Week 14—Tuesday Genesis 1:26-27
Genesis 1:26-27
WHY DID GOD CREATE US FREE?
We continue our meditations on the cross as the revelation of the Heart of Reality. I have often wondered why God dared to create us and to create us free. It was a risky business for God and the creatures created. To make us free would mean that God would have to be limited. God would have to step back and allow that free will to operate. God could not coerce it, if so the will would not be free. And the will would have to be free in both directions—it must be free to choose evil as well as good or it would not be free. To be able to choose in one direction only is not freedom. But suppose that will should go wrong—it would break its own heart and the heart of God too. For God would have to live alongside that straying, rebellious will as love. And it is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sins and sorrows of the loved one and make them its own. If love stays out of the sins and sorrows of the loved one, it is no longer love. But if it gets in, it bleeds. All love has the doom of bleeding upon it as long as there is sin in the loved one.
God, the all-knowing, must have known this. Then why did God care? Well, why do parents create children? It is a risky business on their part to bring into the world children who might go astray and break their own hearts and the hearts of the parents. Then why do parents create? Simply because it is the nature of love to create objects of love upon which it can lavish love and be loved in return. Love by its very nature is bound to create. But the parents say, consciously or subconsciously, “If anything falls on that child, it will fall on us. Its joys will be our joys, its sorrows our sorrows, its sins our sins.” Was it different in God, our Father? Not if God were love. God saw the risk and took it on one condition, that anything that falls on us would fall on God also. God would bear our sin and sorrow in God’s own body.
O God, my Father, when I think of you doing this, my heart is bowed in the deepest gratitude and the profoundest awe. I wonder at such love that would take such risks and carry through though it meant the cross. That love has me forever and forever. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Since God took the risk of creating me free, I’ll not let down God’s trust in me.