We had the grandkids (ages eight and six) for a sleepover this weekend
and they enjoyed a little taste of freedom. They played on the slip n’ slide
until they decided to quit, chose to eat corn dogs and Cheetos over broccoli
and stayed up two hours past their normal bedtime. Our grown-up feelings of freedom
aren’t quite as easy to come by. However, as believers, we are told that
creation will be, “…liberated from its
bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”
(Ro 8:21b NIV)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----I Corinthians 15:22-28 seems to me to be kind of the winding-up-passage regarding sin and the age of disobedience to God. “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at His coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all his enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. ‘For God has put all things in subjection under His feet.’ But when it says, ‘All things are put in subjection under Him,’ it is plain that He is excepted who put all things under Him. When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be everything to every one.”
-----Although we are presently set free from sin, we haven’t been set free from not sinning while we are still in our temporal bodies. We yet have a will of our own, even though we desire that will to more and more fall into accord with our Father’s will, the limitations of thinking and feeling and living within these imperfect bodies still subjects it and our behavior to error. Nor are we set free from the temporal consequences of error. Mistakes we make become causes to further effects which are not as good for anybody as the effects would have been from making no mistake. This is just the way it goes, for now.
-----But what we do have right now is desire for that perfection. We long for that Holy City where everything will go right and where there will be not so much as either a mistake nor a consequence caused by one. From this desire we call upon the One in control and are thus set free from the eternal consequences of sin because we desire what He desires - righteousness - and have addressed the desire in accordance to the truth.
-----I wonder, sometimes, if part of the “all things” to be subjected to Him is the thing of any possible erroneousness of desire or will. I wonder if even our will to wander or turn aside from Him in any way is not laid down to Him by His granting our desire to do so, and therefore will be removed from possibility so that He will become all things to everyone forever. And we will then truly have been subjected to freedom by our own choosing.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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