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What does a slave hope for? “Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom,” Mark Twain writes of the runaway slave Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Jim and Huck float down the Mississippi, approaching Cairo, Illinois, their gateway to the free states up the Ohio River, Jim exclaims, “Pretty soon I’ll be a-shout’n for joy.”
Freedom. That’s the sum of the hopes of a slave. Even the prospect of a kindly master cannot erase the longing for an end to bondage.
How strange, then, is humankind’s bondage to sin? And how much stranger is the believer’s slavery to God?
During our enslavement to sin, we have no longing for freedom. As Paul has shown, we are determined to remain in our slavery at all costs. Why? Because we don’t see our slavery as slavery. We cannot see our misery; rather, we think ourselves to be in the most advantageous state possible. In our view, we are free indeed, at least compared to the only alternative—service to God.
But although we may not want to submit to God, we really have no say in the matter. We are, after all, slaves, and God is, after all, the Master. If He chooses to buy us for Himself, He does so.
The transaction, however, is a most curious one. We are not dragged kicking and screaming from our old master. By His Spirit, God works in us to cause us to see that slavery to Him is such that the term does not work well. Yes, He is the Master. Yes, He owns us body and soul. But as He draws us to Himself, He clears our vision so that we see that our “freedom” as sinners is slavery, while “slavery” to Him is no bondage at all. And so, we willingly submit to this new Master, abandoning all our cravings for “freedom.” In truth, service to Him is freedom defined, for only under His ownership are we liberated to be what He designed us to be.
And so we become like some Hebrew slaves in ancient Israel. Despite provision in the law for their freedom after a maximum of six years, despite the law’s requirement that owners set slaves free with the means to get back on their feet, some slaves found life better under their masters (Deut. 15:12–18). They came to love their lords and made the decision to undergo the piercing of their ears. In the service of their kind masters, they found freedom such as they never had known.
“ ‘My yoke is easy,’ ” Jesus said, “ ‘and My burden is light’ ” (Matt. 11:28–30). When He takes us from slavery to sin and makes us His own, we find rest for our souls. We are free as never before.
What do God’s slaves hope for? Freedom? Yes—but only freedom from the lingering sin that stands between them and wholehearted service to the Master they love and cannot leave.