Living Water of Washington DC. A Christian Outreach Ministry.

The Perfect Freedom

Freedom is word we hear frequently these days. It is a word used to mean many things. Among them: freedom is the opposite of slavery or bondage. But there is only one perfect form of freedom: the kind of freedom that Jesus spoke about when He said, “the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). There are also many meanings for the words slavery and bondage. Likewise, there is only one “perfect” form of slavery—bondage so total that it is impossible to escape it except for the perfect freedom given by the unique, everlasting Truth which has the power to set one free. That bondage is sin (John 8:34; Galatians 3:22).

There are less binding forms of bondage, and there are inferior forms of freedom.

When the Israelites were in Egypt they were, for the greater portion of their stay, doing well. One of their original ancestral patriarchs in the land of Egypt, Joseph, was the second highest ranking official in the Egyptian government, next to the Pharaoh (Genesis 41:40). The treatment by their hosts permitted them to become numerous and to prosper (Exodus 1:7). The harder they worked, the greater and stronger they grew (Ex 1:12). Tellingly, one of the persons with whom Jesus was conversing in the John 8 passage cited above even said that as descendents of Abraham, they “have never been in bondage to anyone” (John 8:33 NKJV).

It was when the Israelites in Egypt became numerous that the Egyptians felt threatened. At that point, Pharaoh tightened the screws on the burgeoning Israelite population. But it was when the Israelites demonstrated their eagerness to worship the LORD God that the Egyptian taskmasters became especially brutal, because Pharaoh would tolerate no other god competing with him (a “god” in Egypt) for the allegiance and veneration of the people.

Toward the end of their stay in Egypt, the Israelites were not free. What does this mean? Conversely, what is slavery? At what point did bondage under Pharaoh warrant the LORD’s divine intervention? Exodus 5 explains:

Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival [Holiday] to Me in the desert.’ …let us take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the LORD our God, or He may strike us with plagues or with the sword.”
  But the king of Egypt said, “Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their labor? Get back to work!” Then Pharaoh said, “Look, the people of the land are now numerous, and you are stopping them from working.”
  That same day Pharaoh gave this order to the slave drivers and foremen in charge of the people: “You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making bricks; let them go and gather their own straw. But require them to make the same number of bricks as before; don't reduce the quota. They are lazy; that is why they are crying out, 'Let us go and sacrifice to our God.' Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working” (Exodus 5:1-9 NIV, my emphasis).

Now, the Israelites were working long hours without rest, with little or no opportunity to take time out to worship the LORD. Their taskmasters first became more demanding, then brutal. By burdening the Israelites with onerous work, Pharaoh prevented their proper worship of the true God. If simply forbidding the worship of the LORD was not enough, Pharaoh kept them working long hours, with no straw to make bricks, consequently leaving them with barely time to even think about worshipping the LORD God.

This situation might strike some of us as a vaguely familiar. Although our own situation is not as extreme as the plight of the Israelites suffering in Egypt, the Enemy’s strategy is the same. Pharaoh wanted to keep Israel enslaved with hard work, not for the work’s sake (otherwise he would have provided them with the straw they needed to make bricks), but to keep their thoughts away from God. Many of us today feel so burdened by our careers that we end up with very little time, if any time at all, left for worship or for study of God’s Word. We have been taught to adhere to a different set of priorities. Work is effectively our highest priority, and then our walk with God, if convenient. Some of us need to work long hours in order to make ends meet. But many of us who work long and hard hours do so by choice in order to support a desired lifestyle, standard of living, and level of comfort. We are in no danger of starvation, so the thing which motivates us is something substantially beyond the basic need for daily bread (which God provides). Not only are our thoughts away from God, but our hearts are as well.

