Excerpt from the book Is This A God Of Love, by A. E. Wilder-Smith
Chapter IV
The Origin of Evil
Difficulties of the type discussed in Chapter 2 led
Baudelaire, the French art historian and poet, to exclaim, "If there is a
God, he is the devil!" Such a statement is the direct result of believing
that man has always been as he is, good and bad, and was so designed
originally. This is the Muslim position.
Theistic evolutionists cannot avoid the same difficulty when
they maintain that God used evolutionary processes to produce the world of
nature as we see it today. If he did, then his methods made the bad with the
good, as Baudelaire maintains, and he therefore must be the devil as well as
God. Everything pivots on whether we believe nature was once "good"
and then subsequently ruined, whether we believe in the fall of man as laid
down in Genesis. By tampering with the structural details of Genesis, we are
likely to garble the whole reason for the present state of man — and the whole
plan of his salvation which will take him out of the present disastrous mess.
Genesis presents an integral whole on which the total plan of Scripture is
firmly founded.
Let us return to the cathedral illustration of Chapter 3. It
is superfluous to point out that all illustrations and analogies are imperfect
and have their weaknesses if pressed too far. Our illustration of the cathedral
is no exception. One of its imperfections lies in the fact that the architects
who designed and built the cathedral are long-since dead and therefore could
not prevent the bombing of their masterpiece. Then is God dead, too? Was he
dead when his masterpiece, nature, was "bombed” into ruin?
Today many assume God to be, in fact, dead and resolve the
question that way. But this is a doubtful escape exit for several reasons.
Although it might explain God's creative work in the past and its subsequent
ruination, it would never explain the present maintenance of nature and
creation. No dead God could take care of that. Christians rightly believe that
he is not only the living creator, but also the living maintainer of nature —
and of us. By very definition, the "God is dead" theory will not fit
in here, for maintenance implies activity and life.
Thus the question now becomes: Why didn't an almighty God
who made, maintains and presumably loves his masterpiece, creation, prevent its
"bombing?" Here the parable of the cathedral can do us no more
service.
People who continually ask the question, "Why doesn't
God stop it?" are often those who don't bother to ask what "stopping
it" would entail. Some specific details must be examined before attempting
to solve the greater principles involved.
Consider any virtue of which a person is capable; love,
kindness, honesty, faithfulness, chastity, or any of the traits named in
Galatians 5 will do. Select a virtue which pleases us all—love—and ask the
following question: "What is the nature of love in particular, and virtue
in general?"
Nature Of Love And
Virtue
This subject of the nature of love and virtue is vitally
important because the Christian way of life maintains that God himself is love.
Christians in the Western world often do not realize the tremendous import of
this statement. I have given other religions, including Islam, some thought,
and have studied Islam's Holy Book, the Koran, which designates Allah as the
compassionate, forgiving one. As far as I know, nowhere in the Koran does Allah
figure specifically as an embodiment of love. He may threaten, may be merciful,
omnipotent compassionate and omnipresent. He may offer the faithful a place in
the gardens of paradise with as many dark-eyed hour is as they wish. But love
never figures in the Koranic "revelations" of Allah's nature. A
designation of God as "love" stands unique in the Bible.
Right in the center, then, of the Christian position is this
virtue we call love. It must be of vital importance for that very reason.
Nevertheless, I find myself at an extreme loss when I am asked to rationally
explain anything at all about God's love. I know that "God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish
but have eternal life." But God, even though loving, is also infinite.
Therefore, he exceeds anything my thinking apparatus can handle. So I do not
pretend to be able to plumb the depths of either his love or character. To
think rationally about that love is far beyond me.
I suspect it is for this reason that when the Scriptures
speak of God and his love, usually man's love to a woman and vice versa is used
to drive home the point at an anthropomorphic level. It is like using real-life
illustrations to clarify abstract and abstruse points of chemistry
non-scientific people. Thus, God provides information on himself and his love
in a human setting in order to really communicate with us. The information we
thus obtain by "cutting down the high voltage of God's love" to the
"low voltage of human love,” we will then apply to our main problem.
