There's a character in the anime Attack on Titan named Eren Yeager. He grows up inside a walled city, hemmed in on every side by colossal barriers built to keep out man-eating giants nobody has ever gone far enough to truly understand. He hates the walls themselves more so than the danger they're built against. To him they are the shape of his own captivity, and he spends his childhood promising his friend Armin that one day they'll go past them and see the ocean, which by that point in the story is treated by everyone in the city as something close to a myth.
He grows into a young man and joins the most dangerous branch of the military, the one whose recruits mostly die, because it's the only path that leads toward the walls instead of away from them. Many years later he gets out, and he sees the ocean. Armin, the friend who shared the dream with him since childhood, is overwhelmed, crying and laughing at finally standing inside the thing they promised each other they'd reach. It's the payoff the whole story has been building toward, the moment the wall finally comes down.
Eren is the one who isn't satisfied. He looks past the water, past the horizon, toward the people he now knows are out there, the ones responsible for his people's isolation behind the walls in the first place and asks his friends whether killing them all is what it will finally take to be free. He says it right there, still standing at the edge of the very ocean he spent his childhood dreaming about. The goal he achieved doesn't quiet anything inside of him. It just relocates the wall to the next horizon and puts new enemies on it.
That should be the end of it, but it isn't. Once that threat is handled, the goalpost moves again, and now freedom means eliminating anyone anywhere who could someday threaten his people, because their mere existence is itself a constraint on his freedom. Eren ends up trying to wipe out most of the human population of the earth, framing it to himself as the final act of liberation, and he dies having never once arrived at what he was chasing.
The god Eren Never Named
It's tempting to read this as a story about one boy's escalation into extremism, but that undersells what's actually happening to the concept of freedom itself. The definition doesn't get bigger by choice. It gets bigger because nothing bounds it once Eren makes it the thing he answers to, and that escalation follows the exact shape of a verse most people read past too quickly:
And the shorter version of the same warning:
The verse describes an individual who worships his own will rather than a carved statue. The sealing of his hearing, his mind, and his sight reads less like a punishment handed down after the fact than like a process, one that advances in step with how much ground the ego has already been given. The more you feed a desire that answers to nothing outside itself, the less capable you become of perceiving anything beyond its next demand. Eren doesn't wake up one day and decide on genocide. Every stage of the story narrows what he's able to see as an obstacle, until the only thing left in his field of vision is the next wall. This is the mechanism the sura is describing: an ego with no master above it has nothing telling it when to stop, so its scale keeps expanding without limit.
Knowing the Future Didn't Save Him
In this show, Eren has a specific power as the Attack Titan, which has the ability to see the memories of every past and future holder of that power, which gives him more certainty about how things will unfold than any other character in the story, and he isn't guessing at any of it. That certainty changes nothing, and if anything it makes him worse: he starts acting as though the outcome is already fixed and he is merely the instrument carrying it out. Knowledge, on its own, bought him nothing.
That failure should sound familiar. It's the same one that shows up at the very start of the human story, with Iblis:
Iblis is not ignorant of God. He stood in front of Him and rebelled directly. He had more theological certainty than anyone else in the scene, and his failure had nothing to do with a lack of information. He had a command and a reason he considered sound, and he chose his own verdict over submission to that command anyway. "I am better than he" is not a statement of confusion; it is a conclusion he was arrogantly confident in.
It would be comfortable to say Eren failed simply because he didn't know any better, and that the lesson here is just "trust God because you can't see what's coming." That's true as far as it goes, but it undersells the point, and Eren's foreknowledge is what proves it. What was missing was never certainty; it was submission. A person can hold the whole picture and still refuse to place his own judgment beneath anything higher, and the picture alone will not save him. Iblis had it. Eren, in his more limited way, had it too. Neither needed more information. What both needed was to stop treating their own verdict as final.
A created being, by definition, will never hold the full picture no matter how much he learns, and the only sane response to that permanent condition is to stop insisting that his own judgment gets the final word. Eren's unusual access to the future made no difference, because access to outcomes was never what stood between him and peace. What stood between him and peace was submission, and that is the one thing his idea of freedom would not let him give.
This is where the word freedom itself gets reframed. Eren spent his whole life understanding freedom as the absence of anything above him telling him what to do, and by the end he was the most controlled person in the entire story, ruled by an idea he had built and could no longer question, watching himself carry out an outcome he called unavoidable. The total sovereignty he achieved over his own life turned into the most complete captivity in the series, which is less an irony than 45:23 working exactly as described: an ego given the final word does not liberate the person who follows it, it instead seals him in.
The only freedom that doesn't eventually turn and rule you is the one that was never manufactured by you in the first place. Everything you build yourself will eventually need feeding, and it will never stop being hungry. Eren proved that at the largest possible scale, and it cost him everything he set out to gain. The only way to keep moving forward is by submitting to the fact that God is far higher than you, that He knows every single permutation of events that could and would ever unfold, and that He alone always has your best interest at heart. Armin got to stand at that ocean and simply be there. Eren stood at the same water and started measuring the next wall. The difference was never distance traveled — it was whether either of them had something higher to finally rest in.
