Freedom that Matters : A Biblical Paradigm
- Part 1 -

RT Johnson Raih *

Come August 15th 2011, and India will be celebrating her freedom and liberty. Kites with the tri-colour will be flying all across the cities of India, parents will be buying new dresses for their children and the sweet shops will be making hay as the sun of freedom season shines on the cities. As this season draws nigh a pertinent question keeps coming to the fore, 'What is the true freedom that really matters?'

It was Jawaharlal Nehru who in his famous 'Tryst with Destiny' speech remarked, "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance..."

Yes, India has achieved her long cherished goal of attaining freedom from the imperialistic rule of the British Empire. Rabindranath Tagore's poem, 'Where the Mind is Without Fear' which ends with this sentence, '...into that heaven of freedom, my father let my country awake' has inspired thousands of Indians as they travelled the road to political freedom.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak's famous statement, Swaraj is my birth right and I shall have it had been a magic sentence that inspired countless freedom fighters. Mention may be made that Subhas Chandra Bose gave a superb speech regarding freedom while addressing a Students Conference at Lahore in 1929.

He said, "It is time for all lovers of Freedom to bind themselves into one happy fraternity and form the Army of Freedom. Let this army send out not only soldiers to fight the battle of freedom but also missionaries to propagate the new Cult of Freedom... This freedom implies not only emancipation from political bondage, but also equal distribution of wealth, abolition of caste barriers and social inequities, and destruction of communalism and religious intolerance."

But today, after 64 years of Independence and freedom, what does this freedom or freedom celebration mean to the various groups of people in India? What is this freedom celebration for the inmates of Tihar and Shajiwa jail? What does freedom celebration mean to the thousands of genuine beggars in the cities of India? What does freedom celebration mean to the people affected and infected with HIV and AIDS?

What does this freedom celebration mean to the drug addicts who live a life of a shadow of the former self? What does this term mean to the derelict and children from broken homes? What does freedom celebration mean to the orphans who cannot afford two square meals a day? What does freedom celebration mean to the oppressed and the violated women?

What does freedom celebration mean to this country which invests so much in developing nuclear war heads and other military equipments out of insecurity and threat? Isn't it ironical to be celebrating and unfurling the national flag with pride and at the same time with much fear and insecurity in this region called the North East India? Isn't it equally ironical to be celebrating the day of freedom with bandh and fear?

The former US President Franklin D Roosevelt in January 1941, said to the congress that he envisioned four basic freedoms for all after the war was over. They were:
1) Freedom of Speech
2) Freedom of Worship
3) Freedom from Want and
4) Freedom from Fear.

But what has happened to America after the 9/11 episode? Have the people been living without fear now? Has the presence of the Statue of Liberty brought fear down in Los Angeles? I doubt it has.

If we look at the world we live in, we will find that in countries declared free there will be stories of genocide, mass killing and violation of human rights. There will be absence of freedom of speech and journalism, absence of freedom of religion, absence of women rights, absence of economic rights for the marginalised and many others. The concept we have mentioned above is the external form of freedom which has relative implication.

Relative freedom is the freedom which to one group may be freedom but not to the other group. But we would like to focus for the rest of the article on a higher kind of freedom, a freedom that really matters, a freedom which is spiritual, objective and universal. This freedom is beyond time and space, and we shall call it the freedom that really matters. The Biblical concept of freedom is spiritual in its essence and universal in its influence. People with freedom that really matters are those who have with them some spiritual realities. In this article the writer would like to confine on just three of them. They are mutually inclusive, for one without the other is not complete.

1. People who are no longer Slaves to Satan and Sin or People whose Sin are Forgiven

The Bible tells us that long ago in a garden called Eden, human beings were unwittingly enslaved by Satan/Lucifer who had declared war against God in the heavens and whom God had banished forever along with his fallen angels. Since Satan could not get back to God, he devised a plan to tear the heart of God by taking away from him what is most precious in his sight.

The same plot of course is evident in the movies we see where the villain kidnaps or takes to ransom the near and dear ones of the Police officer they cannot defeat. It was John Milton, who in his epic poem 'Paradise Lost' dramatised how Satan devised this plan to get even with God. He began his poem by saying how human being lost Eden and with it ushered in death and woe in our universe until Jesus Christ brought salvation thus,
"Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat..."

Satan's purpose did not consist merely in rejecting God; he was designing a huge cosmos world system in which he proposed to employ and misappropriate the elements which belong to God's creation, which, in themselves, are good. Satan creates nothing. No step in the satanic cosmos project was more crucial than that he should secure the allegiance of humanity. The issues at stake in the Garden of Eden were, in respect to Satan's career, such as would determine his realisation of his whole undertaking. He must gain supremacy over man or fail completely.

