A Higher Liberty | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 3, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 27.

A Higher Liberty.

THAN liberty mortals know nothing more glorious. Life itself were a questionable boon without liberty. Orators have declaimed in its honor. Poets have sung its praises. Dryden says:

"The love of liberty with life is given, And life itself the inferior gift of Heaven."

Thomas Jefferson declared: "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." And Patrick Henry voiced the sentiments of the American colonists in his famous speech when he cried: "Give me liberty, or give me death." Men, since the world began, have plead for it, fought for it, bled for it, died for it. They have not only done this for liberty for themselves, but for others.

The highest type of civil liberty has been developed—and abused, we may also say—in America. It is the longing for liberty and freedom which has brought the millions from the cramped territories and narrow laws of the Old World to this large, new land. And we do not from the human view blame a single soul for feeling proud that he is an American citizen, and that the Stars and Stripes—"Old Glory"—is the finest flag ever flung to the breezes of heaven. Patriotic pride has thrilled every orator and schoolboy who has repeated Drake's stirring lines:

"When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night And set the stars of glory there. She mingled with its gorgeous dyes The milky baldric of the skies, And striped its pure celestial white With streakings of the morning light. Then, from his mansion near the sun, She called her eagle bearer down, And gave into his mighty hand The symbol of her chosen band."

But as Burke truly said, in "Reflections on the Revolution in France:" "What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint." And liberty without wisdom and virtue has been the ruin of every so-called free republic, and the latest is rapidly drifting in the same current.

But, reader, there is a greater bondage than physical slavery. There is a greater tyranny than taxation without representation. There is a greater misery than physical want and hunger, and loss of property. There are greater troubles than persecution and torture and loss of life. The greatest slavery the world ever knew, because the mother of all forms of bondage, is the slavery of sin. The most grievous bondage ever witnessed by angels or men is the bondage of the soul. Out of sin's lordship has grown every evil under the sun, all the world's load of wants, woes, heart-breakings, miseries, tragedies.

But the awful misery of the slavery comes home to the sensitive, longing heart who wishes to break from his chains, and can not do it. He acknowledges a God. He knows that Deity demands perfection. His own conscience, quickened by the Spirit of God, demands it. He knows in his own soul that judgment, the decisions of which are eternal, lies on before; that he must himself give account to the bar of God, as he daily pleads guilty at the bar of conscience. Like one of old, he feels, "I am carnal, sold under sin;" "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?"

Soul, whoever you are, there is liberty from sin and sinning in Jesus Christ. The Gospel message is a message of liberty. He came to give "deliverance to the captives," "to set at liberty them that are bruised." Luke 4:18. The mighty creative power of God in the Gospel will set you free if you will receive it. Impotent you may be in yourself, He says to you as to one of old, "Rise, and walk;" walk in the paths of righteousness, in the way of liberty from sin.

That liberty the world can not give. No country, however beneficent its laws, can bestow it. Praise God, no human tyranny, however powerful, can take it away. It reaches beyond all earth's miseries, beyond the chain-gang and the galley, beyond the prison and the rack, beyond the gallows and the stake. It tunnels the grave by the righteousness and life of Jesus Christ, and gives eternal liberty in immortal bodies in a world of freedom in the ages beyond. So, dear reader, while we rejoice in the civil liberty vouchsafed us, we rejoice more in the Christian liberty granted us in Jesus Christ our Lord, and we wish to assure you by living experience that it is infinitely greater, better, and higher, and that liberty waits every soul in Christ Jesus.