The first question in analyzing human love is: "How did
this love between bride and bridegroom originate?" The history of most such
relationships provides the answer. The young man met the young girl one day and
sooner or later began to feel attracted to her. The attraction is better
experienced than described. Very often the girl feels attracted to him at the
same time, although she might at this stage be more hesitant to display her
feelings. Often, he begins the action side of the relationship by looking for
suitable ways to court her. But until wooing is begun, the whole affair is
lopsided. A one-sided relationship in which attentions are not returned can be
extremely painful. Certainly it is neither happy nor satisfying to either
party.
At this stage there is one burning question which every
prospective bridegroom would like answered as soon as possible: "Does she
love me?" Is my attraction to her reciprocated?" One purpose of
courtship is to give the girl a chance to settle the question in her own mind.
For, once she notices the man's attentions and, therefore, attraction towards
her, she has to make a momentous decision: "Can I return his
affection?" If she thinks that she may do so, then she must decide if she
can love him. Here she must rely on her own heart as well as on her common
sense and the principles of life to which she adheres. After due consideration,
she may decide she does. An understanding is reached between the two. Aradiant
couple emerges, and great are the happiness and joy of two hearts that have
entrusted themselves to one another in mutual love and faithfulness.
In order to answer the question why a God of love just
doesn't "stop it” we must analyze this process of falling in love more
closely in order to draw some reason out of what often appears to be an
entirely unreasonable happening.
First the young man must court the girl of his choice. She
will be unhappy if he doesn't and he will be unmanly if he doesn't know how.
Now, courtship is a very fine art besides being a very necessary one. Some of
our finest poetry, music and art have arisen as its by-products! Most important
perhaps, is that it is a so called gentle art, which brings us to a cardinal
point in our analysis.
The moment force takes the place of wooing, both love and
the joy of love cease. They are often replaced by hate, recriminations and
misery. For the whole structure of love is built on absolute mutual consent and
respect for the character and sovereignty of the loved one. In other words, the
structure on which human love between a bride and a bridegroom is squarely
based is freedom to love.
Most civilized societies recognize precisely this structure
in their marriage services. The two persons intending marriage are both given
the public opportunity of making a free-will consent in saying "I
will" before the assembled congregation. Old Testament cultures stand for
exactly the same principle, as the following well-known story emphasizes.
Rebekah
When Eliezer, Abraham's servant, asked Rebekah to become
Isaac's wife (Gen. 24), he became so assured that he had found God's choice for
his master's son that he was ready to cut comers in the process of taking the
bride home. The evidence that Rebekah was God's choice was so overwhelming that
he wanted to speed things up, intending to take off immediately with the girl
and forget about all the formalities or ceremonies.
However, Rebekah's relatives saw immediately that this was
no basis for marriage, even though the Lord might be in it. What a good thing
it would be if young couples saw this point too, instead of just starting to
live together with no ado or ceremonies. It is to emphasize the necessity of
mutual public consent before love and lifelong married joy, the greatest
relationship in our earthly life, that Rebekah’s relatives got together and
said that even though God might be in it all, Rebekah must first be publicly
questioned on the matter. She had to give her own decision and opinion before
they would let her go to Isaac. So they called her in before the family and
their friends to ask whether she wanted Isaac. Only after she had given public
consent based on her own free-will decision, did they agree to marriage. They
knew that no other basis was good enough, even though it was obviously God's
will even without such public decision-making.
The Amnon And Tamar Affair
Thus, the first point arising out of this analysis of the
basis of bride-bridegroom relationships and love is that such a partnership is
based firmly on public mutual consent or free will.
The second point deals with the consequences of neglecting
the above point. The shocking “love affair" between Amnon and Tamar (2
Sam. 13) illustrates this danger in a crass way. Amnon fell madly in love with
the king's beautiful daughter Tamar. He was so infatuated with the fair girl
that he just could not wait to woo her and win her consent. By guile, Amnon
arranged to be alone with the girl. Feigning sickness, he received the king's
permission for Tamar to come and cook for him in his apartment. Having got rid
of everyone else, he proceeded to force the poor girl because he was so madly
"in love" with her. "Love" that cannot wait to woo is
abnormal. It often metamorphoses before our eyes into “lust.”
