The granting of free will

The concept of free will and how it has caused us a human race to go so wrong is well documented.  For whatever reason He saw fit, God allowed Adam and Eve the ability to choose between Him and sin, knowing that it could go badly.  The natural question we ask, then, is "why would He do this?"  Wouldn't it have been better and achieved His objectives more to create us in such a way where we love Him and there is no capability to choose anything else?

The underlying focus of this statement is the risk involved with free will.  We know how the story turns out, and now in hindsight we suggest that God should have arranged the situation differently in order to produce a better outcome.  But what if we switched the focus of the question of why He gave us free will from the risk involved to the positive reasons why He might have given us the ability to choose?

First and foremost, it is important to recognize and state the absurdity in questioning anything God has done and has chosen to be right and good.  To question the Source of life that gave us the ability to think and formulate questions in the first place is lunacy.  God did it, and God is good.  The only conclusion to be drawn, therefore, is that granting us free will was right and good.

I continue to read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  He makes a short, simple statement that points out the positive reason why God had no choice but to give us free will.  It is a thought I have never heard before, although the simplicity of it makes me feel as if I should have heard it before.  The statement is part of his response to a question of why God gave us the ability to choose poorly, thus leading to a fallen world in which He had to make the most painful decision of all- sending His one and only Son into that fallen world to save it.  Had he created us differently, the whole process of redemption and salvation would have been unnecessary. 

But what free will allows us to do is what is at the core of God.  Lewis' statement is as follows:

"The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away from God centuries ago.  They were able to do this because He gave them free will: He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness."

At His core, God is love.  He could not create anything in the likeness of Himself without giving it the capacity to love.  If we were created to be in relationship with God, who is the source of infinite happiness, we have to have the ability to love because God is love.  Granting us free will was not an unnecessary roll of the dice on His part, but an essential requirement for creating a being in His own likeness with the capacity to know and love Him.

What we have since chosen to do with free will is a different topic, and one that should cause us no small bit of shame.  But the question of why we were created with the ability to choose is rendered pointless when we step back and understand why we were created at all, and that free will is a necessary component of our basic makeup required to achieve that goal.