This post was actually intended as a comment on these thoughts on my friend Annie’s blog. Unfortunately, I rambled too long and blogspot would not accept a comment of this length. So, I’m going to post these ramble-y comments and post a link over there.
It’s late, and I’d like to spend more time developing this thought, but I think that -- in many aspects -- you are correct in your assessment.
It does indeed seem as if we are left on our own, largely, in terms of our decisions, as if God just does sit up in heaven and smile down at our bumbling.
But the problem is this: is there any evidence, in this world, that we are able to properly make decisions? After all, we are the people who chose hell over heaven and death over life. We’re the people who are utterly incapable of finding truth -- so much so that the Truth had to be sent to this earth and die, that we might have it.
There is no evidence that we, as humans, are capable of making right choices on our own, because we are so fundimentally not in the right. Kierkegaard would argue this way, and I think I agree: fallen man is so fallen that he could never, ever, find his way to the truth, or the right. If there were, the Law would have been enough. Heck, it would have been more than enough. God was nice enough to give us training wheels, and yet we still failed, because we have no truth, and no ability to find the truth, even if it is in front of us.
This is why it cannot be that God abstractly set up a system in which he sits back and lets us make our decisions and fumble our way blindly through life. Or, rather, there is no way he’d set up such a system and call it good -- because we’d never make the correct decision.
The thing you’ve not quite hit on is the thing most significant of all: the presence and reality of Christ. “I am the way, the Truth...” he says. But not truth or wisdom in an abstract sense, the kind we’d not comprehend. But in a personal sense, in a present sense. Not that kind of truth that we merely study in an objective sense, but the kind of truth which is a man. One that we can know.
But not only know, but one who dwells IN us. One who is so inseparable that we cannot divide between him and us. Paul said, “For me, to live is Christ, to die is gain... for it is not me who lives, but Christ in me...” (Bad Summary) I wonder if any of us have really truly appreciated the meaning of that verse. I know that I have not; the more I consider it, the more my mind wrestles with it.
But I know this: that Christ is present in me... and not only that, to some extent, he IS me, as if there is an almost trinitarian symbiosis between him and I, to the point where we are utterly inseperable, and I -- who have no truth -- become as one who has the truth.
I don’t want to overstate my point; I am not Christ. But if I die, and he remains, yet as a person do not cease to exist, there is something of a symbiotic relationship I do not fully understand -- much like, I think, the paradox of Christ and the Church.
I’m a bit longwinded at this point, but the point I want to emphasis is that you are missing the key to understanding not only God’s will, but God Himself: Christ. The question of the will of God cannot be understood in the abstract; we cannot study him and come to any conclusions, like a scientist studies the physical world. We can only understand him through knowing him; and we can only know him through Christ, who is the Truth, the Logos, the very wisdom of God himself.
If Christ dwells in you, and you have died, the question isn’t one of your will, but a question of his will. And I do not mean that in a, ‘feel his will and follow it’ sense. I mean that in a literal sense. If you truly know Christ and have died, you cannot not do his will. There is no separation between his will and yours. None. To the extent that you know him and his truth, you naturally follow his will -- like a train on tracks follows its stated path. The question of choice is moot; the train does what is fundamental to it. (I could support this point from a Biblical standpoint, but haven’t the time right now. Perhaps I’ll return to it some other time)
In the same way, the question of personal choice without the question of who Christ is and the nature of his presence in our life is a dangerous one, since it avoids the very thing which can provide an answer.
Sorry, I got a bit ramble-y there; hopefully, you can glean my point on the centrality of Christ and the question of his presence as more central than the question who makes the call. Summary: the redeemed are led by the one who has redeemed them, the one who is in them. If one has Christ in them, that person is dead -- not in a personal sense -- but in a sense of his/her will. It’s not a question feeling; it’s a statement of how things are. So, one who knows Christ knows his truth, and does his will. It’s the way of things.
Again, my apologies for the general length of this comment.
