"There but for the grace of God, go I."

So at Pat’s wedding, I managed to hit it off with an old friend. His name is Angelo Valle. He’s currently graduated, married, and attending Westminster. Today, we made a point to get coffee and talk. It was exactly what I needed. I have been praying now for days. I’m so confused. I’m so frustrated. I feel like I’ve been given a very small chip of my life to manage, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job with it. The problem is that I want to see the puzzle. I want to control my fate and I can’t.

I have uncomfortably discovered that God is on control of my future. Also, I may be a Calvinist and I mean that in the lightest sense of the title. I’ve just recently found myself very humbled by the grace of God. I don’t deserve this grace thing . . . not at all. There is no part of me that could ever earn his salvation and I can almost feel his hands around me . . . holding me . . . sustaining me by his grace alone. The thought of that just overwhelmed me today. The chair that I’m sitting on right now, the words that I type, the thoughts that you are having as you read this . . . They are only sustained by the grace of God.

I don’t know where I stand on my thought of salvation, but I don’t think that in my fallen state that I could have chosen Him. I was placed in a good home, brought up on the Bible, and I did absolutely nothing for it. My every movement has been orchestrated and used for the ultimate glory of God. Through my victories I can learn his grace for I am undeserving, and through my suffering I can better identify with Christ.

Who am I that God should rescue me? I am nothing to no one but to Him. I will humbly submit to his will and his will alone because he is God and he is on the throne. I don’t know whether or not God has only to chosen to rescue some and allowed others to be damned. I don’t know . . . but if I am . . . If I am . . . then I can only respond by worshipping Him and Him alone.

Without His intervention, whether He made himself apparent and I chose him or He grabbed hold of me and I clung to him, then I would be damned.

‎"There but for the grace of God, go I."

Will.

If there truly is a benevolent God who manifested Himself in the being of Christ Jesus orchestrating the Universe, can there really be free will?

If we pre-suppose Original Sin through the story of Adam and Eve as outline in the Bible, can a loving benevolent God exist in despite of the presence of Evil? If God love us so much, why does he allow us to suffer?

In the Garden of Eden, mankind was given a choice: Obey Me or Get Lost. God placed his creation as governors over the entirety of Creation allowing them to freely choose good or evil. He gave them the entirety of the world with only one command, “Do not eat from the forbidden tree.” God stacked the deck in favor of obedience. It wasn’t enough for Him, you see, to simply create humanity and force them to obey his will. If they were to do so they would be no different than the animals. They would have no choice because they would not be intelligent enough to choose for themselves.

God wanted to create humanity in his own image. That is to say with the Imago Dei or the Image of God. He wanted humanity to create and to prosper as he does. Being created in the Image of God presupposes our ability to choose. Can God choose to be evil? In my human understanding I would say, “Yes.” In my understanding of the nature of God through the Revelation of the scripture I would say, “No.” God is not good because he doesn’t want to be good. He is good because he is inherently good.

He did not want to create a race of servants who had no choice but to serve. He created humanity with the option to not serve him. They, possessing the Imago Dei with them, would have the option to choose an alternative path than the one laid down for them by the Creator. This is what we call Free Will. [If You come from this with a Calvinistic understanding of salvation then you should probably discontinuing reading this now and go be a Calvinist elsewhere.]

Free will is our ability to choose. Though our choices may be stacked in favor of one choice rather than another, we still posses the ability to walk down a less favorable path. When we walk down this road, we do so in contradiction to the original plan. Adam and Eve possessed eternal life in the garden. They walked almost hand in hand with God. They were innocent. Pure.

When they willfully chose to sin by disobeying God’s only command, they chose to take an alternative route. Being that God had created them free. They were free to do so. Why would an omniscient God who knew everything and knew that he would be disobeyed not intervene and stop them from sinning in the first place? Because such an intervention would have contradicted his original intent in creating humanity.

He gave humanity the ability to choose. He wanted them to serve Him. That’s why he stacked the deck in the favor of choosing Him. He created for Adam and Eve an entire planet with only one single tree being forbidden. It isn’t like he created a grove of forbidden trees and only one good one. He didn’t set them up to fail. He set them up for a choice that he knew that they would disobey.

That was unsettling to Him, but he knew that it was in the hearts of his creation to disobey. They had freewill. They had it within them to choose to sin, but they also had it within them to come back. Hence why as soon as they are reprimanded for their sin, they are given provision and a hope that one day their offspring would be reconciled unto God again.

We now fast forward to today. The presence of sin in the world is apparent. With the sex slave industry and senseless violence, it is difficult to see a loving God. How can we explain the lack of intervention on the part of God when there are children being sold into slavery? I believe the answer lies in free will.

We posses within us the ability to choose our actions, we also have the ability to impose our will upon others. If God were to intervene in almost every case, just as it would’ve in the Garden of Eden, it would ultimately be contradictory to his very nature. Allowing mankind to choose for themselves. He guides through subtly and through events in our lives. Even the most tragic of things are used as agents to guide his creation back to it’s original intent. Not that he initiates these actions or causes them to come into being; he allows them to happen because he has given mankind the freedom to choose evil. What God created he saw as good [or in the Hebrew finished/complete]. What man created was a perversion of what God created . . . Evil.

What do you do then with natural disasters, which kill millions of Christians and non-Christians alike?

This world is not our final destination. If you presuppose that the God of the Bible exists and the Bible is his revelation to mankind, then you also presuppose it as truth. If the Bible is true than there is another world after this one . . . A second Earth for those who chose Him despite the evil in the world.

In this world, there will be no sickness or pain; there will be no natural disasters or suffering. There will only be the eternal glory of God. Here the people who chose God would then be able to choose Him for all eternity, with the deck eternally stacked in favor or worshipping God.

If we posses the freedom to create Evil, but choose to follow the original plan through the example of Jesus Christ then and only then is there an explanation to the suffering in the world. The suffering imposed by other people, is those people choosing evil. It is up to the person who has had evil done to them to choose whether or not to return evil with evil creating more evil or to choose a higher road and allow God to create good. The changing of the Earth is only a bi-product of the temporality of this life.

“This world that seems to us so real, so substantial, is nothing more than the Shadowlands . . . Real life has not yet begun.”