How to Lose Your Freedoms
How we lose our freedoms by being free.
The argument is this: we are encouraged to be free from sin by engaging in sin.
When we start to question what is right and what is wrong with this world, it is easy to see a pattern that started right from the beginning. So, I have always been advised that the best place to start is at the beginning.
The first place we see sin is when the snake lied to Eve. In fact, even before that, the Devil had to think himself better than God before he could have lied. That would have been the first-time sin occurred.
But let’s look at the devil’s interaction with Eve as a blueprint for how we become tempted. Now, the snake added one small word — not — to God’s command. But what was really going on was the snake caused Eve, and Adam ostensibly, to think that they knew better than God. It wasn’t the actual fruit that caused their death, but the eating of it.
God didn’t say that the fruit was poisonous. He said that if they ate of the fruit, they would surely die. Of course, they encountered a spiritual death at that moment — a separation from God — because they realized that they had done something wrong. So, that knowledge, that corruption of their conscience, was itself the knowledge of good and evil. There wasn’t something in the fruit that caused it, it was their action.
So, fast forward to today, and the devil is using the same tactic. He is telling us that there is nothing wrong with doing what we have been told is wrong, and we fall for it and sin (ruin our lives) as a result. The thing is, the devil has become more subtle about it by focusing inwardly on our feelings. We are told a simple lie that we need to have self-expression and to explore how we feel.
We are told it’s OK to have the inward feelings we have, that it is wrong to resist them, and that is the way to freedom. This encourages us to engage with and amplify these feelings and take an action that is nothing other than sin.
For example, a man who wants to pursue and have sex with women outside of marriage is encouraged to do so. Women are encouraged to be sexually “free.” They are liberated to be sexually licentious but choosing to be chaste is labelled as anything but free. Those who opposing this apparent freedom are the patriarchy that caused the problem in the first place.
So, the process is simple to follow. God tells us what is right (how to have a good life), the devil tells us that God is oppressing us and to explore our “freedom” and feelings, and the only way to experience that so-called freedom is by sinning. Finally, those who say this is wrong are part of the problem and they are suppressing your freedoms.
This is fleshy thinking and full of lasciviousness. It is a focus on the self and it gives us the apparent permission for us to do whatever we want, including sin. I would have to fight my own sense of what is right and wrong to, yes, to have the freedom to do what is wrong. Is there no freedom to do what is right?
If we are each the only source of what is right and wrong, there is no right and wrong. The only moral compass is our feelings. The problem with this is that if someone else has feelings that are contrary to my own feelings, then they would necessarily be wrong.
So, instead we seem to have tolerance. Here, there is a major problem because those who subscribe to a universal set of ideals of what is right and wrong — ideals created by God — are criticized for being intolerant. One thing is clear in the Bible, which is the history of God and man, is that God is intolerant of sin. And, interestingly, this is the only way of thinking that is not tolerated by the woke movement.
Remember, Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened when they ate of the fruit. To them it seemed like things were better. However, they had just cut themselves off from God. In the attempt to express their freedom they had lost it.
