Every Sunday morning since we met, my wonderful wife and I have a tradition that we fulfill after we awake. We have a cup of hot chocolate together and usually discuss the word of God from the devotional that she reads for us, or subjects related to the Scriptures. She has her apple, I have something from the store that I generally would not eat during the week, and this morning it was a piece of chocolate cake.
You must realize that this particular food group to my wife is more precious than gold to her, cake should be the only thing on the menu at any restaurant, especially chocolate cake, and it has always amazed me how well she can control herself around it. This particular morning dessert, as it were, had marshmallow frosting on it, and that is not her favorite and so as she took a bite or two of the cake around the frosting she informed me of this, “I do not like that type of frosting.” Well, if you have read any of my past letters to you, you will notice that there is always an occasion where I can find a way to glorify the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, even in chocolate cake with the wrong type of frosting.
The devotional of the morning concerned itself with how the Lord removes the dross from our lives, those things that are of no use to the furtherance of His kingdom, that have no place in our lives beyond the eternal, and how He achieves this goal, by fire. Gold, silver and other precious metals must be heated up to a very high temperature to bring out all the imperfections, the dross, so that the final product will be as pure as possible, without it the craftsman would be working with an impure material and no sort of perfection could be achieved in the final product that he has in mind. Gold is not a sentient creation, it does not know when it has impurities surrounding it, we do, the point then of this letter to you is this, are you willing to go through the fire, several times during your life to allow God to purge these contaminants from you, and will you by your free will allow Him do this.
“Be ye holy, for I am holy.” (1st Peter 1:16) Sure Lord, no problem, I will never perform another unholy thing in my life, no more sinful thoughts, everything I do from now on will be perfect in your sight, yea, sure, you bet. Not going to happen my friends, not while we are here, not while we have the old man, (Rom. 6:6) the sinful nature within us. You would say then, well, as soon as we are glorified, we will not be inhibited by this sinful nature, we will be free of it, and that is the main topic of this conversation, will we. Adam and Eve had no knowledge of the definition of the words good and evil, and still they chose to sin, “Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.” (Ezek. 28:15) Lucifer had a choice, how he knew of the possibility of that choice is a mystery to us, but choose against God he did. When we are glorified, will we still have the choice to sin, or will that part of our free will be taken from us, will we, as it were, be forced against our knowledge to become robotic in a sense in our service to the Lord.
“In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” (Rev. 22:2) Healing of the nations, nations are people, with a glorified body, what need would there be to be healed. This brought to my thoughts the war that was fought in heaven, (Rev. 12:7-9) and the possible way that this war was fought. The first thing that for some reason usually comes into the mind of some believers is the weapon of war called the sword, but angelic beings do not die, and so it makes sense only in the terminology that when one struck another, they disappeared into, let us say, a mist form only to reappear at a different location on the battlefield. But the sword of the spirit, the Word of God, is a much more effective weapon, and the angels that retained their place in heaven would have used the strength of the Lord God, not their own strength in the battle. A third fell, and have lost for all eternity the possibility of returning to their first estate, (Jude 1:6) but what form of free will do those angels who did not rebel, those who still remain, have intact, if they still have the same knowledge that those who were cast out had, what inhibits them from making a decision against the precepts of the Lord, for surely after the battle our Lord did not remove from them what they chose of their own free will before the battle to retain and use for the glory of the Lamb.
We are accountable for the actions that we determine to take by the use of our own free will, they are conscience decisions that we make each day, when we are glorified I do not believe that our free will in every area will be removed from us, just because, in other words, we are to be holy does not mean that we are going to be holy, that is our choice, and to say that we are slaves to our sinful nature without any control over it whatsoever is an incorrect statement, if it were not, our Lord would not have told us to be holy. When we are glorified our old man, our sinful nature will die, praise God, but does that infer that our free will will also die with him, or will only the desire to sin be gone, and if so, what was the mitigating factor that caused our first parents and Lucifer to rebel openly against the Lord, since they also had free will without a previous sinful nature.
The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, in this particular verse these nations are the gentile nations, not for those who will reside in the kingdom of our Lord, they will need to be healed, for they will not be of us, but will we still have the free will that we have been accustomed to, without of course the old, sinful nature. If it is our sinful nature that causes us to sin, where was this sinful nature in Adam, it did not exist until he ate of the fruit, he did not have this nature within him yet. I contend that free will, the gift of free will given to every man by God, does not need the sinful nature that came upon us in the fall of Adm to rebel against the precepts of our Lord, and if this assumption is correct, then the only way that we could be one-hundred percent obedient to the will of the Lord would be either for that free will to be removed from us, or by a conscience and continuing effort on our part to serve Him freely for His glory, which we are to be doing now.
We would say perhaps that by the power of the Holy Spirit we are restrained from sinning against Christ, and in a sense that would be correct, yet the determining actions that we take of our own free will are not inhibited by the Holy Spirit, He is a guide, Christ is a leader, we are to be Christ like, but we are never forced into either following or adhering to the leadership of the Lord. We are given a choice, we are always given a choice, and if that choice is taken away from us after we are glorified, then we are no longer able to serve in love by the efforts of our own desires, we will have lost the ability to make a choice on our own, our free will will have been removed from us. If the Lord had wanted to create beings who would serve Him without question, without the conscience effort of their own choosing, He would have done so, but He did not, He made individuals with the ability to choose, with the ability to serve or not to serve. There are of course consequences for our actions on the final day for all of us, but the path that we choose is the path of our choice, the believer attends to the will of God in his life for the glory of God, as best as he is able, the lost do not, their choice is not to serve, and they will only be forced to bend the knee on that day, then cast into the lake of fire, against their will, the only two choices that they would not have chosen for themselves of their own free will.
When we are glorified, will we still have free will, but will that free will include the ability to choose, if only for a moment, against the will of God, and if not, then what was the predominant factors in the cases of Adam and Lucifer, what free will options did they have, and why did they choose against Him. If we have the free will to choose between good and evil today, why do we constantly seem to blame our poor decisions upon our sinful nature, or at least on the influence of our adversary and our own weakness to refuse his constant barrage. If the possibility of an act against our Lord is taken away from us in heaven, then are we indeed in a bubble, as it were, where the only options are to serve with a heart that desires to serve, uninhibited by the sinful nature and the influences of Satan, and how then does that equate to a created being, made in the image of God with free will. Does free will need an adversary before it can know that it is truly free.
Gods perfect love is balanced perfectly with His perfect justice, His enduring compassion is balanced perfectly by His wrath. There is an opposite for every action, the actions of our free will are ours to make, we can choose for or against, whether we will be allowed to choose those actions, or if our only choice will be to choose for, even though everything that we will do will be for His glory, remains to be seen, and if so then, why not now. What are you blaming the choices that you make today that are against the will of God upon, if you indeed have free will today, then you alone are accountable for those choices. Will those choices remain when we are glorified, even without our sinful nature or the influences of our adversary.
Adam did not need a sinful nature to sin, do you?
