The Gift of Freedom

Jesus’s birth promises true freedom from the bondage of sin and death through His being Savior and Lord.

Life is an enigma. It takes a lifetime to figure it out, finally, and by the time we do, we’ve run out of time. Such is the paradox of our sojourn between the dash of life and death. What is important today is not as important tomorrow. And what was not important today becomes critically essential tomorrow.

King Solomon tried to warn us after much trial and error, being “wiser than all men” (1 Kings 4:31), that “everything is futile” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). If we can’t take the wisest man’s words for it, then who can we believe? Yet, there remains hope because there is a Man who has made it possible for us to escape the futility of life in exchange for the abundant life. He is known as Jesus from the village of Nazareth.

The Pursuit of Freedom

Jesus offers us a better life. A life free from sin and death, pain and sorrow, sickness and disease, war and famine, and poverty and suffering. Freedom is what Jesus promises, and freedom is what we are chasing after. One definition of freedom is “the state of being free.”^[1] Thus, it is not something we pursue; it is a state of existence that must be conferred by the authority that has the power to grant it.

On December 6, 1865, slavery was legally abolished in the United States of America, making the freedom that had been nothing more than a promise on January 1, 1863, a legally recognized state of existence. Now it is true that the forces of evil attempted to impose lesser forms of bondage upon the newly freed slaves, but their legal status remained the same. And such is the paradox that believers find themselves in. We have been set free by Jesus, but we are not yet free from the effects of the fall—sin and death, and everything else that comes with both. The good news is that what is legal is binding. And the rule of law will always carry the day.  

The Promise of Emancipation

The birth of Jesus is more than a lovely story that we tell our children each Christmas. It is the promise of human emancipation that would later be ratified during what we celebrate as Easter—the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. In effect, Christ’s birth is analogous to the Emancipation Proclamation. For it is the promise of freedom: “I proclaim to you good news that brings great joy to all the people: Today your Savior is born in the city of David. He is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).

There are two crucial titles given to the baby Jesus that promise liberation to all humanity.

1. He is the Savior of the world. When Adam (and Eve) disobeyed God’s command not to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, sin and death entered the world. That fruit, whatever it was, unleashed the tyranny of slavery like no other. Anything and everything that causes human suffering is the fruit of that fruit.

But as the song says, “that’s not how the story ends.” The angels proclaimed to a group of shepherds in Bethlehem that the Savior had been born. A savior is “one who rescues.”^[2] Though He was only a newborn baby, Jesus was the One who would rescue humanity from our enslavement to sin. Yet, we needed more than someone with a mission to liberate; we needed someone with the power to legislate.

2. He is the Lord of the world. When Adam sinned against God, the legal punishment was spiritual and physical death. There was no person with the legal authority to free us from this verdict. So, the eternal Son of God became human so that He could issue a new decree to override the first. The first decree was death; the second decree is life. Humanity was in a state of being dead, and we needed our state of being to become freedom.

But for emancipation to be legal, it must be authorized by a legislative body or someone with supreme authority to decree it. Thus, the angels also proclaimed that the Lord was born. The word Lord is “(a title for God and for Christ) one who exercises supernatural authority over mankind.”^[3] By the time of Christ’s birth, Roman Emperors referred to themselves as lords. This suggested that, as the head of the most powerful country in the world, they were sovereign and deified—i.e., godlike. But the angels declared Jesus to be Lord, which speaks to His right as God to exercise His divine authority over His creation. As a result, “to all who have received him—those who believe in his [divinity]—he has given the right to become God’s children” (John 1:12). That, my friend, is freedom.

Praise the Newborn King!

This month, we celebrate the birth of Jesus as the greatest gift one could give—and He is. As we celebrate the gift that Jesus is from God, let us also celebrate the gift inside the Gift. Christ came to rescue us and ratify our freedom by offering the same body He was born in as our payment to God to redeem us from sin’s plantation, eternally. “Hark! The herald angels sing,

"Glory to the newborn King!”

Dr. Isaac Hayes is an Assistant Pastor at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Illinois, and author of Men After God’s Heart: 10 Principles of Brotherly Love. He also has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Follow Dr. Hayes on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube at @RevIsaacHayes.

^[1] Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson, eds., Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

^[2] BDAG, 985.

^[3] Louw and Nida, 138.