Most of us are familiar with the story of Adam and Eve and the
forbidden fruit (Gen 2:15). God commanded Adam not to eat of the Tree
of Knowledge of Good and Evil for in the day that it was eaten, he would
surely die. Later (Gen 3: 1-6), Eve is approached by the Serpent, told
to the contrary and the rest is history.
Before we begin, let us ask ourselves a couple of basic questions.
Is God all-knowing? (Omniscient)
One might conclude that He didn't see what was coming and is, in fact, partially ignorant. One might also conclude that He couldn't prevent Eve from eating. If either of these are true then He is not worthy of our attention.
Now for the alternative, which isn't very comforting either. If God IS omniscient and omnipotent, then He did it knowing full well Eve would succumb to the serpent's proposition and His inaction to protect Eve was deliberate.
As to the matter of the forbidden fruit …
What was God thinking? Well, two things come to mind.
By our very DNA, death has entered through “…one man’s sin.” We have been separated from God, not able to have fellowship with Him without some help from Him. However, FREE WILL is not set aside by this predetermination to defective DNA. It is not complicated, not contradictory to total depravity, not a circumvention of choice but an absolutely brilliant way (Praise God and His Wisdom) of removing personal merit from the equation without rendering humanity to the level of puppet. Imagine we are at sea, shipwrecked, tossed about on the ocean waves, too far from land to swim. We are lost and without hope. Suddenly, a Coast Guard Helicopter circles, drops a line and a voice yells, “Grab the line!” We have a choice. We are still completely dependant on being found by another, hoisted by another, carried to safety by another and nursed to health by another. As we are raised we are not deliberating on whether or not I have merited my rescue nor are we measuring the work which aided in my way to rescue. Had it not been there to begin with, my ‘grabbing’ would have been a striving after the wind. All is asked of me is to “Grab the line!”
Let me say this again. God is ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!!! He gets the glory for the rescue and we can express our trust in Him by ‘grabbing the line.' We can take credit for nothing other than declaring He is trustworthy. He is still the focus in the declaration.
I’ll come back to this in later studies. Right now, it is important to understand that 'free will' is not only a given and is part of my design, but it is not isolated. Free will does not stand by itself. Okay, no brainer time … Choice is not choice unless there are choices … dah. Free will choice is more than choice of ‘this or that’ as in our example. In the salvation choice it must coexist with another factor. Our belief or mental assent is really meaningless. Demons have a better understanding of God than we do and they are not saved. But the expression of their faith is to shudder. Our expression of faith can be obedience yet this obedience can be deceptive. The age old dilemma of works based salvation slithers into the picture.
Here is how God clarifies this age old dilemma. Using the second part of our contract, God makes belief and obedience secondary by requiring this be without hypocrisy. My obedience CAN be for show. My belief CAN be based upon deception or error. The only way for me to be absolutely sure is through the heart felt surrender of the things which I have grown to love for the heart felt devotion to Him.
So where are we going with this?
Mankind was subjected to futility. This is not cruel, but a act of Sovereignty. God had total sway over His creation. He set it up exactly the way He wanted it and nothing overruled His plans. He, by an act of choice, released his grip and granted free will to Adam and Eve. God did not want puppets but free will agents. Furthermore, God did not want mindless flukes of behavior, but informed creatures who would be able to deliberate upon the disclosed terms and intelligently agree or disagree.
Now there is a word of caution. The illusion of choice and linking it to free will can be a mistake. There are many things in this world that we will experience and will not have a say in it. Government edicts, sickness, our birth and death are just a few of the many things we honestly have no choice over. Back to Romans 9 … God made me the way I am, the country I was born in, the parents I was born to, the exposure and influences I have witnessed, my intelligence factor, etc. Whether one would consider me a vessel of honor or dishonor is subjective. Amos was a farmer while Solomon was a man of means. One had more ‘influence’ and ‘public notoriety’ than the other. A professor may have more influence (honor) than a janitor. It is not the man that is important, but the message that vessel contains. This is predetermined by many many factors which are out of our control. As to the rest of the verse, let’s go back into the Old Testament and look at Pharaoh of Egypt. He was born (no choice on his part) into a family of influence ( no choice on his part), allowed to grow up thinking he was a god (his choice to believe the lie – which God allowed to circulate), for the purpose of being humiliated by the Truth of the One True God. He had every opportunity but the Truth (God) hardened his heart like the sun hardens clay yet melts wax.
Now the rest of the story. God created man in His image, after His likeness, gave him a free will and subjected him to the lusts and weaknesses of the flesh so that man could completely understand the meaning of sacrificial love. You see, if God is love, and we are created after His likeness, then we are capable of making a deliberate choice to love from the heart. We must choose to neglect what we have grown to love for the Purity of Him. Our choice is the focus of our deliberation. The rest is His glory. We ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ by our choice of focus upon His ‘fireworks’ show, but the SHOW is HIS. We can not take credit for that which we did not create.
God gets the glory for the very choice of free will HE HAS GIVEN.
ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.
Before we begin, let us ask ourselves a couple of basic questions.
Is God all-knowing? (Omniscient)
The answer is either YES or NO.Is God all-powerful? (Omnipotent)
The answer is either YES or NOIf God is omniscient, He would have seen the outcome of Genesis 2. Likewise, if God is omnipotent, He could have NOT created the Tree of Knowledge or could have prevented Eve from eating it. Even if He couldn't stop or protect Eve, His sight into the future would have been sufficient warning for precautionary measures. Therefore, He could have prevented the Fall of Man and the whole mess that followed. But He didn't.
One might conclude that He didn't see what was coming and is, in fact, partially ignorant. One might also conclude that He couldn't prevent Eve from eating. If either of these are true then He is not worthy of our attention.
