Kingdom Come

People are quick to blame God when things go bad, even faulting him for having the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden because, being omniscient, he knew full well what would happen.

The reality is that the tree gave us freedom – defined as “the power to determine action without restraint.”

• Freedom is not being able to do whatever you want.
• Freedom is being able not to do actions being forced on you but acting within shared boundaries with your partner(s).
• Freedom is not being oppressed either from an outside force or an inner uncontrollable drive.

Without the opportunity to choose, provided by just one fruit tree, humans would have been drones, always under the control of our Creator. But God isn’t a control freak. In contrast to the bad guys, he doesn’t force anyone to submit to his control.

I often keep my granddaughter at my place. She has lots of creative activities at her disposal, and because the items for the activities are already stored in her play space, she doesn’t have to wait on me to give permission or resources. She has the freedom to chose if she wants to make “soups” or “cakes” from the ingredients in her kitchen cabinet, paint pictures, string jewelry, play with her dolls, or play Tornado Warning! Her products are highly imperfect – the soups are always inedible, only with Nana’s help are the cakes (but even then only to taste). The pictures are gross caricatures, the jewelry usually abandoned as being too tedious to continue, the dolls are never wearing coordinated clothes, and the living room is in complete disarray when she goes home. But the product is not what’s important, its the process of skill, personality and relationship development.

She says she loves being here with me, and I love having her here and our rapport. Neither one of us demands that we always get our own way, we dialogue. Our respect for each other rights and values is what gives her the freedom to choose a TV show, get a snack or piece of candy from the pantry without asking my permission, independently go into any room or the patio outside.  Without this mutual respect, one or both of us become victims of the other’s tyranny, and the shared space becomes a place of torment or either or both of us.

Can you apply that to a relationship between God and humans? Freedom to choose is the only possible basis of a mutually agreed upon relationship.

We make choices because of the intended desired consequences.

Separation from Creator God’s authority – not only from oneself but from his authority over others who have malevolent intentions towards us – is plainly the unavoidable consequence of being one’s own authority.

God clearly stated this consequence when he introduced Adam to the tree.

“And the LORD God formed [hu]man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath / spirit of life, and [hu]man became a living being…of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it surely you shall die / become separated from the source of life .” (Genesis 2)

Not only does the same passage that defines life as God breathing life / his spirit into a human allow us to logically induce that death is God taking the breath / his spirit out of a human, this is frankly stated elsewhere.

“Remember now thy Creator…man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets…Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit / breath shall return unto God who gave it.” (Ecclesiastes 12:1-7)

In other words, the Singularity Creator formed our ancestor and brought him-her to life with his own spirit. Then he gave mankind the opportunity to choose.

1. Stay linked in to his power and authority
2. Or disconnect.

We can deduce from this primary premise that both desired and undesired consequences can result from choices we make. In Mrs. Adam’s case, it was discovering that

1. humans are in fact powerless to sustain life by ourselves, and that
2. we don’t know enough to be our own authority, but
3. our only real choice is deciding which higher authority we will trust.

There is always the most basic toggle option to every decision we face:

1. align our plans with the Creator’s / Author’s system design by doing things right – i.e. be right-eous,
2. or not.

“if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve…the [old] gods which your fathers served…or the [new] gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: ” (Joshua 24:14-15)

Of all the choices we make in this life, the one that matters most is this one.

1. I am going to acknowledge the fact of an ultimate powerful immortal Supreme Source of Life through
   1. the evidence provided in his creation,
   2. the provenance provided in his written word if I have it,
   3. the witnesses of his physical manifestation and resurrection if I have them,
   4. and submit to his authority in my life thereby placing myself under his protection now and in the hereafter as best I know how through the conscience given to every human being,
2. or I am going to buy into the lie of the Adversary that I can be my own authority and achieve whatever I want out of life even if I violate God’s laws AKA sin against God.

No agency has done more to wipe out the significance of “sin” than Christianity with fundamentalists relegating sin to a list of behavioral does and don’ts and liberals updating what constitutes allowable social interactions from Puritanical or Victorian restrictions, selectively obeying the parts we like and ignoring the rest. The essential problem with transgressing God’s laws is that these are not, as some people claim, legal restrictions or arbitrary rules established by certain cultures which change over time as circumstances change. 

God’s laws are natural laws, like gravity, established when he designed the universe. “A phenomenon of nature that has been proven to invariably occur whenever certain conditions exist or are met.”

We understand this process in the material world physics that we can observe, but this also applies to social and spiritual domains that are more or less hidden. Can we not extrapolate the same point of view that human actions within these domains cannot break these laws without causing chaos and inevitable destruction. Conflict within the social domain is an obvious result of breaking social contracts, is it not?

Unless counteracted, unchecked transgressions of established rights and natural boundaries protecting the various elements of Creation results in ever-spreading chaos and ultimate utter destruction. Current scientists are saying exactly the same thing. We humans are destroying our ecology, our social interdependency, our ability to survive as a civilization and even our own selves through our refusal to sacrifice our self-indulgence to promote the welfare and sheer existence of our interdependent social and physically sustaining world.

This is sin, a disruption in the “right-ness” of that person’s relationship / connection to Creator/Sustainer God and others and the natural world, which spreads and contaminates every dimension, not just moral. Anyone who has experienced a relationship breakdown should be able to personalize this concept to their own life.  There is much more than a cessation of relationship with the ex-spouse – there is loss of time and experiences with children during split custody, loss of financial security, loss of shared friends, loss of a home, and it goes on and on, loss of emotional stability, loss of physical health. Then there are the effects felt by the children, and family members, and friends, and school associates, and work colleagues, and…