Tony Evans — The Good News of Freedom
What you have to understand is when you got God's definition of freedom in light of your own definition of freedom, there will be consequences that you pay personally, in your family, and in your society.
Hello, this is Dr. Tony Evans, and I want to wish all of our viewers a very happy Fourth of July, celebrating our independence and celebrating the birth of a nation. Our nation, however, is struggling. We're struggling to fully realize what freedom really means and how it's supposed to work in every area of life.
Well, to help us do that, I want to bring God's view of freedom to us today. We really want to let freedom ring, but we want God to ring the bell. We want him to define, delegate, and explain freedom as he intended it to be, and how it ought to operate in a society. That's our message for today. So join me and let's really discover what it means when we do let freedom ring.
I want to talk to you today about freedom, but not from America's definition — from God's definition. Because the first person to use the word "freedom" is God. And he used the word "freedom" in the creation narrative, as we read in Genesis chapter.
So perhaps if we can get his understanding and his definition of freedom, we can learn what it should mean for us, and what it should mean for our culture and our country. God told the first man who ever lived, Adam, what freedom was.
He said in Genesis chapter, verse, "The Lord took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. And the Lord commanded the man, saying, 'From any tree of the garden you may eat freely.'"
Here we have the first reference to freedom in creation by God to man. Now, you have to understand in the garden, when God first created man, God was himself the government. He set the governing rules for how mankind was to function. He tells man in this first declaration of freedom, "Every tree of the garden you may freely eat. There is one tree you may not eat from.
If you do eat from it, you will surely die." Right there, we find three specific clarifications of freedom. First of all, whatever freedom is, it's very broad because whatever tree you want to eat from, you're free to eat from it. So freedom is a very broad concept. So the first thing we know is freedom is maximum. That is, you are free to enjoy whatever God legitimately provides.
At the heart of freedom is the ability to enjoy and experience and participate in whatever God has provided. God had provided all these multiple kind of trees and he says, "You can pick your tree." Or in the words of a few brothers, "This your thing. You can do what you want to do." If it was legitimately provided by God, you can partake of it and you can partake of it by your decision, by your choice.
So whatever freedom is, it's very broad. However, he goes on and he says there's one tree you may not eat from, and that is the tree in the midst of the garden. That is, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So freedom does not mean no restriction. He gives them a restriction while telling them they are free. In other words, freedom has boundaries.
Please notice that while there was maximum freedom, there was minimal regulation. There was only one tree they couldn't eat. They could eat all the other trees, so freedom of what they could do was a lot bigger than what they couldn't do. Now, I know there are a lot of definitions of freedom out here. And what they mean by that is we want to be free not to have boundaries.
We want to be free to kill the baby in the womb. We want to be free to marry whoever we want to marry, even if they're the same sex. We want to be free-- And they call that freedom. And what they mean is we do not want boundaries.
Freedom without legitimate boundaries is chaos. Why? Because of the third thing you see in this passage. Because he says if you eat the tree, cross the boundary that I told you not to cross, on the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.
In other words, there would be consequences to breaking the boundary in the misuse of legitimate freedom. When you take advantage of freedom to the degree that you erase the boundary that the divine designer has put in place, what you wind up is not with freedom of life, but the experience of death.
Because while you get to choose what you will do, what you don't get to choose is the consequences of your choice. Those are imposed from another. On the day you eat from it, you will surely die. So the penalty was maximum and immediate.