36 CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX “To will one thing”: Section 13

 Free Will and The Fall

The idea that people have free will to make their own choices is central to Christianity—Adam and Eve were free to obey or not and Jesus didn’t try to force people to follow him, but offered to them what he had. If they didn’t want it, he told his disciples to “shake the dust off of your feet” and go on to the next town. At one point he even asked his disciples whether they wanted to leave. He always allowed people to make their own choices.

The fall isn’t something that just happened once a long time ago. It happens every day to every person. Relatively speaking, eating an apple wasn’t some heinous act. It was the fall because it was doing something God said not to and with it showed a distrust in him.

Our motives are always mixed (DC Talk, What if I stumble?) and our minds are easily distracted—I see so many things when I pick up my smartphone that I often forget what I picked it up to do.

In “They Call Me Coach,” John Wooden shares the following:

I am not what I ought to be,

not what I want to be,

not what I am going to be,

But thankful that I am not what I used to be.

Or, as Paul wrote (in Romans 15: 7),

For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do

It should be noted that Jesus and Paul and many others seemed to assume that non-believers would behave differently, and did not expect those outside of the faith to observe the laws and expectations they described. They were talking to and advising believers, understanding that they had chosen to believe—that they had exercised their free will.

The question of Free Will

Taking a step back, it is important to acknowledge that there is significant scholarly debate as to whether humans actually possess free will at all: some argue that our lives are deterministic, with all of our thoughts and actions governed by external events and the inevitable firing of our neurons in response to those events and within the neurons themselves. Proponents of this view believe that the universe is deterministic and that the chain reaction of neuron firings in our brains is systematic, and reliable, and therefore inevitable, with no room for us to influence it by our free will.

For me, this position represents things too simplistically for several reasons. As Aristotle saw was true, for many things, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”: the brain’s work taken as a whole is much more complicated than the simple firing of individual neurons—they interact with each other in complex ways. Chaos theory (discussed in another chapter) tells us that very small differences can result in very large changes. Quantum mechanics tells us that some processes are probabilistic, not deterministic and recent research indicates that neurons in the brain may be able to generate pairs of quantumly entangled particles—quantum mechanics may play a role in brain function. The plasticity of the brain means that it changes through experience and learning, so any small differences in those would change our brains. These and other ideas lead me to believe that our thoughts, actions, and lives are not predetermined, but that our spirits or consciousnesses (which we don’t understand well either) are able to foster changes in our physical beings that are chosen, change our brains, thoughts, actions, and lives, and are the exercise of free will.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s scientists believed they had identified the critical components of human milk and many replaced nursing with baby formula, but subsequent research has shown that nursing provides biological (e.g. antibodies, live cells, enzymes, etc.) and psychological (e.g. bonding, stress reduction, etc.) benefits that formula does not. We thought we knew more than we did with nursing and I believe the same is true with the workings of the brain. With all of this in mind, I assume that humans have free will throughout this work.

To me, the issue of whether we have free will seems related or similar to the question of predestination and the elect: do the elect have any choice or merit in the matter or are they already so “programmed” that their choices and path are deterministic? Though similar, the ideas of predestination and free will can be separated by the fact that the elect may have free will, but that God, who is omniscient, knows what choices they will make—not necessarily because they are inevitable, but because he foresees them—and so the elect are already understood by God to be making the choices necessary to be saved. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets,

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

Or, as the Oracle said to Neo in The Matrix Reloaded, “You’ve already made the choice.”

And yet, as Proverbs 16: 9 states, “A person’s heart plans his way, but the LORD determines his steps.” So the relationship between our exercise of free will and God’s intervention is complex.

Watching my grandson, I remember that one of the first ways babies demonstrate the potential for agency is when they realize that they have some control over their hands and mouth. From that time on until, hopefully many years later, either something happens to them to incapacitate them or they become so old as to lose that capacity, there is an ability, and I think for all people a desire, for agency: for the ability to play a role or otherwise have input into what happens to us no matter what our circumstances. Any efforts to take that away or reduce it for people seems to diminish our lives, our liberty, and our ability to pursue happiness. And yet, coming to faith, to true trust in God, means giving our sense of agency and responsibility up to him. We are led to freely choose to obey or not and accept the consequences of either. And we need to renew that choice every day, every hour, every minute—with every thought, word, and action.

God’s original plan was to ultimately draw us to Himself, but our grasping for that (agency and self-will) and trying to do it ourselves separates us from Him and His plan.