Now for the alternative, which isn't very comforting either. If God IS omniscient and omnipotent, then He did it knowing full well Eve would succumb to the serpent's proposition and His inaction to protect Eve was deliberate.
God deliberately set Adam and Eve up. Sounds cruel? God allowed our father and mother to fall and thereby setting our DNA on a self destruct course toward death. Every loved one who has died, suffered the pains of disease and persecution, has done so because a long time ago God 'subjected' creation to futility. What God did is like a parent leaving a loaded handgun in the sight and reach of a child telling the child not to play with it knowing full well the child will, does and dies. At the very least in today's American society we call this child endangerment.Romans 8:20
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope (expectation)...
Romans 9:19 - 23 (NASB) 19You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” 20On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? 21Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? 22What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory,Romans 9 opens up lots of controversy. This controversy is needless as we will soon see. Let me say just briefly, Paul was a vessel of dishonor, prepared for destruction only to become a vessel of mercy prepared beforehand for glory. Putting it another way, the potter makes a spittoon and he makes a chalice. One is a vessel of honor while the other is a vessel of dishonor. Both are useful to the Potter. Furthermore, it does not prevent their roles being exchanged.
As to the matter of the forbidden fruit …
What was God thinking? Well, two things come to mind.
- Free Will
By our very DNA, death has entered through “…one man’s sin.” We have been separated from God, not able to have fellowship with Him without some help from Him. However, FREE WILL is not set aside by this predetermination to defective DNA. It is not complicated, not contradictory to total depravity, not a circumvention of choice but an absolutely brilliant way (Praise God and His Wisdom) of removing personal merit from the equation without rendering humanity to the level of puppet. Imagine we are at sea, shipwrecked, tossed about on the ocean waves, too far from land to swim. We are lost and without hope. Suddenly, a Coast Guard Helicopter circles, drops a line and a voice yells, “Grab the line!” We have a choice. We are still completely dependant on being found by another, hoisted by another, carried to safety by another and nursed to health by another. As we are raised we are not deliberating on whether or not I have merited my rescue nor are we measuring the work which aided in my way to rescue. Had it not been there to begin with, my ‘grabbing’ would have been a striving after the wind. All is asked of me is to “Grab the line!”
Let me say this again. God is ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!!! He gets the glory for the rescue and we can express our trust in Him by ‘grabbing the line.' We can take credit for nothing other than declaring He is trustworthy. He is still the focus in the declaration.
I’ll come back to this in later studies. Right now, it is important to understand that 'free will' is not only a given and is part of my design, but it is not isolated. Free will does not stand by itself. Okay, no brainer time … Choice is not choice unless there are choices … dah. Free will choice is more than choice of ‘this or that’ as in our example. In the salvation choice it must coexist with another factor. Our belief or mental assent is really meaningless. Demons have a better understanding of God than we do and they are not saved. But the expression of their faith is to shudder. Our expression of faith can be obedience yet this obedience can be deceptive. The age old dilemma of works based salvation slithers into the picture.
Here is how God clarifies this age old dilemma. Using the second part of our contract, God makes belief and obedience secondary by requiring this be without hypocrisy. My obedience CAN be for show. My belief CAN be based upon deception or error. The only way for me to be absolutely sure is through the heart felt surrender of the things which I have grown to love for the heart felt devotion to Him.
- Full Disclosure
So where are we going with this?
Mankind was subjected to futility. This is not cruel, but a act of Sovereignty. God had total sway over His creation. He set it up exactly the way He wanted it and nothing overruled His plans. He, by an act of choice, released his grip and granted free will to Adam and Eve. God did not want puppets but free will agents. Furthermore, God did not want mindless flukes of behavior, but informed creatures who would be able to deliberate upon the disclosed terms and intelligently agree or disagree.
Now there is a word of caution. The illusion of choice and linking it to free will can be a mistake. There are many things in this world that we will experience and will not have a say in it. Government edicts, sickness, our birth and death are just a few of the many things we honestly have no choice over. Back to Romans 9 … God made me the way I am, the country I was born in, the parents I was born to, the exposure and influences I have witnessed, my intelligence factor, etc. Whether one would consider me a vessel of honor or dishonor is subjective. Amos was a farmer while Solomon was a man of means. One had more ‘influence’ and ‘public notoriety’ than the other. A professor may have more influence (honor) than a janitor. It is not the man that is important, but the message that vessel contains. This is predetermined by many many factors which are out of our control. As to the rest of the verse, let’s go back into the Old Testament and look at Pharaoh of Egypt. He was born (no choice on his part) into a family of influence ( no choice on his part), allowed to grow up thinking he was a god (his choice to believe the lie – which God allowed to circulate), for the purpose of being humiliated by the Truth of the One True God. He had every opportunity but the Truth (God) hardened his heart like the sun hardens clay yet melts wax.
Psalms 81:11 - 12 (NASB) 11 “But My people did not listen to My voice, And Israel did not obey Me. 12 “So I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart, To walk in their own devices.
Romans 1:20 - 25 (NASB) 20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. 24Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. 25For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.We have always had the ONE CHOICE. Focus upon God in order to … make further choices … informed choices. God has negated our ‘total depravity’ through that which He created.
Now the rest of the story. God created man in His image, after His likeness, gave him a free will and subjected him to the lusts and weaknesses of the flesh so that man could completely understand the meaning of sacrificial love. You see, if God is love, and we are created after His likeness, then we are capable of making a deliberate choice to love from the heart. We must choose to neglect what we have grown to love for the Purity of Him. Our choice is the focus of our deliberation. The rest is His glory. We ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ by our choice of focus upon His ‘fireworks’ show, but the SHOW is HIS. We can not take credit for that which we did not create.
God gets the glory for the very choice of free will HE HAS GIVEN.
ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.
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