Day 4103 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 12:6 NIV

What is emancipation?

Is it just some fancy way of saying freedom? Is it a feeling of having been freed? Is it something that one person can ever really give another? Is it something we’ve never already had? Is it some plainly political ploy played to endear a new group unto a side of some war you wish not to lose? Is it a familial failure found in setting free from the family one who wishes to no longer remain so connected? Is it just the general disconnecting of someone from something that’s elsewise proven entirely too prone to pain or strain or struggle or other such persecution?

Is it a formal document written unto the benefit of those for whom it’s written as it literally spells out both their recent lack of freedom and also an awareness as to both their newfound liberty and that with the stipulation stated clearly as to who granted it?

Is it something that we can be granted having given it away in order to be defined as those now in need of it?

It’s truly a weird thought to think, that being any about freedom. And it’s strange because it somehow both pleases and pains as, well, truth is that none can know what freedom is unless and until they’ve known or know what freedom isn’t. None can know liberty until they’ve experienced slavery. Nobody can truly appreciate what it is to be set free from what is something that they’ve already been always free from. And so the entire idea of liberation, which is indeed the basic foundational purpose of emancipation, it’s one won within the loss of something we never wanted to have, or somehow thought we did.

And yet that because we had to have it so that we can lose it in this decidedly formal process of it being overruled and thus removed.

Problem then is that, as I’ve said in posts past, He can’t free us from what we either can’t or, and more commonly, won’t admit we need said liberation from. Because again, as we just discussed above, you can’t understand freedom unless and until you’ve understood its lack. You simply won’t have anything against which to measure what freedom is if never you’ve encountered what freedom obviously isn’t.

Thankfully we’ve all encountered what freedom obviously isn’t.

Unfortunately we’ve been so brainwashed by the same that our every thought seems always to say that we’re already free.

And that simply because we get to spend these days doing whatever we want.

But is that laxity in terms of personal, social, spiritual responsibility truly what freedom is? Is freedom really defined by something so simple that it can be found all but effortlessly and that by everyone and yet so too so unique that it does indeed mean something different to everyone? Is freedom something that we should be so able as it so often seems we are to define by ourselves and that only for ourselves? Is freedom something we can, as so often seems we try, really define for those around us and that by, again, only us?

Are we the creators of freedom?

Even as those who are thus enslaved to our idea thereof?

See, that’s what’s always stood out as rather amazing to me. It’s that anytime inside a life in which we abide, either beside or behind, what is quite clearly a personal priority or plan or opinion or expectation, what we’re unwittingly doing is nothing more than chaining ourselves to the same.

Let me give you an example to sort of break that up a little.

Exercise.

I know, I use this one a lot but that’s because it’s one that I happen to know a fair deal of having had a fair measure of experience with in recent years.

But exercise is something that we undertake in the effort to get healthier, stronger, better looking, just to feel better in general. And indeed, this is a good thing and in fact one that even Scripture tells us has some purpose and is thus useful for something beneficial. If used properly.

And that’s where we’re always going to find that freedom isn’t found but rather lost.

It’s in that place in which something as obviously helpful as exercise can be rather becomes something that becomes a rather monstrous devotion that begins to steal our time, our focus away from what are other things which have themselves obvious benefits. And in fact, speaking from a personal problem that I’ve actually known of for a while now without really wanting to admit I did, even something obviously healthy and helpful can be allowed to become something decidedly more harmful and even hazardous if not careful.

Which is the problem with our version of freedom, and also what points out our need for being emancipated as is done only for those whom one loves enough to so offer such liberty.

It’s that we’re not careful when it comes to our expressions of our understandings as to what freedom is. Rather we throw that stuff all over the place. In fact this place has been racing toward the brink of basic lawlessness if not utter anarchy in recent years as folks are being found using their freedom as, well I think the Bible puts it always better than anyone else ever could, a cover for evil.

Indeed, folks down here are doing some patently wicked things in the name of liberty. And that because we seem still to think that just because we have the ability to do something means then we ought to take every opportunity we have to do said something. And, as my mom out of nowhere shared the other night from a movie franchise we literally never watch (Jurassic Park), we’ve indeed become so preoccupied with the whether or not we could that we didn’t stop to think if we should.

Instead we just did.

And this is something we still do. We just do things. We just say things. We just think things thinking them the things we should be thinking simply because they are the things that we’re thinking.

But you see, this is where the enslavement sneaks in entirely unnoticed. It’s in all those places in which it’s become our words, our thoughts, our actions that we agree to keep saying, thinking, doing. It’s in those moments in which we choose to willingly repeat something we already know thinking it then better than whatever we don’t. Those moments are snapshots of our opting to remain tied to whatever it is that we think is best, which itself is a measure of enslavement and that only to us.