The consequence of this haste and trickery was that Amnon’s
"love” turned in a twinkling into hate for her. The eventual result was
murder, for her relatives had Amnon murdered later for his brutality and
treachery. Tamar suffered heartbreak and "remained desolate in her
father's house" (2 Sam. 13:20).
Free Choice
In order to love in
this sense — not merely physical union, which can result from lust—we must
experience the mutual attraction and union of body, soul and spirit in an
exclusive personal relationship.
If the basis of
mutual consent in the love relationship is removed, if there is no freedom to
love, if freedom is replaced by force, then all possibility of loving is
removed. Love can be replaced then by its opposite — hate. This implies, of
course, the further step of logic: Where there is true freedom to love, there
is also freedom not to love. If this freedom to say "no" were not
really present, there would ipso facto be no freedom to say "yes" and
to love. The ability to say "no" must be just as genuine as the
ability to say "yes" if true mutual consent is to be achieved as a
basis for love.
As we have seen, the Bible teaches that God himself is love,
and his love is often likened to the bride-bridegroom relationship. Our third
conclusion is that, if his love to us is to be compared in some way with our
human nuptial love, then the principles governing the two loves can be expected
to be comparable in some ways. We should expect God, on this basis, to be the
grand wooer. That being the case, we should expect him to be awaiting our
response to his wooing. To receive and experience his love we should expect the
mutual-consent basis to decide everything — my consent to him in answer to his
"attraction to and love for" me.
Thus, we conclude that if God is love in this sense of the
word, he will be looking for answering love from me. Love is only satisfied if
it is returned. He woos us by many means, mainly by having sent his Son, the
Second Person of the Trinity, to justify us by dying and being resurrected for
us.
Being love, we would not expect him to demand or attempt to
force love. That would be a contradiction. The very attempt to do so would
destroy the basis of all love. As our true lover he does everything to show the
true nature of his love— even to becoming a fellow man, heir to our lot as well
as bearing our sin. Jesus was serious about his love — serious even to death.
The Case Of The Robot
Consider one more vital point. What would have happened if
God had so constructed man that he could not make a true free-will decision
himself, but was only capable of automatically doing God's will, just as a lock
opens when one turns the correct key in it? If man had been so constructed
that, when a certain "button" in his mind was depressed he delivered
"love" automatically, would real love be in fact delivered? Of course
the answer is negative. Such a person would be "congenitally” devoid of
free will and therefore incapable of love and virtues in any real sense of the
word.
None of us would be interested in "loving" the
outward form of a partner who, every time we touched a certain
"button," put chocolate in its mouth or stroked its hair or
automatically intoned the sentence "I love you." If such a system
were conceived or constructed, it would have to be subhuman or machine by
nature. For to try to construct it so that it delivered "virtue" or
love" on command would of necessity mean that it be devoid of humanity,
and therefore personality, and as a result it could deliver nothing of the kind.
Assume that God, in order to be sure of our love and to make sure that we were
"virtuous" in every way, made us like marionettes. He would have
taken from us the possibility of really exercising our free will in order that
we might not exercise it wrongly. Wanting to be so sure that we loved him and
our fellow men, he would have made us so that we could not do otherwise.
Whenever he pressed a button we would "deliver the goods," just like
a vending machine. How could such a setup involve real love in any way?
The Grand Risk
This brings us right up to the great principle. If God
wanted creatures that really loved him and their fellow-beings, then he was, by
the very intrinsic nature of love, obliged to recognize the fact (though it
sounds strange to us to use such phraseology and maintain that God was forced
to do anything — his own moral nature brings with it the consequence that he
will or must act according to that nature) that love and virtue demand absolute
freedom to love and exercise freedom. Such a necessity lies in the very
structure of love and, indeed, of any other true virtue. Thus, to create the
possibility of love, God had to create free personalities just like himself,
for he is love and he made us to love.
