Liberty – The Word Worker

Outside the Boundaries

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When Paul wrote to the Christians in the city of Rome, they were beginning to fracture as a group from the pressures of human diversity. As capital of the empire, Rome was a cultural conglomerate. Trade and politics brought representatives from every conceivable background into close proximity, and the call of Christ left no group out. As usual with humans, most found reconciling their cultural heritage with spiritual existence in Christ confusing. As a result, each group brought a different set of traditions, different religious customs, different systems of laws that they expected to reign supreme, and the groups squabbled constantly about whose expectations best pleased God.

The Christians who came from a Jewish background particularly struggled to rise above it. For millenia they had been held up as the nation that represented God, the only nation whose entire political and social structure had been instituted directly by God. Despite recognizing Jesus as the promised Messiah, despite understanding that all nations were now welcomed into the kingdom, many were convinced that the only path into the kingdom was through continuing rigid observance of Sinai law and legal traditions that time had built upon it.

Paul wrote an entire letter explaining the fallacy of this thinking to an increasingly divided church. He reminded these people surrounded by lawmaking on a daily basis that laws had limits. Laws governing physical behaviors only exist within specific physical boundaries. For example, marriage is a legally binding contract between two people, but when one or the other dies, the contract ends since the dead person can no longer fulfill his or her responsibilities. By the same token, failure to behave within the boundaries of a physical system comes with clearly defined consequences, the greatest being forfeiture of life as the price for treason.

The Sinai Law had been no exception, had even exceeded all other systems in its specificity and in the weight placed upon infraction. Other systems were instituted by humans with human enforcers; the Sinai Law was instituted by God Himself and enforced directly by His hand. Its design, as Paul reminded the Romans, was to emphasize how deeply enslaved to sin humanity truly is, how treasonous to our Creator we behave on a daily basis. The price for such treason had already been demonstrated by an incalculable flood that claimed the lives of an entire earth full of people and reshaped an entire world. And even that was not a great enough consequence, as mankind habitually repeated the same treason.

Jesus, God in the frame of humanity, laid His own head under the executioners blade having committed no treason against Himself. His incomprehensible purity canceled the price for our treason, but only if we recognize it. With no more price, no more lawful consequence, the system of law became obsolete, unenforced by the Creator and unenforceable by humans. While the physical world remains, humans will continue to shuffle boundaries and systems devised by ourselves for the purpose of governing our physical existence. These are necessary for those who cannot see beyond the physical existence and backed by God in so far as they are founded in His character. However, they are still prisons that enslave us to our basest desires.

God’s prescribed system, its purpose extinct after the execution of its consequences, ceased to exist except as a memorial of His character. With the ultimate price paid, we have the opportunity to plead guilty without fear of punishment. Jesus stands holding the prison doors open from the outside. Our minds have to step outside with Him, outside of the need for physical boundaries and into a character not our own. We are changed, guilt and the reason for it left behind. We see ourselves and all humans as He sees us, so limited in our capacity that we can never hope for perfection, but loved so deeply that childlike adoration and imitation are more than enough for Him. The shackles of fear and insecurity that enslave us to our inadequacy disintegrate, and we are embraced as long-lost children.

No Limits

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When people ask me what grades my children are in, I have to stop and think where they would probably be assigned in the public school system based on their age, because we don’t level our homeschool in that way. Homeschooling multiple children of varying ages more strongly resembles the one room schoolhouses of 150 years ago than any modern classroom. Learning occurs based on developmental readiness rather than on arbitrary divisions.

We also don’t really divide our education into disconnected subjects. Mathematics tends to be set apart for the moment because numbers have never been my forte, and needing help means we need some sort of curriculum. However, the principles of logic, reason, and spacial relationships naturally form the foundation for learning everything else. And without the enforcement of artificial boxes, even the smallest question can lead to a full educational experience.

For example, my ten year old chose a project about games played during the 1940s from an available suggestion list. I had him write down a handful of questions he wanted to answer on the topic, starting with the obvious “what” question. Before I knew it, he had chased the game of hopscotch back to the Roman empire, learned how to build an early version of pinball from scraps, and followed the game of chess to ancient China.

