false freedom…

“While promising them liberty , they themselves are the slaves of corruption, for by what a man is overcome, by that is he brought into bondage” 2 Peter 2

“Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your shackles!” Karl Marx

“All the world over, so easy to see, that people everywhere just want to be free…”(The Young Rascals)

We live in an age of revolution. Everywhere on this planet people have been “breaking off the shackles” in one “liberation movement” after another in the quest for that elusive goal, which is freedom. The American revolution was followed by the French revolution, which in turn spawned successive waves of  bloody reversals of the so called ‘existing order’, which ripple up unto this present day.

But almost invariably, whenever the “order” is successfully overthrown by the latest “Liberation” movement, the old order is replaced by something even more oppressive than the previous one. The French Jacobinist movement ended in the dictatorship of Napolean,The Marxist “liberation “, resulted in the 70 year slavery of Russia and the subjugation of her neighbors. Mao set the Chinese free into the nightmare of His own reign,  Who can forget the brutal “liberation” movement that has strangled Cuba since 1959? There is a false freedom, that leads to bondage.

Culturally as well as politically, we have been subjected over the last 100 years to various forms of ‘liberation’ which is in fact bondage. The Women’s liberation movement, the sexual revolution, Homosexual liberation, and etc.,have all promised us liberty, but I dare say there is a lot less true liberty today than ever before.

Take the sexual revolution; did throwing off the norms and habits born  of the Judeo Christian ethic really make us any freer? Sexual revolution promised us a loving, freeer world, but it has actually killed love, as well as  romance. Where is the love in sexually transmitted desease? Is “hooking up” romantic? What about illigitimacy and the problems compounded by it? has the debasement of marriage, the encouragement of various deviancies liberated our society? The sexual revolution has enslaved millions and made everyone’s life uglier.

This is the bitter fruit Peter warned about when he decried the false freedom, which eventually enslaves. It would do us well to define it’s charachteristics, because the siren song of false freedom , luring people into the shipwreck of life, is one of the defining marks of our age.

* False freedom is an end in and of itself… The point of false freedom is the removal of all restraints. It is the freedom to “do your own thing”, providing no else’s freedom is impinged on. Therefore there has been a relentless war on any inhibitions, any restraints whatsoever, and above all , on any moral judgments. It is insistance on this false freedom which has given us the coarsened,balkanized, pornographic, in your face culture that we live in today.

*False freedom is not seen as a Gift from God...but rather as something to be siezed. There is a famous sculpture, in which the upper body of a man is seen using a hammer and  chisel to emerge from a block of marble. In the modern world, we liberate ourselves, we make our own lives, we define ourselves.

That is why the various ‘liberation’ movements have had to foster a kind of ‘consciousness’. Blacks have to be kept angry at whites, women have to induced into resentment at the patriarchy, sexual deviants have to be encouraged to hate the churxh, etc. Satan as well, had to lure Adam and Eve into a ‘consciousness’ also, to get them to resent the limits the Creator had put on them.

*False Freedom is rebellion against the very laws of our being… Remember that true freedom, is liberation to be what we were made by our Creator to be in the first place. False freedom is actually rebellion against the Creator, therefore it often manifests itself as rejection of the God ordained uses.

Picture an astronaut making a spacewalk, and really having an existential experience in the process. There is no North ,South .East, or West not even Up or Down! No weight, no boundaries, nothing but pure freedom! Ah, but wait a second, not quite absolute freedom…for the astronaut is still tethered to the spaceship by his supply line, he is not quite 100 percent free…not until he pulls out the utility knife he carries, and cuts the tether that held him back from pure freedom.

Now he is free…free of air, water, companionship, a trip home…this is the end of false freedom. This is the sense that for example the sexual revolution set so many free…Woman were liberated from motherhood, from marriage, from nurture, care, affection, love and committment! Likewise men were liberated also… from virtue, responsibility, maturity, love, selflessness in short the liberation was from humanity as God intended it to be in the first place!

God didn’t make women to be man like, and vice versa. The liberation movement, has gone far past the adultery and fornication stage, now modern man and woman would free themselves of their most basic identities, the God assigned sexual roles. Now we know words like “Transgender”, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual. This is the spaceman, long cut free of the ship, without North,south,east or west, no longer a point of reference, no longer any boundary, taboo or inhibition, “free” to the point of insanity. And saving for the grace of God , with no point of return.

The most liberated man in te bible, in that sense, would have to be the Mad man of Gedara. He was so free, “that no man could bind him, not even with chains”. He was free of convention, free of civility, even free of clothes! And yet where does Jesus find him? “Among the tombs…crying and cutting himself…” a True metaphor for this generation.

to be continued