The Freedom of God
By John Gavazzoni

One of the things that exposes the off-centeredness of our (supposed) Christ-centeredness, is how most Christians have made man's freedom a central pillar of their theological understanding. "Pillar" may be not as accurate a metaphor as "glue." The freedom of man seems to be the very glue that holds together most folk's understanding of how the God-man relationship works out. They simply cannot understand how God's relationship with man can possibly be explained without there being a place deep within the soul of men and women where he/she makes choices according to some kind of sovereignty that God has ceded over to them, concerning which God will not, refuses to, interfere at all.

This obsession with man being effectively his own god, in that as it is perceived, God acts toward man only in accordance with how man chooses for Him to act, or as it is popularly conceived, how man allows Him to act, makes a laughing stock of the freedom of God. One of the indicators of a more mature theology, instead, is an insistence upon the freedom of God: God acts freely without any constraints laid upon Him. He doesn't consult with you or me; He doesn't take into consideration any notion on our part that we should have a say in things, other than, I hasten to say, to with great sovereign determination, finally rid us such vain imagination.

With that above as a background, in this article, I mean to apply the truth of God's freedom to the matter of God being love and God being loving. There is the matter of love and as noun, and love as a verb. There is the matter of the difference between Love's Being and Love's activity. The action of God is never robotic. God, as Love, freely acts, freely chooses, when and how and in what measure, to be actively loving toward us, that is, to be actively giving us life's good things.

While He is Love, and while that Love is intrinsically good, and intrinsically good-bestowing, and always has our long-term best interests at heart, the fact that He is love does not bind Him to always, at all times, in all circumstances, shower us with good things. In fact, as I've noted in other articles, His freedom is such, that He often chooses to withhold from us positively good things, with a view toward not letting us miss the best of His love, and His loving.

In terms of salvation--that is making us whole--God always acts toward us having our total wholeness as His goal. Your soul, at some point in God's dealings with you, may need for God to freely refuse to heal (healing is good) your body, yet likewise, at another juncture of His relationship with you, the healing of your body may be just what your soul needs. God releases treasures out from within our spirit by both His goodness and severity.

So, consistent with His freedom, God at times (and here I speak anthropomorphically) steps aside into the shadows of our lives, and leaves us to ourselves to make our "free will" choices (which really are bondage-of-the-will choices), and to, therefore, suffer the consequences. It seems to escape much of our notice, that in such an epistle as Galatians, where Paul reveals the primacy of grace so clearly, and with such force, that he deems it important to remind the Christians in that province, "be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Very recently, in fact, it's hardly more than hours ago, as the Lord brought to my recollection, times of intense suffering in my life; one which left me so unable to pray that in attempting to do so, I could only manage an animal like groan, and another which left me in bed in a fetal position, whispering, "Jesus, save me," that He whispered, "you were reaping what you sowed." It seemed so strange that upon hearing that whisper of the Spirit, that I felt a great release of spirit, accompanied by immediate peace and joy. That did seem strange to me. You would think one would be unhappy to hear that analysis, and be troubled rather than be ushered into a deep peace.

With some time to meditate on the experience, I realized that the joy and peace had come from a fresh realization that circumscribing the whole of those experiences, was the freedom of God in action. On one hand, God had laid my suffering at my feet, but on the other hand, it really lay at the feet of His sovereignty, His sovereign right to give me, as it were, in those times, as the saying goes, "enough rope to hang myself." When we understand it, there is no better place, no finally safer place, than to live within the freedom of God.