The Word of God through Moses continues:

The slave drivers kept pressing them, saying, “Complete the work required of you for each day, just as when you had straw.” The Israelite foremen appointed by Pharaoh's slave drivers were beaten and were asked, “Why didn't you meet your quota of bricks yesterday or today, as before?”
  Then the Israelite foremen went and appealed to Pharaoh: “…Your servants are given no straw, yet we are told, 'Make bricks!' Your servants are being beaten, but the fault is with your own people.”
  Pharaoh said, “Lazy, that's what you are! That is why you keep saying, 'Let us go and sacrifice to the LORD.' Now get to work. You will not be given any straw, yet you must produce your full quota of bricks.” (Ex 5:13-18 NIV, my emphasis)

Apparently, Pharaoh had full intention of keeping the Israelites from worshipping God; Pharaoh wasn’t bothered that the Israelites could not complete their work without straw. Productivity and results clearly were not his objectives—distracting the Israelites from worshipping the LORD was.

When Pharaoh refused to grant the Israelites freedom to worship the LORD, and when Pharaoh reacted to their requests to pay homage to a God (besides the Pharaoh) by first increasing their workload and then by punishing them if they didn’t perform impossible tasks, the LORD freed the Israelites from this bondage. God enabled proper worship to Him. But when the Israelites no longer had to serve their oppressive master Pharaoh, realizing that they were free from Pharaoh’s fist, something very revealing happened: when the Israelites were free in the wilderness to do as they pleased, they showed that they were still in bondage. When given the opportunity to worship God in the wilderness as they had initially resolved, they could not help but to instead worship an idol of gold!

[The Israelites] gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him.” Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” He took what they handed him and made it into an idol [of gold] cast in the shape of a calf. Then they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” …the next day the people rose early and [presented offerings]. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. (Ex 32:1-6 NIV, my emphasis)

Thus, when the yoke of tyranny in Egypt was lifted, the Israelites took advantage of their new “freedom” by worshipping a golden fertility idol. They had been working hard in the wealthiest nation in the world, Egypt, where they apparently enjoyed good food (“we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted”, Ex 16:3; also, when God gave the Israelites quail and manna to eat in the desert, they continued to grumble, unfavorably comparing God’s heaven-sent food against the food they had earlier enjoyed: “we detest this miserable food [quail and manna]!”, Numbers 21:4 NIV). Then when Pharaoh afflicted them, God saved them from Pharaoh’s oppression. But once freed from Egypt, rather than worship the LORD as they told Pharaoh they wanted the freedom to do, they worshipped an idol of gold instead. When freed from Egypt, they were not free indeed. They were still slaves to “the lusts of their hearts” (Romans 1:24). Although politically free, they still had the most “perfect” slavery of all to deal with—sin. There is only one solution to this problem. God provided this solution years later in Christ, exactly as He had promised, whose finished work on the cross was foreshadowed by Israel’s exodus from bondage in Egypt!

“your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (Matthew 6:32)

I alluded earlier to some of the similarities of the Israelites when given their freedom in a political/governmental sense with contemporary Americans who also enjoy such “freedom”. Sometimes movies are effective illustrations of the godlessness of our own lost culture. I reference Jeff Spicoli, the perpetually stoned surfer played by Sean Penn from the 1980’s teen-movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, who gave a profound (unintended, of course) encapsulation of a pervasive postmodern ideology. He said (with the drawl characteristic of marijuana-induced haze), to wit, “[Dude,] all I need are my tasty waves [i.e. Doritos?], a cool buzz [cold Buds?] and I’m fine”. Spicoli might have been talking about the delights of surfing, but as he gazed at his sundry food items at checkout in a convenience-store, he seemed to be referring to them. Significantly, he spoke of nature and of altered states of consciousness metaphorically as he eyed the convenience-store victuals.

Sadly, this is the attitude of many Americans today. Like the Israelites in the wilderness fondly reminiscing about life back in luxurious Egypt—“we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted” (yet were not permitted to worship the LORD)—many Americans say, “all I need are [insert consumer products, conveniences, and luxuries here] and I’m fine”.

