Devotional 102: The Nature of Christian Liberty: Freedom from the Curse of the Law

The Confession Read

The liberty which Christ hath purchased for believers under the gospel consists in their freedom from the guilt of sin, the condemning wrath of God, the curse of the moral law; and in their being delivered from this present evil world, bondage to Satan, and dominion of sin, from the evil of afflictions, the sting of death, the victory of the grave, and everlasting damnation; as also in their free access to God, and their yielding obedience unto him, not out of slavish fear, but a child-like love and willing mind. All which were common also to believers under the law; but under the New Testament the liberty of Christians is further enlarged in their freedom from the yoke of the ceremonial law, to which the Jewish Church was subjected; and in greater boldness of access to the throne of grace, and in fuller communications of the free Spirit of God, than believers under the law did ordinarily partake of.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 20, Section 1

Introduction

The word liberty, in every age, has been a banner under which armies have marched and revolutions have been launched. Men have bled and died for liberty as they understood it: freedom from the tyrant's sword, from the oppressor's chain, from the stranger's foot upon their neck. Yet there is a liberty more fundamental than any political freedom, a liberty that no parliament can grant and no revolution can secure, because it concerns not the body's relation to the state but the soul's relation to God. It is the liberty which Christ purchased, and it is the subject of the twentieth chapter of the Confession. When the Westminster Divines took up the question of Christian liberty, they were doing more than filling a gap in a systematic outline. They were answering errors that threatened to deform the gospel from two opposite directions. On one side stood Rome, which had buried Christ's purchased freedom under mountains of human tradition: prescribed fasts, obligatory holy days, forbidden foods, and a priestly mediation that pushed the believer away from the throne of grace rather than drawing him near. On the other side stood the antinomians, who had seized on the language of liberty and twisted it into a license to sin, as though freedom from the law's curse meant freedom from the law's content. Between these two errors, the Divines planted a careful exposition of what Christian liberty actually is: a freedom so rich and so thoroughly rooted in the work of Christ that to add to it or to abuse it is equally to betray it. Section 1, the longest and most detailed of the chapter's four sections, lays out the content of this liberty in a single, sweeping sentence. It is a sentence that begins with what Christ has purchased, moves through what we have been freed from, turns to what we have been freed for, acknowledges the continuity between old covenant and new, and then rises to a crescendo with the particular privileges of the New Testament believer. To read it slowly is to trace the outlines of the Christian's emancipation from every form of bondage: a freedom so complete that the believer who fully understands it will never again reach for the chains he has been released from, and so precious that he will never again treat lightly what cost Christ his blood to obtain.

