"Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." (Joshua 24:14-15, NIV)
This passage is an example of the people's having a free will, in that they were capable in-and-of themselves to choose whether they would serve the God who had brought them out of Egypt, or instead serve the other gods which proliferated in that region. But once they made that decision, it would dictate their words and actions in the future. If they chose to serve God, then their words and actions would conform to what God wanted of them. But if they chose to serve the other gods being worshiped during that era, then their words and actions would conform to the teachings which had built up around that deity.
We see a clear example of the consequences of such a decision in Romans, where St. Paul wrote that the people's decision to practice homosexuality as their lifestyle would not end there, but instead would cause them to sink increasingly further into depravity:
Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. (Romans 1:28-32,NIV)
Once people choose evil rather than good, then it soon becomes apparent that it is no longer they who are in control of evil, but rather it is evil that is in control of them. Just as a stream invariably leads to a river, which in turn leads to larger rivers until it eventually becomes a sea, in like manner those who deliberately choose to commit a specific act of evil soon find themselves out of control, and thus commtting other evils which at the beginning they had no conscious intention of committing.
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