It is well established that no consumer goods of this world, durable or perishable, can save anybody (let alone satisfy), regardless of how technologically advanced or “cutting edge” the latest breakthroughs are. Many people don’t perceive their dire need for forgiveness, mercy, and deliverance from the coming wrath of God. They do not see the need for Christ, for salvation. They look at Christianity as a means of getting what they want, a way of finding personal satisfaction and fulfillment, a social club, a twelve-step program, a network through which their own desires can be met, a tool for helping them to achieve vain, mundane objectives. They do not properly see Christianity as service to God with and among members of His Body, but rather as a peripheral resource to support the fulfillment of the true focus of their lives, themselves.

Jeff Spicoli sounds like many people today: all’s well so long as someone (some god) “gives” them what their hearts desire, even if they have to jump through hoops like a circus dog for the greater part of the week, or run the figurative “rat race” like rodents scrambling through mazes looking for that cheese that somebody moved. But so long as someone (some god, Pharaoh, Caesar, whomever) provides them with their hearts desires, bread or tortilla chips, water or cold beer, manna or pasta, quail or caviar, all’s well. Although we as Christians know the everlasting LORD God already provides us with what we need such as food and clothing (Matthew 6:25-33), we are nevertheless conditioned to perceive the need to acquire the right currency to buy and sell these things (plus a great deal more), busily running after them as the pagans do, frantically foraging for currency bearing an image of its issuer (some god, Pharaoh, Caesar, whomever). Jesus clearly indicated that the denarius, a Roman coin, belonged to Caesar, a pagan among pagans.

We have been conditioned to strive to collect wealth or possessions beyond our basic needs—vanity (Ecclesiastes 2:11) —and to look to present-day Pharaohs to enable us to do so. We spend time, labor, and resources in pursuit of possessions, when we could have been using our God-given resources in service to Him instead, knowing that He is the Giver of Life and trusting in Him to provide for our needs. However, we have been encouraged to live life as the pharmacologically anesthetized, lotus-eating, robotically working, mantra-chanting consumers paying whatever prices are set by our contemporary gods, our “Pharaohs”, for the acquisition of worthless vanities (“He who has the most toys wins”), as well as for those things necessary for subsistence—food, clothing, and shelter. We make constant appeals to Pharaoh rather than to God even though the Lord taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

“You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24)

In Egypt, Pharaoh forced the Israelites to labor leaving them no time to worship God. By God’s providence, they prospered in spite of Pharaoh’s lording over them. Today’s situation in the West is knottier than the plight of Israelites in Egypt because nowadays people independently choose to work (and choose not to worship) in order to acquire vanities (Ecclesiastes 2) such as expensive clothes, vehicles, and homes. The Bible tells us pointedly not to think about such wealth (Proverbs 23:4). Although we do not have the scourge put to our backs, nor do we fear for our lives, there is a great incentive unleashed by modern-day Pharaohs to subdue a captive civilization and keep it in line with the Pharaonic agenda such that no whip is needed: debt.

We neglect service to God when we prefer to toil long hours in ways that enable the collecting of things that we don’t need. Jesus said that serving God and serving wealth are incompatible goals: “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon [Money].” (Matt 6:24 NKJV) The worship of Mammon, or the love of wealth, keeps a person in slavery because it and service to God are mutually exclusive.

The Bible urges us to be content with what God our Sovereign gives us. People who are driven to acquire wealth fall into traps and foolish and harmful temptations.

“But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. [See also Job 1:21] And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” (1 Tim 6:6-10 KJV)

Mammon competes with God for our hearts (See Matthew 6:21, Luke 12:34). Love of money comes with thirst for wealth acquisition rather than for the Word of God. We know that it triggers desire to accumulate wealth for wealth’s sake, beyond the house in the “right” zip code, the two SUVs, and the turboprop. But the void cannot be filled.

“All I need are my uptown condo and Nintendo and I’m fine.”
“All I need are my house in the burbs and the Lexus in the garage and I’m fine.”
“All I need are my chateau, stable of Thoroughbreds, and exclusive collection of Rembrandts and I’m fine.”

