Today at services we had the yearly camp video, which always makes me briefly want to volunteer at camp with a smile, before I think about the logistical difficulties and my own diffidence in the matter. One of the interesting aspects of the message was the way that the teens and young adults in the video correctly noted that God wishes our free obedience and doesn’t wish to coerce us into following his way. Although the young people may not have been aware of it, they had correctly understood and verbalized the Arminian nature of our particular religious culture [1], that God cares so much about human freedom that He will not coerce someone into salvation, and that at some level they must choose to follow His ways. The sermon, not consciously designed to match the video, managed nevertheless to dwell on God’s plan and the way that people nevertheless had choice within that providential design.

The thought got me to wondering about the places in the Bible where someone is clearly given the choice of how to behave and the chance to repent and change their ways, but where that would require a fundamental change in their character, and therefore doesn’t tend to happen. With the story of Rehoboam, for example [2], we read that the prophet Ahijah had told Jeroboam that he would receive the ten tribes of (northern) Israel with the chance to have an enduring dynasty if he followed God as David had done. Yet he did not. Rehoboam had the chance to avoid the rupture between north and south, but he insisted on seeking to bully the north, and when it failed there was a lengthy civil war. This division could have been avoided, but it would have required Rehoboam being a more godly individual than he was, and so what had been prophesied came to pass because of Solomon’s apostasy and Rehoboam’s folly. Rehoboam could have reversed the prophecy through repentance and through listening to wise counsel, but he would have had to have been a different sort of being.

I am often reminded of the American Civil War and the way in which the laudable drive to crush the rebellion gave those who sought after government the belief that the extraordinary efforts taken to crush rebellion were acceptable whenever there was opposition to the spirit of the times as it was present in government. It would have been far better for the United States, and all parties in it, for there to have been consensual cultural change that recognized the ideals of the American founding as they related to all of the people who lived in the United States, but that was not to be. For that to have happened, our people would have needed to be aware of the divine requirements for justice, and to have been sensitive to the ways in which it was easy to deprive the innocent of life, liberty, and property simply because we had the power to do so and were dealing with people who did not have the power to resist us. Yet the people of the Deep South in late 1860 could not accept even a curtailment of the spread of slavery or accepting that slavery was wrong. So it is with social evils today, in that a great many people cannot even accept that what they are doing is wrong, much less accept any way of stopping it. And yet while we could no doubt have eased and ease in the present the sort of crises we have over social evil, that would require being different sorts of beings than we are, beings who accepted wise counsel.

I often ponder the sort of mistakes that Satan made. In his persecution of godly people, from Job to Jesus Christ, he seemed to play directly in the hands of God, whether it was in refining the character of people, or in acting in such a way as to lead to the fulfillment of prophecies that ended up working against him, it seems like very often what was done in order to hurt people often made them stronger and more ferocious foes of Satan. Yet the short-term lure of the freedom to act with hostility seems to overwhelm any longer-term concern for what would work out best. Yet if evil and wicked beings could really think long-term effectively, and not just according to short-term lures and drives and the like, then they would not be wicked beings, but would be thinking of the bigger picture and being concerned with others and with the repercussions of their actions, and that would at least be a step in moral development that is elusive so often in life. And yet we too often do not think for the long-term, or act wisely, or accept wise counsel.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/all-things-work-together-for-the-good-the-political-implications-of-predestination/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/book-review-afraid-to-believe-in-free-will/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/the-five-point-biblical-covenant-model/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/how-to-shrink-your-kingdom-lessons-from-1-kings-12/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/divinely-authorized-rebellion-and-its-limits-an-examination-of-1-kings-1126-40-1225-33/