Scripture Foundation

The foundation upon which the entire doctrine of Christian liberty rests is the finished work of Christ, and no single passage expresses this more compactly than Galatians 3:13: "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree." The Greek verb rendered "redeemed" is exēgorasen, a compound drawn from the marketplace, meaning to buy out or to purchase off the auction block. In the ancient world, the agora was the public square where slaves were bought and sold, and the preposition ek ('out from') adds the sense of complete removal. Christ did not merely adjust our legal status; he paid the price that took us entirely out of the slave market of the law's curse. And the price was himself. He became what we were, accursed and condemned, hanging exposed to the wrath of God, so that we might become what he is: righteous, accepted, beloved of the Father. This is the transaction that stands at the head of every discussion of Christian liberty. The freedom we enjoy is not an abstract philosophical principle; it is a purchase that cost the Son of God his life. But the curse of the law is only the beginning of what we have been delivered from. The apostle Paul, writing to the Colossians, extends the scope in Colossians 1:13: "Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son." The Greek errusato ('delivered') carries the sense of a rescue, a drawing to oneself out of danger, and the exousia tou skotous ('the power of darkness') names not merely a condition but a dominion, a realm under the active authority of a hostile ruler. The believer's liberty is not merely a change of status before the law; it is a change of citizenship. We have been transferred (metestēsen, the same word used for the deportation of conquered peoples) from one kingdom to another. The tyranny under which we formerly lived was no abstraction. It was the real and personal bondage of Satan's dominion, and our liberation from it was no less real. Christ did not negotiate with the powers of darkness; he conquered them, and in his exaltation he led captivity captive, taking his people with him into the kingdom where he reigns. This deliverance from the curse and from the powers of darkness finds its personal, experiential counterpart in what Paul describes in Romans 8:15: "For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father." The pneuma huiothesias ('the Spirit of adoption') is the third person of the Trinity indwelling the believer in such a way that the believer's whole relation to God is transformed. The Greek term huiothesia, which Paul uses five times and which appears nowhere else in the New Testament, was a legal term drawn from Roman practice, denoting the full legal placement of an outsider as a son with all the rights and privileges of natural-born children. The believer is not merely pardoned; he is adopted. He leaves the prison of guilt behind and is brought into the family hall. And the evidence that this adoption is real is the cry of the heart, 'Abba, Father': an Aramaic term of intimate address that no slave would ever have dared to use to his master, but that every child learns to speak as his first word. Here the Confession's language about "free access to God" and "yielding obedience unto him, not out of slavish fear, but a child-like love" finds its deepest biblical root. The Spirit who indwells believers does not merely instruct them in the commandments; he changes the very disposition of their hearts toward the Lawgiver, so that the God they once fled they now approach, and the will they once resisted they now embrace. The New Testament enlargement of this liberty, to which the Confession devotes its closing clauses, is most vividly expressed in Hebrews 10:19-22: "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; and having an high priest over the house of God; let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water." The term translated "boldness" is parrēsian, a word that in classical Greek denoted the freedom of a citizen to speak openly in the assembly, without fear of reprisal. The writer to the Hebrews applies it to the believer's approach to God: we have freedom of speech before the throne. Under the old covenant, only the high priest could enter the most holy place, and that only once a year, and never without blood. Under the new covenant, every believer approaches with boldness, because the blood that gives access has already been shed, and the way has been opened through the flesh of Christ, the veil of his body, torn on the cross, through which we pass into the presence of God himself. This is liberty of access such as no Old Testament saint, not even David, not even Moses, could ordinarily know.