From Sampler to Sower

Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Text(s): Genesis 4, Romans 5

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 9 of 10, We’ve already talked about the ways we’re using polleverywhere.com to facilitate this series.  We also used it during our game time Tuesday night.  Unfortunately right in the middle of our game the service started returning 504 errors both to me who was using the web interface and to contestants trying to text in answers.  I’ve never had this problem with them before, and it was cleared up within 10 minutes, but obviously you need to have a back up plan if you use Poll Everywhere.

Message Summary: If you’ve been following our weekly updates, you know that our new Senior High teaching series, You Decide, focuses on soliciting and answering students questions.  We’ve set up a Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.

This week we again started off by answering some of the frivolous questions: “Where’d you get your computer stand?” “What’s your favorite activity?” “You wanna buy a duck?” and then zeroed in on a couple of questions dealing with the creation and fall of humanity.

The first question had to do with the story of the fall itself. “Why didn’t God know that Adam and Eve ate the apple? Or was he just being sarcastic?”  You’ll remember that after Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they realized they were naked and hid from God.  When God asked why they were hiding, Adam admitted it was because of their nakedness.  God then asked “”Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from (Genesis 3:11, NIV)?”

So, how did God not know?  And if God knew, why’d he ask?

We talked about the questions that parents can ask – questions typically about things their children do wrong, questions the parents typically already know the answer to.  We discussed the reason parents ask such questions are not because they need the information, it is because their children need to confess.  Likewise, when God asked Adam if they had eaten the forbidden fruit, he wasn’t revealing his ignorance or being sarcastic, he was offering grace.  From the very beginning we see that God’s response to sin is to extend grace and provide opportunity for repentance.

But that brings up another question that came into our poll:

“Why did God create people if he knew not all of them would follow him?”

Really, this question is really two questions.

First, did God know that Adam and Eve would fail to obey his command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

We acknowledged that there are some schools of thought that would argue God didn’t know.  That’s not to say that God isn’t omniscient, rather this school of thought argues that the future is not real, and therefore not knowable.  In other words, God knows everything, but the future is not yet a thing, it’s only a possibility.  Most advocates of this position would argue that God knows all the possibilities, and all the potential outcomes but he doesn’t know which possibility will be actualized because it hasn’t been actualized yet.

They make this argument in order to defend the concept of human freedom.  It’s a reaction to the argument that if God knows in detail all the choices we will make, we really have no choice; we have to do what God already knows we will.  However, knowledge is not necessarily causation.  Despite the logical conundrums caused by such a statement, the Bible seems to affirm the seemingly contradictory truths that God knows and we have a choice.

The  Bible certainly seems to affirm that God knows the future.  We see this anecdotally, as in the stories about Joseph.  God knows and reveals to Joseph by a dream that one day he will rule over his siblings.  God knows and reveals by way of dreams that in three days the baker will be executed and the cupbearer will be restored.  God knows and reveals by way of dreams that there will be seven years of plenty in Egypt, followed by seven years of famine.  God certainly appears to know.

The Bible also affirms this by way of declaration.  Perhaps my favorite comes from Isaiah 46:10:

I make known the end from the beginning,
from ancient times, what is still to come.
I say: My purpose will stand,
and I will do all that I please.

In light of these stories and statements I have a hard time with the argument that God doesn’t know the future.

So if God knew that Adam and Eve would use the gift of choice that he was giving them, why did he give them the choice in the first place.  Why not simply put humanity in heaven to begin with, or leave the tree out of the garden so Paradise would really be a paradise?

Simply put, God gave humanity a choice because God is love.

Remember last week?  We talked about the natural attributes of God (those things that God, by definition is) and the moral attributes of God (those things that reveal God’s character because it is what God chooses to be).  Among God’s moral attributes, and central to them all, is his essential character as love.  God is love.  And that love stands behind and motivates his every action.

But love requires an other.  In order to love, there must be someone else to love.  You cannot love if you are everything and the only thing.

And for there to be an other there must be freedom.  Without freedom, humanity would be nothing more than a puppet, a poorly disguised extension of the imagination of God.  You can’t love a puppet.  Love is essentially other centered, and despite what we say about loving yourself, self-love isn’t really love.

And so because God is love, and so there might be someone for God to love, God chose to create humanity as the special object of his love.  And so we might truly be an other, God gave us freedom.  Creation itself was a sacrifice on the part of God.  God chose to stop being everything and the only thing and allowed there to be another will in the universe that might oppose his own.  As Revelation 13:8 puts it, Jesus is the Lamb that was slain, not from the year 30 AD, but rather from the very creation of the world.  Not only our redemption, but our very creation was made possible by the cross.

That then begs the question: “But isn’t it a cruel love who would create someone with the possibility of hell?”

Before we can begin answering this question the first thing we must understand is that God does not desire to condemn anyone.  As 2 Peter 3:9 tells us God is not slow, “He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”  Just because some people will spend eternity in hell, that reality is not the result of God’s will, but their own.

But why would God even allow that?  The question that always gets asked is “If you were a parent and saw your child doing something that would cause their death, wouldn’t you stop them?”  As a parent the obvious answer is yes – if I saw my child making a fatal mistake I would stop them.  But I also know as a parent part of parenting is allowing your children increasing freedom as they grow.  And the essence of parental love is not protecting your child from every mistake, but in the end allowing your grown child to become an independent adult.  Forcing your child to obey your every desire is not love, but abuse.

Similarly it is no love which forces itself on another.  Love requires sacrifice.  Love requires freedom.

And so, because God is love he gave Adam and Eve a choice.

God’s moral attributes explain his actions.  But it doesn’t stop there.  There are some other things we know about this freedom because we know about God.  We also know:

1. Because God is sovereign we know his purpose will stand.  We read that in Isaiah 46:10 also.  Our freedom does not put God’s kingdom in jeopardy. By our free will we might opt out of that kingdom ourselves, but God’s kingdom will endure.
2. Because God is wise God can accomplish his purposes in the world without resorting to coercion.  One of the key criticisms of Wesley’s belief in human freedom was that it eroded divine sovereignty. But Wesley pointed out that God reveals his wisdom by ruling sweetly rather than coercing creation to do his will.
3. Because God is love, we can also be confident that the final outcome for those who turn to God will be better than what was lost in the fall.  Creation redeemed will be even more glorious than the Paradise lost.  God has our best interests in mind.

But the most important question isn’t why did God give us freedom in the first place, it is will you use your freedom to choose God now.  We ended by giving students to make a choice for God.

Element of Fun/Positive Environment: Like our Junior High service this week, we played a game of Balderdash as an up front game.  But for Senior High we tried to incorporate the Poll Everywhere experience into it.  The first five students to text their names into us were our five contestants.  And then we attempted to use Poll Everywhere to allow them to submit their made up definitions.  Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, about halfway into the game, we got 504 access errors from Poll Everywhere, both on the web interface and on our cell phones.  But if everything always worked exactly right, it wouldn’t be youth ministry would it?

Worship Set: From the Inside Out, Hosanna (Brook Fraser’s version)

Favorite Moment: I’m really loving the connection that this series creates between my students and me.  There is something about being honest about the questions they have that really brings us together.  My one regret is that I don’t have time to deal with every question that comes in.  For example, there was a question that came in on our comment line while I was teaching that asked if Adam and Eve made it to heaven.  I would have loved to talk about the grace that God extended to them, and the significance of the clothes of skin God provided them, but we just didn’t have time.