Lifting his eye to its battlements, he cast over them a glare such as I never saw before or since.  Pain, shame, ire – impatience, disgust, detestation – seemed momentarily to hold a quivering conflict in the large pupil dilating under his ebon eyebrow.  Wild was the wrestle which should be paramount; but another feeling rose and triumphed; something hard and cynical, self-willed and resolute: it settled his passion and petrified his countenance; he went on:-

“During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point with my destiny.  She stood there, by that beech-trunk – a hag like one of those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres.  ‘You like Thornfield?’ she said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the air a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front, between the upper and lower row of windows.  ‘Like if you can!  Like it if you dare!’”

–Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

I think Christian freedom is a difficult thing for people in our culture to grasp; I know it is for me.  In our emancipated American mind’s eye we think of that freedom merely as the loosening of chains and the proclamation of liberty to the one in bondage.  We hold supreme with our regard and our celebration the moment when the prisoner steps out of his cell into the sunlight, flinging open the door and strewing roses on the threshold for him, and well it is to do so.  But as our forebears demonstrated 150 years ago, all too often we stop there.  Having broken the hold of oppression we do not continue in the proper path, that is, the path of restoration.  And it can be argued that in some cases the luckless recipient of our well-meaning graces would have been better off left in jail, provided at least with food to eat and a roof over his head, rather than deposited out on the street with the collective “Go, be warm and well fed” of those who should have become their brother’s keepers (as much better than a jailer as grace is greater than law).

To be given freedom without direction and motive, is to be rescued from the sinking submarine and placed on a raft in the middle of the Pacific.  It is to be pulled from the wreckage of your burning plane and pointed straight into the desert.  It is to hear a blessing and receive a curse.  Yet we daily inflict this supreme disappointment on others and, trying to understand why, discover that it is because we have first inflicted it on ourselves.  We have glimpsed the dawn of freedom and condemned ourselves to wander in the darkness.

Xenophanes once said, in the course of his rather noble attack on the pat anthropomorphism of Greek mythology, that if donkeys could speak they would describe God as a superdonkey.  What he was saying, of course, was that we ascribe to our deities the things we most wish were true about ourselves; and that from a perspective that is fundamentally flawed.  The gods of Olympus were raucous, greedy, lustful, bellicose and vindictive; that is to say, their character was exactly like their progenitors’, only magnified with power.  So far from being true worship, such a posture is instead the ultimate degradation of the position we were created to take.  But the philosopher’s remark showed remarkable insight into the human soul.  True worship offers meaning commensurate with the idea that there is glory inherent in every part of our being, and that if we find within ourselves a need to offer our homage to a being that is divine and eternal, that need must belie any notion that we will find our equal at that altar.  Or even that we will find something or someone that could be extrapolated from the dimensions in which we live our lives.  True worship confronts us with the overwhelming realization that we have met One than whom we are wholly other, and with whom we are not even able to develop the metrics of comparison.  It is initiated by the moment in which we see God, high and lifted up; and in seeing we despair of our very being.  And the reason we despair is that, in our heart of hearts, we want nothing to do with him.  In our best moments our desire for salvation from sin is rooted in our wish to be relieved of the punishment due our iniquity, our desire for fellowship the wish to perceived by others according to our wishes, our desire for righteousness the wish to go blithely around God’s rules without fear of censure, our desire for God’s glory the wish that it would be ours – need I go on?  This is why David said no one living is righteous, and why Paul said that our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God.  It is why worship that proceeds from our preferences and natural impulses will always be false, and why worship that is done in Spirit and in truth is for our salvation.

Being good Presbyterians we understand this in our soteriology.  We quickly accept that before we were saved there was no good thing in us, and our desires were untrustworthy.  I am not so sure that we accept this in our practice of sanctification, however.  When God liberated us from sin he put us into the same posture in which we were designed to live originally: one of dependence.  He said to us, “You will find your righteousness, your holiness, your meaning, your motivation, your joy, and your perseverance in the Lord Jesus Christ.”  And the very first test he gives us along these lines is to accept that we are broken, deceptive, calculating, and unworthy at the same time as we realize that we are no longer slaves, but sons, and if sons then the heirs of all things.  And we balk at this!  Under the guise of purity we try to present ourselves as not really all that broken.  Under the guise of freedom we try to hedge our bet that people will not find out the lies we tell with our bodies.  Under the guise of love we deal cunningly with our brothers and sisters, and under the guise of humility we flaunt what we see as our complete and utter worthiness.  And the Holy Spirit grieves that we cannot see what we first saw at our conversion: that we are wretched, poor, pitiful, blind and naked.

And that is what we are.  If our life and flourishing is to be found in worship of a holy God, then the only thing to be found in our rejection of him is destruction.  That is the horrible freedom into which we consign ourselves when we seek a relationship with God but without Christ.  It is true that this destruction we foment was poured out on the head of our spotless Lamb, and that he took the punishment for it just as surely as he did for our more commonplace immorality; but he did it for a reason, and that reason was to lead us out of its tyranny.  He does not free the prisoner only to wave to him from the doorway; he does not lift the drowning man only to cast him on the waters; he does not buy a soul only to let it slip away again.

Author: Jeremy Vogan

My name is Jeremy Vogan. I live in Staunton, VA with my wife and four kids. I love to write, and seek to honestly explore the intellectual and emotional implications of following Jesus as a deeply broken person in a twisted, cruel world that is full of veiled beauty and meaning. Writing is part of how I faithfully look for Jesus Christ to someday make all things new. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback! JV