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly convened in the Jerusalem Chamber, the question of Christian liberty was not a speculative exercise. It was a pastoral emergency. For generations, the Roman Church had constructed an elaborate system of religious obligations that had no warrant in Scripture: prescribed days of fasting, forbidden meats, compulsory celibacy for clergy, obligatory auricular confession, and a host of ceremonies that had accumulated over the centuries until the simple worship of the New Testament was buried beneath them. Rome did not deny that Christ had purchased liberty; it claimed that the Church, as the custodian of that liberty, had the authority to define its boundaries, and that the faithful were bound in conscience to observe whatever the Church commanded, whether or not Scripture required it. The result was a conscience perpetually burdened, never certain whether it had done enough, always reaching for a standard it could never fully meet because the standard kept expanding. The Reformation was, at its heart, a recovery of Christian liberty. When Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and declared that his conscience was captive to the Word of God, he was not asserting personal autonomy; he was asserting that no human authority may bind the conscience where God has left it free. The Confession's first section does not directly address this question of conscience; that comes in Section 2, but it lays the foundation by defining what Christian liberty positively consists in. The Divines wanted the believer to understand what he had gained before they warned him against those who would take it away. The structure of the sentence reveals their intention. It falls into three movements. The first movement is entirely negative, a catalogue of what the believer has been freed from: guilt, wrath, curse, this present evil world, bondage to Satan, dominion of sin, the evil of afflictions, the sting of death, the victory of the grave, everlasting damnation. The list is comprehensive because Christ's work is comprehensive. There is no form of bondage, no consequence of the fall, no dimension of the curse that Christ has not addressed. The Divines were not content to say that Christ freed us from sin's guilt; they enumerated the full chain of consequences, from the internal (guilt, wrath, curse) to the external (the world, Satan, sin's dominion) to the ultimate (afflictions, death, grave, damnation). Nothing is left out. The liberty Christ purchased is total liberty. The second movement turns to the positive: free access to God and willing obedience. Liberty in Scripture is never merely negative, never merely freedom from. It is always also freedom for. The believer is not turned loose into a moral vacuum, a pardoned criminal with no direction for his pardoned life. He is brought near to God, given the privilege of communion with his Maker, and then enabled to obey that Maker from the heart. The Divines choose their adverbs with care: obedience is rendered "not out of slavish fear, but a child-like love and willing mind." The fear of the slave looks at the master and asks, "What must I do to avoid punishment?" The love of the child looks at the father and asks, "What may I do to bring him pleasure?" The outward action may be identical: both slave and child rise early and work diligently, but the inward disposition makes all the difference, and that difference is the gift of the Spirit of adoption. The third movement addresses the relationship between the covenants. The Divines insist that all the foregoing blessings "were common also to believers under the law." This mattered, because some in their day, and in ours, have spoken as though Old Testament saints lived under a regime of bare legal terror, earning their acceptance by works, ignorant of grace. The Divines reject this. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. David knew the blessedness of the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity. The Old Testament saints were justified by faith, adopted as sons, sanctified by the Spirit, and heirs of eternal life no less than we. Yet the Divines also insist on a genuine enlargement under the New Testament: freedom from the ceremonial law, a yoke that the Jewish church bore throughout its minority; greater boldness of access, because the veil is now rent and the great High Priest has passed through the heavens; and fuller communications of the free Spirit, poured out at Pentecost in a manner and measure that the old covenant only foreshadowed. The difference is not that Old Testament believers lacked grace, but that New Testament believers enjoy grace in greater clarity, fuller measure, and with the shadows removed.

