It really is your decision, your choice. So… what are you doing with your free will? You know you would be screaming bloody murder if you thought you were denied your will. It would probably be a whine about the unfairness of creating you in the first place with no opportunity to act on what you want. But since you do have free will… ‘how’ are you exercising it? Do you employ your will with only you in mind? Is your approach, ‘my way or the highway’? Or do you simply go about doing what you want irrespective of other’s and their will?
The obvious point though is that we all have been created with free will. The question is not – do we have free will. Everyone has free will. And everyone exercises it. These two points are ‘givens’, they are ‘is’s’. However, we sometimes are in conflicting or opposing wills: the me v. you confrontation. This is the conundrum. Now what? How do we, hopefully peaceably, reconcile opposite wills? Typically, we don’t. We only engage in battle rather than the, ‘come, let us reason together’ approach.
Being a ‘reasonable’ person, I think that the determination should be the subject of the conflict. If it’s a ‘I want you to stay’ but ‘You want you to go’ then the subject is you not I, thus the final arbiter. Rarely, though, are the issues that simple and clear. So… is there a final arbiter in these situations? I believe there are – plural. Some of the arbiters are: eventual impacts. Will one decision negatively impact others more? Another arbiter is your character.
But I believe that the final arbiter is scripture. Unfortunately not everyone will accept the Word of God as authority. And unfortunately too often scripture is ‘interpreted’ to prove my point. You should never take scripture out of context or without considering what happened before and after the verses you are using… but we do. The problem isn’t scripture, the problem is how we use it. More of us need to look at Paul’s behavior (1Corinthians 8:9-12). He said that tho’ he had the ‘right’ that he wouldn’t act on it if it made a brother stumble. Free will. It is. How do we use it – attempting to impose ours on others?
…but, what do you think?
