The True Freedom by George Dana Boardman

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 2, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 34.

The True Freedom.

By George Dana Boardman

“If ye abide in my word, then are ye truly my disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Then truth has emancipating power. For born as we are into a fallen world, we are born to a heritage of misconceptions and delusions. Surely every man walketh in a vain show, flitting to and fro as in a realm of unreal shadows. And a state of delusion is a state of slavery. Falsehood is a fetter, chaining our best faculties. But let truth enter in, and how soon it dissolves the chain. This emancipating power of truth holds in the intellectual world; observe how the knowledge of the sciences or truth as it is written in nature, frees us from the thralldom of ignorance, and superstition, and fetishism. But the emancipating power of truth is especially manifest in the moral world; observe how the knowledge of God, or truth as it is written in Scripture, frees us from the thralldom of falsehood, and prejudice, and misconception, and evil habit. Truth it is, especially truth in Jesus, which unlocks the dungeon in which sin has imprisoned our Godward faculties, bidding them go forth into God’s own realm of moral liberty, wherein the hitherto pent-up religious capacities shall have full scope for unfolding into all varieties of strength and beauty and joy. The truth shall make you free.

But the Lord’s declaration is too spiritual for these carnal Jews, and so they haughtily exclaim: “We be Abraham’s seed, and have never yet been in bondage to any man; how sayest thou, Ye shall be free?” As though their fathers had never served in the rigorous bondage of Egypt, or borne the ignominious yoke of the Philistine, or suffered the woes of the Babylonian captivity! As though these Jews themselves were not at this very moment under the yoke of Rome, the symbols of her pagan tyranny flaunting over Moriah’s temple! Oh, the blinding power of pride and guilt!

Jesus answered them: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin.” For there is no bondage so bitter as the bondage of a sinful habit, no thralldom so absolute as the thralldom of a sinful character. How true this is of the drunkard

the libertine, the spendthrift, the miser, the scoffer! “And the bondservant abideth not in the house forever: the son abideth forever.” That is to say: the slave has no legal right to the patrimony; he may at any moment be sold to another; it is the son who is the heir. It is as though the Lord had said: “Because ye are Abraham’s seed, ye imagine that ye are his spiritual heirs. It is not so: ye are sinful, and therefore ye are not Abraham’s spiritual sons; ye are slaves of sin, abiding as it were for a while in Abraham’s house. But those who live a true life, accepting my testimony as God’s ambassador, are Abraham’s true sons, and therefore his true heirs: the son abideth in the house forever.” Have ye never read what Sarah said to Abraham: “Cast out this bondwoman and her son, for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac.” “If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” For Jesus Christ, in virtue of his own two-fold sonship—Son of God, and so God’s heir; Son of man, and so man’s next of kin—is this world’s true emancipator, striking off with his own cross-stained hands the shackles of sin, manumitting into the eternal freedom.—George Dana Boardman, D. D.