I Am and the Light IV

Don: There are differences between God’s original creation in the Garden of Eden and his final creation of a new heaven and earth as promised in Revelation. In the Garden, there was night and day. In the new earth there is only day, eternal light. The Garden had a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The new earth does not. The key to the difference seems to lie in the presence of free will, which seems to function only in darkness. Free will was present in the Garden because darkness existed there, but it will not be present in the new earth, which will be devoid of darkness and therefore of free will.

There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. (John 1:9)

This was a down-payment by God on the full measure of light, of grace, which allowed Jesus to say:

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16)

It seems that we are hardwired to be sons and daughters of the light. Free will is the ability to choose darkness over light—and this was the judgment stated by Jesus to Nicodemus:

This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, … (John 3:19)

Conversely, free will gives us the ability to choose to remain in the light. A choice against the light is simply to suppress the truth about God:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 1:18-25)

What is the “truth of God” that they exchanged for a lie? It is that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Light.

But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn,
That shines brighter and brighter until the full day.

The way of the wicked is like darkness;
They do not know over what they stumble. (Proverbs 4:18-19)

The unpardonable sin is to extinguish this inner light, to deny the grace that is given to everyone for so long that the light dies. The path of the righteous is iterative: It keeps adding and adding to the light until “the full day.” This is simply being a steward of God’s grace, as Peter indicated:

As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. (1 Peter 4:10)

The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25)—expands upon this principle.

Two remarkable passages show that walking in the light or dark depends not on one’s relationship with God: It depends upon one’s relationship with one’s fellow man:

This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. (1John 1:5-10)

and

…the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.

Beloved, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning; the old commandment is the word which you have heard. On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining. The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him. But the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1 John 2:6-11)

The light that lights every man is not to show God the way; it is for us to show the way to others. It is our duty to light the way for others.

Turning toward the light and away form the dark is not a 50–50 proposition. In scripture, God often actively intervened to guide men toward the light, as in the Exodus, where he guided the fleeing Israelites as a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day. He prevented Balaam from going to curse Israel. He wrought havoc on Jonah for trying to go his (Jonah’s) own way. Moses told God he couldn’t do what God wanted, but God made him do it anyway. He told Jeremiah the prophet:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
And before you were born I consecrated you;
I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Then I said, “Alas, Lord God!
Behold, I do not know how to speak,
Because I am a youth.”

But the Lord said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am a youth,’
Because everywhere I send you, you shall go,
And all that I command you, you shall speak.

“Do not be afraid of them,
For I am with you to deliver you,” declares the Lord.

Then the Lord stretched out His hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me,

“Behold, I have put My words in your mouth.

“See, I have appointed you this day over the nations and over the kingdoms,
To pluck up and to break down,
To destroy and to overthrow,
To build and to plant.”(Jeremiah 1:5-10)

There does not seem to be much freedom of will for the Israelites, Moses, Balaam, Jonah, and Jeremiah. And there are many more examples. The message is that God will not let light and dark each have a 50-50 chance of success. If God plays dice, the dice are heavily loaded in favor of light. Is this a violation of free will? Not really. It is as though free will is proportional. These scriptural characters all had—and we all have—the choice to refuse God. But he did not and does not make that choice easy.

Donna: It seems that free will always leads us away from the light.

Don: I’m not sure about “always” but that is certainly its tendency. As we see in the fall of Lucifer, there is a time when deviation from the will of God becomes so extreme, so pronounced, that it does lead to darkness.

Alice: The ego takes us away from the light.

Dave McF: How does being “hardwired to favor the light” correlate with the concept that we are born into sin. If we are born sinners are we not therefore predisposed to darkness?

Donna: One’s free will grows in inverse proportion to one’s relationship of obedience to God.

Dave: I think the light—the holy spirit—resides in us. It’s a pilot light we can choose to invoke to fire up the full light, or not. I don’t think we can ever extinguish it.

Donna: Even atheists—who make it their mission to disprove the light—must have been confronted by it, otherwise they would not even consider it.

Charles: Throughout scripture, pride—the will to live without God, the sense that we can make it on our own, that we can be like God—is the grandaddy of all sin. The ultimate act of pride is to choose one’s own will over God’s. The turning point in the Garden was not the bite of the apple in and of itself but Adam and Eve’s decision to exercise the free will which had always been theirs but hitherto lay dormant. It was a prideful moment. The law is a mirror to show us just how much we stumble before God. There is a constant battle between the will of God and the will of the flesh. The penultimate example of flesh and spirit in One is Jesus, yet throughout his earthly life he relied totally on the will of the Father. You never heard Jesus telling God: “It’s OK, I have got this one covered.” We are far removed from that ideal, as the success of the humanist movement reveals—a prideful notion that we can handle things, we don’t need God.

