Choices set the course for your life. One choice like choosing to drink and drive can dramatically change a life in an instant. Who you choose to marry sets a course. The college you attend has great influence. Trying recreational drugs can set a course.
The nature of choice (free will), consequences (principles), and a sovereign God can be confusing. You have a choice to accept the tension between the three or not.
Consequences are not God’s punishment. He’s already forgiven you, if you accepted Jesus’ sacrifice on your behalf.
- Choice or free will has to do with what you have control over in life. Your attitude and reactions or actions are the only things you ultimately control. God created you in his image. Therefore, you are free to make a choice regarding how you will handle yourself. Each day you make a million choices. The more you understand and respect principles and God, the better your choices will be.
- Consequences (principles) are rules set in motion by God. They apply to everyone, regardless of belief or values. Physics, the study of matter and energy and how they interact, reveals principles. For example, the law of gravity as first explained by Sir Issac Newton, which in the simplest of terms means that if you drop an egg from the roof it will fall till it meets with a surface (matter). The law of the harvest is another example. Seeds placed in the ground die and emerge as a plant, i.e. we reap what we sow. There’s Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction of some sort. The Ten Commandments given by God through Moses are principles too. Cecil B. Demile, the famous movie producer, said, “We cannot break the ten commandments, only break ourselves on them.”
- God is sovereign over all, in control of everything. While he can and has at times suspended the laws of nature, those laws apply to everyone. This means that you should not assume you are different and attempt to defy principles. But you have the right, and should exercise it daily, to pray to God for anything, including miracles of healing and restoration of all manner.
God’s unique plan for each life allows for people to survive accidents, illnesses, and addictions. He often uses horrible experiences to turn lives into opportunities to teach or touch others.
Your life will include turning point opportunities. Choices you make at the turning points can change the course and timing of God’s plan. In Exodus we see God’s people freed from many years of slavery at the hands of the Egyptians. God’s plan is to give them a “promised land.” It is a real place, about an eleven day journey by foot from Egypt. It took them forty years to get there.
They made bad choices and kept falling back into a bad attitude. God does not suspend free will to work out his plan for you. He is patient. Many of the Israelites died in that desert; never saw the promised land.
God is loving, holy, and just. He can redeem anything you turn over to him, but some of the opportunities he places before you have an expiration date. In most cases, where individual choices defy the basic ground rules God has given for how humans should live well, people and those around them suffer.
For many, an “eleven day journey” becomes years of desert time where God works with them to mature and develop character.
The best chances for living a life of peace and for living up to your potential is to accept that God is sovereign, that he loves you, and his rules are in place to protect you and keep order in the universe.
*Read all of Exodus for full account of the Israelites journey from slavery to freedom.