The Frustration of Free Will

“Mom, can God do anything?” my five-year-old son asks me as we drive to school.

“Yes Jackson, God can do anything. But what are you thinking about in particular?”

“Well… can God stop someone from doing something?”

And so begins a lesson on free will…

“Yes Jackson, God could stop a person from doing something, but he doesn’t because he gives us choices – something called “free will.” Just like I want you to make good choices, God wants us all to make good choices. He provides us with what we need to know to make good choices, but then he leaves it up to us. He doesn’t want to make us do the right thing; he wants us to want to do the right thing and to make the choice to do the right thing. And so that is why bad things sometimes happen, because of the consequences of people making bad choices.”

Jackson is quiet, so I throw in an illustration to help explain. “ For example, if a man is driving too fast and hits a child crossing the road that terrible thing happened not because God wanted it to happen, but because God gave that man free will – he gave him choices.”

I park the van and then we dodge raindrops as we run toward the school.

Our impromptu conversation about free will today got me thinking about the subject. Free will is such a tricky matter – it is frustrating really. There are times when I wish God didn’t give it to us at all. We are hardly worthy of it!

Look at all the destruction we cause through our choices! And the results of all that sin, the impact of human selfishness, greed, laziness, etc, ironically make humans turn around and blame God! “How can God allow such suffering?” “Why doesn’t he step in and stop it?”

But the answer is so frustratingly simple it can be explained to a child, “God gives us choices.”

To take away our choices would change everything – the whole design, the purpose of humanity. We wouldn’t choose to love God, we would have to love God and wouldn’t know any different.

But oh how beautiful it would be – a return to the Garden of Eden.

I must admit, it sounds appealing to me. I understand why God made free will. And most days I am grateful he did.

But sometimes I would trade it all in. I would hand over my choices for everyone to happily live in peace with God. Free will is not an easy burden – look at what humanity has done with it!

Now, I am not meaning to question God’s wisdom here. I am just admitting that sometimes I hate free will. It brings pain and suffering. And – as if that isn’t bad enough – humans then turn around and blame God for the pain that humans caused! It drives me crazy!

As I open the door to let Jackson into his classroom he whispers to me, “That story about the man hitting the child made me sad.”

I feel terrible. “I am sorry sweetie. I was just using it as an example. That particular story didn’t really happen,” I try to console him before he walks into school.

But I know I can’t really take away that sadness. The story made me sad too because of the million other stories that are true – the drunk drivers who do hit children, the gunmen who slaughter students on their way to class, the kidnappers and molesters who steal childhoods and devastate families. Yes, free will does make me sad and I know that not until heaven will we be protected from the effects of free will.

We can’t blame God for these horrific results of sin. We can only blame ourselves and try to make better choices in our own lives.

I may sometimes want free will to magically disappear so that the pain goes too, but that is short-sighted and impossible. That would alter the whole course of life. God is not going to do that. Humans who have the choice to love God and not sin are the crux of God’s plan.

I may sometimes wish God designed it all differently – but what do I know? I am just one of those sinful, foolish humans that messed it up in the first place.