Captivity is a terrible thing but what is worse is for someone who has been set free to prefer and long for life in captivity. Captivity is so limiting and puts you under absolute control of the person and/or personality that holds you captive. The best of your days are only to the extent that He allows. It appears that the most grievous impact it makes on the slave is the latent desire to become like the slave master. To live like you saw your master live; as far as you know, it is the best life anyone can ever live.
Ephesians 2: 2-3b – You used to live in sin, just like the rest of the world, obeying the devil – the commander of the powers in the unseen world. He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God. All of us used to live that way.
It is sad for a person who has been set from a life of sin by reason of the shed blood of Jesus to long for and prefer the life in slavery: to idolize the lifestyle of the slave and exalt it above any other. This is what appears to be happening to the church today. I wonder how God feels when people who have been believers for ages and served Him faithfully suddenly begin to look back at their lives before they came to Christ and begin to love and admire it and to talk about it in a way that leaves you wondering if they want to return to it. My question is this – if it was so good in captivity, why did you come to Christ who never compels anyone to come to Him.
Ephesians 2: 13 – “Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ.”
This is the story of the Israelites as they journeyed into the Promised Land. They kept longing for all they had in Egypt. Every time they hit a difficulty, they didn’t desire a change in the circumstance, they just longed for what they had in Egypt until they “longed” enough for God to get totally dissatisfied with them. Clearly, they wanted liberty but they thought it would leave them in their comfort zone which was Egypt. What they knew about life and liberty was the life that their masters lived but God was calling them to a life higher than what they had and they were too short sighted to see.
Ephesians 4: 18 – 19a “Their minds are full of darkness; they wander far from the life God gives because they have closed their minds and hardened their hearts against Him. They have no sense of shame. They live for lustful pleasure”
Remember Lot’s wife who became a pillar of salt for looking back to Sodom and Gomorrah. Let us face it; life there had become terrible for them in Sodom and they wanted to be set free. The culture they longed for was not that of Sodom so why did she look back? Did the life of sin appeal to her? Was she short-sighted and refusing to look beyond what she knows to what God was about to open up in front to her? Was she blinded?
These are the questions we need to ask ourselves today? If your life in the world was wonderful, why then did you get born again? You can’t have the best of both worlds but the world that is before you, the one that God presents is a great one so why don’t you stop looking back and longing for the life your masters lived? You can’t live that life in Christ. You can’t import that culture into this new life in Christ.
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