Main news for 22 May 2018

The limitation of freedom is an inevitable experience of every person in this world. Voluntarily or under compulsion, we submit to very many things: the laws of physics, the laws of society, the law of God... These countless laws entangle a person, and the best years of life are spent learning to accept them. This is normal and even, perhaps, right. But in the soul of the person under law, some kind of conditioned reflex eventually forms, so that without law, without an impersonal external regulator of life, we can no longer live. Remaining in fear of violating something, whether the law of universal gravitation, the administrative code, or the law of God, a person nevertheless tries to find laws for himself in order to submit to them. Sometimes we simply declare our own desires to be a law of the universe; sometimes we find something more exalted. But then we try to force everyone around us into it, and thus totalitarianism is born from passion for law.

Law attracts a person because law is impersonal. You can correspond to it or violate it, if you manage, without entering into personal relations with it. Thus the feeling is born of the world as an objective reality given to us by God in our sensations. And since all laws are impersonal, the person himself remains the only active agent in his life. This half-voluntary submission to impersonal law is what the apostle Paul calls the spirit of slavery.

But in reality, besides laws, there is the Lawgiver, and we turn out not to be strangers to Him. Therefore you can build personal relations with the Lawgiver, while the fulfillment of the laws, generally speaking, happens somehow by itself. Such is the alternative that the apostle Paul called the spirit of adoption. And the choice between law and the Lawgiver is one of the key choices for a person.