Freedom or Lawlessness

The other day, I overheard a conversation between two non-Christian men. The discussion was about drug use and abuse in our society, and particularly among young people. They came to the conclusion that while, in their opinion, drug use was a personal choice for teens and young adults that should not be judged by society or regulated by government, there are certainly some negative impacts from it. They posed the question to one another, “Since law never works anyway, can’t we just educate people to the point that they would always choose to use moderation in their drinking and drug use?”

This whole line of thinking really got me thinking about several things. For instance, isn’t it interesting that education is the world’s best solution to all the ills of society? Since they have rejected God, God’s wisdom, and man’s need of a Savior, they have to fall back on something they can do themselves. Since they believe that the mind or intellect is the highest part of man, they neither understand that the root problem is spiritual, nor see the solution.

While education is vital for a number of reasons, it falls woefully short in making any long-term change to our behavior–making us better people. The Bible teaches us that we humans are three-part beings – spirit, soul, and body. Only when the spirit is brought out of spiritual death and darkness, and reunited with the Holy Spirit, can we experience true transformation that first changes who we are, then produces new behavior.

If we choose education, without a relationship with God, as our primary tool for creating better behavior, we are relying on a fallen and broken part of man for positive change. No matter how much we learn about the negative impacts of sin, it is the Holy Spirit, not the knowledge alone, that empowers real, permanent, change. Education alone still relies on the flesh to carry out what we may have learned, and we all know that the flesh and its desires simply do not produce Godly behavior.

I also found it ironic that although both of these gentlemen would absolutely reject the idea that God exists, or that “religion” is a valid choice for anyone (I know this because I have had many discussions with them on the subject), here they were trying to find some way to get people to make better life choices. They reject God’s work in the heart, but then have to go searching for something else because their belief system produces quantifiable bad results. Hmmm….

Finally, both of these men talk frequently about how much they dislike government and law. They see that law alone never seems to actually fix the problem, but they refuse to acknowledge that the real problem with law lies not in law, but in the fallen nature of mankind. Jesus didn’t come to abolish the law, He came to fulfill the law, and to write God’s law on the human heart in the form of a relationship with God.

As I pondered this, it struck me that I agree with these men’s assessment of law. While I know that, because of the sin-nature in mankind, we will always need laws, I also know that they will never solve all the problems on earth. The message of the Gospel is that Jesus came to set us free–free from sin and free from the law. God in Christ has made it possible for us to live a life of transformation that produces Godliness, rather than a life of restraint that will always fall short. So I agree that law, while necessary, is not the real solution to the sin problem.

But here’s the thing; I hear a lot of this talk from people who, on the one hand, want to live in what they call “freedom,” but who do not want to deal with any of the negative consequences of their lifestyle. By “freedom” they mean they want to live a self-determined life. They want to do what they want to do when they want to do it without any responsibility or accountability. They don’t like laws primarily because laws are restrictive for them. They would rather live by a worldview that says there is no such thing as right and wrong, or that just because something is wrong for you, it may not be wrong for me. In other words, there is no such thing as an absolute (which of course is in itself a statement of an absolute).

They want to believe that enough education would eliminate the need for regulation inward or outward. But what is the real motivation behind this distain for law? Is it really that society would actually work better without law? History says otherwise. Or is it that they simply want a social framework that allows them to do what they want to do?

It seems that in many cases the cries for freedom are there, not because living with no moral or ethical framework actually produces better results, but because people don’t want any boundaries on their own behavior. In other words, I will champion freedom, because I don’t want anyone judging or restricting anything I do. Even within Christianity, if I speak of a socially acceptable, but Biblically condemned, behavior as sin, I am often accused being legalistic.

As I pondered all of this, and especially the fact that I fully agreed with these men’s sentiment that you can’t legislate morality, the Lord spoke this simple truth to me. “There is a big difference between avoiding legalism because you love freedom, and avoiding “legalism” because you love lawlessness. Only in Christ is there a freedom from both sin and law, because only in Christ can the human heart become clean and selfless. In Christ, God’s deepest motives, desires, and passions become our own. As a Christian I don’t live under law but under grace. But, the grace of God teaches me to say no to ungodliness, and to live an upright and self-controlled life in Christ (Titus 2:11). Freedom? Absolutely. Lawlessness? Absolutely not.