Enslaved Deliverance

“And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?” (Jer 7:10 AV)

 This attitude prevails in our contemporary Christian world.  This idea that God sent His Son to be beaten and persecuted, ending in a horrible and cruel death so that we could be free from hell and continue in our sin!  This is not new.  This is the doctrine of the Nicolaitans and mentioned in the book of Revelation.  Nicholas was a first century preacher who taught freedom from law.  His misunderstood Paul’s teaching on Christian liberty and taught it to mean the saint was free from the principles and statues of the entire Old Testament law.  Not just the ceremonial law, but all of it.  The principles of the saint became whatever he chose to make them.  Israel, thousands of years earlier, did the same thing.  God delivered them from the power of Egypt.  He gave them law for the orderly function of a nation and their homes.  This law foreshadowed the coming ministry of the Messiah and the glory of God.  Specially compared against the lawlessness of the heathen around them.  Israel chose to exercise their liberty from Egypt and their nations as a means to transgress God’s law.  They were delivered.  Yet they used this deliverance and a means to pursue their own pleasure.

If we are saved, the Jesus came to deliver us.  Not just from the consequences of sin (that being hell), but from sin itself.  Sin is destructive.  Sin leaves behind it messed up lives.  Sin us cruel. Sin knows no satisfaction.  Jesus Christ came to save us from that. He did not deliver us so that we could turn around and enjoy the liberty He bought with His life, presuming upon that grace, by living in a way that directly insults the very deliverance He purchased.

We have this great dog.  He is wonderful!  He is a lab mix.  When we put him outside, he is chained to the railing of our back porch.  He has about fifty feet of liberty.  However, right outside our back door is an ivy tree.  Birds nest in that tree.  Kimber (that is what we named him) is a bird dog.  Sometimes, he sits at the top of the stairs and jumps at the birds leaving the tree.  However, there are other times he goes in and out of those bushes, entangling himself with his lead.  To teach him a lesson, I may leave him out there to bark and bark, hoping he can remember these bushes are not a good idea.  The lesson sticks for a while.  However, he soon forgets and does it again.  I did not free him so that he could turn around and exercise his liberty to his own hurt. But that is exactly what we do.  It is presumptuous to think that God delivered us from abominations for the purpose of us turning around and doing it again!