True Freedom

I finished reading Huckleberry Finn this morning.

 

Set around the Mississippi river in 1840s America, it tells the tale of Huck Finn - a teenage boy who escapes an abusive father by faking his own death and travelling down the river on a raft. 

 

Along the way, he meets an escaped slave, Jim, who has run away from his owner, because she has threatened to sell him.

 

Jim is recaptured and sold several times throughout the novel and, as a black slave, he has absolutely no rights.  He doesn't own himself.  He is not a free man.

 

At the end of the novel, Huck and his friend Tom develop a very elaborate plan to free Jim from his slavery once and for all.  However, in the very last pages, the reader discovers that Jim has, in fact, been free for a while:

"Old Miss Watson died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going to sell him down the river, and said so; and she set him free in her will."

"Then what on earth did you want to set him free for, seeing he was already free?"

 

Sometimes, we too, don't realise our own status as free people.  We are no longer bound by things in our past - sin, or mistakes, or regret, or shame, or guilt.  We are no longer enslaved.

 

But sometimes we waste our time trying to set ourselves free from these things, without realising that we are already free.

 

"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free."

[Galatians 5: NIV, emphasis mine]

And in The Message translation, this verse reads,

 

"Christ has set us free to live a free life.  So take your stand!  Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you."

 

[emphasis mine]

 

In both of these verses, freedom is something that Christ has already secured for us.  It is not something that we have to strive for or earn - it is something that he has already won for us.

 

Like Jim, we need to realise and remember our true status as free people.  And we need to make sure that no one - not even ourselves - snatches this freedom from us.