Which has long proven our very favorite form of captivity because, well, it’s endlessly pleasing.

We can always find some way to continue enjoying what we’ve spent the better part of our lives enjoying. And, well, to a people who think pleasure is the very, if not only, purpose we have in life, then yeah, we’re probably not going to find too many issues nor worries within our always winning what’s always proven entirely pleasing.

But behind the scenes what we don’t seem to realize we’re doing is shackling ourselves to both our pleasure and all those things which offer it.

And we don’t see it because we think we’re walking in freedom simply because we think freedom is nothing more than the combination of an ability to determine whatever it is that we want with any opportunity we’re given to act thereon.

Again, is it?

Is freedom honestly nothing more than our doing always only as we please? Is the grand outcome of freedom nothing more than our being pleased?

Or is not our being pleased only then something of a master to whom we seek to offer our lives and the choices made herein?

See what I’m saying?

It’s that so long as we choose to serve anything or anyone, we are thus slaves unto the same. And this is because, even if unbeknownst to us, everything we say and think and do is said and done and thought with the glory and honor and praise of they for whom we do it. We are thus captives to the hope of pleasing whomever it is that we feel the obligation to so honor in whatever means they hopefully make clear they so wish to be appeased.

And, again, while this can in theory be a good thing, like exercise, it can also, like exercise, cross a line in which it becomes the direct opposite.

Take the exercise example again. It’s something that most folks start doing because they want to feel better, look better, get stronger, just become healthier. But, speaking from personal experience, there’s an unseen risk of crossing this line in which it all becomes a matter of vanity, of selfishness, of isolation even in which the thoughts themselves shift from those seeking to get healthier to those willing to do anything to get skinnier and look better. And then you find yourself not eating properly, spending more time in the gym than your body can recover from, potentially even considering such extremes as taking steroids or weight loss injections, maybe even having cosmetic surgery just so you can get closer to an ideal that’s become an idol.

And sadly, well, that’s exactly what it seems as if freedom has become.

It’s an ideal that we’ve turned into an idol. Ideal because it’s literally who and what God created us to be. He designed us to be free, to be untethered, to be unbothered by the gravity of sin and the darkness it lives within. He created us to be His, even bestowing upon us His own image which is this existence that exists beyond time, outside of space and even matter. He cannot be contained.

And yet here we are so constrained by so many things that have become for us worries over which we stumble and fall seeking inside them all to arrive upon this outcome in which we’re so successful and powerful and seemingly then important that we can literally do whatever we want without ever needing worry about cost or consequence ever again.

This is obviously this world’s understanding of freedom. That there exists this supreme version of it in which there is no consequence.

But friends, even our expectation of being actually free to do whatever we want without ever needing to worry about paying in any way we don’t, this itself is a master to us.

But it’s one so personally pleasing that we never realize to see it as such.

And that’s the problem.

It’s that we’ve chased this idea of our doing as we please for so long now that God has left no recourse but to either come along and correct our course so that we don’t die atop it or, well, just sit up there and watch us die atop it. And that’s because no matter what we do nor how special we are nor how good we look or strong we feel or successful we become, nothing in or of His Word has or ever will change. And thus the wage of sin remains death and thus anytime we’ve done anything wrong in life, even the right thing for the wrong reason, this is death for us.

And so we’ve left Him with no choice but to either do what’s needed to invoke us to change or to simply wash His hands and watch us walk away.

Problem then is that He already did what He’d decided to do.

And washing His hands of us wasn’t His choice.

It was rather to use them to literally buy our freedom in what is in fact a very formal proclamation of our being emancipated from the entirety of all we’ve said, all we’ve done, all we’ve wanted and all we’ve become. Christ chose to hang on that cross to pay for every single time that we’ve crossed that line in life and willingly left true freedom behind for the chance to serve as if slaves our every preference in this place.

He died that we might change from who we’ve been to who He thus clearly still knows we can become.

Question then becomes whether we share His hope for us.

Or are we rather still tied inside this way of life that caused Him to die, doing still those very same things that His Word defines as sin and thus earning within each of them another death and another death and another death?

All because we think we have the freedom to do them.

For is that not why we do all we determine to in life? Because we can? Because we want to? Because we don’t know that we’ve become slaves to ourselves and our desires and our disasters? Because we can’t yet see that so many of our desires are moral disasters that do indeed deserve the death He died? Because we can’t yet see that we deserve to die the death He did?

All because we are not victims of unfortunate circumstances.

No, we’re but willing participants in every possible rebellion spent against Him.

For we all know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. And thus every single time we’ve ever experienced something wrong or bad was only known because someone chose to do what they shouldn’t, something they chose to do anyway because they wanted to and felt they had the freedom too.

All because we are the victims of a selfishness so foolish as to actually believe that true freedom means nothing more than doing always only whatever we want.

It isn’t.

