The choice of freewill

“Because you have done this,…Gen 3:14 ESV

Silence fell over the house suddenly, but a sense of calm did not come with it. This silence offered a subtle heaviness of uncertainty. You should go check this out a nudging in my spirit arose. Crinkle under step one, crinkle under step two as a trail of empty candy wrapper interrupted my path. Squeaks emerged from the door as an alarm announcing my arrival. Wide eyed cheek bulging my children looked in my direction with one of them elbow deep in the bag of Halloween candy. I sat in awe first trying to figure how the two of them secured the bag I had placed high up on the countertop and did it efficiently in the few minutes I had walked away from them. Children, you are going to make yourselves sick. I told you only one piece after lunch. With giggles they swallowed hard as I removed the bag and directed them to clean the mess. Within a few hours, both were complaining of their stomachs with no interest in any food at all. Pitiful and uncomfortable they reaped the ultimate fruit of their efforts. Experience had told me the outcome would be like this. My attempt to spare them from the consequences had failed. They were given clear instructions, yet they made a choice contrary to my guidance. They are children with less wisdom yet they did not listen deciding instead to go their own way. This is a microcosm of sin and how it leads to our harm which we see play out here.

Because of this
God could have chosen to protect them from the fall by not placing the tree of good and evil in the garden or putting an angel in front of it to preclude them from approaching but that is not His way. He always offers us a choice. If we listen well, the choice is clear even if His rationale is not. “I give to you life and death, choose life”, Deut 30:19. Every choice placed in front of us comes down to this. Either it’s a choice on the way to abundant life or a choice away from it. It is hard sometimes for us to see it this way because we reason and rationalize to fit our desires. We might even minimize the possible consequences. Whichever the case, we determine that the immediate pleasure is better than the promise of what might come that is not yet tangible. That is what makes a trap effective, satan’s schemes enticing. This is what led my children to enjoy filling their bellies with candy only to reap the sourness of indulging the desire.

As much as I could say thank you Eve for the great multiplication of pain in childbirth (sigh), as a parent, I find a slight lighten in the load of parenting. The God of the universe walked with Adam and Eve, yet they directly defied His direction. As moms, we take our responsibility to raise our children seriously, but we know that despite all we teach them they will do somethings contrary to those teachings, contrary to the plan we have for them. We do not know what that might look like but we know our children will not always obey us. We feel guilt and shame to some degree wondering where we went wrong but if a perfect God can have imperfect children then we have to see that the choices our children make are not necessarily a reflection of us. We are trying to raise children the best we can in a fallen world which means because of their own freewill they will sometimes go their own way. Because of this, although their choices might grieve us we should not let satan deceive us into carrying a burden of guilt. God does not ask for perfect parenting as we define it. He asks us to train them up in the way they should go and leave the rest to Him.

Freewill isn’t free
After they sinned, God made His presence known. Surely, He was there all along watching from the side lines seeing all the events unfold. Yet when He arrived on the scene, He asked them to show themselves and then explain themselves. He may have been giving them an opening to own their wrong and to give an opportunity for repentance and forgiveness. Maybe if they had responded differently the cost of their sin would have looked different. Death still came but not the way they may have thought. This may have been why Adam ultimately ate the fruit because Eve did not die on the spot. Sometimes we sin because it looks like others get away with it but freewill has a cost to everyone when it falls out of line with God’s direction. The wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23). It might be a loss of a relationship, job, security, or fellowship with God. These things may occur slowly over time only becoming obvious when it has all come to a head or it might be the loss of something greater God had planned that we will not see.

A preacher said once, “Sin will take you further than you wanted to go, cost more than you wanted to pay and keep you longer than you wanted to say”. My children’s belly pains and the expulsion from the garden for Adam and Eve illustrate this point well. Despite their choice, God in His grace, covered them, with leaves at the time. Thankfully, His grace remains available for us today. The law in the Old Testament provided only one way to atone for sin, blood (Lev 17:11) meaning something had to die.

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”, John 1:17. Through His grace, God sent a final answer to cleanse us from our sins with the birth of Jesus. The fall of man reminds us why we needed Jesus to come to serve as the ultimate lamb to be sacrificed for our sins. A perfect lamb, to cover imperfect people to restore what was lost to something even more glorious. The cost of our freewill paid by the blood of Jesus.

As we go through this season, let us continue to remind ourselves of what we are truly celebrating remembering, the birth of our savior who’s life, death and resurrection assures us that not only is the promise to come is far greater than what we see but that God’s grace still abides as He continues to cover us as we go along our way.

Sow the seed: Freewill isn’t free.

Nurture the seed:
“But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.” Rom 5:15

Until next time,
Happy sowing!