God Honors Our Choices

Good news – God respects the choices we make. Bad news – God requires us to live with the consequences of our choices. All our lives on earth and our destination in eternity comes down to a single choice. Will we honor God as God - as Creator and Savior? Or will we be the god of our lives?

This has been the choice from the beginning. God created a perfect world and installed Adam and Eve to care for it and fill it with their offspring. He asked them to demonstrate their love and respect for Him by giving them a choice.

God had forbidden them from eating from a single tree – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:15-17). Satan lied and persuaded them to eat of the tree promising that they “would be like God” (Gensis 3:4-5).

God allowed them to choose – they freely ate. God then acted on their choice, proving Himself to be the only true God. He pronounced a curse on them and all His physical creation (Genesis 3:14-16). However, with the punishment came a promise.

God would send them a descendent who would be both fully God and fully man. That One would crush the head of the serpent (the god of this world) and redeem them from eternal separation from God – hell (Genesis 3:15).

Jesus never coerced anyone to believe in Him. During His ministry Jesus sent out the twelve disciples to share the Gospel. Jesus was giving the people the choice to receive Him as the promised Messiah. He told the disciples, “Any place that does not receive you or listen to you, as you go out from there, shake the dust off the soles of your feet for a testimony against them” (Mark 6:11).

Paul described how men throughout time ignored the testimony of creation that was meant to get men to seek God and make the choice to believe in Him. Men made a choice, “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks,” so they experienced the consequences, “but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Romans 1:21).

God does not need to punish us for our wrong choices; He only needs to let us experience the consequences of those choices. “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

The consequence of Adam’s choice was that sin and physical death enter the world (Romans 5:12). But God simultaneously promised a Redeemer to take the consequences of that choice on our behalf. In Romans, eternal death again the consequence for our choosing to sin. Here God names the Redeemer whose actions will result in the gift of eternal life instead of the consequence of hell.

God does not want, “any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Repentance for our wrong choices leads to God’s salvation.