Your ShelfYour Projects

How We Are Free

3%

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, Cal. · Jul 16, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 27.

Read the full edition

How We Are Free

By L. A. R.

RELIGIOUS liberty — what is it? Free moral agency — what do the words mean?
Free from the bondage of sin — what is this freedom, this liberty?
Fundamentally there is but one answer to the three questions. We will seek to give some fragment of the meaning of it all.
God is free. No power in the universe in any wise restrains or constrains Him. He is able both to will and to do of His own good pleasure. Phil. 2: 13. What He sees is best, that He wills and does; naught else. He works "all things after the counsel of His own will." Eph. 1: 11.
And enjoying freedom fully, God grants the same freedom to all His creatures. What God is infinitely, that His creatures are to be finitely. Thus each soul is to be like God, an imitator of God.
This is religious liberty.
It is free moral agency.
It is freedom from coercion, even the bondage of sin.
True, man yielded to voluntary slavery; but God's will that man should be free follows him still. The moment sin entered, God said, I will put enmity, or antagonism, into the controversy. The power to choose is still granted to man; and having chosen, power is vested in him to do what he has chosen. Thus even man, and in this sinful world at that, is made able to will and do of his own pleasure.
But there is a power that does not wish man to be free. He wishes to make his will man's will. By misrepresentation, by deception, or by coercion, he seeks to make all do his will. That is the power and purpose of the evil one.
He has agents who, following his methods, seek to control men. Some who claim to be followers of God, use the evil one's methods; and by so much they are imitators of Satan.
The rack, the dungeon, the stake, all witness to the fact that misguided men have tried to put their will for the will of hundreds of their fellows. And the rack, the dungeon, and the stake speak clearly that man's will is free, that God has really granted him the power to choose against every opposing influence in the universe.
In the light of these axiomatic truths, what shall we say of those who by law would control the choice of humanity? What shall we say of those who demand that all mankind worship as they worship, or suffer the penalty of broken state or national law?
Some regard one day as holy, and seek to prevent all secular labor upon it. God has given His Sabbath, and left all men free to observe or violate it. He has plainly stated in His Word both sides of the principle, and how it will all eventuate. There He leaves it. But not thus some men. They have put forward a day of their own as a sabbath, and wish laws enforcing upon all conformity to this choice.
Such is religious tyranny.
Such is exactly the opposite of the course pursued by our Maker.
It is the method of him who leads the whole concourse of evil.
God wants His creatures free, intelligently free, morally free.
Do you?
Character can be developed only by an intelligent creature acting under choice. Just to the extent that he does not choose his course, just to that extent it is not he who acts. Just to the extent that man is coerced — if he be coerced — just to that extent is he a machine, and the act is not his, but is that of the one coercing.
Then do you not see that he who seeks to coerce the individual, seeks in that to destroy the individual, and supplant the individual's will by his own will?
Therefore all attempts at coercion, all attempts to hinder a man in his religious liberty, all attempts to destroy his free moral agency, are really attempts to destroy that individual.
And hence it has not been strange that men eventually, in their efforts to coerce, to persecute, have killed or tried to kill those who did not believe or worship as they did.
Seeking to control by these unfair means a man's religion, is to seek to destroy his individuality, or character. And hence it is logical and natural that all Sunday law advocates or religious persecutors end by placing penalties upon him who disputes their right to coerce — penalties that gradually tend to the victim's destruction.
Christ paid on the cross the penalty of asserting His God-given freedom.
Likewise did Peter.
Paul was beheaded because he chose the free way of God against the tyranny of the Roman emperor.
You are free, my reader, to choose.
Choose therefore this day whom you will serve.
Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made you free.
Tell your brother God's truth, and in love with him; but do not, even by the sign of impatience at his unbelief, show a desire to coerce him.
L. A. R.