“So I decided there is nothing better than to enjoy food and drink and to find satisfaction in work. Then I realized that these pleasures are from the hand of God. For who can eat or enjoy anything apart from him? God gives wisdom, knowledge, and joy to those who please him. But if a sinner becomes wealthy, God takes the wealth away and gives it to those who please him. This, too, is meaningless—like chasing the wind.”
Ecclesiastes 2:24-26 NLT
“Problems often cannot be answered or resolved because the problem itself is never clearly recognized.”
So once said the late R.J. Rushdoony when talking about the so-called problem of free will. It’s our contention that the problem is deeper than we tend to think of it, that it’s not an abstract theology debate indulged in by egg-headed ivory-tower nerds who read a lot of Calvin, Bavinck and those sorts of heavy fellas. Quite the contrary, it’s at the heart and soul of human experience. It’s the centerpiece of man’s war against God and, therefore, the crisis point of so much suffering.
Spurgeon once said that the more truth we believe the greater will be our sanctification. Our knowledge of the true God – that is, our actual knowledge rather than our false opinions and half-digested thoughts about Him – directly relates to our sanctification. Rushdoony said that the question of free will can never be resolved until it is recognized that because man is a secondary cause, i.e., he is not God, his will can only have a secondary, conditioned, and contingent freedom.
God’s sovereignty and human responsibility are both true. God’s authority and our freedom are indeed facts except that the former is unlimited and the latter is fenced in by that aforementioned unlimited authority. The question of man’s freedom is impossible to answer if we don’t see it as a derivative one. God’s freedom is absolute; man’s is limited, reactive and responsive. It must always be so and can only be so unless in due course of the ages ownership of the heavens and earth change hands from God to man.
Men are free to drive the car to which God hands the keys. To some He gives a sports car, to others a truck. To each He gives. God is the author and giver of life and gifts and man is the receiver. Thus, man can drive the car he’s given but a car isn’t a boat or a space ship. This is the key to godliness with contentment; it’s the sole building block of this thing we call the pursuit of happiness. All such pursuits contrary to God’s truth is like trying to make your Toyota or Ford a boat. The worth of each man resides in the fact that he’s an image bearer of the Creator God who made him, not in his athletic or financial prowess. Yes, indeed. Chesterton said that there’s nothing more extraordinary than an ordinary man and ordinary woman raising an ordinary family.
Men pursue goals apart from God, and for their own glory, because of the theological flaw of humanism. Humanism is all that would make man live without the true God. And the central metaphysic of humanism, in every demonic variation, is that man is the measure of all things, not God. Nothing, though, is more easily proven to be false than this absurdity.
Which of us is free to choose his time of birth or his race? There was a movie, Benjamin Button, where Brad Pitt played a man who aged in reverse and it was fascinating precisely because it was fantasy. You and I are free in derivative issues but we aren’t God. We may choose to marry Betty or Sue, or go to the beach or mountains for vacation, but we can’t be as God. To know this truly is to see the sipping of a hot coffee, the hearing of a bird’s morning song, and even so mundane a thing as washing the dishes as divine acts through which we worship. The earth is literally the Lord’s and that means that there’s no action, no experience, no labor, and no repose that isn’t, therefore, pregnant with the theological reality of the triune God. To breathe is to worship for the man or woman of God.
Pleasing and enjoying God is life’s primary goal or else this isn’t His world but something else. And if so, what is it then? Can we for the moment seriously, soberly consider the options?
They’re fearful.
If this is not God’s world, and if it isn’t as He declares it to be in the pages of holy Scripture, then what is it we have? A tragedy interrupted by fleeting pleasures and loves; a meaninglessness fought and pushed against to no avail. If not God, if not the love and salvation of Christ our Lord to redeem us and this world, we scream in the perpetual nights of the soul, for this is all nothing, we are nothing, and there is nothing. If this isn’t our Father’s world then what’s the difference between a nice meal with friends and a killing field? If Christ is a liar, if Christianity is false, then something like Auschwitz is just another fact of reality. And that fact is neutral because nothing means anything in godless world. What are horrors and loves, or hopes and losses, but the moral evaluations of deluded minds in an amoral universe?
But God has done in Christ what none can do! And this makes the sitting with friends and enjoying a meal the grandest of things. It makes the smallest conversation where Christ’s name is praised the greatest light of the world! The fact of God’s radical sovereignty and the salvation in Christ by faith alone change all things, redeem all things, and are exactly the facts that transform our hearts and everything we do. Since God is sovereign, and we’re saved by His love – love that put Him on the cross so that we’d have eternal life, not judgment – every single aspect of our existence is Corem Deo. We aren’t alone in this. We aren’t abandoned in a world gone mad. Our every hurt, every fear, every desire…all things from Him and to Him and for Him. In Him we find our true selves.
“As a child of your Father, request from the Lord all those things which are the focus of your good desires. This is the reason why the Lord does not fill His children to overflowing in this life, but permits much emptiness to be in them, so that they would make their childlike desires known to Him and beg of Him for fulfillment. Make all your needs known to your Father, that is, whatever presses you down, threatens you, and you long to have; do this as intimately as a child would ask his father. Do not then tremblingly stand from afar, but rather, as a child, use the boldness which you have received and cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’ Pray for the fulfillment of your desires with sweet childlike supplications; that will be pleasing unto the Lord.”
— Wilhelmus à Brakel, ‘The Christian’s Reasonable Service’
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