Devotional 104: Liberty of Conscience: Traditions of Men Not to Be Imposed

The Confession Read

They who, upon pretense of Christian liberty, do practice any sin, or cherish any lust, do thereby destroy the end of Christian liberty, which is, that being delivered out of the hands of our enemies, we might serve the Lord without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 20, Section 3

Introduction

A poison wears the costume of medicine, a tyranny marches under the banner of freedom. The history of the church is littered with the wreckage of souls who took the precious gift Christ purchased, liberty, and twisted it into a warrant for the very bondage from which they had been delivered. Section 3 of this twentieth chapter is the Confession's sober warning against that twisting, and it comes with the force of a surgeon's knife: precise, necessary, and aimed at a disease that, left unchecked, proves fatal. The Westminster Divines were not theorists. They had watched with alarm as groups in their own land claimed that Christian liberty meant freedom from the moral law altogether: that the gospel had abolished the law's condemning power and its guiding authority alike, and that the believer could live as he pleased without danger to his soul. Section 1 unfurled the full scope of Christ's purchase; Section 2 established God alone as Lord of the conscience. But now Section 3 turns inward, addressing not the external tyrant but the internal traitor: not pope or magistrate usurping God's throne, but the sinful heart bending liberty into a cloak for the sin Christ died to destroy. The logic of this section is as tight as a syllogism and as warm as a father's warning. Christian liberty has an end, a purpose, a telos toward which it is directed. That end is not self-indulgence but service; not license but holiness; not the freedom to sin but freedom from sin to live unto God. Whoever uses liberty for any other purpose does not merely misuse a gift; he destroys the very thing he claims to possess. The word the Divines chose is stark: "destroy." Not diminish. Not impair. Destroy. The man who says, "I am free in Christ, therefore I may indulge this lust," has not found a loophole in the gospel; he has nullified the gospel's purpose in his own life and, if he persists in that posture, has given evidence that he never understood the gospel at all.

