Three Streams

This was the question posed to me on Friday night by the freind of one of the young people who comes to our Youth Night. If that wasnt challenging enough it was accompanied by the statement ‘If you can answer it for him he says he will come to church’! So here you have this young dude who is not a Christian wrestling with a theological question and looking for an answer and promising to come to church if I can answer the question. Talk about pressure!

My immediate response, in my head, was… ‘that question is easy, I’v answered it lots of times, when it suddenly dawned on me that I had always answered it with arminian assumptions!!!!

My traditional answer to the question would simply have been to say

God is a God of love who has given us freedom of choice because he wants a relationship with willing people not robots! Like a marriage, God wants people to choose to love Him and will not force people to love Him because he respects the freedom of their will!

Dilema, dilema, dilema!!!! This answer, though I had used it in the past was laden with unbiblical and faulty philosophical assumptions that ultmately implies salvation of an individual is centred in mans choice and not Gods!

Anyway, I told the guy I would think about His question and get back to him once I had an answer (I think this may have been the first time I have ever responded to a young persons theological question in this way! Anyway, the following ‘article’ is my response which I put together on Friday/Saturday night. This question really helped me develop my thinking and some of it was quite new to me to.

Why would God give us the freewill/choice to hate him if He wants us to love Him?

1. God is completely sovereign (all powerful, all knowing, always present) and does what he pleases.Psalm 135:6 (NKJV)
Whatever the Lord pleases He does,
In heaven and in earth,
In the seas and in all deep places.

However we also know that the Lord is good.

Psalm 135:3 (NASB-U)
Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good;
Sing praises to His name, for it is lovely.

Because of this we can know that although He is all powerful and does as He chooses He will always do what is good and right.

2. People do not have a ‘free will’ but a will that is only free to sin.

Sin means a) miss the target i.e. as people we miss God’s perfect standard of righteousness. Like a dart which misses the dart board (only we miss the target by a lot lot lot more than a few feet! b)Sin also means wilful disobedience to God’s laws and commandments.
For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. [15] For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. [16] But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. [17] So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. [18] For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. [19] For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. [20] But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.
[21] I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. [22] For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, [23] but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. [24] Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Since people have a will that is tied tightly to sin, people from the day they are born naturally choose to hate God. In this sense people are not really free to choose to love or hate God, they naturally hate Him.as it is written,
“There is none righteous, not even one;
[11] There is none who understands,
There is none who seeks for God;
[12] All have turned aside, together they have become useless;
There is none who does good,
There is not even one.”

Romans 7:14-24 (NASB-U)

3.

Romans 3:10-12 (NASB-U)

This natural hatred for God that we all have is expressed in many ways.

Some examples are

· Atheism: a deliberate choice to deny God’s existence
· Indifference: Sitting on the fence and not choosing one way or another
· Idolatry/False Religion: The worship of other god’s who are not the true God
· Loving other things, people or activities more than God
· Not obeying God’s law (i.e. The Ten Commandments)
· Not Worshiping God with all of our heart, soul and mind
· Not loving other people as much as we love ourselves
· Not putting God first in everything

4. The only people who have been free to choose to love God were Adam and Eve and later Jesus.

Adam and Eve where the first people to walk on the earth, they were uncontaminated by sin. God gave them a choice because He had created them for a relationship. This relationship was to be defined by love, honour and obedience. God did not make them robots; He gave them the choice but warned them if they turned from him they would die. We live in a world that has been screwed up through sin (disobedience to God). Adam and Eve were born free but their sin has infected the whole human race. They were born free and became slaves to sin; they have passed on that slavery to every one who has been born except Jesus.

Jesus was free from this slavery because he was miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit, He was The God Man. He came to reverse the sin problem. He had the ability to choose God and he did.
Refusal to love God is demonstrated by hatred towards him expressed through unbelief and disobedience to His laws. Not loving God is the same as not obeying Him; not obeying Him is to dishonour Him. To dishonour God is to become His enemy and to become His enemy is to bring divine judgement upon your self.

6. God is concerned about His honour, not just people loving Him.The question implied that God wanted all people to love Him; the bigger picture is that God wants all people to honour Him. God will defend His honour through judgement on every person who continues to dishonour him and through showing mercy to all who trust in His Son and in doing so give Him honour.

7. Only God can enable us to love Him through opening our eyes to the love He has shown to us through Jesus death on the cross for our sin.To become a Christian is to experience a miracle! It is to become a miracle! It is to receive a change of heart. It is a gift from God that cannot be earned, bought for or strived for. The word Grace means GIFT. Salvation means deliverance from divine judgement, deliverance from sin and reconciliation with God. It is the repair of a broken relationship, a relationship that we cannot fix!

5. To not love God is to dishonour Him, to dishonour him is to come under judgement.

If we turn from sin (repent) and put our trust in Jesus and(believe) demonstrate by our lives that we have become new people through faith in Jesus we turn from being dishonourable to honourable. We show ourselves to have received Mercy from God, mercy that he doesn’t have to give us.

God is not sitting back waiting for everyone to choose to love Him, he is waiting for the day, when when the Honour which people have robbed him of, will be restored to Him. For those who have come to Christ, he will be honoured and loved because He first loved them and in mercy saved them even though they were once his enemies. For those who persist in dishonour he will be honoured through the eternal judgement that they will suffer. In this sense justice will take place, dishonour to God is injustice, punishment of dishonour is justice.

Summarya) God is concerned about His honour, not just people loving Him.
b) The only people who truly had a freewill were Adam and Eve and Jesus
c) Adam and Eve lost their free will through sin
d) As a result of Adam and Eve’s sin people do not have a ‘free will’ but a will that is only free to sin.
e) Sin Dishonours God
f) God defends his honour through Mercy and Judgement. Judgement on all who Dishonour him through unbelief and sin and Mercy on all who He chooses to save.
g) God is not obliged to save anyone but his justice demands that He punishes sin and therefore the sinner
h) In His mercy God gave His Son, that He might save some people from the world and present them at the end of the ages as a gift to His Son. Those who do love God do so because His mercy made it possible.