Theological Depth

The Genevan Reformer, in the third book of his Institutes, devoted an entire chapter to Christian liberty, and he opened it with a striking claim: that a right understanding of this doctrine is necessary to prevent the conscience from being entangled in endless scruples. For Calvin, the three parts of Christian liberty correspond to what the Confession later codified: freedom from the law's condemnation, freedom for willing obedience, and freedom in matters of indifference. On the first point, Calvin insists that the conscience that still trembles before the law as a condition of justification has not understood the gospel. "The consciences of believers," he writes, "when seeking an assurance of their justification before God, should raise and advance themselves above the law, and forget all the righteousness of the law." He does not mean that believers should ignore the law's moral content; he means that in the matter of acceptance with God, the law has no voice except to drive us to Christ, and once we are in Christ, the law's condemning voice is forever silenced. The conscience that continues to ask, "Have I done enough?" has not grasped that Christ has done everything. This is not a counsel of carelessness; it is the foundation of the only genuine obedience, for until a man knows that he is accepted apart from his works, his works will always be poisoned by the anxiety of self-justification. Watson takes up the practical consequences of this liberty with characteristic vividness. He notes that Christian liberty is a liberty purchased, not a liberty seized; it is Christ's blood that bought it, and therefore it is to be valued as one values anything bought at such a cost. Watson presses the believer to consider what it means to be delivered from the curse of the moral law. The curse, he explains, is a sentence of eternal separation from the face of God, the withdrawal of every comfort, the infliction of every misery, and the sealing of that state forever. When Christ cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" he was experiencing the curse in the believer's place, so that the believer might never experience it. Watson's application is searching: how can the believer who knows that the curse has been borne by Christ continue in a state of slavish terror, as though the curse might yet fall? Such fear is not humility; it is a practical denial of the sufficiency of Christ's satisfaction. The believer who trembles as though the law might still condemn him is like a prisoner who, having received the king's pardon under the royal seal, refuses to leave his cell because he cannot believe the pardon is real. Faith receives the pardon; hope rejoices in it; and the life that follows is lived in the sunlight of a sentence already served by the Substitute. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, provides the systematic framework that holds all these elements together. He observes that the Confession distinguishes between different kinds of liberty, corresponding to different aspects of the believer's condition. There is the liberty of justification, freedom from the guilt and penalty of sin. There is the liberty of sanctification, freedom from the dominion and power of sin. There is the liberty of adoption, freedom of access to God as Father. And there is the liberty of glory, freedom from the very presence of sin and all its consequences. Section 1, Hodge notes, encompasses all of these, moving from justification through sanctification to adoption and pointing forward to glory. The comprehensive character of the list ('from the guilt of sin... to everlasting damnation') is deliberate. The Divines wanted no believer to imagine that there was any corner of his existence that the liberty of Christ had not touched. The same Christ who freed him from hell has freed him from the dominion of sin in the present, and will one day free him from the very presence of suffering in the age to come. There is no half-liberty in the gospel. The eschatological dimension of this liberty receives its most penetrating treatment from Warfield, who insists that the New Testament's language of freedom is always forward-looking as well as backward-looking. The believer has been freed, and yet he awaits freedom. The redemption of the body, the final destruction of death, the swallowing up of mortality by life: these are liberties already secured by Christ's purchase but not yet fully delivered into the believer's experience. Warfield notes that the Confession's list includes "the sting of death" and "the victory of the grave" among the things from which the believer is delivered, and yet the believer still dies. The liberty is real but not yet consummated. This is not a defect in the purchase; it is the order of the application. Christ has disarmed death of its sting (which is sin, the guilt that gives death its terror) but he has not yet abolished death itself. The believer who dies does so in the confidence that the grave has already been defeated, that the resurrection of Christ is the firstfruits of his own, and that the liberty he now enjoys in part will one day be his in full. This tension between the already and the not-yet is not a weakness in the doctrine of Christian liberty; it is the very structure of the Christian life between the ascension and the return. Owen, in his treatise on the mortification of sin, supplies the pastoral complement to this eschatological framework. He asks the question every believer has asked in the heat of temptation: if Christ has delivered me from the dominion of sin, why does sin still rage so powerfully in my members? Why do I feel, at times, more like a captive than a conqueror? Owen's answer turns on the distinction between the right of dominion and the exercise of dominion. Sin's right to reign was abolished at the cross, where the guilt that gave sin its legal claim over the sinner was fully atoned for. But sin continues to exercise a usurped, residual power in the believer's mortal body, not because it has any right to do so, but because the believer has not yet been perfected and the Spirit's work of mortification is progressive. The liberty Christ purchased is genuine; the warfare it produces is genuine too. The believer is not to interpret the presence of battle as the absence of victory. The very fact that he fights (that he resists sin, that he mourns its presence, that he looks to the Spirit for enablement) is evidence that the dominion has been broken. A slave does not fight his master; he complies. The believer's struggle is not a sign that he remains in chains but that he has been set free and will not willingly return to the house of bondage. Owen's counsel is bracing: do not deny the reality of the remaining corruption, but do not grant it a dominion it no longer possesses. Fight in the confidence that the enemy's head has already been crushed by the captain of your salvation.