Because there are no subject divisions or levels to pass, there are no tests. Without age-assigned levels, there are no time limits, so there is no need for scored work. With enough time to practice a skill or explore a concept, mastery or at least comprehension can be reached, therefore failure is never ultimate. Without the randomized sets of skills and concepts assigned to each level, education becomes about the process of learning rather than about deadlines. The mind is trained to look and to think, to process new information and produce with it in whatever context occurs. And what is produced is much more practical than the ability to recite information; it is conversation, play, invention, business, art, architecture, medicine, and so much more.

Without grades, without subjects, without tests or scores, there is no need for carefully controlled classrooms. Discipline becomes about character rather than classroom management. The world expands outside of four walls as far as feet and imagination can carry us, and every experience is food for the mind. There are no divisions. There are no limits.

In Spirit and Truth

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The woman of Sychar belonged to a people with a cobbled together heritage. The poorest, least useful of the Israelite people were left in the war ravaged land to fend for themselves and eke out what existence they could along with floods of foreigners displaced from their rightful homes by their mutual conquerors. Never faithful to the Sinai covenant in independence, in captivity these castaways blended what little they remembered and treasured with bits and pieces of the many religions brought to the region by foreigners. Mt. Gerizim, where Jacob’s Well had been dug, became the center of their corrupted but unfailing worship to a God they never knew due to a faded memory of blessings pronounced there and a crumbling altar built by Moses.

The Jews in the Roman region of Palestine were a people of enduring heritage, a nation that had lost their way more often than not but that had retained overall allegiance to the letter of the Sinai covenant. They were a people divided into sects that squabbled over legalities, followed religious rites to the smallest detail, but treated the neediest of their people like scum and used God’s house as a marketplace for the sake of personal convenience. They abhorred and ostracized the corrupted remnants of Israel in the center of the region because that remnant had impure blood and rejected the temple, rather than seeking to redeem them.

When the woman of Sychar met Jesus at Jacob’s Well and questioned Him about the appropriate place of worship, she expected Him to say Jerusalem and harangue her as any “good” Jew would have done. Jesus had a far different answer. Instead, He told her that the time would come when none of the earthly trappings of religion would matter any longer. No longer would there be legally prescribed rituals, God-blessed temples, historical altars, ordained priesthoods, or blood sacrifice. Instead, those who KNEW God and gave their whole hearts over to Him would spend their lives in soul-sourced worship to Him alone. In other words, they would worship in spirit and in truth.

The woman, as ignorant as she was of God, recognized the fulfillment of prophecy when she saw it, and immediately accepted the Messiah and His words. Immediately she sought to know Him and bring others to know Him, and her focus on physical traditions and religious laws vanished. Unfortunately, it was a conversation Jesus, and the apostles and teachers after Him, would have to repeat many times.

Despite having two thousand years to sit with their message and reflect on it, we seem to have stopped short of the transformation seen in the woman of Sychar. Those who claim the name of Christ divide into sects based solely upon legalities in a system no longer defined by laws. Despite abundant scripture and evidence that God created everything about humanity for the express purpose of glorifying Him, each sect insists with great force that worship can only happen in specific places using specific rituals led by specific types of people. Perhaps one group requires great temples, special robes, and prescribed prayers. Perhaps another insists that only the human voice can be used to worship, that worship can only happen in an assigned building but that said building has to be as plain as possible, and that proper reverence excludes any expression of human emotion or any physical comfort. Both approaches, and any approach that seeks to set boxes around worship, reject the words of Jesus Himself.

Like both the corrupted remnant of Israel and the Jewish people, we do not know God. We have replaced Him with our own ideas and preferences and selfishly called those by His name. We cannot truly worship someone that we do not know, no matter how sincerely we may try. If we focus on physical trappings of religion our spirit, our heart, is excluded. Neither the Jews who revered themselves nor the corrupted remnant who lacked information had it right. Neither were prepared for the heart and truth that Jesus revealed through his human life, brutal death, and impossible resurrection. We have had two thousand years of reflection upon their failures. It’s time to accept the truth of freedom in Christ and pour our whole hearts into a life of unending, unselfish worship to our Lord.

