True Freedom

RESURRECTION FREEDOM

By Harmony Grant


Passover arrives each year with the sunlit blossoms of spring, cleansed by rain. Jews in Israel mark out seven days, abstaining from work on the first and last. They eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs in memory of the hurried escape from Egypt. The Hebrews’ exodus from this land of slavery is a giant metaphor for a more personal flight: the liberation from sin that we each need more than anything else.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a classic description of the human problem: We want to rebel. Russian rationalists said humans act in their own best interest, but the great writer disagreed. His story portrays a man driven by the need to assert himself, even destructively, for the perverse sake of Ego. Dostoevsky understood people well. We were created in the image of God, the great “I am.” From childhood, we want to assert ourselves and say, “I come first.” From this basic drive come the wars of the world, the injustice, and the spiritual poverty of our lives. Sin is the decision to act on our primal, I-come-first impulse.

When they asked, “What is our sin?” God said to the Hebrews, “You too have done evil, even more than your forefathers; for behold, each one walking according to the stubbornness of his own evil heart, without listening to Me.” 1

This is how God defined sin. He didn’t cite human emotions, instincts, or personality faults. He condemned deliberate choices to rebel against His will, preferring our own way. Paul says we are slaves of sin when we obey its evil desires, not when we merely exist in a human body. 2

The distinction matters because many influential thinkers like John Calvin said our physical body, on its own, is corrupt and infected with sin. Calvin believed we can’t be truly holy as long as we exist in our physical bodies. But the Bible describes sin as a free, conscious decision made with our eternal wills. Scripture defines sin as rebellion against the known will of God. “Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.” 3

Would You Go to Heaven?

How can we be saved from this relentless drive of Ego, which causes us to hurt even those we love and sin against our Maker whose will is perfect? Christ!

When we put our whole trust (for the next life and this one) in Jesus, we are freed from sin. We trust His mercy to save us, not our good works; and we are filled with His Spirit that empowers us to stop willfully rebelling against Him. As God’s children, we daily die to desires that conflict with our Father’s will; we freely crucify the “flesh” when it tempts us to disobey. Through the gate of this private Calvary, we enter the greatest freedom a human can know: freedom from Ego and its relentless impulse to assert itself against God and others in pride. “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for you are not under the law [of works] but under the grace [which accepts simple trust].” 4

In fact, Christ recreates our desires by filling us with His Spirit. He enables us to “put on the new self, which in the likeness of God, has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” 5 As Zacharias prophesied, Christ granted us “that we might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all our days.” 6 Scripture says Christ has “released us from our sins,” 7 and “put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” 8 Jesus is described as coming to save us from, not in, our sin, as the “Lamb who takes away the sin of the world,” 9 and the “Son [who] cleanses us from all sin.” 10 Paul wrote that through Christ “God gives us the victory” 11 over sin.

Christ’s redemption makes it possible for us to be cleansed from the inside, from the fountainhead of human action: our will. Because of His death, we are no longer tethered to the imperfection of keeping an external law, “for Christ is the end of the law [of works] for righteousness to everyone who trusts.” 12

Rather, we follow a law of obedient trust written on our hearts. “He takes away the first [the external law of works] to establish the second [the internal law of faith]. By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all . . .” 13 We enter a new covenant with God, in which the spirits of righteous men are “made perfect.” 14 It is written, “God has not called us for uncleanness, but for sanctification.” 15 For “through Him, everyone who trusts is freed from all things, from which you could not be freed through the law of Moses.” 16

There are No “Sinning Saints”

Calvinist doctrine denies Christ complete power to renew us, teaching that although we must struggle to be holy and Christ-like, we still can’t live a consistently sinless life. But this idea is contradicted by Scripture that celebrates our new victory in Christ. “For if [animal sacrifices] sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ . . . cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” 17 Paul wrote that Christ died, not to merely cover our sins, but so “we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” 18

“Having been set free from sin and enslaved to God,” Paul wrote, “you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 19 He commanded, “Keep yourself free from sin.” 20 A chapter later, Paul repeats, “Keep the commandment without stain or reproach.” 21 John added, “No one who lives in Him keeps on sinning.” 22 Peter wrote that we know we have been born again because we “have in obedience to the truth purified our souls.” 23

“How shall we who have died to sin still walk in it?” asked Paul, aghast at the idea of “sinning saints.” “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life . . . Our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.” 24