In our dumbed-down society people are taught that satisfaction comes from having just the right array of belongings. If that doesn’t do the trick, well, then try having more. When a person finally comes to the realization that wealth does not satisfy, he is quickly shuffled into any of a number of modes of spirituality offering to bring fulfillment and enlightenment, but which do not. Persons who “have it all” frequently find themselves seated in the full-lotus position, eyes shut, chanting “Ohm” somewhere in Nepal, or in some other exotic foreign country, such as San Francisco. Everything except the absolute Truth of biblical Christianity is offered on the glittering menu of spirituality. The media which shapes our opinions and our worldview, has a distinctly anti-Christian agenda. It peddles the latest must-have gadgets, baubles, and fads, and when all else fails, cordons people into the arena of pagan spirituality, especially the ancient Babylonian mystery religion and its varied permutations that include Egyptian Isis worship and the blasphemous feminine (popularly known as the “sacred feminine”).

“I pray you, let us leave off this usury” (Nehemiah 5:10)

The religion and the economics of ancient Babylon, which are the archetypes for those of most civilizations throughout history, are intimately tied. The mystery religion from ancient Babylon, where the roots of today’s most insidious apostasies lay, which became the religion of Egypt and then of other “advanced” civilizations such as Rome, is alive and well today even in the “advanced free world”. In every age and civilization, it rears its ugly head in an attempt to supplant God by appealing to humanity’s wisdom, creativity, intellect, covetousness, and most of all, pride. It appears in many forms and is known by many names, but always exhibits the same enmity toward God’s Truth as it has since the Beginning.

A less occult principle of the ancient Babylonian religion practiced today is the use of artificial economic constructs to compel continuous labor (the LORD God did not frivolously ordain the Sabbaths). By this means, thoughts about the true God are relegated to the remote backburner of our minds, an anti-God strategy which was employed during the religion’s implementation in ancient Egypt. Unlike the visible brutality of Pharaoh’s taskmasters, the goal is today neatly accomplished through subtler pressures transparently and expediently applied by indebtedness. Throughout most of history, including American history, debt was sternly frowned upon, even in the purchase of homes, and lenders were commonly despised as human vultures. The mortgage lender does not ask “how much house do you need”, but “how much house can you afford”. Need is irrelevant. One is reminded of a scene in a certain Chevy Chase movie where the actor, playing clueless Clark Griswold, asks a couple of car mechanics “how much will it cost?” to which the grinning mechanics reply, “All of it [i.e. ‘how much have you got?’].” Unfortunately, we’re not living in the movies where problems conveniently vanish at the end, and it’s not just a couple of grinning car mechanics in rural Nevada we’re dealing with here. It’s far worse.

We are constantly encouraged to be saddled with debt. If you are a home-debtor like myself (some people use the imprecise euphemism “home-owner”—a gross misnomer since banks hold title to the home until the loan is paid off.), then you know what I’m talking about. If you are a renter, look into the mortgage industry and you’ll see what I mean. “Home-owners” are, more accurately, serfs in a neo-feudal system of economics masquerading absurdly as “freedom and democracy”. And according to Proverbs 22:7, they are slaves: “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave.” (NASB)

Today, it is considered customary to kneel at the feet of the mortgage lender. Americans have been fooled into believing that credit is wealth. They often exhibit pride when they are in debt (mortgaged) to the hilt, and highly leveraged persons such as Donald Trump are called “wealthy” even when they are in legal bankruptcy, as the debt-ridden Trump has found himself on more than one occasion.

For some bizarre reason, a lot of people are proud to be steeped in debt; they characterize their incurring onerous debt as the fulfillment of the wonderful, magical, dreams of a lifetime. They boast about the homes which they don’t own (the banks do), for which they have agreed to perform full-time labor for approximately three decades, or a good half of their adult lives. Oddly, they insist that this is a situation in which everyone would be fortunate to find themselves, calling their three-decades contract of indentured servitude “The American Dream”. And there’s no seven-year release in which debts are forgiven which was commanded of the Israelites by God (Deuteronomy 15:1). The yoke persists until the debt is paid. Interest rates are usurious—read Nehemiah 5: in most English translations of the chapter, a 1% interest charge is called “usury”. (How conditioned we have become to interest on debt that to us, a 1% charge sounds low!)

