3. Born from Above – God’s Sacred Jailbreak
3. Born from Above – God’s Sacred Jailbreak.
Because of Christ, we have been delivered from death to life, from hopeless captivity to expansive freedom. The remarkable, and anonymous, Psalm 107 offers several vignettes of what has been called “God’s Great Works of Deliverance.” We find people in all kinds of trouble in this psalm, and the Lord provided salvation each and every time. Most scholars claim that this psalm can be taken either literally or as metaphor, or more probably both. Historically we can point to the Chosen People here, experiencing exile and all sorts of problems because of their disobedience to their Lord Yahweh. But there are many who say, especially in verses 10-18, that the description of people who are as good as dead, hopelessly imprisoned in a dark, windowless dungeon is rightly understood as a picture of our spiritual captivity before the arrival of Jesus Christ. It is a picture of what spiritual death looks like, and how we have no hope of ever coming alive, of being delivered from spiritual death in our captivity to Satan, without the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is a realistic picture of the inner prison of the heart before redemption and deliverance. This is certainly a bleak snapshot of the hopeless state of our soul without Jesus. Weaving together many translations of Ps. 107:10-18, the following paraphrase can best be understood at the spiritual level, and is what salvation looks like when we are delivered from our spiritual captivity. I have written the following in the more direct and personal first person instead of the more impersonal and distant third person.
“We are those who sat in darkness, locked up in a gloomy prison, living in the shadows that were as dark as death. We were prisoners in absolute misery, bound in chains. All this because we defied the instructions of Lord Yahweh, we despised the counsel of our God, scorning the thoughts of the Most High. So Yahweh humbled our hearts through suffering, and if we fell down, there was no one there to pick us up again. We cried out to the Lord in our distress, and He saved us. He rescued us from our miserable plight. He delivered us from the gloomy darkness and the deathly shadows. He shattered our chains of captivity, He broke the jail wide open. We thank Yahweh for His goodness and lovingkindness, His faithful love for us, His wonderful works for the children of mankind. He broke open those gates of bronze, He smashed the iron bars, and He shattered those heavy jailhouse doors. Yes, we cried out to Lord Yahweh in our distress, and He saved our lives from the Abyss, the pit of destruction, from certain death. We will thank the Lord for His mercy, faithfulness, and goodness!”
This would be the testimony of our fallen heart if it could talk. What better way to paint a picture of sin holding us captive, hopelessly locked into a dark dungeon without any true freedom. The truth is that we aren’t strong enough to break those chains. Only Jesus has “bound the strong man” and mercifully liberated us in a dramatic spiritual jailbreak.
‘He saved us.” The word for save here is “Yasha,” which means to be set free into the wide open; to be delivered in a time of desperate need; to be saved from destruction and certain death. “Salvation” literally means to become spacious, and refers to “the sense of deliverance from an existence that had become confined, compressed, or cramped.” (Eugene Peterson). When Jesus delivers us from our inner spiritual prison, we are liberated into a wide open, broad, expansive place.
There are three passages in psalms that describe this soul freedom beautifully:
Psalm 118:5 = From my distress, I called upon the Lord. He answered me and set me on a large place. After being in a tight spot, the Lord placed me into a broad space. Because I was hemmed in, I called on Lord Yahweh. He answered me and gave me room.
Psalm 31:8 = Lord, you have not given me over into the hands of the Enemy; You have liberated me and set my feet in a wide expanse, a good and spacious land. You have given me the freedom to roam at large, where I can freely move. You have given me room to breathe.
Psalm 18:19 = The Lord rescued me because He delighted in me. He brought me out to freedom into a wide open space. My soul has been delivered because of God’s love for me, and my soul finally has some elbow room! (The word for “wide open space” is the opposite of a straightjacket. Without Jesus, our soul will never be freed from our spiritual straightjacket).
The messianic Jewish Bible scholar, Brother Rex Andrews, points us to Psalm 118:5, and notes that the Hebrew word for “distress” suggests a siege, a heart held captive to a siege. Without Jesus, we are in extremely constrained circumstances, surrounded by enemies, with no way of escape. Enemies include our fallen human nature; our inclination to sin without the ability to change ourselves; the ongoing spiritual warfare conducted by the Adversary and his demons; a broken society that makes it difficult to do the right thing; our wounded past that needs healing; deep-seated patterns that are impossible to overcome. But this is the Good News: Jesus makes a way where there is no way. He breaks the enemy’s battle lines, destroys the siege, and sets us free from our enemies. Jesus is our only hope to accomplish this act of liberation, release us from captivity, and grant to us the freedom to be enslaved no longer to our sinfulness.