The Ancient Law of Freedom

These words of our Lord — “How often I wanted to gather your children together, and you would not!” — set out the ancient law of human freedom. God made man free from the beginning, holding a power of his own, just as he has a soul of his own, so that he might follow God’s purpose willingly and not under compulsion from God. There is no coercion with God; a good will toward us is present with him always. That is why he gives good counsel to everyone. And in man, as in the angels — for angels too are beings that reason — he has placed the power of choice. So those who obeyed would justly possess what is good, given by God, yes, but kept safe by themselves. And those who did not obey would justly be found without the good, and would receive the punishment they deserve. God kindly gave them what was good; they did not take care to keep it, or count it worth anything, but poured contempt on his surpassing goodness. Having rejected the good, then, and, as it were, spat it out, they will all deservedly meet the just judgment of God. The apostle Paul bears witness to this as well in his letter to the Romans, where he says: “Do you despise the riches of his goodness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the goodness of God is leading you to repentance? But by your hardness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself against the day of wrath and of the revealing of the righteous judgment of God.” And he says: “But glory and honor to everyone who does good.” So God has given what is good, as the apostle tells us in this letter; and those who do it will receive glory and honor, because they did what is good when it was in their power not to do it. And those who do not do it will receive the just judgment of God, because they did not do what is good when it was in their power to do it. [a]

But if some men had been made bad by nature and others good, the good would deserve no praise for being good, since that is how they were created; and the bad would deserve no blame, since that is how they were made. But all men are of one and the same nature, able both to hold on to what is good and to do it, and able as well to throw it away and not do it. So some are justly praised even among men who live under good laws — and far more by God — and they are rightly attested for choosing what is good in general and for holding to it; while others are blamed and justly condemned for rejecting what is fair and good. That is why the prophets kept urging men toward what is good, to act justly and to do what is right, as I have shown at such length: because it is in our power to do it, and because through great carelessness we can become forgetful, and so need the good counsel that the good God has given us to know through the prophets.

For this reason the Lord also said: “Let your light shine before men, so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” And: “Take care that your hearts are not weighed down with overeating and drunkenness and the cares of this life.” And: “Keep your belts fastened and your lamps burning, and be like men waiting for their Lord to come home from the wedding, so that when he comes and knocks they may open to him. Blessed is that servant whom his Lord finds doing this when he comes.” And again: “The servant who knows his Lord’s will and does not do it will be beaten with many blows.” And: “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do the things I say?” And again: “But if that servant says in his heart, My Lord is delayed, and begins to beat his fellow servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, his Lord will come on a day he is not expecting him, and will cut him in two and give him his portion with the hypocrites.” All such sayings show that a man has power over himself, and at the same time show the counsel God gives him, by which he urges us to submit to him and works to turn us away from refusing to believe him — without forcing us in any way at all.

If a man is unwilling to follow the good news itself, no doubt it is in his power to refuse it; but it does him no good. It is in man’s power to disobey God and to lose what is good, yet such conduct brings harm and trouble on no small scale. That is why Paul says, “Everything is permitted me, but not everything is good for me.” By “everything is permitted” he points to man’s freedom, in which God puts no compulsion on him; and by “not everything is good for me” he points out that we should “not use our freedom as a cover for doing wrong,” because that is not good for us. And again he says, “Let each of you speak the truth with his neighbor.” And, “Let no rotten talk come out of your mouth, and no filthiness or foolish talk or coarse joking, which are all out of place — but rather thanksgiving.” And: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; live decently, as children of the light, not in wild parties and drunkenness, not in sleeping around and shameless living, not in anger and jealousy. And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were made holy in the name of our Lord.” Now if it were not in our power to do these things or not to do them, what reason did the apostle have — and far more the Lord himself — to counsel us to do some things and to keep away from others? But because man has free will from the beginning, and God has free will, in whose likeness man was made, a man is always being advised to hold fast to what is good; and that is done by obeying God.

And God has kept man’s will free and under his own control not only in what he does, but in faith as well, when he says, “Let it be done for you according to your faith.” This shows that a man has a faith that belongs to him, since he has a judgment that belongs to him. And again, “Everything is possible to the one who believes,” and, “Go; let it be done for you as you believed.” All such sayings show that a man is in his own power when it comes to faith. And for this same reason: “the one who believes in him has eternal life, while the one who does not believe the Son does not have eternal life, but the wrath of God will remain on him.” So in the same way the Lord, showing his own goodness and at the same time making clear that man has a free will and a power of his own, said to Jerusalem: “How often I have wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! And so your house is left to you deserted.”

Those who hold the opposite of all this make the Lord out to be without power, as though he could not accomplish what he wanted; or else they make him ignorant that they themselves were by nature “material,” as these men put it, the sort of thing that cannot receive his immortality. “But he ought not,” they say, “to have made angels of a nature that could break his law, nor men who turned ungrateful to him at once. They were made beings that reason, able to weigh a matter and judge it; they were not made like things without reason, or like animals, which can do nothing by their own will but are dragged toward what is good by necessity and force — creatures of one mind and one habit, unbending and without judgment, and incapable of being anything other than what they were made.” But on that supposition what is good would not be welcome to them, and fellowship with God would not be precious, and the good would not be worth much seeking, since it would arrive without any effort or care or study of their own and would be planted in them of its own accord, with no concern on their part. The upshot would be that their being good would count for nothing, because they were good by nature rather than by will, and possessed the good spontaneously rather than by choice. For that very reason they would never grasp the fact that good is a beautiful thing, and they would take no pleasure in it. How can people who know nothing of the good enjoy it? What credit is it to those who never aimed at it? What sort of crown is it to those who never went after it, like men who win a contest?

This is also why the Lord declared that the kingdom of heaven belongs to “the violent,” and said, “The violent seize it by force” — meaning men who by strength and hard striving are on the watch to snatch it away on the instant. For the same reason the apostle Paul says to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that all who run in the stadium run, but one receives the prize? Run so as to win it. And everyone who competes exercises self-control in everything — they to receive a crown that decays, we one that does not. So I run, but not without a goal; I fight, but not like a man punching the air. I beat my body black and blue and make it my slave, so that after preaching to others I am not myself rejected as unfit.” So this skilled wrestler urges us into the struggle for immortality: that we may be crowned, and may count the crown precious — the crown a man gets by his own struggle, not one that grows around his head of its own accord. The harder we strive for it, the more valuable it is; and the more valuable it is, the more we ought to prize it. Things that come to us on their own are never valued as highly as things reached by long and anxious care. Since, then, this power has been given to us, the Lord has taught us, and the apostle has ordered us, to love God all the more, so that we may reach this prize for ourselves by striving after it. Otherwise this good of ours would in effect be a good without reason, because it would not have come by trial. Sight would not seem so desirable to us if we had not learned what a loss it is to be blind; health is worth more to a man who has known disease; light, when you set it against darkness; and life, when you set it against death. In just the same way the heavenly kingdom is worth more to those who have known the earthly one. And the more it is worth to us, the more we prize it; and the more we have prized it, the more glorious we will be in God’s presence. The Lord has therefore borne all these things for our sake, so that we, taught by every one of them, may be careful in every way for the time to come; and so that, having been taught by reason to love God, we may go on in his perfect love. For God has shown patience over man’s apostasy, and man has been taught by it, as the prophet also says: “Your own apostasy will heal you.” God settled everything beforehand for the bringing of man to completeness, for his building up, and for the unfolding of his arrangements — so that his goodness might be made plain, and righteousness brought to perfection, and the church shaped after the image of his Son, and so that man might at last, at some time to come, be brought to full growth, ripened by such privileges as these to see and understand God.