The thirty-year mortgage is a relatively recent phenomenon. If your great-grandparents, even some of your grandparents, had the good fortune to live in this great nation and to own a home, they probably purchased it with the labor of less than ten years (much less thirty years), and only one parent was required to work. By contrast, the family where two (or more) parents work is becoming the rule today rather than the exception. (I won’t get into other strange family arrangements quickly becoming popular these days.) Recently, I’ve even seen advertisements for the forty-year mortgage. Across the board, we’re trending in the wrong directions. The message our Lord gave to the Church of Laodicea: “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” (Revelation 3:17) surely indicates spiritual and economic conditions of our day, especially in the civilized West. Although we might not need to be concerned about the national debt at this point, we will need to be concerned about it at some point, because a day of reckoning will surely come.

Meanwhile, let’s return to the Exodus account:

[The] LORD said to Moses, “Go down, because your people have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol [of gold] cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ …When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. (Ex 32:7, 19 NIV, my emphasis)

We can be pretty sure that when Moses’ anger burned because of “the dancing”, it wasn’t the Texas Two-Step or the Electric Slide he witnessed.

Such is what happens when people have one form of freedom, such as political and/or religious freedom, but not freedom in the Truth, or equivalently, freedom in Christ (John 14:6). It is clear that people are enslaved more deeply than they know. Regardless of all the civil liberties we enjoy, we all are still slaves to sin and to the lusts of our heart outside of the redeeming power of Christ, and this causes many of us to be, in turn, slaves to debt and servants to the lender; servants of Mammon, not God. Without freedom in Christ, we are still in bondage regardless of our political, religious, and economic freedoms!

Freedom is not simply being able to work as you wish, when you wish. Freedom is not having the scourge removed from our backs. Freedom is not affordable healthcare and education. Freedom is not comfort, pleasure, self-indulgence, sexual liberation, unnatural acts against nature and God, or license to commit perverse acts if “it doesn't hurt anybody”. Many of those things are just more enthralling forms of slavery. To call those things “freedom” is a lie, a fatal illusion. A person can have freedom to do all those things and still live in oppressive, unrelenting, and damning bondage. True freedom comes in the liberating power of the Lord from the bondage of sin.

“worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25)

Ancient Egypt was fabulously wealthy with plenty of gold sitting around. The Israelites brought much of this gold with them out of Egypt (Ex 12:35) but they used this gold to make an abominable idol. The practice of making gilded idols of virile beasts had come from the pagan religion of Babel (the earliest civilization, see Genesis 11) first, then in Egypt. (Consider also the golden idol built by Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel 3.) This wicked religion is doggedly enduring, because it elegantly exploits the existing predisposition of humankind to sin, utilizing compulsions that we already have, for example, to covet. The duress of man’s sinful nature is so strong that the taskmaster’s whip becomes superfluous. Humans are already slaves to sin, and to control them one needs only to exploit their inherent bondage, that is, to capitalize on pre-existing inclinations and weaknesses. Until we are committed to serve God, the real slave driver in all of our lives is sin. Further, a contemporary Pharaoh doesn’t use the no-straw-for-bricks scheme as did the ancient Pharaoh; a cleverer Pharaoh takes advantage of man’s sinful inclinations. It is like sailing a boat downstream. Look at how marketers make appeals to the basest of our sinful natures to motivate us (it is a cliché that “sex sells”). The sex and glamour used to foist their vain wares would make an ancient Babylonian sailor blush.

“Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbor's” (Exodus 20:17)

The lesser slavery of debt works like a charm because it takes advantage of the ultimate slavery of sin by appealing to covetousness, pride, and other attributes of fallen man. It thus empowers taskmasters to motivate workers without having to use the scourge; it derives its strength from man’s inexorable slavery to sin. It is a non-violent and “acceptable” means of control. But it is no less binding than bondage under the scourge. In fact, it is more powerful because it deceives us with the illusion of “freedom” so that we make no attempt to escape. Taskmasters can then turn up the heat as we bask like blithe frogs in a warming kettle of water.

