The Freedom of the Christian
For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.
1 Peter 2:15-17
Martin Luther wrote a book by this title in 1520, one the books for which he had to give an answer at the Diet of Worms in the year after. Very early on its first page, he wrote what strikes us as a paradox:
A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.1
The Reformers, like Luther, believed that the when the gospel is unveiled, that uncensored grace has a liberating effect, first on the conscience of the individual believer and then, for that very reason, on confident Christian action in the world.
But Christian freedom is badly misunderstood by two different extremes: by those we call “legalists” and by those that earlier generations would have called “libertines.” Luther had to speak in that paradox for this very reason, that there were these two ditches; and the mature, truly free Christian would confound both the legalist and the libertine.
Doctrine. The freedom of the Christian is for the silence of the devil and the proof of Christ’s kingdom.
(i.) Christian freedom is not license for evil.
(ii.) Christian freedom is for the silence of the devil.
(iii.) Christian freedom is for the proof of Christ’s kingdom.
Christian freedom is not license for evil.
The key expression is in the middle of the passage, but I focus on it here first, to clear our ground from what this freedom is not. Sometimes we have to get out of our vision what a thing is not so that we are not distracted by it. So it is here that our true freedom is ‘not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil’ (v. 16b). We have to admit that this is a thing. Jude talked about even false teachers that encouraged this, “ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality” (Jude 4).
This is a common objection against the Reformed doctrines of grace, and that should be no surprise because it was a common objection against Paul—“Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” (Rom. 6:1-2) Paul spends that chapter in Romans (Chapter 6) to answer to charge by taking a deep dive into our union with Christ. In other words, Paul answers the charge that too much grace just is license—too much freedom is an excuse to sin—he answers that charge with doctrine. Peter is going to answer that same charge with practical life. But it is the same accusation.
And it is the first words of the passage that begin Peter’s strategy: ‘For this is the will of God’ (v. 15). This is not speaking of the decretive will of God, but of His prescriptive will. Another way to say it is that this is what God desires of you. This is what He would have you do. This is what is pleasing to God. This is what God put you here for. Elsewhere: “this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3). God saved you by his grace (Eph. 2:8). For what? “for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). So no: grace doesn’t oppose work. Grace alone works. We don’t bring our works into God’s courtroom in that place where Christ alone should be; but once justified, having been cleared in the courtroom and entering God’s house, His house are filled with good works.
Christian freedom is for the silence of the devil.
Peter has a human adversary in view here: ‘that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people’ (v. 15b). Why then does this silence the devil? The answer is simple. The devil is called the accuser of the brethren (Rev. 12:10), and so like their head, the people of the devil take up his evil scheme of slandering the saints. That is why Peter pits our honorable conduct up against what amounts to charges of dishonorable conduct. But the key, as Peter will bring back in Chapter 4 of this letter, is don’t live up to it. Do take care that you don’t dress yourself up in the straw man suit.
But the upshot for Peter here—the aim of this liberating lifestyle—is to prove it wrong in real life, to live for that crown of glory and honor. This too is a much underrated treasure of the gospel—that every mouth may be stopped not only in their boasting of their works (as in Romans 3:20), but also those mouths that accuse Christians of anti-social behavior.
Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish (Isa. 41:11).
“He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as fthe noonday” (Ps. 37:6). This is why Jesus can say, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Mat. 5:11-12). So here is another reason that this is liberating. This puts us in good company! Being charged with evil and then tracing out its cause as a distinctly devilish accusation is confirmation.
Christian freedom is for the proof of Christ’s kingdom.
To ‘Live as people who are free’ is coupled with ‘living as servants of God’ (v. 16a, c). We have to remember the true nature of this freedom to see how it works. Peter does not elaborate here. But there are two possible candidates. It is either a freedom from a spiritual and eternal bondage, or else a freedom from a material and temporal bondage. Of the first kind we are told that, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1). In the context of that letter, Paul was talking about a freedom from legalism and those who want to “spy out our freedom … so that they might bring us into slavery (Gal. 2:4). I happen to think the spiritual and material freedoms are related. For example, Jesus once said to Peter,
“What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tax? From their sons or from others?” And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel. Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself” (Mat. 17:25-27).
