Freedom is a pretty lie.

Posted on By pukeko

One has to edit. The Psalm this morning also fits with the passages, because it talks about how, at various times, Israel rebelled, and sacrificed their sons and daughters — in the words of the Psalm — to demons. Yet we are told to present our bodies to Christ as a living sacrifice. One has to ask what this means: why we should struggle with these issues.

For the pagans just have fun: they seem to prosper: they grow fat (very fat) on the profits of their enterprises. It does not take much marketing to sell lethe: be it booze, weed, bodies, or the marketing of human activities, or a human caste, as evil and the cause of all your suffering. But suffer we do.

The one truth that the Stoics and Buddhists got correct is that we are slaves to our passions, and that self-discipline is better than slavery. What they did not understand is that the spirit of this age means that we are susceptible to the sins of this age, and the only way we can have a choice is by the Grace of God. We con now choose to be slaves of God. Otherwise we are slaves of Satan. Freedom is an illusion, a pretty lie.

Jesus Cleanses the Temple

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,

“‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise’?”

And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there.

Jesus Curses the Fig Tree

In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once.

When the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, “How did the fig tree wither at once?” And Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen. And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”

(Matthew 21:12-22 ESV)

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

Slaves to Righteousness

What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 6:12-23 ESV)

We all need to discipline ourselves. WHen alarm goes up, we need to get up and get going: we need to be thinking of our diet and be disciplined about it, think of what we look at and read, and deliberately use the means of grace to allow ourselves to be more and more like Christ. Those disciplines include both marriage (anyone who has been married knows that you end up changing because this habit or that hurts your beloved and you love her) and holy celibacy.

We need to be disciplined in our exercise, and we need to be disciplined in our work. As Augustine pointed out, most sins take a usual. human need and either deny it or indulge in it overmuch: the ascetic starving to death and the obese both have a slavery to their appetite.

Finally, as slaves, we all worship something. At present, the twitterage and internet are full of sport as the World cup is taking place. But winning or losing these things affects, literally, the health of the nation. , although in NZ it is rugby that matters, and we can enjoy the World Cup from a certain distance.

Now, I do not see anything that wrong with sports, but with sport business…. I am less sure. I do know that most of the funding for these things comes from Pay TV and sponsorship (which is no longer alcohol in NZ as that was Banned: it is McDonalds). I am also aware that much of the governing bodies — FIFA, the Olympics… are corrupt.

But my bigger issue is that it is more important to get everyone playing soccer, or running, or hiking, or doing ab bunch of other activities, than to have a festival where we all eat the sponsor’s products and we have a busy ambulance service dealing with the associated cardiac events. The sprite of this age does not help us with moderation: we are either ultrafit or obese.

And we are told to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. If this means anything, it means that our bodies matter. We need to look after them. This means sexual purity, but it also means health living. Perhaps one can reinforce the other. For the spirit of this age is one of indulgence and slavery, which we generally call addiction because saying the truth is too scary for a society that is in a death spiral.

Time to not be like them, or be associated with them.

And as our society becomes more feral, time to stay away from crowds.

One thought on “Freedom is a pretty lie.”

  1. When I was in Mexico, it was always too hot to stay indoors in the evenings, so the kids all met and played soccer outside and the adults sat around them and talked or joined in.
    There is no one in the streets where I live now and it makes me sad. Our nice air conditioning and tv’s keep us in our homes. Sometimes, people take walks, but they quickly return to their homes afterwards.

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