"Positive freedom, that is, freedom to or freedom for rather than freedom from. Specifically, liberty referred to the freedom to pursue good ends of your own choice within the bounds of natural and divine law. Liberty thus included a moral imperative: the only legitimate ends had to be virtuous themselves and had to be pursued by virtuous means...
The alternative to liberty is license. License is a negative freedom, that is, freedom from restraint. Licentious people pursue their desires without regard for any rules or restrictions on their behavior. Freedom to them means that no one can tell them what to do or tell them that what they are doing is wrong.
No political thinker in the centuries leading up to the Founders believed that we had a natural right to license, only liberty. And yet today, freedom is overwhelmingly understood as negative freedom, as license."
The Bible affirms the virtue of liberty, highlighting its generation from the life of God; and the vice of license, highlighting its manifestation in the lives of the unregenerate.
2 Corinthians 3:17
Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
Isaiah 61:1
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.
Galatians 5:19-21
Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
Jude 1:4
For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.
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