S147P4 – Lost to disobedience: freedom
Jer. 25:8-11
Therefore thus says the LORD of hosts: Because you have not obeyed my words, behold, I will send for all the tribes of the north, declares the LORD, and for Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants, and against all these surrounding nations. I will devote them to destruction, and make them a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting desolation. Moreover, I will banish from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the grinding of the millstones and the light of the lamp. This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.
God’s people had developed a pattern to this point of disobeying him for a variety of reasons. Generation after generation failed to learn from these ancestral errors. Sometimes the record of disobedience and punishment was relatively recent in history and much more real than a mere story of a people who lived long ago. We might be tempted to go back to Israel’s escape from Pharaoh and say that this is the starting point of their historical disobedience, but this kind of disobedience goes back even beyond the garden of Eden. After all, a whole host of angels fell from heaven the first time God’s creation designed for his glory chose to disobey him.
God created Israel as his nation for his purposes. He did the same with Adam and Eve and with the angels. He has done the same with us. We are given the freedom to choose him, and the hope is that we do so wisely. However, there are those who will not choose him, and that is when freedom is compromised. Because of their disobedience, Judah would be made to endure what Israel had to endure. When the freedom to choose God was abused by instead choosing to disobey him, He took away that freedom. This is because we cannot be free in our disobedience. The nature of disobedience to God is that of bondage and of captivity to the thing which tempts us to disobey.
The basic truth is that freedom can be found only in the Lord. When we deviate from him and his precepts, we determine to be bound by that which is sinful and unholy. Satan chose this, and he and his fallen angels will cease to be free one day. Adam and Eve lost their freedom through disobedience, and we are originally bound to sin because of it. When we choose to be free apart from the Lord instead of being free in the Lord, we are choosing not to be free at all. In justice and in love, God cannot let us roam free in sin without bringing that freedom to an end. Father, give us a better understanding of what it means to be free in You, that we would choose obedience because we know we cannot be free otherwise.