Sunrise in Moab, August 2023
We don’t like being told what to do, even by God himself. We don’t like rules. They are a suffocating blanket. Freedom is what we want.
Are God’s rules suffocating? Is it freedom from Him that we really want?
In Psalm 119:97-99, we are told that God’s commands for us are to be “desired more than gold,” that they are “sweeter than honey.” That they “give [us] more understanding than all of [our] teachers,” “make wise the simple,” “delight the heart,” and “enlighten the eyes.”
Ok, wait a minute. What the psalmist is telling us here seems to strongly conflict with our idea of freedom. What’s going on?
Because we are dull in wisdom and hard of heart, Jesus sums it up for us all in Matthew 22:37:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
So that’s it? All those rules and regulations come down to this? Love God and other people?
Doesn’t sound suffocating to me at all.
Only our broken nature could make a hell of heaven, a bad guy of the source of all goodness. We are called to give up our little kingdoms of one and join the Kingdom of God. He’s the only one who can give us true freedom.