Scripture Foundation

The biblical foundation for this section is not a single proof text but a constellation of passages that together establish an unbreakable link between liberty and holiness, between freedom from the law's curse and freedom for the law's obedience. The Confession's language is so saturated with Scripture that nearly every clause echoes a specific text, and the Divines expected their readers to recognize the allusions. The most direct source is the prophecy of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, who, filled with the Holy Spirit at his son's circumcision, declared the purpose for which God was visiting his people: "That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life." Luke 1:74-75. The Greek verb translated "serve" is latreuein, a word the New Testament reserves for the service of worship, the ministry of priests in the tabernacle. Zechariah is not describing a life of mere ethical compliance, as though one could check off a list of rules and be done. He is describing a life of priestly consecration, in which every act (eating and drinking, working and resting, waking and sleeping) is offered to God as an act of worship, performed "without fear" because the enemy has been vanquished, "in holiness" because the server has been sanctified, and "in righteousness" because his standing before God is secured. This is the telos of deliverance. The hand that broke the enemy's grip did not release us into a vacuum; it transferred us into a sanctuary. The liberty Christ purchased is not the liberty of the wilderness but the liberty of the temple: not the aimless wandering of freed slaves with no master, but the ordered service of consecrated priests with a glorious Lord. The Divines wove Zechariah's words almost verbatim into their confession, and they did so deliberately. By grounding the purpose of liberty in this Benedictus, they anchored the doctrine in the worship of the covenant community. Christian liberty is not an individualistic project of self-actualization; it is the liberation of a people for the corporate worship of God. The "we" of Zechariah's prophecy is the covenant community, and the service rendered is the service of a kingdom of priests, as Peter would later describe the church. Every individual believer is a living stone in that temple, and his liberty is not for private license but for public, priestly service. But the danger against which the Divines warn (that liberty would be twisted into license) is precisely the danger Paul anticipated in his letter to the Romans. Having spent five chapters demonstrating that justification is by faith apart from works of the law, and having reached the stunning conclusion that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound, Paul pauses to answer an objection he knew would arise: "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?" Romans 6:1-2. The logic is ontological, not merely ethical. Paul does not say, "You should not continue in sin because it would be ungrateful." He says, "You cannot continue in sin because you are dead to sin." The believer's union with Christ in his death means that the old self, the old relationship to sin as master, has been terminated. A dead man cannot respond to commands. The slave who has died can no longer be summoned by his former owner. To continue in sin is not merely a moral failure; it is a metaphysical impossibility for those who have truly died with Christ. And if someone claims to be united to Christ while living in continuity with the sin from which Christ died to free him, that claim is contradicted by the nature of the union itself. Paul returns to this argument later in the same chapter, applying it directly to the question of license: "What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid." Romans 6:15. The phrase "not under the law" was the antinomian slogan of Paul's day, and it remains the antinomian slogan of our own. "We are not under law but under grace: therefore the law has no claim on us, therefore its commands are irrelevant, therefore we may live as we please." Paul's response is the emphatic negation mē genoito, "May it never be!" The very suggestion is blasphemous. And the reason he gives is the same as before: the change of masters. "Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?" The believer has not been freed from all authority; he has been transferred from the authority of sin, which pays its servants in death, to the authority of God, who leads his servants into righteousness. To claim liberty while serving sin is to live a contradiction. The man who says, "I am free, therefore I may sin," does not understand the grammar of freedom. In the kingdom of God, freedom is not the absence of a master but the presence of the right one. The apostle returns to this theme in his letter to the Galatians, where he turns the argument from the nature of the believer to the purpose of the call itself: "For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another." Galatians 5:13. The word translated "occasion" is aphormēn, a military term denoting a base of operations, a staging ground from which an army launches its campaigns. Paul pictures the flesh as an enemy commander who sees Christian liberty as a strategic opportunity, a forward base from which to launch fresh assaults. The believer who treats liberty as a warrant for self-indulgence has handed the enemy the very ground Christ conquered. And Paul's alternative is profoundly counterintuitive: the opposite of using liberty for the flesh is not a return to legalistic rule-keeping but service to one another through love. The liberty that is not directed Godward and brotherward turns inward and downward, curving in upon the self until it becomes indistinguishable from bondage. The flesh is never satisfied with a little liberty; it wants all liberty, and the end of that road is not freedom but a new and more terrible slavery. Peter, writing to churches scattered through Asia Minor, adds a complementary warning that addresses not the inward lust but the outward disguise: "As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God." 1 Peter 2:16. The Greek word translated "cloke" is epikalumma, a covering or veil, something that conceals what lies beneath. Peter's concern runs deeper: believers might use the language of freedom to disguise their sin, to give it a respectable name, to make it appear virtuous. "I am not indulging the flesh; I am exercising my Christian liberty." How much mischief has been done under that cloke? How many consciences have been seared, how many weak brothers have been wounded, how many testimonies have been destroyed because a believer insisted on his right to do what, in any other context, would be recognized as sin? Peter strips away the disguise: you are free, yes, but you are free as servants of God, and a servant does not use his master's liberty to dishonor his master's house. Finally, Jude's brief but searing letter identifies the archetype of those who twist grace into license: "For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ." Jude 4. The verb "turning" is metatithentes, indicating a deliberate exchange, a substitution of one thing for another. These men take the grace of God, the unmerited favor that cost the blood of the Son, and exchange it for lasciviousness, for unrestrained sensuality. Jude does not say they misunderstand grace; he says they exchange it. It is a transaction, a deliberate perversion. And the root of that perversion is a denial of the only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. Antinomianism is not a theological error that happens to have practical consequences; it is a practical denial of Christ's lordship dressed in theological language. The man who claims liberty to sin has, whatever his lips may say, denied in his heart that Christ is Lord. For if Christ is Lord, his commands bind; and if his commands bind, liberty cannot mean freedom from those commands.