Puritan Application

First, understand that Christian liberty is a known liberty, not a hidden one. The Confession describes the content of this liberty with such detail precisely so that believers may know what is theirs. The believer who remains ignorant of what Christ has purchased for him will live as though half his inheritance were still locked away. He will fear the wrath that has been propitiated, cower before the adversary who has been defeated, and tremble at the grave whose victory has been nullified. The Scripture calls believers not to blind hope but to informed confidence. Paul does not say, "I hope that there is no condemnation"; he says, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus." The indicative precedes the imperative, and the believer's first duty with respect to his liberty is to know it, to count it real, and to live in the light of it. If you have been freed from the curse of the moral law, then stop living as though the curse might yet fall. If you have been delivered from the dominion of sin, then stop living as though sin's authority were intact. Many a sincere believer spends years in a prison whose door Christ has already unlocked, simply because he has never been taught to look at the door. He mistakes the lingering echoes of the law's thunder for the law's continuing verdict, not realizing that for the justified, the storm has passed and the sky is clear. The conscience that has been sprinkled with the blood of Christ no longer hears the law's curse; it hears only the law's direction. To know this is to possess a liberty that shapes how you pray, how you face temptation, how you endure affliction, and how you approach the hour of your death. Christian liberty is not a secret doctrine for theologians; it is the daily bread of every believer's assurance. Second, never confuse liberty from the law's curse with liberty from the law's direction. The Confession is careful to place the free access to God and the willing, childlike obedience side by side, because they belong together. The believer who uses his liberty as an excuse for license has not misunderstood a minor point of doctrine; he has, as the Confession will later state, "destroyed the end of Christian liberty." The purpose for which Christ freed us was not autonomy but a new kind of service, service rendered not under the slave-driver's lash but in the Son's freedom. When the apostle writes, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage," the very next verse warns, "For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another." Freedom from the law's curse is never freedom from the law's content as a rule of gratitude. The believer who reasons, "I am free from the law, therefore I may sin freely," has not advanced beyond legalism; he has fallen below it, for at least the legalist acknowledges the law's authority, even if he misunderstands its relation to grace. Third, make daily use of your liberty of access. The Confession states that believers possess "free access to God," and under the New Testament, this access is characterized by "greater boldness." Yet how many believers live as though the way into the holiest were still blocked by a curtain they dare not pass? They approach God tentatively, apologetically, as though they were intruding where they have no right to be. The remedy is to fix the eyes not on one's own worthiness (for no one is worthy) but on the blood that opened the way. The writer to the Hebrews does not say, "Having therefore, brethren, worthiness to enter"; he says, "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter by the blood of Jesus." The ground of access is entirely outside the believer, in the finished work of the Mediator, and therefore the access is as secure as that work is complete. The believer who understands this will pray with a freedom that astonishes those who have been taught to approach God through human intermediaries. He will come to the throne as a child comes to a father: not presumptuously, for the Father is still the King, but confidently, for the King is now his Father. This is not arrogance; it is faith taking Christ at his word when he says, "Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." Fourth, distinguish carefully between the substance of Christian liberty, which all believers share, and the accidents of circumstance, which vary. The Confession is careful to note that the essential liberties (freedom from guilt, wrath, curse, free access to God, childlike obedience) belonged to Old Testament saints no less than to New. Abraham, Moses, David, and Isaiah were not second-class citizens of the kingdom, laboring under a covenant of works while we enjoy a covenant of grace. They were justified by faith, adopted as sons, and heirs of the same eternal life. The enlargement under the New Testament is real but it is an enlargement of degree, not a difference of kind. This matters for the believer's reading of the whole Bible. The Old Testament is not a record of failed legalism from which the New Testament delivers us; it is the history of the same covenant of grace administered under types and shadows. When you read of David crying, "Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation," you are hearing the voice of a brother who knew the same liberty you know, even if he saw Christ's day from a greater distance. The unity of the covenant people across the ages is itself a dimension of Christian liberty, for it assures the believer that the faith by which he stands is no novelty but the faith once delivered to the saints, the faith of Abraham and Moses and David and Paul, the faith that has carried every generation of the elect safely home. Fifth, let the fullness of the Spirit's communications become the object of earnest prayer. The Confession closes Section 1 by noting that New Testament believers enjoy "fuller communications of the free Spirit of God" than Old Testament saints ordinarily possessed. This is not a statement to be filed away as a historical observation; it is a privilege to be pursued. The Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, but the effects of that outpouring are not automatically appropriated by every believer. The Spirit is given, but he must be sought. The believer who lives with a distant sense of God, a formal prayer life, and a lukewarm obedience has not exhausted the Spirit's provision; he has neglected it. The Spirit's communications are always fuller than our experience of them, and the gap between what is available and what is enjoyed is closed by prayer. Ask for the Spirit's fuller work. Ask for the boldness of access he was sent to produce. Ask for the childlike love that overcomes slavish fear. Ask for the willing mind that delights in the law of God after the inward man. These are not extraordinary gifts reserved for apostles and martyrs; they are the normal privileges of the new covenant, purchased by Christ and applied by the Spirit, and they are offered to every believer who will ask in faith.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who didst send thy Son to purchase for us a liberty no earthly power could obtain, we bless thee for the freedom that is ours in Christ. We were slaves to guilt, to wrath, to the curse of thy holy law, to the dominion of sin, to the fear of death and the terror of the grave. We lay under the power of darkness, and we could not deliver ourselves. But thou hast translated us into the kingdom of thy dear Son, and every chain that bound us has been broken by the hand that was pierced for our transgressions. Grant us, we beseech thee, to live as those who have been set free. Let not the old fears return to haunt us, as though the curse Christ bore might yet fall upon our heads. Let not the old master reclaim his former slaves, as though the dominion of sin had not been shattered by the cross. Teach us to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, neither returning to the yoke of legal bondage nor turning our liberty into an occasion for the flesh. We thank thee for the Spirit of adoption, who has taken up his dwelling in our hearts and taught us to cry, Abba, Father. We thank thee that we may approach thy throne with boldness, not because we are worthy, but because the blood of Jesus has opened a new and living way. Let the distance between what the Spirit offers and what we experience be closed by a fresh outpouring of thy grace. Give us fuller communications of the free Spirit: fuller light, fuller love, fuller power to obey with a willing mind. Let our obedience be the glad response of children who know they are loved, not the cringing compliance of slaves who fear the lash. And in those hours when the old fears whisper and the grave looms large, remind us that death has lost its sting because sin has been forgiven, and the grave has lost its victory because Christ is risen. Keep us steadfast until that day when liberty shall be perfected in glory, and we shall see the face of him who loved us and gave himself for us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.