Servants and sons.

I was reading a historical biography to Ben and Oscar this morning and came upon a sentence:

"After all, Captain Newport had made him cabin boy; he was used to telling Thomas what to do, as if he were a servant, or as if he were really a son."

It immediately called to mind the contrast between "servants" and "sons" that we say marks the difference that Christ's redemption has made in our relationship to God.

In that passage, the captain commands the boy, and the boy obeys,  as if he were a servant OR as if he were a son.  It doesn't really matter, at least not outwardly.  Both servitude and sonship carry -- or at least they once carried -- an implication of total obedience on the part of one, total authority on the part of the other.  And yet they mean something so very different.

Nowadays, for better or worse, "sons" and "servants" are not so easily mistaken for one another.  So maybe we forget how very interior and unseen the difference can be, before and after redemption.