Liberation. What a word of beauty. Yet where is the liberation? Who is liberated? What is liberated? What is liberation?
Liberation is the setting free of man from self, sin, death, and oppression. The preaching of the gospel of the kingdom is a spiritual truth that liberates man and the faith in this truth is the instrument of liberation. In these last days, this belief is the liberating condition that sets man free from the mark of the beast by breaking the bonds of delusion.
Liberation viewed as a process of liberty, social justice and love sees the emancipation movements of the third world as a direct result of greed, abuse, cruelty and conceited domination of the northern countries like the United Kingdom. If there is violence in the area, it is the straining of freedom in the struggle of the poor to be free of the whole process of economic oppression.
Liberation holds the whole process of opposition to all forms of colonial oppression. The people of the north believed that they would not be set free until they free others and I strongly believe that there is some truth in this. So long as they need to control other people, however kind their motives were, they were captive to that need. They also believed that giving people freedom would make them, the northern people free themselves; and that the oppressed people would be free to grow in their own way.
Personally, I believe the whole idea of liberation requires that the individual will find out the truth for himself.
Each generation must experience the liberation in its own life experience. In the bible, the running away of the Israelites was the bitter experience of slavery, and of being held in scorn, a deep isolation and the sense of rejection, and of the feeling that there was no escape from the brutal circle of violence and the fear and hate of not knowing whether life is worth living at all. Without really experiencing this, it was not possible to understand what the liberation of Exodus...