NOTES for Co2 3:17
We meet very often in the Bible the assertion that God is Spirit. As seen, the apostle connects to this obvious fact the liberty, asserting in a way that God, being spirit, is the God of liberty, and not of slavery, even if it is about the enslavement of some form of religion. At first sight, the link between these two assertions is not visible. But if to think well, it is easy to see that this link all the same exists, although it is not visible immediately. Indeed, any spirit (whether it is God Himself or any spiritual being created by Him) distinguishes itself from the nature (in all its possible forms, maybe, even those that are still unknown to us today) in particular by the full and absolute liberty. God has no nature; He is pure will and pure self-consciousness.
It is not accidentally, in contrast to the theologians, the Bible tells us nothing about God's nature, but here is about His will and His personal qualities - constantly. The will is the foundation of any spirit and its primary demonstration; it is not by chance that it is the basis of any spiritual life, including the human. The self-consciousness is a derivative of the will, which in a normal case is only conditioned by it and depends only on it.
Practically it means that the spirit in the original sense of the word depends only on itself, and never on nothing and on nobody else. Any relations between spiritual beings will be always free and profoundly personal, and any restriction of the demonstration of the will means the restriction of liberty, which ultimately leads to the diminution of the fullness of the spiritual life of the one, whose will is limited. Other thing is the nature: it never defines its own being, being always dependent on something, and on the final account on somebody else.
If the spirit by definition is free, such that the diminution of its freedom reduces its spiritual potential, then the nature is also by definition not free. Of course, any spirit can cooperate with the nature, without losing its liberty, quite as God created the whole world natural, not belittling Himself at all and shamelessly thus of His liberty. His self-belittlement and self-restriction turned to be connected not with the nature, but with the spiritual beings created by Him, with which connected Him to love relations.
Such a self-belittlement and such a self-restriction can also of course be considered formally as a restriction of liberty, but since it is about an absolute voluntary choice, such restriction stops to be external, becoming for God an organic form of His own existence. And in the Kingdom all the forms are defined in the same way, from the relations of mutual love, which suppose a mutual self-restrain, as consequence of the consideration of the existence of those who are close by.
There is no external border here, there is only a form of the self being voluntarily accepted by each, considering the existence of the relationship with God, with Christ, with the neighbor. And here is; in the not transformed world, on the contrary, all restrictions are connected, above all, with the natural component of man, which prevailed after the fall, subjugating the breath of life that every person receives at birth.
It is not surprising that they bind, fetter the spiritual liberty of man. And the religion here is not an exception: because except the spiritual component appropriate to it, there is in it quite a lot of nature, connected with the psyche and the behavioral models of the fallen man. And it was impossible of course to the apostle not to know it. That is why he calls his correspondents to liberty. To the liberty of the Kingdom, without which are impossible real and full relationship with God. And thus, is impossible the salvation also.