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Love and Free Will
Human Responsibility
Conclusion
A fundamental paradox of religion it that God, the Creator of all things, it almighty and good, hut the world people live in and know through history it full of evil. In other words, the sinful world of human experience does not mirror the sinless, perfect God who created it.This paradox it further complicated by the widely-held belief that an omniscient and omnipotent God mutt be in control of all human affairs and thus predetermines the course of human lives and history. Taken to its extreme, this traditional theory of predes-tination obviates the need for human effort altogether, including the practice of prayer, meditation, fasting and other religious disciplines, since an individual's life course is decided by God irrespec-tive of that person's thoughts and deeds. If God were in full con-trol of human lives, how could they be so steeped in ungodliness? How could it be that a good and loving God created a world of sin and suffering?
The key to resolving this lies in understanding why God gave a portion of responsibility to human beings, according to which hu-man life is determined both by the will of God and individuals' voluntary response to God's will. If human beings fail in their por-tion of responsibility, the fulfillment of God's will is postponed un-til such time, as they become responsible. An individual's life is predestined for goodness by God, but the fulfillment of that pur-pose depends on his or her response to God.
As discussed in Chapter 3, men and women were created to receive love from God and to return love to Him by sharing it with others within the paradigm of the three blessings. Love can be given and received only out of human free will. Any human expressions of af-fection and passion that are forced or contrary to God's will are not in fact true love, but merely simulations of it. They cannot truly ful-fill men and women and they donut give joy to God.
It is the essence of God's nature to give love. God's desire to ex-perience joy by giving and receiving love inspired the creation of a man and woman to receive and reciprocate His love. But God would not force His children to respond to Him and His love be-cause to do so would violate His own principles of love, principles by which God exists and by which He created. Therefore human beings are free to love God or not to love Him.
God created human beings with the expectation that they would grow in their capacity to receive and give love, passing through the three stages of the learning process: formation, growth and completion. Thus God created His children with only one purpose and destiny: to grow to maturity as true men and women who would develop their love in the creation of families, clans, tribes, communities, nations and a world of true love rela-tionships, centered on God. This purpose is unchanging and ab-solute, a manifestation of God's absolutely good nature. There-fore, it is right to believe that human destiny on the individual, family, tribal. national and global levels is predetermined to be one of goodness and ultimate fulfillment.
The timing of the fulfillment of humanity's original, good destiny is determined by the response of individuals to God, in particular the fulfillment of their responsibility to learn bow to give and receive love. Until human beings fulfill that responsibility, they will not be fulfilled and will not create the world of love and goodness that God intended.
It is not in any way a diminution of God's power for Him to en-dow His creation with a portion of responsibility. On the contrary, to do so is to confirm His omnipotence in that all His creation ulti-mately lies within His domain and belongs to Him. Regardless of what people do with God's gifts to them, eventually God's will shall be done. The unchanging will of God is for human beings to create an ideal world by completing the three blessings.
Thus the traditional view of predestination, which holds that all things (including human salvation and damnation) are predeter-mined by God as part of His overall scheme for the creation, is correct in recognizing the absolute nature of God and His will but wrong in ignoring the role of human beings in the accomplishment of that will. Without understanding the human portion of respon-sibility in salvation, such a concept of predestination provides a theological basis for individuals to maintain fatalistic views of life instead of responsible attitudes towards God, other people and na-ture. A traditional predestination theory may also negate the value of religious figures who have appeared in history as guides and saviors for fallen humans, begging the question: if the destiny of men and women is pre-determined, why would God send prophets and messengers to Sum fallen people from ways of error to paths of goodness?
The evil that exists in the world today, and has made human histo-ry such a tragic record, is not part of God's dispensation for hu-manity, but rather the product of men and women failing their re-sponsibilities. Not until people take full responsibility for their lives will evil end and good begin. All people are predestined to live lives of goodness, in the fulfillment of God's ideal, but the tim-ing of that fulfillment depends on them. To believe that human life is determined by God's will alone can lead to irresponsibility and fatalism, whereas to recognize and carry out the human portion of responsibility in the fulfillment of God's will leads to a life of spiri-tual growth and the completion of human purpose.
The next chapter will show how the first man and woman failed to fulfill their responsibilities, and how this affected fulfillment of their predestined purposes. Instead of complet-ing the three blessings, they destroyed the ideal world intend-ed by God and created hell instead of heaven. Their error is the root cause of all that has been wrong in human history and all that is wrong in the world today.