freedom, they were still the servants of the devil and the rejecters of the truth—in a word, wrapped up in the darkness of intellectual and spiritual bondage.
Let us observe several points in the foregoing discourse of Christ’s that may be fitly applied to present-day circumstances.
1. We note that men may be bound with the chains of the direst bondage, and yet boast of the greatest liberty.
Such was the case with the Jews in the time of Christ, and such is the case with many professors of religion at the present day. Men, who are bound hand and foot with the chains of unrighteousness, proclaim themselves the apostles of spiritual liberty. Never delivered from the thraldom of Satan or made subjects of a new birth, they yet imagine themselves freemen in the Lord. Sin has blinded the eyes and hardened the heart, and no amount of native intellect or acquired learning can break the bands. There is a light that is darkness and a freedom that is bondage.
2. These persons who boast of liberty, while yet in thraldom, are generally the captives of error in doctrine as well as in life.
The Jews, whom Christ condemns, were such; they had unsound views of man’s relation to God. For example, they practically denied their total depravity by nature. This is seen in the fact that they regarded themselves as enjoying spiritual liberty when they were under the dominion of lust and of Satan, and possessed nothing spiritually good in heart or life. Further, they asserted the erroneous opinion of the universal fatherhood of God. We daresay the scope of their ideas on this subject was confined to the Jewish people, the people of Church privilege. But now when the gospel is extended to the whole world, it transpires that errorists on a similar principle assert the fatherhood of God as having respect to every creature. Some hold the most dangerous view that because God is the creator of all, He is the Father of all in the highest sense. Jesus condemned the notion of the Jews out and out, and His words also overthrow all similar errors. He makes it clear that they only who love Him—the Son who came forth from God—are the persons to whom God stands in the intimate relation of Father, and who are manifestly his children. God is certainly spoken of as “the Father of Spirits” in His capacity as Creator, but He is not the Father of all men in a way of covenant and saving relationship. In this most important sense He is only the Father of those who are in Christ Jesus. “As many as received him (that is, Christ) to them gave he power (or right) to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name, which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John i. 12, 13).
3. Observe the true nature of intellectual and spiritual freedom.
Intellectual freedom in spiritual things is just a branch of that divine freedom which the Son of God confers upon the children of men. It must always be kept in mind as a prior consideration that sin has darkened and enslaved the understanding as well as the other faculties of the human soul. The intellect is naturally in bondage to error as well as the heart to sin. Correct views of God and spiritual realities, if now possessed by many natural men, did not emanate from the unrenewed mind, but from the heavenly Fountain of light. Man’s thoughts by nature are vanity, and it is only when he receives divine light in his understanding and begins to think in accordance with the mind of God as revealed in His Word that he enters upon a new era of intellectual liberty. Intellectual freedom, then, is deliverance from mental darkness and error, and ability to think right thoughts, thoughts of truth, the thoughts of God. Spiritual freedom in general is freedom from the bondage of sin and Satan, accompanied with ability to delight in God and to do His will. The understanding is enlightened in the knowledge of sin and Christ and salvation, the conscience is cleansed from the burden of guilt and enjoys peace with God, the will is renewed and brought into harmony with the divine will, and the affections are sanctified and elevated and set upon things above where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. The soul is thus translated from death to life, from darkness to light, from the kingdom of Satan to the kingdom of God’s dear Son; it is freed from the spirit of bondage to fear, and breathes the spirit of adoption crying Abba Father. Let us take special notice of the fact that this is not a lawless freedom. Though believers are delivered from the law as a covenant of works, they are under the law as a rule of life. They receive the law—the whole preceptive will of God, including the ten commandments—from the hands of Christ as Mediator, and are moved by regard for Him, who loved righteousness and hated iniquity even unto death, to keep all His commandments. They are “not without law to God, but under law to Christ.” They are free, and yet under obligation not to use their liberty as a cloak of maliciousness or evil doing, but as the servants of God. They are free to cast off the tyranny of the devil and the unlawful authority of men, but not free to renounce the government of Christ or to discard any part of His revealed will. Free only are they to do His will from the heart, and to run in the way of His commandments with delight. Lawless liberty is the atmosphere in which the hosts of darkness delight, and is rebellion against the throne of God and the Lamb.
4. Let us observe how this freedom is obtained.
It is by the knowledge of “the truth.” “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The truth is no uncertain quantity that varies according to the opinions of men from age to age. It is the infallible and unchanging word of God that perfectly corresponds to the fact of reality in whatever sphere it touches. It is His Word concerning all these matters that He has been pleased to speak of to the children of men, matters that pertain to their good and His glory. This is “the truth” that can be absolutely relied upon, and made a foundation of faith and hope for eternity. It is by the knowledge of it that men are made intellectually and spiritually free.
