[Gourds, Nat. Apple Festival, 2008, JAVanDevender]
Ezekiel 18:4 "Behold, all souls are Mine; The soul of the father As well as the soul of the son is Mine; The soul who sins shall die.
Everything hinges on this... am I my own man or not?
It makes all the difference in the world as to how I am "at home" in my life. At one extreme, among those religious or not, who understand our lives to be the outworking of a mysterious deterministic necessity, whether Divine or Scientific, the effect tends toward hopeless resignation. What will be... will be. What I am.... I am. Tomorrow will be what it will be and I, by taking thought, cannot change it.
Life becomes flat and the idea of "right and wrong" dims and if carried to an ultimate extreme, disappears altogether.
On the other extreme there are those, religious and not, who say that our lives and the future are entirely potential. They will be what we make them and ultimately neither God nor nature, Godlessly construed, can or will stop mankind from fulfilling whatever it deems expedient for its own ends. Individually this comes down to "It all depends on me." "I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul." (Henley, "Invictus").
Life becomes, proportionate to our immediate self-confidence, a measure of anxiety. In its ultimate extreme, man becomes exorbitantly arrogant or immeasurably anxious.
God alone can bring these two extremes into balance. Each of us, "all souls", belong to Him. As the Master Potter He forms us to house His Spirit. He shapes us according to our unique character. He knows just where the hole is, which He will either enter or leave open to our hollow interior. Yet each individual, in balance, is able to make his plans, initiate them, and strive to carry them out. In doing so we will reveal the nature of our hearts. We will demonstrate whether we seek to live in love for God and man or whether our only concern is to further our own selfishness and conceits. God gives us the freedom to decide in accordance with the desires of our hearts and allows us to undertake to fulfill them. But then He guides our steps... His sovereignty arranges and promotes or hinders and obstructs us according to His predestining grace. It was impossible that Christ should not die, yet the awful sin of that event and the decisions that lead to it, were fully and completely the product of the free will choices that Pilate, the Sanhedrin, Jews and Gentiles alike, made.
We belong to Him... hook, line and sinker... yet the soul that sin shall die.. because his sins are his and his alone. The plumb line hangs straight and true. God is sovereign in all things... and man is free to choose in accordance with his own individual nature.
Life thus becomes hopeful and responsible. We recognize the value of our own judgments and integrity, thus we are not robots, yet we have rest and comfort in knowing that no matter how far we are imprudent in some regard, if our motives and hearts are directed toward God, His sovereignty shall take all that we do and cause it to work together for good. We cannot fail.
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