Living in a Rubber Room (Part 2)
Last week we looked at the question, “Why didn’t God make the world in such a way so as to give people freedom but without any bad consequences?” The answer was two-fold. Either God would have to control people personally and stop them from doing bad things (make puppets out of them), or He would have to take away all bad consequences, which would put us in a “rubber room.” Two follow up questions might be, “Why did God make us free to choose anyway? And why should there be negative consequences to bad choices to begin with?”
God made humans free because freedom is necessary to proclaim love. Could this be done without freedom? Not without sacrificing love (Galatians 5:13). For example, I could program my computer to tell me that it loves me regularly. Initially, it might give me an ego boost, but after a while, it would get dull. Why? Because it is just the computer telling me what I told it to do with no will of its own. The computer does not choose to love me; I choose for the computer to love me, and that’s not real love. Would it be any more impressive if God did it with us? No. It is just another “rubber room.”
For a proclamation of love to have any meaning, a free choice is required. A free-will being that sincerely says, “I love you,” to another is a meaningful expression because it is not just a preprogrammed response. It stems from an independent agent who is not under the absolute control of the one desiring to be loved. But to say, “I love you,” to another involves the risk of being rejected, and this answers our second question: why must there be negative consequences to bad choices? We will talk about this more next week.
God bless you, and I love you.
Kevin Cauley