FROM FREEDOM TO SLAVERY
Numbers 14:26-30 (NIV 1984)
26 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron: 27 “How long will this wicked community grumble against me?... 28 So tell them...29 In this desert your bodies will fall–every one of you twenty years old or more who...has grumbled against me. 30 Not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home….
The generation of Hebrews born into slavery and miraculously given their freedom could never completely get out of the slavery mindset. Freedom was a foreign concept. They had been ruled harshly, but were provided for. Life was miserable...yet predictable. They knew what each day held: get up, eat, do the slave work, go home, eat, sleep a little, repeat. This was their life; it had been the life of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers for 400 years. As slaves, they were raised to be completely dependent on the Egyptian government for every aspect of their lives, and that slavery caused great suffering, bad enough that their cries reached heaven (Exo 3:7-8); be careful what you pray for. God heard, and deliverance came. It came with splendor and great demonstration, so magnificent that the story is told and celebrated all over the world thousands of years later, a hallmark event of a covenant people. However, that specific group of people didn’t fare so well in freedom. They were walking for many miles, and it turns out many years, from Egypt to...where, exactly? Doing what, exactly? Eating “what is it?”, which is the meaning of the word “manna”. Wild beasts! Armed enemies! Famine! Poisonous snakes! The wilderness was unpredictable and difficult; they had to make their own decisions and trust Hebraic leadership, neither of which proved an easy task. Predictable suffering seemed better than the uncertainties of freedom.
It is difficult to shed a slavery mentality and take personal responsibility, learning to live in the blessings, risks, and uncertainties that freedom offers. We’re not exempt from this in the enlightened world. We enslave people to government dependence to the point that they can't foresee a life without it. Their inner development is stunted, and their insecurities are so intense that they are unwilling to take the risk and bear the responsibility that freedom exacts from them; so, they keep voting the same taskmasters into office who will give them free stuff. They choose orchestrated poverty because it's predictable and guarantees the little they have. The difference between this kind of slavery and the Egyptian slavery is that this slavery does not conscript people into harsh, back-breaking labor, but into the cruel reality of rewarded laziness, which seizes a person deep down on the inside, stunting their inner development perhaps more than forced labor.
We are not exempt from this individually. We have been slaves to sin from birth and know its power firsthand. Initially, we broke free and were highly motivated to move on from its grasp. John concurs, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin.” (1 Jn 3:9). We were mesmerized by our success against the old way of life, but then experienced the devastating reality that our salvation is a process, not merely an event. We get disillusioned with the struggle and our continued ability to fall prey to sin's alluring pull. Piously, we observe the absolute power it has over the non-Christian world, but are surprised to see its scandalous impact on the Christian world, our highly esteemed leaders not exempt. The slavery mentality is not far behind. Like the Hebrews, we wonder what we actually signed up for. We have neither the desire nor the inner confidence to do the work and take on the risk that freedom requires. Make no mistake, salvation is a free gift, but with freedom comes struggle. Ask our founding fathers. Freedom had a high price, and sustaining it has not been a cakewalk. Freedom for the Christian is both a gift and a struggle, a struggle against sin (Heb 12:4), a struggle with supernatural forces (Eph 6:12), and a duty to die to ourselves every day, looking forward to the promises of God which will culminate in the resurrection of our bodies (1 Cor 15:29-34). As His people, we have destiny, purpose, and spiritual land to take, but shame and common experience beats us back into faithless submission to the inferior, predictable life of spiritual mediocrity that refuses to hope for more. We’re too saved to enjoy sin and too compromised to enjoy promise, and here, apart from faith that dares to believe what seems impossible, we will die, and someone younger will get the chance to enter the land we were supposed to take.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Joshua and Caleb survived this, even if they were the only ones; they kept their faith intact by keeping their promise in sight. Faith sometimes is simply choosing to believe what the natural man says ain’t so. It doesn’t take much faith to remember the havoc that the heavy-handed taskmaster of sin wreaked on us when we were still under its rule. It doesn’t take much faith to remember that the struggles in freedom are far more glorious than the predictable lashings and miseries of a life of compromise. By the grace of God, we leave the debilitating mentality of slavery behind and walk in promise, hope that the creation itself will be liberated...and brought into the glorious freedom OF the children of God (Rom 8:21). Perhaps, the more we live in freedom, the less it will seem like a foreign concept and more like an expected routine.