Jay: An important characteristic of light is its “essentialness.” Without it, there can be no light. A water heater will not heat water without a pilot light to start it. Life cannot exist without the prior existence, presence, spirit, light of God. It still puzzles me that he did not choose to eliminate darkness at the Creation, that he left the potential for a challenge to his power, that he allowed free will. It is as though he cursed us with it. The new earth promised in Revelation does not have this bug… or is it a feature?… of God’s Creation program. It is unspoken in scripture but it might as well have been written: “And God said: ‘Let there be dark!’” We try to explain free will as a sign of god’s love—that he loved us so much he created us in his image, including free will; or that without free will, we would simply be mindless stooges of God, contributing nothing. But if that’s true, then the new earth has the bug, not the Garden, and not the earth! It is all very disturbing.

Donna: Free will is not from God; it is from the devil. God simply allowed it. As your pilot light grows in obedience to God, your free will gets smaller and you can see more clearly when something is not the will of God. Obedience takes discipline. It is not always joyful in a fleshly sense.

Dave: Before Jesus, the law kept us on the path of righteousness:

But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted. (1 Timothy 8-11)

But when Jesus came, he changed all that. He gave us an example of how to live our lives, through love and obedience to God’s will—not through law. We can do this through God’s grace. It seems to me that grace is what distinguishes the Christian from others and this is the message we need to take to them—including to the people who harm us.

Dave McF: The concept of freedom of choice existed from the beginning of Creation. God would not otherwise have put the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden. Jesus came to save us from the sins that resulted not through observance of the law, as the rabbis taught, but through grace and forgiveness and by teaching us what God is really like—what I Am truly means.

Charles: As I see it, the three main events of Creation were: (1) The creation of the heavens and the earth—a creation out of nothing, which is something even science will never be able to explain; (2) The creation of life—the fishes, etc.; and (3) The creation of Man and Woman. The creation of Wo/Man “in his own image” implies knowledge of good and evil and the freedom to choose between them. God is the ultimate “example” as it were, of choosing good. He had to give Wo/Man that same free moral agency to choose, that he had, otherwise they would not truly be in his image.

Of course, he could have chosen to do nothing [that would have made him the first Daoist—DE 😉 ] and just meditated for eternity, but there is some inkling in scripture of his desire for fellowship. In the end, in the new earth, when his will alone is done, we will have come to reflect and represent his true image as he intended at the start.

Dave: And god gave us the inner light and the road map (Jesus) to guide us toward that end.

Charles: Was the pilot light lit in the people of the Old Testament? There are allusions to it in those who were chosen by God for a purpose—“and the spirit of God was with X”—but it is not stated nearly so clearly as it is in the New. And interestingly, it was only AFTER Christ paid the ransom for sin. It is interesting to contemplate Dave’s metaphor of a pilot light when viewed as a gift to those who freely choose to believe in and follow Jesus. Does God ignite a pilot light in those who choose to “listen to” and to “believe in” the one He sent?

Jay: Free will is not a good thing. Choice is not a good thing. In the end, the good thing is to sacrifice one’s choice. Little children—the innocents Jesus told us often to emulate—don’t care much about having choice. They look upon everything with wonder. They seek guidance from the parent, sometimes by provoking us through some naughty act and being ready to hug us after we have disciplined them! Free will is just not an issue for them. Life is wonderful. Life is what it is. What’s to choose?

Dave: So we must give up earthly freedom for the mere promise of spiritual freedom?

Dave McF: Paul said “I die daily.” He must have been battling choices every day.

Charles: God wants us to want to choose his will over our own. Children want to please their parents. God wants that relationship with us, where his children have free will but defer to the father’s will anyway.

Jay: Is God happier when you choose to do the right thing, or when you do what he tells you to do?

Don: Paul said:

For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.

I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin. (Romans 7:14-25)

This is a different take on free will: I choose to be good but the devil is making me do bad things.

Donna: Everything is either from God or the devil. Everything. It is spiritual warfare.

Jay: Without darkness, we could not appreciate light. In order to know it, we have to have its opposite within us.

Charles: Paul also said salvation comes not from the law but through Jesus. That is victory in the spiritual war. I can’t help wondering if this is not the whole point, which might explain why the first of the main events of the Creation (the creation of the universe) merits scarcely more than a line in the entire Bible!

Dave: Do obedient Christians have more or less earthly freedom?

Donna: It depends on whether you mean fleshly or spiritual freedom!

Charles: Nietzsche is atheism personified. He ended up mad! 😉 But throughout history, atheistic societies have always ended up in ruin.

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