Daily Devotion by Nick Jones

It used to be thought that these elements are the most fundamental building blocks of the world, and cannot be split up into anything smaller. But ever since Ernest Rutherford proved the existence of the atomic nucleus in 1911 we know now that this isn’t true.

Going further back in time, in the ancient world there were considered to be just four elements – earth, air, fire and water – and it was believed these in combination accounted for everything in the universe. This might be what Paul refers to when he writes of ‘the elemental spirits of the world’. For Paul, these things enslave us. Only in Christ are we are no longer slaves, or children controlled by a guardian. Nothing is more fundamental than our identity as Christians.

Therefore, to be free we must move beyond the idea that the word is divided into fundamental elements or categories. As he has already said, in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female. We need to move beyond dividing people into such categories, or thinking that our cultural constructs are truly fundamental. Being free in Christ means looking past what we sometimes think is fundamental to see there is a new world beyond them, just as beyond the elements there is a mind-boggling sub-atomic world of tiny particles which behave in peculiar and confusing ways.