“The Power Of Choice - Part 2”

Monday, July 04, 2016

In your post this morning, "The Power of Choice", you made two points that interest me:

1. "Anyone can trust God, but very few people are interested in doing so."
2. "Whenever you give people freedom, expect most of us to abuse it."

But given that God created us, why didn't He create us so that more people are interested in choosing Him?  He could have made us in any way He desired.  But He gives us freedom to choose what we want, plus a natural inclination to turn away from Him.  It doesn't make much sense.

Sincerely,
Free To Fail

Dear Free To Fail,

Your question has a built-in contradiction.  You wrote, “Why didn't He create us so that more people are interested in choosing Him?” – if God designs us to choose one thing over another, we aren’t really choosing at all.  It would be like engineering a car that automatically stayed on the road; it would take driver error away, but it would also take driver freedom away.  God didn’t make man with a natural inclination to rebel against Him or choose Him.  God makes every human a blank slate and gives us equal opportunity to decide between righteousness and wickedness.  In the Garden of Eden, God walked with Adam & Eve (Gen 3:8), and the serpent offered deception (Gen 3:1)… both options were available.  Adam & Eve had equal freedom to choose to do the right thing or the wrong thing – perfect freewill.  God sets before us life and death (Deu 30:15), and we have the total freedom to choose either option.  God hasn’t stacked the deck one way or the other.  The entire world is full of sinful temptation, but none of those temptations are beyond our capacity to resist (1 Cor 10:13).  There are false prophets who proclaim false gods (1 Jn 4:1), and yet the entire creation screams of God’s existence, so that we are without excuse (Rom 1:20).  The evidence is there; the choice is ours to freely make.

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