Daily Java: Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God's mercy to you. For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all. (Romans 11:30-32)
God made us the way we are: potentially rebellious. He made us this way when he gave us free will, the ability to choose.
It is a fact that when you give people the power to choose, chances are high they will choose a direction you do not want to go. And so we did.
We chose sin. We chose disobedience. God could have made it different but it would have been at the expense of our free will. If we could not choose, we could not do wrong. But then again we would be robots, blindly following the wishes of the one who made us.
On Star Trek: the Next Generation, Data is an android. As such he has no ability to discern right and wrong. He follows his programming. Oddly enough, he is aware of it and wishes he could be otherwise. He does not hate because he is incapable of love. He does not become angry because he is incapable of joy.
Those feelings all follow each other. Take away pain and you take away pleasure because that is the other side of pain. Take away hatred and you take away love, take away hunger and you take away fulfillment.
They are all sides of the same thing.
The apostle Paul says that God bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all. In other words, he made us disobedient when he made us able to choose.
He knew when he did it that we would turn, but what God wanted more than anything else – the same thing we want in our lives – was for us to turn to him of our own free-will.
If he had made us worship him automatically, it would have lacked the joy that someone choosing to love you would have.
It would be like making a robot for your wife. She would love you because she had no other choice. And there was no greater day in your love for your wife than the one in which she professed the free-will desire to love you and be you wife.
If you tied her down, or drugged her or gave her a frontal lobotomy, she might have to love you. But the free-will offering of herself to you would be gone.
It is the same way with God. He wants you to respond to him in love. So he made us the way we are so that he can be able to accept us freely. That is the mercy: the response of one to another who loves him.
That is also the father’s love that every man feels for his children. A mother loves her children because she has to, It is built into her system to love them and protect them. A father, on the other hand, chooses to love the children of his wife. In one sense, he adopts them. Even though they are his children, he chooses to love them and support them.
God chooses to love us. Now the only other thing is whether or not we choose to love him. His love will always be whether or not ours is or not.
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