04. Spiritual liberty and bondage

Spiritual liberty and bondage

(2.) Evangelical liberty is that that is more appropriated to the times of the gospel since the coming of Christ. Now the liberty that belongs to Christians as Christians, is perpetual from those grand enemies, the greatest enemies of all, spiritual and inward liberty. In evangelical liberty, besides that, there is another outward liberty, from the ceremonial and moral law and such like; and a liberty from the restraint of the law. The Jews were under many restraints, that under the gospel in this time we are not. I speak therefore of liberty as it runs through all ages of the church, not of evangelical merely since the time of Christ. Where the Spirit is, both these liberties are now since the coming of Christ. Now in that the Holy Ghost saith here, ’Where the Spirit of Christ is there is liberty,’ it supposeth that we are in bondage before we have the Spirit of Christ. That is a supposed ground and truth, and indeed so it is. For out of Christ we are slaves, the best of us all are slaves. In Christ the meanest of all is a free man, and a king. Out of Christ there is nothing but thraldom. We are under the kingdom of the devil. When he calls us we come. We are in thraldom under the wrath of God, under the fear of death and damnation, and all those spiritual enemies that I need not mention. They are well enough known to you by often repetition. There is no man but he is a slave till he be in Christ; and the more free a man thinks himself to be, and labours to be, the more slave he is. For take a man that labours to have his liberty, to do what he list,* he thinks it the happiest condition in the world; and others think it the best condition to have liberty not to be tyrannised over by others. It is the disposition of man’s nature without grace. They account it a happiness to have their wills over all other, but the more liberty in this, the more slavery. Why? The more liberty that a man hath to do lawlessly what he will, contrary to justice and equity, the more he sins. The more he sins the more he is enthralled to sin. The more he is enthralled to sin the more he is in bondage to the devil, and becomes the enemy of God. Therefore if a man would pick out the wretchedest man in the world, I would pick out the greatest man in the world if he be naught,† that hath most under him; he hath most liberty, and seeks most liberty, and accounts it his happiness that he may have his liberty. This is the greatest thraldom, and it will prove, when he dies and comes to answer for it, the greatest thraldom of all. Therefore the point needs not much proof, that if we be not in Christ we are slaves, as Augustine saith in his book De Civitate Dei, ’He is a slave though he domineer and rule.’ A man till he be in Christ is a slave; not of one man or of one lord over him, but he hath so many lords as he hath so many lusts. There are but two kingdoms that the Scripture speaks of, that is, the kingdom of Satan and darkness, and the kingdom of Christ; all therefore that are not in the kingdom of Christ, in that blessed liberty, they must needs be shoaled‡ under the other kingdom of Satan. This is a ground. Therefore I speak shortly of it, as an incentive and provocation to stir us up, to get into Christ, to get the Spirit of Christ, that we may have this spiritual liberty, or else we are all slaves, notwithstanding all our civil liberties, whatsoever they be. Now, ’where the Spirit of Christ is there is liberty,’ there is freedom from that bondage that we are in by nature, and which is strengthened by a wicked course of life. For though we be all slaves by nature, born slaves, yet notwithstanding by a wicked course of life, we put ourselves into bonds and tangle ourselves; so many sins and so many repetitions of sin, so many cords; the longer a man lives the greater slave he is. Now when the Spirit of Christ comes, it frees us from all; both from the natural and from the customary§ slavery.