For God to plan at all for true love involved the built-in
risk of the proposed free partner-in-love not loving at all. To have built the
love-partner so that he would be congenitally obliged to respond would have
been to destroy the whole purpose of designing a creation where love could
reign. God wished—and still wishes —to set up a kingdom of love on earth and in
heaven. But to do so involves the above outlined risk of the free partners
choosing not to love, but to do the opposite of their own free will — or even
to hate. The practical result of being indifferent to or hating is the same
from the divine partner's point of view. For there is no positive response to
his love in either case. And love aims at a response of love. Thus, either love
grows by responding, or it dies.
Almsgiving And The
Socialist State
Exactly the same risk is involved in planning any and every
virtue. Take, for example, the virtue of almsgiving. In Turkey one sees
hundreds of needy beggars. There are the blind holding certified photographs of
their suffering wives and children needing support. There are those lying in
the gutters, with their misshapen bodies uncovered so that all who pass by can
see they are not counterfeiting. There is the poor man who has his feet where
his shoulder should be, loudly and slowly repeating selected passages from the
Koran. There is the old man suffering from Parkinson's Disease, whose saliva
continually runs over his poor old dirty face as he holds out an empty
trembling hand all day long. Seeing this misery causes one to exercise
compassion and give a coin so that they can eat a slice of good Turkish bread.
Naturally one is convinced that something much more fundamental should be done
for these thousands of people so representative of suffering humanity. But a
coin will at least guarantee that the immediate plague of gnawing hunger will
be assuaged.
So one gives something to the poor mother sitting in rags
underneath the mailbox at the post office, with her week old, unwashed baby on
her ragged lap. In so doing one exercises a virtue — that of almsgiving. The
immediate reward is an extra-fervent prayer to Allah for the giver's salvation.
The joy on the recipient's face would be reward enough. To exercise any virtue
is a free-will operation which brings joy to the giver and to the receiver.
If, however, beggars are cared for by taxes, and the city
authorities send me a tax bill to help support the poor and needy, then I must
pay. It may be a good thing to organize matters in this way. Many maintain that
this method is less degrading for the poor and that the burden is more equally
distributed. I agree with them in this respect. But let us be clear about one
of the overlooked consequences.
In paying my taxes which are used to support the poor and
the needy, I no longer exercise the virtue I did when I gave the alms to the
poor young mother. I might have paid about 10 dollars in taxes for the poor, or
I might have given the young woman 10 dollars to buy her baby something better
than dirty rags. The sum of money involved is irrelevant. In one case I
exercise the virtue of almsgiving (and reap a blessing) while in the other case
I must pay my taxes, grumbling perhaps about the waste perpetrated by the
bureaucracy of the tax office, with no consequent blessing, even though I may
be perfectly right.
In one case I exercise no virtue. In the other case, where I
give of my own free will in almsgiving I exercise a virtue—simply because I do
not have to act. Therein lies the difference: “forced charity" is no
charity—and "forced love" is no love. Love and virtue melt in the
grip of force just as ice melts under the pressure of a vice.
If I force my children to be "good" when we are
out visiting, they may be outwardly exemplary — sometimes they are! I am
thankful for this, but I recognize the fact that most parents will be familiar
with — that this "goodness" may not be even skin deep! Force itself,
unaided, can make no one good and virtues tend to fade away in its presence.
These considerations disclose one of the fatal weaknesses of
our increasingly socialized world. All "charity" and "works of
love" tend to become organized by the state, which rightly wishes to
eliminate the humiliation to which the poor are subjected in accepting certain
kinds of "charity.” The joy and virtue of true charity and love disappear
immediately when the forced tax replaces the free-will offering. The Lord Jesus
Christ himself remarked that it was more blessed to give than to receive, thus
emphasizing the "blessedness” or happiness accompanying the free act of
giving.
The exercise of any real virtue ennobles and enriches the
character, giving real joy and radiance to those practicing it. Thus the
socialized state often robs its citizens of the flights of exuberance to which
free exercisers of love and charity are heir.
George Muller's
Orphanages
Over a century ago in Bristol, England, George Müller set up
his orphan homes which were run and staffed entirely by the free-will offerings
and services of Christians in sympathy with his aims. Witnesses of Muller’s
work said that these homes full of the victims of suffering were real havens of
love, joy and rest to thousands of orphans. Today many such orphanages (not
Muller's) have been taken over by the state. The state institute is often
merely a matter of rates and taxes, and the person in charge is sometimes a
career person who makes no attempt to be a "mother" or a
"father" to the children. Often the atmosphere of such an institution
is as cold and devoid of love as the concrete bricks of which it was constructed.
