Mankind has a strong conviction favoring freedom (personal choices). It is a driving force for which some persons are willing to die. It is carried over into the social context so that groups are willing to unite to gain it for a group. Persons close to freedom in the context of their lives can be happier, healthier, and more successful to their purposes than those who are more distant from the ideal application of freedom. Our basic problem is that we may not perceive that everything of importance to the balanced life requires some yielding to the responsibility of life. In my view, life is the evidence of God. Wherever there is life that reflects the nature of God that life informs me in some way about God. For mankind life is self-conscious and has known history by which the uses of life can be evaluated. Human beings belong to that grouping.
Life is a pure divine element being formed into a life compound. The factors needed for the compound of life are many with the combination of elements giving meaning to life context – both visible and invisible. They have little meaning without the compound. No virtue or vice exists alone. They would have no life without relationship with other elements. When the combination of elements and factors is made the emerging challenge is responsibility. How is the compound responsible to the surrender of the elements (individual) to the compound (multiples)? Even God is the multiple of that making up his nature. Theologians assert that God is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. He is not one or the other, but all of these and more. His omnipotence is guided by his omniscience. We can extend that explanation to other factors in the nature (compound) of God. A similar pattern applies for mankind, in the mortal sense of meaning and limitations. The principle activates the mortal/divine elements. God’s context, being perfect, will never change. In his perfection he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:12-13)
The management of the competing interests, as we understand it, is applied responsibility. God’s love and compassion would sweep all persons into the kingdom of God – if he would deny some of himself. God’s holiness and truth would admit no one from the mortal context. To achieve his love purpose, and his holy purpose, he took responsibility to meet the requirements of both in the sacrifice of himself in Jesus Christ. By pouring the guilt in that event of his incarnation of Jesus to life and death on the cross, God met his own irrevocable standards so to offer redemptive plan acceptable to the context of God. There remains the matter of freedom, so the individual decides if he or she will give up some of the freedom related to independent mortality to join God in a kingdom of holiness. Some responsibility for my immortality is related to my acceptance of his plan, and to prove to my person, perhaps to those around me, that I have surrendered my freedom to my own choices to those required of God so to gain the freedom of God with responsibility to him. As exotic as all this explanation may appear to a reader, it is the context followed by billions of Christians for millennia. For serious students of the matter, a study of the word deny in Scripture will aid clarification. John’s Gospel and Paul’s Romans are highly supportive documents.
We are brought to an important point, and it seems more important to the well educated than the poorly educated. The unprepared often respond to the good news of the Gospel of Christ without intellectual fussing about this or that factor. The education of our lives, largely secular, may introduce barriers we can’t seem to overcome, or by which we delay the call of God in Christ for his redemptive provision. I have had students who, in their pursuit of education in the mortal context (a good thing) permit it to rob them of the context of a faith life. Years later they may discover that they possess both and make a holistic life for both mortality and immortality in friendly combination. It is helpful to know that God takes this into consideration, knowing our frame, and will respond to doubt, anger, even some unbelief of truth, if we take a sincere position that assuming his interest in us we proceed to ask for his forgiveness of any violation of his standards necessary to a perfect God for acceptance. The arrangement exchanges the imperfect for the perfect in God’s justification for penitent believers. Our freedom permits us to choose God. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020