Rather that lie is perhaps the grandest measure of enslavement ever known to man and that because it’s been known by every man.

For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And yet in His loving kindness so are the same all offered forgiveness and within it freedom should they turn from their sins and place their faith and focus on and in Him who died for them to see the entirety of who we’ve become.

And it’s by no means anything to be proud of.

And that because we’re not free. We know nothing of freedom as we’ve known only that version used as an excuse to do whatever we wanted to thinking the same the only thing we ought to do. Again, it isn’t. And that because we’re not here to please ourselves, to take pride in ourselves, to ensure that it’s always only ourselves who are placated and impressed. No, we’re here to learn how to beat these bodies into submission unto a different kind of enslavement.

One lived as sons and daughters of the Most High as opposed to only slaves and heathens who clearly don’t care to know Him.

The latter we’ve known far more of than the former in what have long been lives lived as if we were the ones we were here to serve, to satisfy, to praise and justify in doing so.

We’re not.

Because contrary to ego telling us otherwise, we didn’t give ourselves these lives. All we’ve really given ourselves are all the bars and bolts that form the cells that these lives have become in which we ourselves have become slaves to everything from vanity to vitriol. Indeed my friends we are so controlled by so many things, thoughts and theories that it’s amazing we can consider ourselves free!

We can’t even manage to find the audacity to break out of our routines for an hour!

What then makes us think we know the power of freedom when we’ve so misused it upon things that have in turn only used us as if poster children for misplaced priorities?

Friends, every regret we’ve somehow ever known has been known because of a guilt we incurred in doing something we either knew then or have since come to know we shouldn’t have determined to do.

And any guilt we know is evidence that we know less of freedom than we’ve long thought we did.

It’s all proof of our need of being emancipated from who we’ve been as has been defined by what we’ve done as was done for what reason we probably don’t know or wish we didn’t. But whatever the case may be, the reality is that we’re all immeasurably far from freedom because in this life we’ve used the idea as nothing but a constant conceptualization of what’s never been anything more than our doing only more of whatever we alone wanted to do.

But that idea is nothing more than a lie we serve, and are thus enslaved to, every single time we give into it.

That’s why Jesus came, and honestly, that’s why God unleashed upon Him the fury we see in Calvary. It was to show us both what our sins deserve and that even those who He knows to be His will be allowed to endure some brutal things if it means that they’re bettered for it.

Jesus was battered, beaten, bruised, bloodied and in every possible way betrayed in this place.

And He’s the Son of God.

What makes us think that we deserve anything different, especially considering how we’ve lived our lives so very different than He lived among us?

Friends, what we see on and in the cross is the very cost of freedom. As we love to say around our nation, freedom isn’t free. Rather it’s bought always with the blood of those who fight and die for it and their courageous willingness to give it. And yet we live as if freedom is the cheapest thing in life, meant only to encompass everything we want and all that we like.

Is it?

Is freedom truly so cheap that sinful freaks like our every past proves we all have been are the same as can choose what to do with it?

Or is not the fact that we are sinful only evidence that we’ve known that life lived as slaves then to sin, slaves who need then to be set free?

Yes, even free from what we’ve come to believe freedom is.

Because, well, freedom isn’t what we think it is. Freedom is far bigger than our doing whatever we want. It’s bigger than wanting everything we do. It’s more priceless than doing whatever we have in order to have all we’ve come to be.

Rather freedom is discipline, it’s devotion, it’s a life willingly lived entirely devoid of any self-interest. Freedom is a life lived so untethered to everything that we can truly say we have nothing to lose as we have nothing left over which we worry, for which we want, of which we are.

Freedom is only accomplished in our being nothing, having nothing, wanting nothing.

Because so long as we want something or have something or think we are something, we’re but slaves to those lies.

And we have all known those lives. But it’s clear few if any of us have ever known much of that life lived as if only sons and daughter and that only of God.

He offers to set us free from the former so that we can finally experience the freedom known in the latter.

But we have to first admit we’ve known the former if ever we’re to know the latter.

And our version of freedom knows only to stand in the way of that.

Indeed, our version of freedom knows only to look upon the cross and Christ as the One afflicted, a sight we selfishly feel we don’t deserve.

And for once we’re right in that! And that’s because no, we don’t deserve what He endured. And that because He shouldn’t have had to whereas we should have to. It should have been us going through what He did, and so no, we don’t deserve the fact that He did it for us.

All so that we could know freedom in that life lived as the adopted children of God who have been emancipated, set free from the lives they’ve known as slaves to sin.

The empty grave a most formal declaration given in the form of a regal writ written for those for whom He shed His blood to write it in.

If we don’t know the gift of His blood and that it was poured out for us, well then there’s simply no way we know what true freedom is.

Perhaps we’ve left just enough time to learn.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold