Engaging God's World: Redemption

Plantinga writes that “Moses emerges with God’s Ten Commandments, a set of requirements that people have to fulfill not in order to get rescued by God from slavery, but because they have been rescued.” This hardly seems desirable. As God’s treasured possession, they must joyfully carry out a myriad of laws. Obedience to God is costly. It can be a desert, inhospitable to human desires. One can no longer eat the leeks of Egypt after crossing the Red Sea. And yet we are to believe this is a whole and more complete life.

But what of freedom: Liberty or death? Why would we willingly give up our freedom? Well, no we wouldn’t, except we have really no freedom to give up. Freedom is not endless time to do whatever we want. I, at least, find myself using “free” time to mostly do things I regret: over sleep, over-Facebook, over-youtube, or some other regrettable indulgence. This is the natural lethargy, the “wilting” as Plantinga calls it, that I fall into. It is only restrictions on my time that jolt me into studying, into meaningful contact with others. From my own experience, it is only deadlines that goad me into completing anything.

But deadlines, homework, they cramp my style, restricting my freedom. And it’s then that I realize that freedom is not so important as living a worthy life. I desire not to live a life of luxuriating in indolence, but one of meaning where nothing I do, whether working or playing, is regretted.

So the limit of time streamlines me into prioritizing. But the limit of God’s law also streamlines my actions. Though I may break his law, its presence, and the threat of guilt, prod me towards the straight and narrow. And when I look back, that’s really where I want to be.

The world that Plantinga describes, where everybody follows the Ten Commandments completely is one, I think, all of us would want to live in. What is so cramping about that? If the world that God’s law would create is what the image-of-God, eternal soul of me truly wants, then won’t the limits of God’s law shear off the practices of the fallen self? If God’s law can free me from my old self, then it is a law I should obey gladly.