What the Divines Meant

The Divines addressed a pastoral emergency that had been building for a century. The Reformation's recovery of justification by faith alone had been accompanied, from the beginning, by a counter-movement that drew the wrong conclusion: if works contribute nothing to justification, then works are irrelevant to the Christian life; if the law can no longer condemn, the law can no longer direct; if grace abounds where sin increases, let sin increase that grace may abound. The Divines had seen this logic play out at its worst. They had read the reports of the Münster rebellion, where radical reformers had seized control of a city, instituted polygamy under the banner of Christian freedom, and drowned themselves and thousands of others in blood. Closer to home, they had contended with groups in England who taught that the moral law had no place in the believer's life, that repentance after conversion was unnecessary, that God saw no sin in his justified people, and that the motions of the Spirit within the believer were so immediate and so authoritative that external commandments, even those contained in Scripture, were rendered obsolete. The Divines recognized this not as an extension of the Reformation but as a betrayal of it. The Reformers had never taught that the law was abolished; they had taught that its condemning office was fulfilled in Christ so that its directing office might be joyfully embraced. Calvin, with characteristic precision, had insisted that the third use of the law, as a guide for the believer's grateful obedience, was its principal use, the very purpose for which the law was given. The antinomians had seized half the Reformation's doctrine and discarded the other half, producing a monstrosity that pleased neither God nor the godly. Section 3 is therefore a guardrail, and the Divines built it with two rails. The first rail is negative: those who practice sin or cherish lust under the pretense of liberty destroy the end of that liberty. The language is striking. The Divines do not say "misunderstand" or "misuse" or "fail to appreciate." They say "destroy." The Greek concept behind their thinking is telos: the end, the purpose, the goal toward which a thing is directed. Christian liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end. It is the removal of obstacles so that the believer may run the race set before him. When a man uses his liberty to set up new obstacles, or, worse, to return to the very sins from which he was freed, he is not off course; he is heading in the opposite direction. He is like a prisoner whose chains have been struck off, who has been handed the key to the outer gate, and who then uses his freedom to walk deeper into the prison, locking doors behind him as he goes. The liberty is real, but its purpose has been inverted, and inversion at this depth is destruction. The second rail is positive, and it is drawn directly from the mouth of Zechariah: the end of liberty is that, being delivered from our enemies, we might serve the Lord without fear, in holiness and righteousness, all our days. Notice the sequence. Deliverance precedes service. The enemy's power is broken before the believer lifts a finger in worship. This is the gospel order, and it must never be reversed. His service is the fruit of freedom, not its price. And because his acceptance is already secured, his service is rendered "without fear": not the cringing fear of the slave who expects the lash, but the reverential fear of the son who would not for the world grieve his father. The liberty that Christ purchased does not make the believer careless about holiness; it makes him care about it for a new reason. The unregenerate man may pursue virtue out of fear of punishment or hope of reward. The believer pursues holiness because he has been united to Christ, because the Spirit dwells in him, because God is his Father, and because sin, which once pleased him, now wounds him at the deepest level of his renewed nature. The phrase "all the days of our life" deserves particular attention. The Divines, following Zechariah, close with a temporal marker that stretches from the present moment to the last breath. Christian liberty is not a phase, not a stage in spiritual development that one might outgrow, not a doctrine to be mastered and then set aside in favor of higher things. It is the atmosphere in which the entire Christian life is lived. Every day is a day of service; every day is a day of liberty. The two are not in tension. The believer who most fully understands his freedom is the believer who most joyfully bends his neck to the yoke of Christ, because he knows that this yoke is easy and this burden is light, that the commandments he obeys are the commandments of his Redeemer, and that the path he walks, however narrow, leads to life. The Divines also understood that the antinomian error was not the only way to destroy the end of Christian liberty. There was, and is, a subtler form of the same disease: cherishing lust rather than practicing sin. The distinction is critical. A man may refrain from outward acts of sin while nursing inward desires with a kind of secret affection. He does not commit adultery, but he entertains the fantasy. He does not steal, but he envies the wealth of his neighbor. He does not blaspheme, but he harbors bitter thoughts against God's providence. The Divines knew that the heart is the fountain from which all outward conduct flows, and that a man who "cherishes" lust, who holds it close, who feeds it with imagination, who protects it from the mortifying work of the Spirit, has already, in the sanctuary of his inner man, turned liberty into license. The outward restraint may fool men; it cannot fool God. The end of Christian liberty is not merely external compliance but inward transformation, and the man who cherishes the sin Christ died to destroy is at war with the purpose of his own redemption.

