Sunday.....Christianity.....Yelling "Free Will" In A Crowded Lynyrd Skynyrd Concert

Saturday's Wall Street Journal highlighted an article by Jane Goodall on her life among the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. It was touching, but there was one glaring error as the anthropologist looked upon these wonderful creatures as being our common ancestors from six million years ago; for our ancestors were, one created man and one created woman, only six thousand years ago. This creation, us, has a free will. Martin Luther wrote a book and Johnathon Edwards, two hundred years later, wrote another with titles that seem, at first glance, to be saying something opposite but Luther's Bondage Of The Will says the same thing that Edward's Freedom Of The Will does. We don't talk about free will much anymore, yet in the back of our minds, it demands recognition. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer concentrated on man's will. It was when one man's will did not coincide with another man's will that suffering ensued. Desire was the problem and denial the answer. Schopenauer claimed to be an atheist and talked often as would a Buddhist. I cut out a Bizarro comic that might address this, an Eastern monk kneels before his teacher and says what do you do when you have freed yourself of all desire except the desire to be free from desire. Third Reich filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's historic work Triumph Of The Will deifies the will and the object of it. When a Christian enters the debate a genuine conversation on free will may come up, and the challenges pour in over a free will but fallen nature that determines the outcome. Chief among these might be, Well, if I can't really choose to believe, what's the use in trying and If such is the case then God is unjust. I think that you have to step back a little bit and consider this, Are you a person...do you exist? Is it a silly question? No. For if you acknowledge that you are an individual...and also that God exists...there has to be a relationship, or a broken relationship. Who determines that relationship, the creature or the Creator? Well, if it's the Creator, He's telling you that you are the culprit but He has provided a way. One might then might say hold on, I'm not the culprit! If you deny culpability...how can you then complain about the method God has designed for forgiveness, for you have rejected his premise to begin with? Why do you barter over the cost of a car that you have no intention of buying? Address the first issue and you will be surprised how little challenge there is to the second! If you truly had an unimpinged free will and consequently have no problem with rejecting God, would it not have been better to have had a fallen free will and forced to depend, not on an intellectual decision of perceived truths or you own righteousness, but a merciful Savior who has already promised forgiveness for coming to Him in sorrow for your sins and faith alone in His ability to redeem you? So to recap, If you do not have the ability to have faith in God, then God is unjust; but if you do have the free will and consequently the ability but reject him, He is not unjust? He says repent and believe and is unjust, but if He says choose what you want he isn't? Would you really rather to have not existed at all? There is an infinitesimal number of people.....who could have been but were never created therefore never existed. The ratio of created souls to souls never created would also be infinitesimal...would God not then have to be infinitesimally fair and just. Think of the multitudes that He never had to offer mercy to! Or is the injustice in that He has created you? Had He not, you could not call Him unjust for there would be no you. If just one soul, or one angelic being, is condemned, would that not, to some, be enough for a charge of injustice?  Then again, if everyone were to be given mercy, would the ultimate injustice not be in the existence of suffering in this life at the hands of some with no threat of punishment? If God never had created, there would be no suffering...but also no joy. What is the ultimate demand that you might give to God in order to absolve Him of the charge of injustice? If you eventually find God innocent of injustice, and He is taken out of the dock, might it not be wise to dwell on His goodness. The offer of forgiveness, adoption and redemption would then be seen as wonderful. This is undeniably a poor treatise on free will but I only hope to encourage you to reconsider charges of injustice towards God and ask yourself who rightfully lays the groundwork for salvation, you or God.