Some Christians have always gotten the idea that because we belong to the more real and lasting kingdom, that somehow “the rules down here” don’t apply to us.2 The New Testament is frequently warning against that. And what was Jesus’s reasoning? It wasn’t to deny that there really is a kind of freedom—it wasn’t to deny the truth spoken by Paul that, “all things are yours” (1 Cor. 3:21), that there is a certain, ultimate way that the Christian is “above it all,” but, what does Jesus add to Peter? So as “not to give offense to them.” Why? Jesus didn’t shy away from giving offense when He had to.
It is to be blameless with those all things. To prove to the world that money is not our God, there’s a point where we let go of it. To prove that power is not our God, or that temporal relationships are not our God, or that appearance is not our God, or that security is not our God—then we live as freemen and free women, as Paul also said,
Those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away (1 Cor. 7:30-31).
Then comes four quick commands which I think show an order of two pairs. ‘Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood’ (v. 17a). Here we move from the general to the specific. What do I mean by that? I mean something like Paul’s words, “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10). Do this toward everyone; be this toward everyone—but especially to those one another of the same kind. This is a concept sometimes called the ordo amoris, or “ordered loves.” Here is the simple principle behind it: None of us are God. None of us can be all things to all people. And so with limited resources, God has made us stewards of our relationships as much as of those resources. Honor everyone, but love the brotherhood. Not that you have no kind of love for those outside your circles, but that you recognize those circles that God has placed you in, with souls eternally shaped by your interaction with them.
Whereas that first pair moved from the general to the specific, now he adds a second pair: ‘Fear God. Honor the emperor’ (v. 17b). Here we move from the higher to the lower. Note that the lesser receives that same honor just like the “everyone” did. Show a deference toward earthly officers, but fear only God. When the people of Judah were in dread of the Assyrian armies closing in on them, and their king didn’t know who to trust, how does the prophet Isaiah counsel him?
Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread (Isa. 8:12-13).
Here is the balance: Do not be naive to the intrigue of the wicked, but also do not fill your heart with the fear of them. Of course “honor” implies the same things that Peter had already commanded in the previous verses about submission; but here its stress is on the contrast that these two pairs have in view.
We prove out Christ’s kingdom of freemen and free-women by fearing God and loving the saints above all. In making earthly leaders and merely earthly people peripheral to that, we testify that these things are not our ultimate treasure. We will exercise wisdom toward them. We will be the best of neighbors to them. But we will not be slaves to their agendas, we will not be pacified by their entertainment, and we will not put our ultimate trust in what they trust in; as “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7).
Practical Use of the Doctrine
Use 1. Instruction. I said we are still avoiding ditches here, but that is how maturity happens. The extreme errors (the “ditches”) are marks of immaturity. Here, the ditches were legalism and license. The southern Presbyterian theologian of the nineteenth century, James Henley Thornwell, once compared these two to gospel thieves. He said,
The natural vibration of the mind is from the extreme of legalism to that of licentiousness, and nothing but the grace of God can fix it in the proper medium of Divine truth. The Gospel, like its blessed Master, is always crucified between two thieves—legalists of all sorts on the one hand and Antinomians on the other; the former robbing the Savior of the glory of his work for us, and the other robbing him of the glory of his work within us.3
Consider this Christian: You can never be freer and never more holy than Jesus. So don’t ever try to loosen His chains or add chains on. Let’s mature past the whole debate of whether we are free to sin, and realize instead that we are free to obey. Free to bring our Lord more glory. We are free to do great things for the King and his Kingdom because He has set us free from all guilt and shame.
Use 2. Admonition. But there is a warning to so-called “carnal Christianity.” This is not new. Not only does Peter warn against it here, in the person who would use the grace of God as license to live like the world. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, there is a very pointed warning against it:
For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience (Eph. 5:5-6).
Jesus did not come to lighten up God’s standards of holiness, or to wink at things that His law has declared for all time are an abomination. True freedom comes from repentance from that sin which is the real bondage, and trusting in God’s way of freedom, that
God made [us] alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross (Col. 2:13-14).
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1. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian in Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 277.
2. Calvin comments here, “This is said by way of anticipation, that he might obviate those things which are usually objected to with regard to the liberty of God’s children. For as men are naturally ingenious in laying hold on what may be for their advantage, many, at the commencement of the Gospel, thought themselves free to live only for themselves.” Commentaries, XXII.2.
3. James Henley Thornwell, “Antinomianism” in The Collected Writings of James Henley Thornwell (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1871), 386.
