#4020 – Power to Choose

Good morning people who walk in the freedom to choose right or wrong 

Many argue the point that “If God knew something evil was going to happen (like the many infants murdered by Herod when Jesus was a baby as was prophesied by Jeremiah hundreds of years earlier), then He could have intervened and stopped it from happening”. 

I don’t want to be trite here. I too have thought this at times, and it is based in a desire to not see evil prevail.

But one of the gifts that God created people with is the freedom to choose. 

We all celebrate this when wonderful choices are made; choices that benefit us and that benefit the world. Praise God for the power to choose!

But we all want this same power of choice revoked anytime that it is used to do evil. Imagine how many tragedies and disasters could have been avoided if God took the ability to choose away! 

But He didn’t. Here in lies our challenge and our difficulty. 

We want the freedom to make good choices and to make the choices that we want to make. We don’t want to be forced into making decisions; we don’t want to be told what to do. 

But we can’t have this choice only on one side of the ‘good and evil’ equation. Oh, how good it would be, but then it wouldn’t really be a choice. 

God is not responsible for our choices – good or bad. Nor is God responsible for other people’s choices – good or bad. 

Yes, like with this devastating scripture above, God knows ahead of time what decisions people will make, but He does not initiate the evil that people do.