Choose

 But if it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served, which were beyond the Euphrates River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15)

I know someone who claims we don’t have free wills because – for example – we can’t leap tall building in a single bound. That’s his example, not mine. But Scripture never suggests that we have free bodies or omnipotence. That’s not what a free will is any more than a free hand means that it can scuttle across the room like Thing from The Addams Family.

A free will means that we are able to do what we already recognize that we can do: we can make choices. Those choices may be good, bad, foolish, wise, easy, difficult, or even impossible to carry out, but they are still choices. We can even choose to commit 93 murders and no one but God can stop us – and more often than not, God won’t stop us except as any person stops anyone from choosing to commit 93 murders. Of course, there are other factors that come into play if we attempt to carry out our choice to commit 93 murders: capacity for violence, availability of suitable victims, the law and presence of law enforcement, etc.

My thinking on this subject has been strongly influenced not only by what I find in Scripture, but also by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a professor of neurology and psychology and a victim of the Nazi prison camps. In the camps, he discovered that the prisoners actually had the capacity to be freer than the guards.

The guards had little choice. If they were disobedient, they and their family would suffer dire consequences. The prisoners, on the other hand, could make choices. They could step away from their reactions to things and choose how they wanted to respond to a far greater extent than the guards. After all, they and their family were already suffering. What could the guards do but kill them if they disobeyed, and that was probably better than their suffering?

What did their dignity matter? They had already been put on display naked, mocked, beaten, and degraded in any way the Nazis and some of their fellow prisoners felt the impulse to degrade them. Making decisions, even tiny ones, returned pieces of that dignity.

We face a greater threat than the residents of Nazi prison camps because we aren’t having our choices taken from us, we’re being taught to believe that we have no freedom of choice while at the same time, we’re being taught that freedom isn’t about choosing what’s right or wrong in an absolute sense. It’s about choosing what will get the most positive responses on social media, what will make you popular in your chosen group(s).

The problem is also that we don’t recognize that we have choices. We have been taught that we can’t help how we feel, and how we feel is paramount. We descend into anger, fear, or sadness and it might be hours, days, months r even years before we realize we’re angry, afraid, or sad. This is one of my problems with depression.

As children, we didn’t have the wisdom to choose. If we felt like we had to go, we went and our parents cleaned up after us. As we grow to adulthood, we’re supposed to learn better self-control, and how to interrupt the feel-do cycle. Our parents, other family members, and society encourage us in this. Somewhere along the line, however, they decide that we’re all grown up and don’t need them to step into that tiny gap. We think we don’t need them to step into that tiny gap, but we haven’t been taught that there are tiny gaps that we should step into. No, it’s only with toilet training and a few other key issues that we do so, and we don’t see it as stepping into the gap and making a decision, it’s just common sense and blind obedience.

We may not face the level of challenge that the people of Israel faced. We may not see it as a question of what god we will serve, but every day, we make lots of tiny decisions. Most of them, we won’t even notice. We just do them by rote. But if we were to make those decisions consciously, we’d probably in better able to make the bigger decisions.