Debtor’s Prison

Galatians 3:21–26 (CSB): “Is the law therefore contrary to God’s promises? Absolutely not! For if the law had been granted with the ability to give life, then righteousness would certainly be on the basis of the law. But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin’s power, so that the promise might be given on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ to those who believe. Before this faith came, we were confined under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith was revealed. The law, then, was our guardian until Christ, so that we could be justified by faith. But since that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for through faith you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus.”

In past centuries, those who found themselves unable to pay money owed were confined in debtor’s prison. This usually meant a life sentence of poverty and humiliation. There was menial work available in the prison, but it paid a pittance, and inmates were required to pay rent and necessities for themselves. Unless family on the outside was able to work for higher wages, or someone took pity and paid off the debt for them, they died in prison more deeply in debt than before.

The laws that required people to pay their debts were not bad laws. They were necessary to show right versus wrong, and to uphold right behavior. The problem lay with a society that could not live up to the standards upon which the laws were built.

Similarly, God’s laws given to the Israelite nation on Mt. Sinai were perfect because they codified the character of God. They showed God’s people the difference in good and evil, something they had lost sight of surrounded by idolatrous nations. However, because laws by their very nature focus on consequences for violations, they tend to be negative in nature, holding our attention on what we should not do rather than on how we should live.

Physical nations create systems of laws by which we earn reward or punishment. As citizens of a nation we are justified, or declared lawful, by how obedient we are to that country’s system of laws. However, man’s laws are as flawed and changeable as man himself. God’s laws are built on the unchangeable standard of His own character, a perfect standard that imperfect humanity cannot meet. The Israelites could not “pay what was owed” and were therefore imprisoned for life as debtors under the laws.

Then Christ came, living the perfect life according to the law because He was the law. He paid the price that humanity could not, showing once and for all that only He could declare us lawful. No longer imprisoned by laws that highlight our sin, we are freed by His loving grace to live as His mirrors. No longer are we trapped by human weakness that keeps us imperfect. We no longer need laws to show us how or why to avoid evil, because Good made Himself a beacon that cannot be missed. God’s debtor’s prison is abolished forever, no debt remains to be paid.

Some of the unfortunate souls who landed in debtor’s prison did so due to failure of honest efforts to live lawfully, and did work very hard to pay what little they could. They lived in hope that despite everything they would one day be free. Some of those who lived under the Israelite laws tried with all their might to obey, and their failures made them hold to the hope of mercy all the more faithfully. Others under both systems decided there was no hope, or sought hope from sources that only deepened their imprisonment. Some who were rescued failed to learn from the mercy given, throwing it away to re-imprison themselves. Many today fail to recognize that Hope has become Reality, and bind themselves again into debt that will never be paid with twisted words of fear and control. Relatively few grasp freedom with both hands and work with the grateful confidence of the saved to prove that the prison doors are wide open and the only force keeping anyone inside is their own choice.

What is Liberty?

For those of us who are citizens of the United States of America, this weekend marks the celebration of our ancestors’ declaration of liberty from political, economic, and social oppression. The centuries following that declaration have brought many debates over and changes to how we as humans apply the principles upon which that declaration was founded. Because as humans we are vulnerable to Satan’s manipulation of good things, we don’t always get it right, but our mistakes do not make the principles false. Scripture is full of the concept of liberty, taught to humans by the God who created them in His image. True liberty is founded upon our identity as the offspring of the perfect Creator, given life by His own breath. It is freedom to embrace that core identity in its entirety, to live the image of God in a world whose will is broken by the abuses of Satan. It transcends all human cultures, politics, social structures, economies, and desires. It is the inescapable and unquenchable result of faith, and leaves its unmistakeable mark on the behavior of those who enjoy it. Let’s make sure our definition of liberty matches that of the one who IS Liberty.

Isaiah 61:1 The spirit of the Lord God is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners;…

Romans 8:20-21 For the creation was subjected to futility – not willingly, but because of him who subjected it – in the hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children.

2 Corinthians 3:17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

Galatians 2:4-5 This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus in order to enslave us. But we did not give up and submit to these people for even a moment, so that the truth of the gospel would be preserved for you.

Galatians 5:1, 13-23 For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery… For you were called to be free, brothers and sisters; only don’t use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but serve one another through love. For the whole law is fulfilled in one statement: love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour one another, watch out, or you will be consumed by one another. I say, then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is against the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you don’t do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. I am warning you about these things – as I warned you before – that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.