Just as “Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again,” 25 so we are to live without sin, which is spiritual death. “For the death He died, He died for sin, once for all; but the life He lives, He lives to God. Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin [once and for all], but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” 26

Paul wrote that in Christ, we are “new creations,” 27 and urged us to “put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” 28 According to Paul, the new believer is “transformed;” 29 our alteration is so complete that we become “strangers and aliens on earth,” 30 unrecognizable, as different as darkness and light. 31 We grow inclined toward God, rather than self. Christ said, “[My disciples] are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I do not ask that You [Father] take them out of the world, but keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” 32

Of course, this does not mean we will be without temptation. Instead, like Christ, tempted in the wilderness, we are enabled to consistently conquer the temptation to rebel against God’s known will; for “the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation.” 33 “For He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust,” 34 and “He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted.” 35 Indeed, “He Himself was tempted in all ways as we” 36 and “took on the very [human] nature” 37 we endure, “yet without sin.” 38

“And you know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. Little children, let no one deceive you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous; the one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the devil.” 39

Christ is the great Redeemer, an astounding Creator who loves renewal and metamorphosis: of sunlight into energy, of caterpillars into butterflies, of eggs into eagles and heroic salmon—and of winter into blooming spring! If He causes such profound renaissance in nature, transforming tiny seeds to towering trees and blossoming their naked limbs, why would He do less with us, His children? Christ doesn’t create a double standard in our lives, where He is righteous but we are still evil. He does a thorough job, in which we are completely cleansed and “filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Him, to the glory and praise of God.” 40 Through Christ we “receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness,” 41 and present our bodies “as instruments of righteousness to God.” 42

When we abide in obedient trust, righteousness is imputed to us, just as it was reckoned to Abraham, 43 who is “the father of all who believe . . . that righteousness might be reckoned to them.” 44 Like Noah, we are “heir to the righteousness which is according to faith.” 45

As Christ described, we are each branches that must be connected to Him, the living vine. If we’re rooted in Him through trust and death to conscious rebellion against God’ s known will, then our veins run with the life sap of His “righteousness, which comes from God on the basis of trust.” 46 If we’re not connected, we’re dead. Good works and good intentions without trust in Him are lifeless as winter leaves scattered across a sidewalk. Nothing we do apart from Christ can make us righteous or fill us with the running sap of spiritual life. But when we are connected by simple obedient trust, we can be confident that we are both righteous and pleasing to God, filled to the core with His abundant, ceaseless, sweet energy, which is more beautiful than the bright tulips in any spring garden.



Endnotes:

1) Jer. 16:10-12 (2) Rom. 6:16 (3) James 4:17 (4) Rom. 6:14 (5) Eph. 4:24 (6) Luke 1:74, 75 (7) Rom. 1:5 (8) Heb. 9:26 (9) John 1:29 (10) 1 John 1:9 (11) 1 Cor. 15:56-58 (12) Rom. 10:4 (13) Heb. 10:9-10, 19-22 (14) Heb. 12:23 (15) 1 Thess. 4:7 (16) Acts 13:39 (17) Heb. 9:13-14 (18) 2 Cor. 5:21 (19) Rom. 6:22 (20) 1 Tim. 5:22 (21) 1 Tim. 6:14 (22) 1 John 3:6 (23) 1 Pet. 1:22-23 (24) Rom. 6:2-7 (25) Rom. 6:9 (26) Rom. 6:10-11 (27) 2 Cor. 5:17, Gal. 6:15 (28) Eph. 4:24 (29) Rom. 12:2 (30) Heb. 11:13 (31) 1 John 2:9-10 (32) John 17:14-16 (33) 2 Pet. 2:9 (34) Ps. 103:14 ((35) Heb. 2:18 (36) Heb. 4:15 (37) Phil. 2:5-7 (38) Heb. 4:15 (39) 1 John 3:5-8 (40) Phil. 1:11 (41) Rom. 5:17 (42) Rom. 6:13 (43) Rom. 4:9 (44) Rom. 4:11 (45) Heb. 11:17 (46) Phil. 3:9


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Harmony Grant writes and edits for National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservative watchdog group. Read more of her work at www.hisnamesake.blogspot.com. Contact her at harmony@truthtellers.org.

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