Newsletter article for April 2003
© 2003 by Rev. Paul A. Wolff
In last month’s newsletter article I noted that the selfishness of Americans has reached idolatrous proportions. Since in His First Commandment (“You shall have no other gods.”) God condemns all idol worship and idolatrous practices this is a very serious offense against God. However, the offense is multiplied when such idolatry reaches into the church where God’s people gather around the common ground of God’s Word and His holy Sacraments.
Americans have turned their “Liberty” into a selfish desire for making their own personal choices about nearly everything, including things for which no real choice exists (especially life and death issues, which God alone controls). Consider how God would feel if His people would want to make decisions about things for which He has already graciously given them. Would Jacob, for example, choose not to accept a flock of sheep and goats simply because they were spotted and speckled (see Genesis 30), or would Jacob rather give thanks to God for giving him wealth despite the wicked greed of his father-in-law, Laban? If Jacob had chosen to reject God’s gift then what else would God do but say, “then you shall starve to death because you have rejected what I have given you.” Or what if Jacob had made a big deal out of accepting God’s gift, even then wouldn’t he still have made God angry by making it seem like he was blessed with riches because he had made some kind of right choice, rather than being blessed simply because it was God’s good pleasure to bless him? Either way he would have been insulting God.
In the above example God blessed Jacob despite the fact that Jacob had used trickery and deceit to steal the blessing and birthright from his brother Esau. The choices Jacob made were selfish and sinful and although God blessed him and gave him wealth and a large family, it wasn’t because Jacob was so good, it was because God is so forgiving and good.
The only “choice” which plays a significant role in the life of the Christian is the choice that God made to save us from our sins. God’s choice is the only one that matters, and because of that all people can be saved because Jesus died to pay the price for all the sinful choices that we make. True Christians know that it is an insult to Jesus and the sacrifice that He made for us to say that “I am saved because I chose Jesus as my savior.” That person is likely wrong on both counts. Jesus accomplished everything that needed to be done to bring us salvation, and for us to take even the smallest credit is stealing that praise and glory from Jesus.
The appeal is often made to “free will” as proof of our cooperation with Jesus in our salvation. However, this denies the fact of original sin which means that we are all born sinful (see Ps. 51:5). The Holy Bible clearly states that because of our sinfulness that we cannot contribute anything to our own salvation, and our own will is completely corrupted by sin. Even the great evangelist, St. Paul, struggled greatly with his sinful nature and recognized the corruption of his will. He says in Romans 7:15-20, “What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…. I know that nothing good live in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” It was not St. Paul’s choice to serve Christ, in fact it was Paul’s choice to persecute the church and imprison and kill Christians, but God chose him anyway despite this.
God works the same way in our lives, too. Whether we are converted at our Baptism when we are still infants, or whether we are converted as adults after hearing God’s Word and believing and then being Baptized, God gets all the credit in both cases. The choices that we make are connected to our “free will”, but whenever we exercise that will we are doing so in opposition to God, as the Scripture says, “everything that does not come from faith is sin.” (Rom. 14:23) Faith is all about submission to God and to His will, and about the subordination and subjugation of our own sinful will. Faith has nothing to do with making “right choices.” Even Jesus would not have chosen to die on the cross if He had done what He wanted to do, as He said in Luke 22:42, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” Since Jesus subjected His own will to God the Father’s will even though His human will was perfect and sinless, then we ought not claim that our “free will” or our choice means anything because our will is always tainted by sin. Instead we ought to thank and praise God for His good and gracious will through which He provides forgiveness and salvation for us.
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