Several years ago while on a mission trip to Ukraine, I heard our interpreter make a rather disturbing comment about his nation. In brief he said that many of his countrymen would gladly go back to the days of the Soviet dominance in return for a guaranteed job, paycheck, and pension. This idea that security is to be preferred to freedom is repeated in a quote by H.L. Mencken from the book Why You Do the Things You Do by Clinton and Sibcy. Mencken says, "The average man does not want to be free. He wants to be safe." (p. 15)
Having just come through another Independence Day holiday season, I am reminded again of the struggle we must continually face and the tension in which we must live to have what we call a free country. Our history is fraught with this dilemma of freedom versus security. The more we have of one the less we have of the other. At what point are we willing to sacrifice one to guarantee the other?
A significant percentage of colonials did not feel the war of rebellion against the mother country was worth the social risks. Yet even those who cried out, "Give me liberty or give me death" knew that there could be no liberty without the order that only law could provide, hence limiting the very freedom for which they were willing to die.
I have often thought that America contains within its breast the seeds that could easily spell its doom and destruction. To be free brings its own risks. Social man has never shown himself able to handle freedom in a manner that is both responsible and non destructive. Freedom can only be sustained through the use of power; yet power, and the control it provides, is the one thing that freedom cannot tolerate.
Tony Campolo, former professor at what once was Eastern Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, said that the use of control and love must always be inversely proportional. The more one seeks to control the less love can be shown. The more one loves the less control will be exerted. Perhaps only in the parent - child relationship can we approach the positive use of both. Perhaps only in the Divine Father - mortal child relationship can control and love both be practiced in perfection.
Scripture rather clearly states that man was born to serve. Only in his sinful bent does he dream of the idea of being his own master. In truth his only free choice is who his master will be. Perhaps our churches and the Kingdom of God would be better served if we preached more on the divine plan of human security under the Lordship of Christ and less on the human need for freedom. Ask any member of the persecuted church in countries we deem less free than our own. Would they rather have the American dream of political freedom or the knowledge that they can be free only as they find their freedom in their slavery to Jesus Christ?