Theological Depth

The Genevan Reformer, in a passage that reads almost like a commentary on this very section, insists that the freedom Christ purchased is never to be separated from the new life Christ imparts. Calvin writes that believers are freed from the law's curse so that they might obey with a willing heart, not that they might cast off the law's authority altogether. The image he uses is that of a son and a servant. The servant works because he must; the son works because he loves. Both may perform the same outward tasks, but the inward disposition is entirely different. The liberty of the gospel does not abolish obedience; it transforms obedience from servile drudgery into filial delight. When a believer says, "I am free, therefore I need not obey," he has not grasped the first principle of Calvin's teaching. He has mistaken the liberty of sons for the lawlessness of rebels. The son who says, "I am my father's son, therefore I may dishonor his house," has denied the relationship he claims, for a true son reflects his father's character, and the Father of believers is holy. Watson, with his characteristic gift for turning doctrine into self-examination, presses the believer with uncomfortable questions. If Christian liberty is given that we might serve God in holiness, then what evidence of that service can you produce? Is there a real, observable, progressive conformity to the will of God in your life? Watson is not suggesting that holiness is the ground of assurance, but he insists that it is the evidence of it. A tree is known by its fruit. A liberty that produces no holiness is not Christian liberty at all; it is a counterfeit, as dangerous to the soul as a forged pardon is to a condemned criminal. Watson observes that the antinomian of his day, and of every day, asks, "May I not do what I will, since Christ has freed me?" and he answers bluntly: "You may do what you will, but if what you will is sin, you give evidence that you are not freed at all. The will of a freed man is a renewed will, and a renewed will loves what God loves and hates what God hates." The test of genuine liberty is not the absence of external constraint but the presence of internal renewal. The pastoral implications of this section receive a penetrating treatment from Owen, whose treatise on the mortification of sin turns on the question of how the believer puts to death the sin that remains. Owen's famous dictum, "Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you," is not a departure from the doctrine of liberty but its natural outworking. The believer is free from sin's dominion, but sin remains in the mortal body as a guerrilla force that refuses to acknowledge the new government. The believer's calling is not to coexist with this insurgency but to wage unceasing warfare against it, precisely because the liberty Christ purchased is a liberty from sin, not a liberty for sin. Owen insists that mortification must reach to the root, not merely the branches. A man may cut off the outward expression of a sin while watering its root in the imagination and the affections, and Owen calls this not mortification but hypocrisy. True mortification is a habitual weakening of sin's principle in the soul, a constant opposition to its every motion, and a repeated application of the cross of Christ to the particular lust that troubles the conscience. The liberty of the gospel is a militant liberty; it takes up arms against every affection that would compete with Christ for the throne of the heart. Boston, in his notes on the Marrow of Modern Divinity, provides the theological architecture that holds the doctrine together. He observes that the antinomian error arises from a failure to distinguish between the law as a covenant of works and the law as a rule of life. The believer is freed from the law as a covenant: it can no longer condemn him, for Christ has borne its curse. But the believer is not freed from the law as a rule: it still directs his conduct, not as a way of earning life but as a pattern for living the life Christ has already given. When this distinction collapses, one of two errors follows. Either the believer returns to the law as a covenant, seeking to establish his own righteousness by works, or he casts off the law entirely, imagining that grace has abolished all obligation. Both errors destroy the end of Christian liberty. The former destroys it by burdening the conscience with a yoke Christ removed; the latter destroys it by emptying the conscience of the very direction that liberty was meant to enable. Boston's pastoral counsel is to hold both truths together: the believer owes nothing to the law as a covenant, but everything to the law as the Father's will. The freedom of the gospel is not the freedom to ignore the Father's commands but the freedom to obey them from the heart, knowing that the Father is already pleased with the Son and, in the Son, with all who are united to him. Hodge, commenting on this section, draws attention to the logical structure of the Divines' argument. He notes the Confession does not say those who sin under pretense of liberty lose the end, as though it could be mislaid and recovered. It says they destroy it. The verb is absolute. This is because the end of liberty and the abuse of liberty are mutually exclusive. A thing cannot simultaneously serve its purpose and be used for the opposite of that purpose. A knife cannot be used both for surgery and for murder in the same motion. Liberty cannot be used both for holiness and for sin. Hodge observes that the Divines chose their word deliberately to close the door on any antinomian interpretation: there is no third way between serving God in holiness and destroying the purpose of Christ's purchase. The man who claims liberty for sin has not found a middle path; he has abandoned the path altogether, and unless he repents, he will discover at the last day that the liberty he claimed was a delusion and the sin he cherished was his destruction.

