The key phrase in a popular song on the Disney channel was: “your heart will tell you no lies.” Having discussed this with my children around the dinner table we concluded that this line is the one lie to rule them all. It is a lie firmly rooted in human autonomy. The idea of “freedom” for the natural man is the liberty to do whatever he pleases. Unrestrained desire, however, is anarchy; it is enslavement to one’s own passions and is a brutal form of bondage. It is bondage of the soul that plays out in bodily pursuits driven by the senses instead of reason, truth, or principle.
Contrasting the redeemed with the unregenerate Paul states that we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2:3). How can desires be so tyrannical? Because they wage war against the soul (I Pet.2:11) and against the law of my mind (Rom. 7:23); they are the passions that are at war with in you that cause conflicts (James 4:1) and that plunge men into ruin and destruction (I Tim. 6:9).
Could it be that David Hume was correct in supposing that “we are slaves of our passions – ‘rational’ only in the purely instrumental sense of being capable of employing our intellectual power to, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, ‘range abroad and find the way to the things desired?’”* This is man’s affirmation of what God has revealed – that we were slaves of sin.
But part of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ is knowing that in Christ we have been redeemed from every lawless deed (Titus 2:14); we have been released from the enslavement of sin which held us under the curse of the Law (Gal. 3:13) required by the demands of God’s holiness. The believer can look back at what he was and what had enslaved him but no longer does. That is the believer’s positional reality. What was the cost of this redemption? John informs us that Jesus Christ was the propitiation for our sins. This means that He absorbed the wrath of God for us – for our release from the clutches of sin, its empty, aimless way of life and its resulting destruction.
The nature of redemption must be remembered: we did not climb out of this pit on our own – we were rescued! We were bought at a price to be set free to live the way our Maker designed us. Redemption is not only what we have been released from, but what we have been liberated to.
*Princeton University professor, Robert P. George, in the commencement address at Hillsdale College, May 10, 2003.
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