FREE WILL

FREE WILL

“So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” Phil. 2:12-13

Does man have a free will concerning the human outlook and the attitude of God thereto? You realize that you are raising an old question which has confronted men and women of faith in every age. It is not easy to answer, and yet so far as I am concerned I am perfectly at rest. I remember always that God created man in His own image and likeness, which means, among other things, having the magnificent and yet awe-inspiring power and freedom of the will. Man has used that freedom in rebellion, and all the suffering and the wrong is the result of man's action. I say it with profound reverence that God, by the very nature of the case, cannot prevent these things, but He is overruling them. Man is being compelled, under the pressure of the Divine government, to work out his own choices. It is equally certain that the ultimate victory will be with the righteousness and mercy of God. Those of us who believe in Him abide there and carry on, doing whatever He has given us to do, and believing where we cannot see therefore there is security in our stance concerning salvation.

                The working is mutual. Interdependent are these two things. I cannot work out anything except as He shall work in it; but if I fail to work out I stop the operation of His energy within. But He that began a work in you will finish it to the end.

"work out your own salvation"  In accepting the work of Jesus by resurrecting Him from the dead, God refused all other methods of salvation. He said by resurrection, "Neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved." But we would prefer to work out our own salvation. We would prefer to accept the great Ideal, and see if it be not possible, without reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus, to work out our own salvation. God declares by resurrection that this is impossible, for every other method of salvation attempted by man is doomed to failure and disaster.

                These are blessed words of hope, for in them dynamic is added to injunction. The next verse includes God along with the person addressed in this verse. That means the inclusion of God and our self, and the exclusion of every other human being. The voice of God never comes finally through human lips. We may have heard the voice of God in the sermon preached; we may have heard the voice of God as we have read the page; the voice may have come to us in the silence of our own home; but it always comes ultimately in our own thinking. We may discern between the voice of God and the voice of Satan by the nature of the thought and the thing which is spoken. There came to us a call to higher life, to nobler work, to the consecration of the powers of our being to holy ventures; there came to us the voice that rebuked our sin, there came the moment of illumination when we saw the utter foolishness of our own passionate attempt to satisfy our lives with the things of dust. That is the voice of God finding utterance ultimately, as the voice of God always must, not through the lips of the preacher, not through the written word, but in our own thinking, in our own conception. We can hear sermons by the score and never hear God. It is only when in our souls we say amen to the truth uttered by the preacher that God has spoken to the soul – work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

 See later article TRUE FREEDOM.