Puritan Application

First, examine the direction of your liberty. Christian liberty is always liberty from something and liberty for something. It is never liberty in the abstract, never liberty to drift, never liberty to do whatever the unrenewed heart desires. Ask yourself honestly: what is your liberty producing? If you examined the last month of your life, could you point to specific areas where your freedom in Christ has resulted in greater holiness, deeper love for neighbor, more consistent obedience to the commands of God? Or has your liberty become a quiet zone where certain sins are permitted to dwell undisturbed? The test is not whether you have eliminated all sin; that awaits glory. It is whether your trajectory is toward God or away from him. Liberty that does not lead to holiness is not Christian liberty at all. Be ruthless in this examination. The soul that cannot bear to be searched is a soul that has something to hide, and what is hidden from self-examination is not hidden from God. Second, beware the cloke. Peter's warning about using liberty as a covering for maliciousness is urgently relevant in an age that has elevated authenticity and self-expression to the status of cardinal virtues. How often do believers justify patterns of speech, consumption, entertainment, or relationship by appealing to their liberty in Christ, when in truth they are simply protecting a sin they do not wish to surrender? The cloke works by renaming. Gossip becomes "sharing a concern." Greed becomes "good stewardship." Sensuality becomes "celebrating the body God gave me." The first victim of the cloke is the conscience of the one who wears it. The second is the weaker brother who sees the liberty and stumbles. The third is the watching world, which sees no difference between the church and the culture and concludes that the gospel has no power to transform. Before you wrap any behavior in the garment of Christian liberty, ask whether that garment would survive the scrutiny of Christ on the last day. If it would not, remove it now, while mercy is still available. Third, cherish no lust. The Divines distinguished between practicing sin and cherishing lust, and the distinction is pastoral wisdom of the highest order. You may not be acting on a particular temptation. You may have never spoken the angry word, never clicked the link, never spent the money, never crossed the physical boundary. But do you cherish the desire? Do you turn it over in your mind like a jewel, admiring its facets, imagining the pleasure it would bring, protecting it from the Spirit's mortifying work? To cherish a lust is to build an altar to an idol in the inner chamber of the heart. The outward temple may be clean, but the Holy Spirit sees the inner sanctuary and refuses to share it with a rival. Owen's counsel is direct: bring that cherished lust to the cross. Meditate on what it cost Christ to put it to death. Remind yourself that the liberty he purchased was purchased precisely to free you from that desire, not to provide a safe space where it could be entertained. The mortification of cherished lust is painful; it is meant to be. But the pain of mortification is the pain of surgery that saves the patient, while the pleasure of cherishing is the pleasure of a disease that kills. Fourth, recover the priestly vision of the Christian life. When Zechariah declared that we would serve God in holiness and righteousness all our days, he used the language of the temple, the language of priesthood. Your daily work, whether changing diapers, writing code, plowing fields, or managing accounts, is priestly service when it is offered to God in the freedom Christ purchased. You do not need to enter a special building or wear special garments to render latreia to God. You need only to remember whose you are and for what purpose you were set free. This vision transforms the mundane into the sacred, not by changing the nature of the work but by changing the heart of the worker. The mother who rises at midnight to comfort a crying child is serving the Lord in holiness. The laborer who refuses to cut corners on the job is serving the Lord in righteousness. The student who does her work with integrity, not for the praise of men but for the smile of God, is living out the purpose of her liberty. Recover this vision, and the temptation to use liberty as a cloke for sin will lose much of its power, for a priest does not desecrate the temple in which he serves. Fifth, preach the whole gospel to yourself daily. The antinomian error is as much a failure of the mind as of the will. It arises when the believer remembers that Christ freed him from the law's curse but forgets that Christ died to purify a people zealous for good works. It arises when grace is preached without discipleship, when justification is celebrated without sanctification, when the indicatives of the gospel are thundered while the imperatives are whispered. The remedy is not to shrink the gospel but to preach it in its fullness to your own soul every day. Remind yourself that you are justified, freely, fully, finally, and that this justification is the foundation of your peace. Then remind yourself, in the same breath, that the God who justified you is holy, that the Spirit who sealed you is the Spirit of holiness, and that the Christ who saved you saved you from sin, not for sin. The two truths are not in tension; they are the two sides of the one coin of redemption. A gospel that offers forgiveness without transformation is not the gospel of the apostles. A gospel that demands transformation without forgiveness is not the gospel at all. Hold them together, and the liberty you enjoy will be the liberty that leads to life.

Prayer

O Lord, our God, who hast delivered us from the hand of every enemy and called us to serve Thee in holiness and righteousness all the days of our life: we confess before Thee that we have too often taken the liberty Thou hast purchased at so dear a cost and turned it into an occasion for the flesh. We have cherished lusts that our Saviour died to destroy. We have wrapped disobedience in the language of freedom and called our rebellion by holy names. We have forgotten that the end of our liberty is not self-pleasing but Thy glory, and that every liberty misused is a step back toward the prison from which Christ freed us. Father of mercies, grant us true repentance. Let the cross of Thy Son stand before our eyes until every cherished sin becomes hateful and every cloke of excuse is stripped away. Mortify in us, by the power of Thy Spirit, every lust that wars against the soul. Renew our wills, that we might obey Thee not with the slavish fear of servants but with the willing love of sons and daughters. Teach us to use our liberty as priests in Thy temple, offering every thought, word, and deed as a sacrifice of praise. May our freedom never become a stumbling block to the weak or a reproach to the gospel, but may it bear fruit in love for the brethren and in holiness of life. Lord Jesus, who didst purchase this liberty with Thine own blood, keep us from ever despising what cost Thee so much. Let the memory of Thy suffering be the death of every sin we are tempted to excuse. And when we fall, for we are dust and without Thee we can do nothing, lift us again by Thy Spirit, apply afresh the blood of cleansing, and restore unto us the joy of Thy salvation. Let not one soul entrusted to our care be lost through our misuse of liberty, but may our lives be living demonstrations that the grace of God teaches us to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. All this we ask in the name of Him who is our liberty and our life, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.