Aunty Jane
Well-Known Member
I have always believed in free will, otherwise the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil” would not have been in the garden, and there would have been no command to refrain from taking this fruit that God placed explicitly in his own possession. Humans at the outset were given choices and penalties, meaning that it was wise to obey God and very unwise to disobey him.....still there was the choice.Christian predeterminism makes no practical sense and is an abhorrent teaching, that God purposely and wilfully makes some men to do good, and others to do evil. That is what James calls a false accusation against God. Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.
Exactly.....free will means that God knows exactly what will happen IF a person chooses to disobey him. He tells them in advance, as he did to Adam, what will transpire if his laws are broken. He did the same with Israel...no one can say our Creator is unjust if his laws are clearly stated, and so are the “blessings and the curses”. We choose the action, so we choose the consequence.Actually He does foreknow, which He plainly says, because He foresees all things. It's just that He does no predetermine what He knows. He doesn't create on person to believe Him and another not to, and then watches it come to pass as He predestines.
Yes, imagining that we have no choices makes this life meaningless.The only predestination of God is the manner of His natural creation, so that a tree produces trees, and whales produce whales, and humans produce humans. What is different about man and trees and whales, is that man is created in God's spiritual image to think, intend, and imagaine freely. Which includes the liberty to obey or disobey Him, either for our own life or our own destruction.
Those in the animal kingdom are ‘programmed’ by instinct for the life that God intended for them....to eat, drink and procreate their species indefinitely in a cycle of life.....but we alone are made in God’s image....we alone have a concept of “past, present and future”, which animals lack because “now” is all that exists for them, even though a past experience can make them wary of a familiar present one. They can learn from the past, but they have no concept of the future beyond their present need.
We are unique in that capacity. We alone can plan the future consciously.
The Bible is full of stories of people who made choices and the outcomes that followed......we can see how things panned out for them and use our intelligence and imagination to figure it out.
That is something that is lost on the majority who feel as if there are no choices.I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.
Free will is good if we choose wisely, but is our own worst enemy if we choose evil.
“Life or death” is all God ever put before his people.....he never said they had a choice between “heaven and hell”. That is not a biblical concept, but borrowed from pagan ideas about immortality of the soul....something Jews were never taught from their scripture, but adopted in later centuries from the Greeks.
And when the judgment comes, it will hit many very hard because the choices they made were not just about “believing” (James 2:19) but about what they did with their beliefs, and where they actually came from. Most have no idea that much of what they believe was never taught by the Jesus Christ that they claim to follow.He can't be saying we have no choice in serving Him, because He tells us to make that choice once for all, and quit being double-hearted about it.
The “weeds” of counterfeit “Christianity” that Jesus spoke about were not sown recently....we have in the history of the nation of Israel, what happens when we deviate from what the scriptures teach and justify them by pretending that they are biblical, when they are anything but.
What did Jesus say about the religious leaders of his day? (Matt 15:7-9; Matt 23:33)
Those who lead will have double accountability for what they teach.