Jesus said, “Whom the Son sets free, shall be free indeed” (or something like that). So I have to ask myself, if His listeners were already free, why do they need setting free? Also, He came to set the captives free. That has to refer to those in bondage, including those of us who now follow Him. So were we ever free at all?

Well, sort of free; sort of not. An infant is free to do whatever she wants to do and can do, but she doesn’t know how to want much of anything beyond comfort, and isn’t able to do much of anything beyond cry for relief and carry on bodily functions (and even of these she has no control). An infant has, it turns out, very little freedom.

As she grows and develops she gains more freedom. She can laugh and coo; she can grasp her toys; she can begin to sit up . . . and so it goes.

I wonder if we are like that spiritually. To begin with, we are all slaves of sin, born with the family birth defect and unable to act with righteousness no matter how much we might desire it. The baby girl maybe wants to play with her older brother’s video game, but she can only randomly push buttons. She may enjoy it, but she has no genuine power to play that game.

Likewise we may play around with laws and codes and restrictions on behavior, but we have no genuine power to play that “game.” Enter Jesus who sets us free from the law of sin and death. Now we are free to do righteousness, and we have the power to do righteousness, but do we have the ability? Eh . . . not so much, not yet. We have the ability to develop the ability by the empowerment of the Spirit, but it will take time to grow into that.

As we grow in Christ we become more and more free, and our relationships with God and with one another develop and grow in righteousness, beauty, love. Thus we become ready to enter into that next age and be His mature sons (and daughters) and heirs and representatives of the House of YHWH. At this point we are as free as we ever were to sin, but at the same time, there’s NO chance that we WILL sin because we have grown far, far beyond that — not in our own power, but in our oneness with our Lord and our dependence on our Father and our absolute trust in our Helper.

We have become rational and free, loving and merciful beings, conformed to the image of Christ.

So, that’s why I think people “in heaven” can be free and still not be in danger of falling into sin. I probably read it somewhere or read something that sparked this in my heart/mind, but I can’t remember where. What do you think?

I have my own ideas about this, which I’m not skillful enough to articulate briefly enough to post them here, but I wonder if the agnostic/atheist/struggling Christian might not stumble over this question too. I’ve been wrestling with it for decades to finally come to my conclusions (fluid though they are).