Back into Bondage Again

A selection from the chapter on Liberty in The Lonely God by Ronald L. Dart

But now you have turned around and profaned my name; each of you has taken back the male and female slaves you had set free to go where they wished. You have forced them to become your slaves again. Therefore, this is what the LORD says: You have not obeyed me; you have not proclaimed freedom for your fellow countrymen. So I now proclaim 'freedom' for you, declares the LORD - 'freedom' to fall by the sword, plague and famine. I will make you abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth. Jeremiah 34: 16-17

These were not slaves of a conquered country, by the way. They were supposed to be contractual servants of their own people. But the contract had been broken.

What Jeremiah is telling them is this. Since they were not willing to accept the liberty defined by the law, they would be granted complete freedom. They would be free from God's blessings and protection, free to suffer whatever evil the world had in store for them.

And this is the reason we have so many terrible things in our lives. It is because we have made choices that have brought them our way. We have made choices that have taken us out of the road that God wanted us to walk. We have made choices that have brought bad things upon us, our own sins have opened the door for these things to come upon us.

We have exercised our freedom, and God has granted to us a liberty, a liberty to pain, destruction and loss that sin brings with it.

Freedom is a heavy burden to be borne. It is sad to say that some people, freed from servitude, want to go back. Just as Israel, freed from the slavery of Egypt wanted to go back, some men who have been freed from jail want to return. Men have actually committed crimes in order to get back into prison where they were fed and clothed, where they knew the routine and how to live. They have become so institutionalized that they can't live well outside. And so they go out and do the same things that they did before, and back they go.

There are some on the outside who are of the same mind. They want to be taken care of, they want to lay their freedom down, they want to be slaves. They want to be servants because then, someone else can take care of them.

Freedom, after all, is a terrible burden. I know it must be, because we complain about it so much. We have a litany of complaints about freedom. We ask, "Why does God allow war?" That's a complaint about our freedom. "Why does he allow innocent children to suffer?" That is also a complaint about our freedom. "Why did God allow the Holocaust?" Well that's a complaint against the freedom of both Nazis and Jews.

We have the freedom to do good. We have the freedom to hurt. We have the freedom to harm, and if we have it, so do others. If others have that freedom we have the freedom to suffer from what they do. Freedom is a terrible word. It's a frightening word, a dangerous word. And when you understand it, it is the freedom of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Remember that the way the Bible uses the word "knowledge" in Genesis refers to the experiencing of good and evil.

Adam and Eve made the choice of experiencing good and evil, and we have been living with that choice ever since. Man was told what to do and left free not to do it. He was told what not to do and left free to do it anyway. That's what freedom is. But we want selective freedom, we want to be free to do what we want to do, but not free enough to experience the consequences of what we have done.

The irony of it all is that as we exercise our freedom to choose, what we choose leads us back into bondage again and again and again. And this is why in His original law, God made provision for freeing people. For some people, it required freeing them again and again. In a lifetime, some people could have managed to be slaves and free every seven years. In the same way, some people today are in and out of prison time after time. In every generation, there are people who just can't seem to keep their life together. It may not lead to prison, but each, in his own way, goes back into bondage again.