CGG Weekly publish this essay, “One Choice,” on February 10, 2023.
“I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.”
—Deuteronomy 30:19
Western civilization is fixated on the matter of free choice. Everyone wants to be able to choose whatever beliefs, behaviors, and lifestyles seem best to them, and in principle, it is hard to fault them. The human nature in all of us desires complete autonomy. No one likes to be told what to do; each wishes to make his own decisions.
Over the past several decades, the choice movement has been ramped up by the surge in feminism, centered on the abortion issue, and the sexual revolution, morphing through its various stages from free sex to homosexuality to transgenderism. These in-your-face-24/7/365 cultural issues have made it virtually impossible to avoid the question of the human freedom to choose. The world has come a long way from the original Western freedom movement of 1776.
From the beginning, God has allowed human beings to choose. He did not intervene to stop Eve from taking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden and giving the forbidden fruit to Adam (Genesis 3:1-7). In similar fashion, He informed His chosen people, the children of Israel, “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing” (Deuteronomy 30:19). He gave them a choice; they were to decide the course of their lives between these contrasting outcomes.
Yet, He did not leave them to do so without counsel. In Genesis 2:17, He tells the first couple that taking from the Tree of Knowledge would end in death, clearly implying obedience and life as the better option. Correspondingly, in Deuteronomy 30:19, He advises the Israelites to choose the positive path: “. . . therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.” In both situations, He made the superior path plain.
What is fascinating about these tipping-point occasions is that the human freedom to choose—what scholars call free-moral agency—ultimately boils down to one choice. We make that one choice, and all our subsequent decisions follow as mere iterations of our original choice.
God does not complicate matters with great questions of philosophy, complex legal issues, or endless permutations of possible cause-and-effect scenarios. Instead, He puts the choice in the black-and-white terms of eating or not eating, living or dying, and blessing or cursing. In the end, the one choice is perhaps even more straightforward: Him or some other god. All the great questions men pose about human life distill into a selection of who we decide to worship, serve, and obey. They essentially hang on our determination of who decides for us what is good or evil.
When we do so, we have chosen God or our god. Without fail, every one of us, like Adam and Eve and the children of Israel on the edge of the Promised Land, end up rejecting God and choosing “other.” David notes this sad fact in Psalm 14:1-3:
The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none who does good. The LORD looks down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there are any who understand, who seek God. They have all turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is none who does good. No, not one. (Emphasis ours throughout.)
The apostle Paul quotes this passage in Romans 3:10-12, adding in verse 23, “. . . for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Everyone who has ever lived on the earth—with the glorious exception of the perfect Son of God, Jesus Christ—has used his freedom to choose to pick the wrong god. Paul informs us of the tragic result in Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death.” The result has been this chaotic, uncaring, futile world of sin and death, which he explains in detail in Romans 1:18-32.
Everyone who has ever lived on the earth—with the glorious exception of the perfect Son of God, Jesus Christ—has used his freedom to choose to pick the wrong god. Share on XAnother intriguing aspect of our singular choice is that we all choose the same “other god”: ourselves. Humans may say they worship Zeus, Gaia, Odin, Isis, Brahma, or even some variation of the biblical God, but at the heart of every human religion is the rejection of the true God and the desire to please the self. People choose a religion that suits and satisfies them. What happens when someone realizes his religion has failed to produce benefits for him? He readily moves on to another that better fulfills his expectations, exposing that his real god is himself, the one he is trying to serve.
The Bible consistently teaches that no one chooses the true God, at least not initially. Jesus’ plain statement in John 6:44 flips the matter of choice on its head: “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” We do not seek God and choose Him. Our lives expose the lie in this kind of “seeker” mentality: On our own, we choose the other god, ourselves, repeatedly, and the proof is in our sins. If God did not draw us to His Son, we would continue to seek self-satisfaction until we reached our end in death as billions have before us.
Jesus reiterates this point when choosing His disciples—forerunners of all converted Christians—to follow Him in His way of life: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit” (John 15:16). It took a gracious act of God to wrench sinners from self-worship to worship of the Creator God—to make the right choice and produce good results. Otherwise, we would still be reaping the terrible consequences of our original wrong choice.
Once, like the rest of the world, our sins and hostility of our selfish natures blinded us to the truth, unable to see the better way God offers. God Himself broke the cycle of madness and futility: “For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (II Corinthians 4:6). The stunning implication of God’s choice to call individuals and open their minds to the truth in Christ is that, until that auspicious moment, they could not choose the true God!
It seems contradictory to say that God gives humanity free-moral agency and then say they are unable to choose the true God. However, the fault lies not in God but in us. Our sins and selfishness cause us to reject God. Because this anti-God way has been the course of this world since the first sin in the Garden, no one can climb out of the morass of sinful living to make the choice that will lead to life unless God intervenes in each person’s life.
But God is not content with the human status quo. As Paul writes in the last half of Romans 6:23, “. . . but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” God gives grace to those He calls and provides the opportunity to make the right choice. Then and only then do human beings have true freedom of choice. Only at that point do they have the perspective and knowledge to begin to see the true God and the abundant life He offers through His righteous way of life. Only with the blinders removed do they have the opportunity to make that one choice correctly.
Choose wisely.