Scientists have shown that children in such institutions die from lack of love
as often as they die from disease.
The welfare state, in taking over everything to remove a few
real abuses, too often kills love and the other virtues which make up the
atmosphere of a home. Removing the freedom of service, the voluntary basis,
causes love to evaporate. Not only do the children or inmates of these
institutions suffer. The ennobling of character which the voluntary staff
members would themselves receive by free-will service is lost by their becoming
merely career people. The more the world loses this right to freely exercise
true charity, the harder, colder and more bitter it must become.
This disastrous effect is seen in the character of most
socialized nations. In fact, it is producing just what Hitler produced in
Germany by the same means: de-personalization—people who may do their duty, but
who will not raise a finger to help close a concentration camp if it involves
personal risk. Their characters have not experienced the ennobling,
strengthening effect which results from the exercise of freedom. Hitler was a
living example of a man naive enough to attempt to demand and command the love
and affection of his people. He may have realized at the end that love
evaporates under just such pressure. The strength of character necessary to
withstand any tyrant is not likely to be built in any generation without the
ennoblement of character resulting from long exercise of the various human
virtues we have discussed. Such strength will also overcome the various
vicissitudes of life which often complicate the career of anyone strong enough
in will to be ready to suffer for his own conscience's sake.
The tendency today is to push everything onto the community,
resulting in private character impoverishment. We all know the person who
"doesn't want to get involved." The second tendency, contingent
partly on the first, is to bring up every child to conformity, so that only the
will of the community and majority counts. Thus the steel of a private
conscience, independent of conformity to the mass, does not develop. In
Hitler's Germany, this was seen at its extreme development. People saw corpses
dropping out of vans coming from a concentration camps as they passed through a
big city. But fear had so eroded characters that no one did anything — it was
too dangerous to get involved!
In Chicago a few years ago I was walking from the Chicago
and Northwestern Railway Station as I saw a man in a car literally plow his way
through a group of old ladies as they crossed the street on a pedestrian
crossing with a green light. He knocked one old lady down, injuring her. I took
the license number of the car, which did not stop, and asked for witnesses.
Many young women and men going to work in a neighboring shoe factory had seen
the incident. But all backed away, muttering something about not getting
involved. I didn't get a single witness.
The idea of the community providing for everyone's need
"from the cradle to the grave" may be excellent from a purely humanitarian
point of view. But, insofar as it takes away personal initiative, the
realization of the scheme will never provide sterling characters ready and
willing to suffer for conscience's sake and to stand alone, if necessary.
The Creation Seen And
Unseen
The Bible reports that when God contemplated the creation of
the worlds seen and unseen he wished to construct them so that they reflected
his very own nature and character. To do this, he had to build on freedom of
action. He is free, so he had to make man and angels free too. Man was made “in
his image"—that is, as a free personality, just as God himself is. For
even "his service is perfect freedom” and therefore founded and maintained
in love. Accordingly, the angels who serve him, including their chief Lucifer,
the light-bearer, were given natures capable of genuine love to their Creator
and toward their fellows. They were capable of wooing his love and being wooed
by him so that the perfect joy of love could reign in that kingdom. But this
very possibility had to include the option of rejection. They were no puppets.
The Bible reports, quite as a matter of fact, that a large
proportion of the unseen host showed that it really was capable of the joy of that
kingdom of love and—by a very real proof— of rejection! Therefore, Lucifer did,
in fact, show that he could love, in that he began, for reasons of pride, to
reject the one perfect lover, his Creator. Turning his back on Him, who is the
sole good, Lucifer became the epitome of the bad. So arose the cursed, loveless
and hateful ones who, in the exercise of their characters now turned away from
the good toward the bad and proceeded to destroy the good creation. Men become
"devils" by exactly the same process. Obviously God, his nature being
love, did not immediately take away all freedom of action and choice from his
creatures, thus removing the possibility of our turn to love. He allowed them
still further freedom of choice, which meant in their case, still further
destructive activities being permitted. If he had taken away this possibility
of freedom of choice at the first sign of rejection of love, he would have
destroyed any further possibility of a return to love. So he has given us all a
long time of freedom of action, that is, freedom to love, so that the kingdom
of love can still begin again to rule, if man and angels want it. To have
"stopped it all" at once by the strong hand of
"dictatorship" would automatically have destroyed the very purpose
for which the Creator had created his universe — in order to set up a kingdom
of love in the seen and the unseen.
