Nobody is my boss
Freedom.
It’s the word that ends arguments. Not because it settles them — because both sides want it. The left invokes it. The right invokes it. The person who can’t explain what they mean by it invokes it the loudest. Nobody argues against freedom. The concept is designed to be irresistible.
In the United States especially, this is not new. The founding fathers put it in the Declaration, threaded it through the Bill of Rights, set it at the center of everything. We sing it — the land of the free. We pledge it — liberty and justice for all. We have been doing this for two hundred and fifty years, and the hunger for it has not diminished. It has grown.
But here is a question that almost never gets asked.
What is freedom?
The working answer — the one that actually governs how most people behave — is this: freedom is the ability to think, do, or be whatever I want, with no one telling me otherwise. No constraints. No authority that gets to override my choices. This is deep in the culture now. Children are told they can be whatever they want to be. Believe in yourself. Find your own truth. The message is so constant it has become invisible — woven into education, entertainment, and a thousand conversations that aren’t recognizable as argument until you notice what they’re all pointing at.
The opening verses of Psalm 2 are a picture of this impulse at full scale.
Kings and rulers gathering deliberately, with real power and a real plan. Their goal, stated plainly: “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” The peoples of the earth, standing before God with fists raised, demanding to be free. Not from an enemy nation. Not from an oppressive government. From God himself.
Freedom.
But here is the question the psalmist does not ask — the one I want to ask instead.
What if true freedom is something else entirely?
I heard a story recently about saguaro cacti. They live and thrive in the American southwest — hot, dry, punishing. That is the environment they are built for. Take a saguaro and plant it in the northeast, where the water is plentiful and the climate is cool, and something happens. The plant absorbs too much water. It bloats. It collapses under its own weight.
You could say the saguaro was free in the northeast. Free from the constraints of the desert. Free from the heat, the drought, the demanding conditions it always lived within. But that freedom is what kills it.
The saguaro doesn’t thrive in the absence of constraint. It thrives in the exact soil and climate it was made for. Strip away those conditions — give it everything it wants — and it dies.
This is the image Psalm 2 is building toward. The bonds and cords the nations want to throw off are not arbitrary restrictions imposed by a controlling God. They are the conditions under which human beings were made to live. God made us. He knows — perfectly, without exception — what is best for us, for our relationships, for the world. True freedom is not freedom from those conditions.
True freedom is being planted in the soil designed for you.
Let’s be totally fair.
I want those constraints gone every single day of my life. If I had my own way, I would be healthy, wealthy, and completely in charge of what I do and when I do it. I don’t know many people who don’t want that.
I also don’t know anyone who has that life.
The people I have known who organized their lives around the principle of getting their own way — self first, every time — are not free. They are some of the most isolated people I have encountered. Their relationships are brittle, because no one wants to dedicate their life to someone who is dedicated only to themselves. They cannot find joy in other people’s success, because other people’s success is not about them. Worst of all, a person committed to their own freedom cannot engage with God at all — or if they do, they find a version of God who exists to satisfy their desires. A force to invoke. Not a person to know.
This is not freedom.
It is the saguaro in the northeast — doing whatever it wants, free from every constraint, with all the water it could ask for.
Collapsing.
Next: He Who Sits in the Heavens Laughs — Psalm 2:4–6