Sin is sin

Regarding sin, we must always remember that you can as easily drown in a pool that is eight feet deep as in an ocean that is five thousand feet deep. Any depth that separates you from God (from standing on firm ground) is enough to kill you. Jesus recognized that it can be a challenge for us to accept all sin as deadly, acknowledging that those who are forgiven much love much, but those who are forgiven little love little. This is consistent with the idea that it is easier to lose faith in prosperity than in poverty. We are called to love much no matter what our circumstances.

Being interviewed about his novel exploring the nature of evil, Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West (on which the musical and movie Wicked are based), Gregory McGuire said there was one sentence that was “the most coherent and comprehensive conclusion” of the book: “‘It is the nature of evil to be secret’” This aligns closely with many passages in the Bible, perhaps most notably John 3:19, “people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” Adam and Eve tried to hide as soon as they realized the impact of their sin and I think we all have the tendency to do that. The best answer, of course, is to, as a friend of mine says, “Only do things you would be happy to see in the newspaper.” The second best is to confess and ask forgiveness instead of trying to hide when you fall short. Always remember that “who you are when you are alone is who you really are.”

The closer you get to coming into alignment with God, the more sensitive you will become to any disobedience to the Spirit —something you might not have noticed earlier will seem as harmful as something much more obvious and egregious did earlier because you are more aware and more sensitive. As Spurgeon put it, “Many a man receives a far deeper sense of sin after he is forgiven than he ever had before. The light of the law is but moonlight compared with the light of the gospel, which is the light of the sun. Love makes sin to become exceeding sinful.”

But alternatively, as JC Ryle pointed out, if we choose to ignore that sense and go our own way, “Every fresh act of sin lessens fear and remorse, hardens our hearts, blunts the edge of our conscience, and increases our evil inclination.” And, in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard suggests that if we know the right thing to do, but fail to do it, or even just hesitate, “the knowing becomes obscured,” and it becomes more difficult to do—or even be confident of—what is right.

Like other hardships, evil might be prevented by God by intervening in our free will, but even our bad choices can be used by him for good: the Fall itself resulted in the possibility of something greater coming—in that case, salvation from faith that is greater than the original state of man. And there’s the story of Joseph being sold by his brothers, but him telling them, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” As Paul said, “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”

The cycle of Falling and Reconciliation

Again, history in the Bible is a cycle of people being in relationship with God (from the very beginning with Adam and Eve), but becoming distracted, complacent, self-assured, self-confident, etc., and walking away from/turning their backs on God (committing sin), only to suffer consequences of that separation, causing at least some to turn back to God and enjoy relationship with him, only to become distracted, etc. again, and repeat the cycle. In some ways it seems like a repetitive sifting process, leaving what remains more and more refined—or like repetitively tempering steel or glass or like refining gold (that one is actually referred to in the Bible). It takes great discipline to avoid this cycle, and, even with discipline, every person probably goes through some versions of this cycle. It’s just so easy to forget to hold on, and then get lost—like a child who lets go of a parent in a crowd.

The nature of pride is to want to “be like God,” as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve. As 20th century preacher John Stott wrote, “Sin is man substituting himself for God” (but he continued, “salvation is God substituting himself for man.”) We see that temptation play out many places in literature and life.

So many churches and church leaders have fallen from grace. Is it possible to maintain or still have real faith while also persisting in doing bad things/sinning? Consider the great sins in leadership of the Church at various times. If we are judged by our fruits, are the good fruits of bringing people to God more important than the bad fruit of creating a great stain on the people of God? I believe that we don’t and can’t know. The most important thing is faith. And it’s clear that everybody sins to some degree—even those filled with faith. So, the news articles chronicling falls from grace don’t say that the fallen church leaders lost faith, but describe some highly visible and serious sin. So it does not seem impossible that they could have practiced that great sin and still have maintained their faith. We can’t know—but it seems that David did that, so it does seem possible.

Sections in this chapter:

• The heart of faith
• The core message and goal for your life
• Seeking to trust God and become more like Jesus
• Knowing your role—and God’s
• Fruit of the Spirit
• Managing our priorities and our praise
• Identity, the creeds, and unity
• The struggle of finding and holding faith
• Faith must be our own
• Levels and types of faith
• Faith vs. knowledge
• Faith and the Law and Works
• Free Will and The Fall
• Seeking to understand the Bible and life through discernment
• The challenge of discernment
• Handling different discernments
• "Our own words"
• Exploring challenging passages and ideas
• The importance of prayer
• Personal reflections
• The importance of living the life
• It’s not too late