Hi all,
Wrestling with God
In Romans 7: 15-25 Paul expresses the struggles of all who seek God: “In my inner man I delight in the law of God. But I see another law working in my body making me a prisoner of the law of sin in my body.”
This is the point we truly come to know the freedoms and limitations of free will. It is that wrestling with God that tests our desire to grow in Christ. When Jacob wrestled with God in Genesis 32: 24-30, they wrestled through the night. We too wrestle with God and ourselves through our ‘nights’, our dark times. But he came out on the other side with a new name: Israel (Yisrael), which means ‘God strives’.
We should note that when the Lord changed Jacob’s name, He took His own perspective: “God strives”. This reveals the Lord’s willingness to strive with us, to wrestle with us. The fact He named him ‘God strives’ should be a great relief to us. It means He won’t give up. It means He isn’t angry when we fail again and return yet again to Him in regret and repentance. It means He willingly wrestles with us to work a new name, a new nature within us – He didn’t give up on Jacob. And Jacob didn’t give up on Him. He had hold of God and wasn’t going to let go until he got the blessing.
The thing you think disqualifies you…
…is actually the thing that qualifies you. Our natural man (and church culture) tells us that because in the past, we did X, we aren’t worthy of God’s call. Or that because He called, we answered, then we wrestled ourselves into a ditch, we think we have missed Him to the point we are unredeemable.
Paul wrote in II Timothy 2: 3-4 to be a good soldier in Christ. In that time, the Romans wanted as their soldiers the men who had the roughest life growing up. They wanted farmers, ranchers, fighters, and the like because they knew how to endure hardship. They had worked in all sorts of weather. They made the best soldiers, not those who had it easy all their lives. What you think disqualifies you, actually qualifies you to be used by the Lord.
Free will and the inevitable wrong decisions allow us to explore what we have within the boundaries of free will. Without free will we would not know the depths of sin, and therefore would not know grace.
Hanging on my office wall is the text from US President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech ‘Citizenship in a Republic.’ This section is called ‘The Man in the Arena.’
“It is not the critic who counts; nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Suffering
God the Father lives in the timeless realm of the Spirit. Then He created a physical universe and created humans who can function both in His realm and the natural world to rule it. To do so meant giving humans free will to govern the physical world.
Knowing then that man would make the choice to know both good and evil means the Father can use that to help man know all that He has given them. That brings purpose to suffering. It brings purpose to experiencing the consequences of our actions. If we view free will as something to learn about life’s choices, we can find our way to life and blessing, turning from curse and death.
It is why Paul said he; ‘glories in suffering, for when I am weak, then I am strong.’ It is why he wrote the Philippians that he wants to know ‘the fellowship of His sufferings and the power of His resurrection.’ II Corinthians 12: 9, Philippians 3:10
Paul is describing the high and low of free will – the low is in the fellowship (sharing in common) with His sufferings, the glory being the power of His resurrection. Paul wanted to know the full range of free will, and part of that means suffering. Both elements are required to truly grow as a person and a person in Christ.
Free will is the ability to choose between different courses of action.
Free will is therefore directly linked to morality, responsibility, advice, argument, discussion and persuasion, deep consideration of actions, and setting boundaries.
As far as I know scripture, only actions done by free will get blame or credit. It is often the actions of others that damage our lives, so we are not to blame when we are the victim. It is therefore true that often God is not in the event, but He can be found in our response to the event. He holds us accountable for our own free-willed actions.
This again brings purpose to suffering, for He is faithful that all will be made right in the end. We must hold to the truth we are already in eternity. Ephesians 2:7 mentions ‘ages to come’. We don’t die and then pass into eternity; we are in eternity right now. Whatever happens in this life, it is in part preparation for the next age.
This is in part why James wrote in 1:2 to ‘…count it all joy (a fruit of the spirit, not an emotion) when you fall into various trials, tests, temptations, knowing that the trying of your faith exercises consistency. And if you let that consistency have its complete work, you will (come out of the trial) complete and lacking nothing.’
If we value growth in Christ as our #1 priority, that which drives us every day, then we tell the world to ‘do your worst’, for we know free will, we know how to fight for it. We know how to let the things of Christ in us have their full work, and we realize we battle from the position of having already won, from being seated with Christ in the heavenlies, with Him and our Father forever. We have already overcome this world!
Blessings, new subject next week, until then,
John Fenn
