The Power of Our Choice
In the beginning, God created everything from nothing, and He made it to contain a choice. Inside the Garden of Eden, God’s special home for His newly created man, God “made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Genesis 2:9) From the beginning, humanity was given free will and the obligation of choice. We are not commanded to make a choice without any instruction from our God and neither was Adam. In verses 16-17 record that God gave Adam careful instructions. They say, “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
We all know how Adam and Eve’s choice played out. Our world groans under the sinful death that began when they took a bite of the forbidden fruit. It is easy to judge them, easy to claim that we would have made a better choice, but do we? Each of us are given a choice each day. Do we follow the direction of our Lord, or do we chase what is pleasing to us? It is the same choice, and it often has the same consequences. In fact, James would argue that each of our choices carries the same opportunity for righteousness or for tragedy. James 4:17 tells us, “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” The choices are ours to make, and therefore, the consequences are ours to own.
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