Every man has something of the divine in him, and when he is truest to himself he is most at one with God. The whole meaning of human personality is a growing realisation of the divine personality. God's sovereignty has no meaning except in relation to a world of which He is sovereign, and His purposes can only be fulfilled through human agency. While His thoughts far transcend in wisdom and sublimity those of His creatures they must be in a sense of the same kind--thoughts, in other words, which beings made in His image can receive, love and, in a measure, share. And though God cannot be conceived as the author of evil, He may permit it and work through it, bringing order out of chaos, and evolving through suffering and conflict His sovereign purposes.
The problem becomes acutest when we endeavour to harmonise the antinomy of man's moral freedom and the doctrine of grace. However insoluble the mystery, it is not lessened by denying one side in the interest of unity. Scripture boldly affirms both truths.
No writer insists more strenuously than the Apostle Paul on the sovereign election of God, yet none presents with greater fervour the free offer of salvation. In his ethical teaching, at least, Paul is no determinist.
Freedom is the distinctive note of his conception of life. Life is a great and solemn trust committed to each by God, for the use or abuse of which every man will be called to account.
His missionary zeal would have no meaning if he did not believe that men were free to accept or refuse his message. Paul's own example, indeed, is typical, and while he knew that he was 'called,' he knew, too, that it lay with him to yield himself and present his life as a living sacrifice to God.
Jesus, too, throughout His ministry, assumed the ability of man freely to accept His call to righteousness, and though He speaks of the change as a 'new birth,' a creation from above, beyond the strength of man to effect, He invariably makes His appeal to the will--'Follow Me,' 'Come unto Me.' He assumes in all His dealings with individuals that they have the power of decision.
And so far from admitting that the past could not be undone, and no chain of habit broken, the whole purpose of His message and lifework was to proclaim the need and possibility of a radical change in life.
So full of hope was He for man that He despaired of none, not even of those who had most grievously failed, or most utterly turned their back on purity. The parables in the Third Gospel of the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the lost son lay emphasis upon the possibility of recovery, and, in the case of the prodigal, specially on the ability to return for those who have gone astray.
The teaching of Scripture implies that while God is the source of all spiritual good, and divine grace must be present with and precede all rightful action of the human will, it rests with man to respond to the divine love.
No human soul is left destitute of the visiting of God's spirit, and however rudimentary the moral life may be, no bounds can be set to the growth which may, and which God intends should, result wherever the human will is consentient. While, therefore, no man can claim merit in the sight of God, but must acknowledge his absolute dependency upon divine grace, no one can escape loss or blame if he wilfully frustrates God's design of mercy. Whatever mystery may attend the subject of God's sovereign grace, the Bible never presents it as negating the entire freedom of man to give or withhold response to the gift and leading of the divine spirit.
In the deepest New Testament sense to be free is to have the power of acting according to one's true nature. A man's ideal is his true self, and all short of that is for him a limitation of freedom. Inasmuch as no ideal is ever completely realised, true freedom is not so much a possession as a progressive appropriation.
It is at once a gift and a task. It contains the twofold idea of emancipation {96} and submission. Mere deliverance from the lower self is not liberty. Freedom must be completed by the appropriation of the higher self and the acceptance of the obligations which that self involves. It is to be acquired through submission to the truth. 'Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.' A man is never so free as when he is the bondsman of Christ. The saying of St. Paul sums up the secret and essence of all true freedom: 'The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.'