The Slave Who Could Finally Read

In 1834, when the British Emancipation Act took effect across the Caribbean, a formerly enslaved man named James Williams in Jamaica reportedly wept not because his chains were removed — he had already been working as a relatively free laborer for months. He wept because for the first time, the law of the land declared what he had always known inside himself: that he was a person, not property.

For generations, enslaved people in the British colonies lived under external codes that defined them as chattel. The law was written in ledgers and deeds of sale — cold, impersonal, imposed from without. But no statute could extinguish the internal witness that every human soul carries: the deep, unshakeable knowledge of their own dignity before God.

This is precisely the revolution the Prophet Jeremiah announced. The old covenant was written on stone — external, breakable, dependent on priests and teachers to interpret and enforce. But the Almighty promised something breathtaking: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts." No longer would knowledge of God be secondhand, filtered through intermediaries. From the least to the greatest, every person would know the Lord directly and intimately.

When God writes His covenant on the human heart, obedience stops being mere compliance with an external code. It becomes as natural and inseparable from us as our own breathing — not law imposed, but love inscribed.