Choice

"Jesus replied: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'"
-Matthew 22:37
      Today I want to discuss something I heard about a long time ago and just recently started thinking about again. The topic is choice. Choice is a very interesting concept, and there are many things that can be talked about when it comes to choice, but I just want to talk about two things. The first of these two things is why are we allowed to choose things? Why does God allow us to choose things?
      This is a very weird idea for sure, but God does have the power to take away our power to choose. He never had to give us the ability to choose what we want to do. If He wanted to, He could take away any opportunity for us to sin or to stray away from Himself but He didn't. In the garden of Eden, God allowed Adam and Eve to choose what to eat and what to do. However, God placed the tree of knowledge in the garden, which He forbade Adam and Eve to eat from. Why? Why would God plant the tree if they weren't even allowed to eat from it? Why give them a chance to disobey Him?
      The answer is that God loves us, and because of that He wants us to love Him back. God's love for us is perfect and unconditional, and He wants us to love Him in the same way. So how does choice factor in? God allowed Adam and Eve to choose sin, because He also wanted them to be able to choose Him. True love is a choice. Without the ability to choose something else, love is meaningless. If Adam and Eve only had one choice, God, then their love for Him wouldn't be pleasing to God. It would be forced love. Because God allowed them to choose something besides Himself, had they obeyed Him, their love for Him would be true. However, they chose sin over God, and suffered the consequences of it.
      This brings me to the second thing I wanted to discuss about choice; choice carries responsibility. I wrote about responsibility before, and choice ties into it. We are responsible for sin because we chose to sin rather than love God. Adam and Eve choose to disobey God and sin against Him. They are responsible, and suffered the just consequence. Although the freedom to choose is nice, it burdens us because we are forced to carry the responsibility for our choices. We carry the responsibility for our sins, not anything else.
      It sounds like I am just saying choice is bad, but it's not. Choice does make us responsible for sin, but it also allows us to love God in a way that is pleasing to Him. True love is a choice. We can never truly love, because we have sinned, but God can. We continually choose to sin, but God chooses to love. When Jesus came to earth to save us, He had to choose to do so. He could have decided to save Himself many times, but He always chose to love us rather than abandon us. God knew that by choosing to love us He would have to carry the responsibility and consequence of our sin. Even love has consequences. Every choice we make does. The person responsible for making a choice gets the consequences of that choice. God made a choice to love us, so He carried the responsibility of that choice. Now He wants us to respond to the choice He made for us with a choice of our own. What do you choose?
-Smart