Little did Adam and Eve realise that, so far from attaining freedom, they were becoming bond slaves to sin and Satan. Pauline theology of the 'Original Sin' which is consistent with the theology of various protestant groups and also the Roman Catholic Church is relevant here to understand. Original Sin, according to the Biblical theology is, creation's state of sin and depravity resulting from the Fall of Man in Genesis 3 and which automatically leads humankind to death/separation, now and always.

Original Sin is regarded as the general condition of sinfulness that is (the absence of holiness and perfect charity) into which humans are born, distinct from the actual sins that a person commits ('symptomic sin')

Everybody has sinned in Adam. Let me illustrate this truth through an analogy. If for example the President of India who is the head of the State declares war against another country, we, as citizens of the country are into active war with or without our consent. Firstly, because she is our representative and secondly, because we are the citizens of India, the country which has declared war against another. As a matter of fact, the representative principle runs through the entire range of human life.

Representative action is a sociological fact everywhere and is recognised in all orderly legal systems. An old man living in a remote corner of Manipur cannot say that since he does not have the facility of the Newspaper, Radio, Television, Internet, Mobile Phones, Facebook and other modern gadgets, he is ignorant of what is happening in the world and thus he is not going to be in the war declared by the President of India.

No one can say, 'I was unborn and thus non-existent when the war was declared and therefore I am not going to be in this war'. He may not be present when the action was taken. A person may be only listening over the radio. Nevertheless, our representative acted for us and as representing us, therefore it was our action, and we are implicated and involved in all the consequences of that action.

Whether we are aware of it or not, whether we are born into it or not, whether we agree with the ideology of the war or not, whether we are involved in active fighting or not, the fact is that we are all into war as citizens of India, the moment the President declared war. In fact the future generations who will be born during the war will be in the war until it ends. J Oliver Buswell puts it well, "Just so, I became a wicked, guilty sinner in the Garden of Eden.

I turned my back upon fellowship with my holy God. I deliberately corrupted the character of Godly holiness which God imparted to His creation. I willfully began to spread corruption through the creation over which God had intended me to rule. I was not there. No, but my representative was there, and he acted as such in my place and I was driven out from the garden and excluded from the tree of life." We are sinners by 'Being' and not by 'Doing'. We are sinners and therefore we sin, and not we sin therefore we become sinners. Our actions are irrelevant, because long before we knew how to sin we were declared sinners with or without our consent.

Being a slave to smoking, drinking, corrupt and licentious living, and others are terrible but they are not the main issue for God. They are just symptoms of a higher principle at work, which is the Original Sin. God wants human being to be justified as holy through the finished work of Jesus Christ and be saved from the impending danger of eternal separation (penalty of sin) that will be for everyone whoever does not accept this escape route God has provided.

The state of the sinful mind is corrupt and degenerated, far from the standard of God. This mind rejects God as God. This mind rejects Jesus Christ as the way for salvation and redemption. It is this mind that rejects the finished work of God at Calvary and the work of the Holy Spirit. We live on earth as enemies of God. In other words unless human beings decide to accept their sinful state and acknowledge their wickedness as a sinner by 'being' and not 'doing', 'Original Sin' would continue to hang like a sword upon our necks and cut us off completely from God after our death.

What a tragedy to be living as enemy of God here on earth and also by being forever cut off from the land of the living and God for eternity after our death. This is the Sin that God is more concerned of than our drinking, corrupt living, murder, smoking, etc. In fact all these sinful actions are the by-product of being a sinner by birth.

The Bible says no matter how ethical our conduct may be, not acknowledging Jesus Christ as the saviour of our soul will lead us into eternal separation. We are called to ask not for the forgiveness of sin we personally do in the first place but for being a sinner born into a sinful state. So the concept of how righteous we live, how unblemished our conducts are, how religious our prayers may be and how humanistic our world views are do not arise at all.

We cannot by our good works make peace with God for our good deeds are like filthy rags before him. Accepting the finished work of God through Christ is the only way to be reconciled into heaven for the Bible says, 'So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed' (John 8: 36). Therefore being free from the clutch of Sin and death is the real freedom.

The Bible tells us that a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him whether to sin which leads to death or to obedience which leads to righteousness (II Peter 2: 19; Romans 6: 6-7). We have to be also aware that slaves lose everything in their chains, even the aspiration of escaping from them. People who have been conditioned in an environment for so long lose the vision or the need to be different. This is exactly why Jean Jacques Rousseau mentioned, "Sinners do not find any need as to why they should escape." Are you freed or are you one of them?

to be continued....