As far as intellectual liberty is concerned, it is the incontrovertible testimony of past history as well as of present observation that it is those nations where the gospel of Christ has been most richly proclaimed, and where the Bible has taken the deepest root, that have been most distinguished for intellectual vigour and fruitfulness. Christianity has been the foster mother of education and industry, the happy promoter of progress in every noble field of thought and action. The nations of antiquity, though distinguished at certain early periods for men of outstanding genius and mental ability—broken relics of man’s primeval glory—yet they contained within them all the seeds of intellectual as well as moral decay, with no inherent power of recuperation, no perennial spring of light and liberty. Thus some of them lost their original greatness, while others vanished from the stage of time. It was the proclamation far and wide through the Gentile nations of the blessed saving truths of God’s Word—truths many of which are derided in this degenerate age—that these peoples were rescued from the stupor of mental as well as moral degradation. “The truth” has proved a mighty quickener of all the powers of the human understanding wherever it has come. Its advent in our own country was to us the beginning of days from an intellectual as well as a spiritual point of view.
The chief glory, however, of the Christian religion is that it is the emancipator of the soul from the bondage of sin and Satan. This it accomplishes through the communication of the knowledge of “the truth as it is in Jesus.” Let it not be forgotten that even “the knowledge of sin” is derived from the light of this truth. No fallen creature naturally discerns the true character of the sin which is his master or realises its guilt and consequences. Where sin reigns, there darkness reigns. It is only the light of heaven shining through the windows of divine truth that can show men where they stand as sinners in the presence of a holy God. For the knowledge of our guilt and danger, then, we are indebted to that truth which the Son of God by the Spirit employs in converting the soul. The truth, however, which of His free mercy He has given for the salvation of sinners is gloriously comprehensive; it not only unveils before the astonished eyes of the awakened soul the city of destruction in which he lives, but it opens up to him the wondrous way of escape and salvation through Jesus Christ, and under the quickening influences of the same blessed Spirit of Christ, the soul is enabled to see the infinite excellency of this way of deliverance from eternal bondage and misery, and to embrace it and run in it with delight. The Son of God makes free by the truth.
We also point out that not only is spiritual freedom communicated to the individual soul by “the truth,” but also to the general body of men who profess to be called out into the liberty of Christ’s gospel, commonly named the Church. The Church’s freedom only stands in and by “the truth.” Let the truth of God be departed from, and the Church’s freedom is lost. If professing Churches give up the fundamental doctrines of the faith of God’s elect, no matter though in the supposed interests of boasted light and freedom, they cease to be free, and they pass into the most real bondage, none the less real that it is unrecognised and unfelt.
5. It appears to us that what many men and Churches want nowadays is freedom from the truth and not freedom in the truth, freedom from all subjection to the authority of God’s Word, freedom, in fact, to worship and serve the idol self, whether represented in the opinion of the individual member of the Church, or in the collective vote of the General Assembly.
The ministers of one large religious body (the United Free) at the present moment, like the Ephesians of old in regard to their great goddess Diana, are shouting all day long with one accord, “Great is freedom! great is freedom!” little realising the actual bondage to error and corruption in which they wallow. They have cast off the Confession of Faith as an antiquated symbol; they have accepted the erroneous views of Arminianism, which have done much to poison and destroy humanity; they have renounced the Calvinistic system of truth, which is clearly founded upon and agreeable to God’s Word, and which, by the divine blessing, shook and reformed the world; while to crown their apostacy from the true freedom of the gospel, they have given an unholy licence to their professors and other teachers to set aside the authority of the Son of God in the matter of the Holy Scriptures, and to treat in a blasphemous manner considerable portions of the sacred volume as mythical stories and unreliable traditions. And yet the apostles of this diabolical liberty have the effrontery to claim that they obey the will of Christ, and are subject to “mind of Christ.” How terrible must be the power of the prince of darkness where such strong delusion holds sway! Is not the renunciation of God’s truth and the acceptance of the devil’s lie the very beginning of eternal slavery? May the Lord in infinite mercy send forth His light and truth in these days of blasphemy and rebuke, days also not without tokens of Christ’s reigning power, and may He rescue many deluded souls from destruction, and revive and comfort His true and faithful people, that both together may sing a new song to the Rock of their salvation!
Faith is in some respect an easy thing. Is not that easy, a fte which, if a man look with his heart, he hath it.—W. Guthrie.