And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,
for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17).
The Lord did not place the forbidden tree in the Garden in order to cause man to fall. He put it there to give them a place to prove their obedience and commitment to Him. There can be no true obedience from the heart if there is not the freedom to disobey. The Lord established that man would have to make choices. We have been created to have fellowship with God, and for productive labor. Man was also created to be free, and we will never be fulfilled until we are free. Freedom is the natural state of man.
Freedom is also difficult. We cannot have freedom without taking the responsibility that comes with it. The freedom that God gave to man to reach for extraordinary accomplishments can also lead to tragic mistakes. Mistakes have consequences. Even so, we cannot escape our calling to freedom. It may be easier to live with someone else making all of the important decisions for us, but without freedom we will be perpetually frustrated and stifled in a profound way because we were created to be free.
Some of the most fulfilling experiences in life come when we take initiative, make a good choice, and see the fruit. The most discouraging and hurtful experiences come when we choose to do wrong. To avoid the latter, many choose a life of bondage in cults or authoritarian groups who make all of the decisions for their people. However, as the German people learned in World War II, this always leads to even worse consequences. We were created to have freedom, and we can never become who we were created to be without it. Let us accept the great responsibility that comes with freedom, and choose rightly.
Many also fall into the bondage of trying to live under the law to escape the responsibility of being free. We tend to think of the Old Testament as the law and the New Testament as grace, but that is not necessarily true. The Old Covenant is the letter, and the New Covenant is in the Spirit. If the New Covenant is read without the Spirit, it will just be law. Therefore, righteousness will attempt to be established by complying with the letter, instead of seeking to abide in Christ.
The Old and New Testaments are the written Word of God to us. As Jesus said, "the Scripture cannot be broken" (see John 10:35), meaning that they are a single unity. In fact, everywhere in the New Testament, "the Scriptures" referred to are in relation to the Old Testament books, as the New Testament was just then being written. The Old Testament is the foundation for New Testament faith. The Old Testament Scriptures were the basis for doctrines upon which the church is based, as well as the gospel of the kingdom (see Romans 16:25-26; Acts 28:23). Of course, it was also the books we call the Old Testament that Jesus used and referred to in all of His messages, as we see in Luke 24:25-27:
And He said to them, "O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!
"Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?"
And beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.
In John 5:46-47 He makes an important statement about this:
"For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote of Me.
"But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?"
If the One who is the Word Himself used the Scriptures as the basis for all of His teachings, how much more do we need to be devoted to them? Even so, if in seeking to be a biblical people, we forbid anyone to do that which is not specifically written in the New Testament, we have only turned it into another law. It was not meant to bind us in that way, but to free us to do whatever is not specifically forbidden by it. This does not make everything that is not specifically forbidden by it right, but it casts upon us the responsibility to know the Lord's voice and follow the Holy Spirit. This is a great responsibility, but without it there could not be a true relationship with Him. Without this freedom, we would still be married to the Law. As Paul explained in Galatians 5:4, "You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace." Therefore, "It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery" (Galatians 5:1).