Understanding God's Role in Human Free Will

From the Mecca of Mormonism
Salt Lake City, Utah
This is Heart of the MatterTGNN’s original show where Shawn McCraney deconstructed religion and developed fulfilled theology. Short
Show 5s One Cup of Dirt
Taped November 1st 2020
Aired November 3rd 2020

Over the years of talking with non-believers, agnostics and open atheists, I have often heard arguments about God being responsible for everything.

The arguments go something like this:

“God is supposed to be omnipotent and all knowing, and he created me, right?”

I go along with it.

“So He created my friend here to be a homosexual, and he created me to be unbelieving, and he created Dahmer to be a serial killer and he did this because he knew what we would do and be, but he created us anyway.”

“Okay,” I say, and they go on . . .

“So, if there is a God, he’s responsible for my non-belief! He’s responsible for me being born into a home where my father beat me for not wanting to go to church and for making me bitter for all things related to him.” And the positions typically flourish from off this central theme: “If there is a God, and if he is all that Christians say he is, he is ultimately responsible for the nature and nurture that hinders my ability to believe.”

The Debate on Free Will

Some atheists take this point to an extreme and suggest that there is absolutely no free will at all for human beings. What they mean by this is we are all just products of our genetic make-ups, our environments, and other unseen factors that dispose us to think and feel and react to the world in the way that we do.

And of course, we have our Calvinist friends who pretty much say the same thing except they say that God, being sovereign and in charge of everything, does in fact, determine everyone’s fate, that there is no such thing as freewill, but that this God picks a few to believe (on him) and the rest he just allows to go to hell based on his deterministic indifference.

A Different Perspective

I want to depict God and his ways a little differently to you tonight. And I want to suggest that I believe God will be completely responsible for all factors that he allowed to come into your make-up as a human being.

Using myself as an example, we might say that He allowed me to be molested, he allowed me to be born in a home of LDS parents, he allowed me to be bad at higher math, and he allowed all the other genetic and environmental things to take place in my life. Having admitted this, I also suggest that he will strip all of those factors away somehow from me and my judgement – from all people who have been raped, beaten, mistreated, impoverished – whatever, and at his assessment of us, he will weigh what’s left in every human being and see what hangs in the balance.

I don’t know how he would do this – but simply put I suspect that all such factors will absolutely weight in when it comes to his mercy and justice toward us. Meaning, He will fully and rightfully assess each of us, once all extenuating factors have been removed, justly. So we might step before him and cry:

“My mom was mean to me!”

And he strips that away from our make-up and we see how we would have lived if she wasn’t.

“I was born without a hand!”

And he strips that away and we see what would have been the result.

“I was born a crack baby!”

And he takes that away – and we are left with what remains. And after all the mitigating factors we attribute to our faithlessness, and selfishness and indifference to God and Man have been taken into consideration perhaps our great and loving creator will then hold us accountable for what was actually ours.

Even if its leave just a teaspoon of ourselves and our lives in the balance, that is what we will be judged on.

Therefore, this will not be a “quantitative” judgement of our souls, it will be a “qualitative” analysis of our freewill selves – which I maintain all people have from birth.

(Beat)

Accountability Before God

I suggest that therefore none of us will have any excuse before Him. He is good and so he’ll own whatever he is responsible for in the judgement of human beings. But in the balance there will remain our portion – and rest assured, because we all have a portion, we will all be called in to account for it.

As an illustration imagine your life to be represented by

Accountability in Stewardship

10 acres of land. And you die and go before God to be judged with how you managed that land, and you say:

Well, the city came in and took eminent domain of five acres so they were not ever productive. And God will say, “and what about the other five?” And you say, “Well, you let disease infest the ground on three of those so they were no good.” And so He says, “and what about the other two acres?” And you say, “Well robbers that I could not control took one and a half of those!” And of course he says, “What about the half acre?”

And on and on you go, explaining why you were not able to manage the remaining land faithfully or lovingly. And he accepts all of your reasons – all the way down to the last cup of dirt. That’s all that’s left! “And what about that cup?” he asks. And we will realize, having exhausted every reasonable factual reason for our failure to bloom, that we could have actually produced fruit in that cup. And on that, and that alone, we realize that we will be judged.

Fairness in Judgment

Whether it’s a cup, a yard of dirt, an acre or a million acres, the judgement will be the same – because he is fair, good, merciful AND . . . just. So instead of seeing God as deterministic and yourself as incapable of ever choosing faith, perhaps we ought to see him as a reasonable God, who more than fairly will own whatever it is in our life that was out of our control, all the while holding us accountable for what is.

And I maintain that all people capable of rational thought, are responsible to Him, in some way, for whatever part of their life they freely contributed to – or freely wasted.

Significance of Response

So, whatever you are by nature or nurture that you are thinking prohibits you from receiving God by faith and walking in pursuit of him, I think you may be surprised that those things are really not important to him. What’s important is how you reacted and responded to what you were given with whatever freewill that remained.

This example obviously speaks to those who have been given much, doesn’t it? Those whose lives amount to a million acres with only ten of them being ruined by nature and nurture. The point is, God is fair, God is merciful, and God is just – whether he is weighing 990 million acres of dirt . . or just a cup.

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