With no whip to their backs, the Israelites in the wilderness believed they were not enslaved. Yet they still were slaves because they still were compelled by their sinful natures to worship idols, rather than God, even after the scourge of Pharaoh was removed. Today, many people serve Mammon and “Pharaoh” simultaneously, living in the absurd illusion that they have “freedom” since they work weekdays, day and night, and weekends (not to mention the Sabbath), to make sure that the bank doesn’t take away the house and the car that are really owned by the bank. Like the biblical Pharaoh, today’s Pharaoh keeps people preoccupied with their work, simultaneously enslaving them with debt while exploiting their naturally-occurring propensity to sin. The Bible says “thou shalt not covet...anything that is thy neighbor’s”. But in spite of this, society has encouraged both parents of innocent children to work 50-hour weeks for decades just to keep up with “the Jones’s”, while discouraging them from worshipping God. Debt is a more insidious, more stealthy, and more effective way to keep people laboring than is the scourge.

A person’s inherent covetousness is a mighty motivator that is easier to wield than any whip for the modern-day taskmaster. The ulterior objective for its exploitation in the Spirit War is the same as Pharaoh’s, which is to keep people away from God, away from the everlasting Truth. The religion from ancient Babylon, seen in Egypt at the time of the Exodus, is a religion born of mankind. Or more precisely, it is the religion of the devil propagated through mankind. It will not go away until Christ returns. Humanity cannot fix it.

The greater bondage; the Perfect Freedom

We should get our vocabulary straight here. “Debt” is not “wealth”. “Wealth” is not “freedom”. Those of you have might have studied Logic in school can see the deduction here suggested, which seems to have escaped some global policy-makers. Debt can enslave entire populations by capitalizing on the slavery every human has inherited since Adam and Eve.

Everyone in this world who is not saved is a slave, not of tyranny, but of their sins, including covetousness. Sin is the most oppressive slavery we face, and its consequences are eternal. Other forms of bondage end when you die, but you are not redeemed of the bondage of sin when you die unless you petition your Redeemer for salvation while you live.

When Pharaoh freed the Israelites from Egypt, gold and gilded idols of “four-footed beasts” (Rom 1:23) became their gods (Ex 32:4), the same gods that the Egyptians worshipped. The same gods that ancient Babylonians worshipped. The Israelites were set free from Pharaoh, but not yet set free by the Truth from the most binding bondage of all.

Those who hate the Truth , like Pharaoh, try to keep us enslaved with lesser forms of bondage such that we don’t even recognize the ultimate slavery in our lives, which is sin. We are kept from the Truth by those who hate the Truth because if we do not come to grips with the fact that we are slaves to sin, then we will be unable to find the Truth that makes us free indeed—the everlasting freedom in Christ. In the meantime, they pretend to free us from the lesser forms of slavery so that, like the Israelites leaving Egypt, we are deluded into believing that we are free and we fail to recognize our true taskmaster which is sin. Therefore, we do not discover true freedom which is in Christ.

“For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.” (1 Corinthians 5:7)

The freeing of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt is commemorated in the Passover Holiday. During that same season of the year, Passover centuries later, God enabled people to be liberated from the greater bondage of sin into perfect freedom in Christ by His finished work on the cross. The Exodus out of bondage, first from Egypt, then from sin, was finished. To make the connection between these two forms of freedom crystal clear, God planned Christ’s work on the cross to be concurrent with the Passover. The parallel is extraordinarily striking.

There is no true and lasting freedom until one is liberated from his most powerful oppressor, his own sinful nature which holds him prisoner (Rom 7:13-24). God provided our Redeemer after the Exodus, which is our Savior Jesus Christ, the only perfect sacrifice for atonement of our sins, our ransom, the Truth through whom we are set free.