Therefore, this very existence of evil in a world created by
an almighty, but also a loving God actually illustrates that the good and the
virtue in it are genuinely good. Love in such a kingdom really is love and not
anything else. Sometimes it is taught that love is a covert form of egoism,
etc. The state of our fallen world really shows this to be impossible — the
love of God in a world of blood is genuine enough!
Destroyers and haters usually want company in their
activities. So when the chief, Lucifer, the light-bearer, had become the
destroyer and the hater, he immediately approached Eve to make her and her
husband become a part of his company of destroyers. The pair was also capable
of true love. They possessed true freedom of choice, as is shown by the actual
choice they made. They, too, turned their backs on the good, automatically
becoming polarized to the chronically bad. So the whole seen and unseen
creation of love became a creation of the wrong choice —the choice which turned
its back on the source of all ultimate good. In leaving open a chance for seen
and unseen creation to return to the ultimate good, God did not "stop the
bad.” The free choice was still left open, leaving ruination and its cause
still intact. That is the reason why God allows it — to provide a genuine
chance for the return of love in general.
The Dignity Of Man
But does not all this lead to one main conclusion? Does it
not all go to show the truly high esteem in which God holds his creatures, man
included? It means that God really takes our decisions, our thoughts and our
selves seriously. He even goes to the lengths of wooing us to make our
decisions ourselves. He does not so construct us that we are puppets who have
all decisions programmed — even though many physical processes within the body
are pre-programmed. True love is, in this respect always the same—it always
esteems and respects its partner. It takes the partner seriously.
The same thought also expresses why God bothers to woo men
by the “foolishness of preaching" and not by sending, as he could, mighty
angels with his message. Perhaps they would only succeed in terrifying poor
humanity if they appeared in their supernal splendor. God's purpose is to win
man's simple trust and confidence, to win our devotion and genuine love.
Therefore, he uses the natural methods available to win our decision for him.
If he overawed us in any way, that might make craven slaves of us rather than
wholehearted sons. If he were to browbeat us into submission, he would only gain
what Hitler did — the abject, groveling fear (if not secret hatred) of his
would-be partners.
Thus a God of love avoids like the plague the dictator's
methods in dealing with man, the object of his love, and uses the lover's
better method. It is very fundamental to see that one cannot terrorize people
into love. Consider the miracles Jesus performed in this light. He never used a
show of divine power in healing to frighten people into belief. In most cases,
after doing some mighty healing deed, he admonished those who had seen the deed
or experienced it to keep very quiet about it Jesus' warning "tell no
man" is almost proverbial in this respect. The fact is, God does not wish
to force our intelligence or our will to reduce us to the state of cringing slaves.
He wants redeemed sons, who, of their own free will, love, respect and gladly
serve him.
The Degree Of Man's
Freedom
Thus we conclude that man must be free indeed if he is ever
to be able to love indeed. There is a consequence to all this which the reader
will have surely noted already. It is this: Is man so free that God has
abrogated all authority over him? Can man do exactly and precisely as he likes
as long as he likes so that he can be said to possess a totally unfettered
freedom in all directions as far as he himself chooses? Need he never fear that
his Creator will intervene — all in the interests of man's ability to love and
exercise virtue?
Although the Bible teaches that man has a bona-fide free
will and can certainly say no to his Creator's will and plan (the very state of
our poor world shows that this is de facto the case), yet it teaches too that
there are limits to that freedom just as there are limits to God's wooing
activities of man. These wooing limits, it will be remembered, were founded in
God's counsel from his side and, in time, from man's side. In the first place,
God in his inscrutability sets a time limit for his wooing of our free will.
