We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)
Have you ever sensed that the game of golf chose you? I know! This idea strikes us as nonsensical. Bear with me for a short “thought experiment.”
You initially recoil, “You are personifying golf—golf has no volitional capacities.” After some reflection, you respond, “I have many sporting options, and I chose golf.”
All of this seems reasonable. After all, we live in a culture that has elevated “freedom of choice” to the Pantheon of gods. Human autonomy is an inalienable right. We assume “freedom of will” is the most fundamental reality of life. The moment we felt the pleasure of a “nutted” drive, we made our choice.
For many Westerners, it’s an unexamined truism that everything in our lives results from countless earlier choices! The idea of living in The Matrix is purely fictional, belonging solely in Hollywood movies.
For most of us, Jim Carrey’s movie, The Truman Show, while thought-provoking, is beyond the pale. We convince ourselves, like William Henley’s Invictus, that each one of us is “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.”
We quickly survey the choices we have made throughout life— where I chose to go to college, who I decided to marry, what polo I bought, what shot I played—and, from a smattering of examples, we conclude, “life is entirely what I make it.”
All the while, forgetting that we did not choose our parents, what country we were born into, what ethnicity we inherited, the cultural forces that shape us, the history of ideas that found their way into our assumptions, what experiences shape our outlook (good and bad), or, among other things, what physiological, psychological, and biological make-up constitute our abilities to perform athletically [or not].
Not to mention the supernatural forces that influence our thinking, often going unnoticed or denied; naively, we act as if the objective or external world of creation and culture has little or no impact on our lives.
To clarify, I am not implying that forces — natural or supernatural — completely trap us and strip away all our freedom of choice. I am, however, suggesting that claiming all of life is solely a matter of your “free will” is an illusion.
On one level, you decide to wear socks or not, to buy a BMW or a Ford, or to join this or that club; however, it is wrong-headed to assume that you chose to love God without his initiating overtures.
Like Adam, humanity (Adam’s descendants) has been fleeing from God ever since Adam’s first rebellion. It is important to remember that God, in love, pursued Abraham, David, Peter, Paul, and every other biblical figure — not the other way around. His pursuit of wayward men is the pattern shown throughout Scripture.
Most people toggle back and forth between philosophical determinism (freedom of choice is an illusion) and philosophical libertarianism (external influences are impotent), unaware that both positions are flawed and incompatible ideologies.
As C. S. Lewis explained in The Screwtape Letters, “Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head.”
Biblical realism teaches us that God’s love, demonstrated through the historical sending of his Son and the experiential work of the Holy Spirit, races to find us, running as fast as we can away from surrendering our lives to his authority.
It is through the encounter with his love that our hearts are changed, and with changed hearts, new desires and restored wills emerge.
The Spirit of Christ conquers our radically insubordinate hearts and recalcitrant minds by his wooing love.
Prayer: Jesus, conquer all rival claims to the throne of my heart by your redeeming love.