I listened to the Prime Minister's statement to the House of Commons on Monday, which he said would be about the road map to reclaiming our freedoms. At one point I thought he must have been reading my recent posts on this blog! He said, when talking about the pace at which lockdown measures will be lifted, "I know there will be many people who will be worried that we are being too ambitious and that it is arrogant to impose any kind of plan upon a virus. I agree that we must always be humble in the face of nature and we must be cautious." I too agree that we must be humble in the face of nature, which is ultimately uncontrollable by human beings. But, more than that, we need to be humble before God, who made nature and is in absolute control of it.

Going back to the Prime Minister's plan, he calls it the road map to freedom and we understand what he meant having endured the loss of so much of the liberty we take for granted for the best part of a year now.

If you read the Bible (for example in Romans 6 and 7), you will discover that we are, in fact, never truly free. We are held in a sort of captivity - a moral and spiritual captivity - by sin. We are governed by an inner impulse of mind and heart, something encoded into our very inner self, that turns us away from God and His good will and towards our own sinful desires. We need look no further than our own lives to see this is so and, for confirmation, the Bible spells it out in places like the first three chapters of Romans. To be under the mastery of sin is not without consequence, either in life now or in that which is to come. Happily, there is a spiritual road map to true freedom available and that too is found in the Bible. As Paul, the writer of Romans puts it, "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24-25, ESV)