Thus it cannot be said that we have perfect free will to accept or reject his
wooing at any time. Our free will interacts with his free will to woo us and if
he chooses to stop the courting process, our free will can do precisely nothing
about the new situation. Here it is no longer unfettered. Second, repeated
rejection of the goodness of God's courting sears the psyche of man, rendering
it less and less receptive. This, too, is a process we cannot alter; it is like
the second law of thermodynamics at work in our inward man, and our free will
cannot alter it.
The same principle applies throughout man's kingdom in its
relationship to man's Creator. Man can say no to his Creator for a certain time
by expressing free will. But this process of saying no of our own free will to
God interacts with God's free will and may produce a no from his side. For us
dependent creatures this is the same thing as judgement supervening after
grace. We all can turn our backs on him and run away from him and his goodness
— until we reach what may be looked upon as the end of our tether. The tether
represents the change in God from grace to judgement. How long that may take in
each individual case of God's dealings is unknown to his creatures. This state
of affairs is well seen in the case of the apostle Paul on the Damascus road.
Paul had enjoyed perfect unfettered free will to rebel against Christ and had
done so very successfully, until even he reached the end of the tether God had
allowed him. Then God intervened severely, blinded him and reduced him to the
dependence of a child in his helplessness. But even in a drastic intervention
of this type, the judgment of God was mixed with great mercy and it led to
Paul's seeing the grace of God in restricting his field of unfettered free
will. But perhaps his free will in the strictest sense of the term was not touched.
Perhaps his knowledge was increased.
If we do not recognize some definite limits to our freedom,
we risk abrogating God's ultimate authority and, indeed, sovereignty. Yet these
limits in no way alter the conclusions we have drawn about the vital nature of
freedom if we are to be able to love — or to rebel. One reason for this fact is
that we ourselves do not know where the limits we are talking about lie.
Therefore we are, to all intents and purposes, unlimited in our freedom from
our own perspective. From our own point of view we are free to act wander,
rebel or love as under-sovereigns within a small area of God's sovereign
kingdom. It is just within this area of real unrestricted freedom that real
love and virtue can and do rule in us. Outside these unseen limits are areas of
judgment and no-freedom. But since they are unknown to us, they are, for
practical purposes, fictitious for us and thus of no concern in our decisions
to rebel or to love.
The very fact that man has never succeeded in devising a
formal proof of God's existence shows how completely God can and does hide
himself and his limits from our eyes. This being the case, most men act within
the area of their own lives as completely free agents as far as their
intelligence is concerned. This makes their decisions in that frame of mind
completely free will and therefore valid from the point of view of exercising
true virtue. We conclude, then, that the limits God has set for all mankind do
not alter our decisive free will and its accompanying power of love or
rebellion. These very limits maintain God's sovereignty while allowing man free
agency in the area of his own consciousness.
One more thing deserves mention at this point. The
"tether" we have referred to as God's restricting hand on our free will
should not be regarded as something fixed or static. It is not of a set
permanent "length.” It is my belief that the more devoted a man is to
God's will for him, the longer the “tether" will become. That is, the
greater will be the radius of freedom of action. To stick to our analogy of a
tether, we might say that its elasticity depends upon our will being congruent
with his divine will. To use the words of the apostle Paul, to "win
Christ" and to attain to his confidence in us is the same thing as saying
that the more we attain to the width, depth and breadth of God's will, the more
we attain to his sovereign freedom too. As one prayer book has it "His
service is perfect freedom.”
Here is a link to a page where you will find a PDF of the entire book for free:
http://ph16.blogspot.com/p/free-books-good-ones-you-can-read-right.html
PART 2: http://ph16.blogspot.com/2017/03/guest-post-love-of-god-and-suffering-pt2.html
PART 3: http://ph16.blogspot.com/2017/04/guest-post-love-of-god-and-suffering-pt3.html
http://ph16.blogspot.com/p/free-books-good-ones-you-can-read-right.html
PART 2: http://ph16.blogspot.com/2017/03/guest-post-love-of-god-and-suffering-pt2.html
PART 3: http://ph16.blogspot.com/2017/04/guest-post-love-of-god-and-suffering-pt3.html
