It wasn’t just an exchange of slavery to a certain kind of enlightenment freedom. It was servitude to Pharaoh which was hardship and oppression in exchange for serving God—which is true freedom, true joy, true happiness in loving God, in knowing God, in delighting in God, and doing things God’s way instead of our way.

Defining Freedom

We sometimes define freedom as the ability to do whatever we want to do, but that’s not really how the Bible understands freedom. Freedom is the ability to do what we ought to do—that’s real freedom.

When we hear the story of the exodus and the famous line Let my people go, what we forget is that Moses said, Let my people go in order that they might go into the wilderness and they might worship me.

There was always an end to it. It wasn’t just freedom as we might understand it. It was worship.

So that’s the way the Christian understands freedom. But the cry of the Christian is not first of all just freedom (meaning to do what I want) but it’s the biblical freedom to do what I ought—to go and to worship God. So, the commandments that he gives us are not to make us enslaved but to keep us free.

We see that in the history of redemption itself. Slavery was under Pharaoh, freedom was under Yahweh. But it was a certain kind of freedom.

God would speak to the Israelites with the assumption that they were going to serve someone. There’s a Bob Dylan song that echoes this: “Everybody is going to serve somebody.” The Israelites were going to serve Pharaoh or they were going to serve Yahweh.

It wasn’t just an exchange of slavery to a certain kind of enlightenment freedom. It was servitude to Pharaoh which was hardship and oppression in exchange for serving God—which is true freedom, true joy, true happiness in loving God, in knowing God, in delighting in God, and doing things God’s way instead of our way.

This article is adapted from The Ten Commandments by Kevin DeYoung. This article originally appeared in Crossway.org and is used with permission.