# De vrijheidꜛ in Christus

C
  No, we should not do whatever we want, but I shall come back to that in a moment. Let me first explain how we can be free from the law. Suppose a dead corpse falls down and breaks something, is the dead man responsible for that?
M
  How can he be? He is dead, isn't he? It is only his body that remains. If his brother had put the body on a table in such a way that it would fall, maybe that brother would be responsible, but definitely not the dead man!
Comment
  Depending on the background of the other person, this may be obvious or require elaborate arguing. If the latter, it may be wise to skip the second thread altogether initially. Once people are willing to consider Christ, and thus look beyond their cultural idea world, they may be open to reconsidering their notions about the nature of death and spirits as well.
C
  So you agree that a dead man has no responsibility, in other words: that no law has power over a dead person.
Comment
  This, of course, is not a logical result, but follows from the way God made His law. Proving it logically would require discussing the Adamic, Noahic and Mosaic laws, which I had not done. Don't hesitate to do so if necessary, of course. In my case a step-by-step proof wasn't necessary, because the Koran teaches the same thing.
M
  Obviously. A dead man has no power to do anything on earth, so a law forbidding certain things to a dead person would be useless. As the Koran teaches, until his death he adds to his good and evil deeds; at the moment of his death the books are closed, and his deeds thrown in the scales of justice, and from then on he will get his eternal reward or punishment.
Comment
  I took some time approaching this result from several sides, such as: if a slave obeys his master in breaking the law of the land, the master, not the slave is responsible. So to the extent a slave obeys his master he is not under the law of the land, being screened from it by his master. [I am currently writing out this bit; it is here.]
C
  And, as we have seen, one of the scales, the one with good deeds, will remain empty. Because for a deed to be good it has to be better that what God's perfect law requires of us, and certainly no-one will claim to have done anything that surpasses God's standards of goodness.
M
  It will remain empty but for God Himself who fills it with mercy.
C
  I fully agree. Our discussion here centres on the form that mercy takes.
M
  Which you claim to be Jesus.
C
  Indeed. But now I am talking of the death of Jesus Himself: He died, and fully paid the punishment for all the sins He carried. That means that in His case both scales are empty, and He may live in the presence of God, under the law of heaven.
M
  But there is no law of heaven, because there is no punishment in heaven. People are free there to enjoy!
C
  Yes, to enjoy the highest possible bliss: being in the presence of God! Well, there is the law of love, but you are right that Jesus is not under any law that carries a punishment with it. This is the meaning of the resurrection — that Jesus has paid the infinite debt we stood in, the punishment, the fine we could never have paid ourselves. He — and therefore anyone who had accepted Him to suffer in his place — is now under the law of love that carries no punishment.
M
  So it still seems true that a Christian can do whatever he wants, there being no law to restrain him. Because a law that does not punish carries no force.