Notice in the following Scripture that our Creator put Himself on record as giving his man Adam a choice? What a tremendous and terrible choice it was: one choice would lead to life, the other to death. But in spite of the warning, Adam chose wrong!
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him… (Deuteronomy 30:19-20).
You have been given the same choice as Adam—a choice between these two conflicting and powerful forces, life and death. If we can recognize the differences between them, we can make life-giving choices that satisfy us, rather than death-producing choices that are harmful and leave us empty.
The power of choice is one of the biggest and most compelling realizations you can ever have. God has never negated the power of choice that he gave to you and me. This means that your life path is not fixed! You can change it by the way you think, by what you say, by the choices you make, and by listening to and obeying the voice of the One who created you.
Once when we were in Egypt, our bus driver told us “what will be, will be!” In other words, there is nothing we can do about it. This seems to be the attitude of most people today. However over one hundred years ago, William James said “the greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”
The first law of life
We must learn that the right to choose for ourselves is a basic principle of life; in fact, choice is a sine qua non of life—an essential condition, a thing that is absolutely necessary of what it means to be a human being.
The late Swiss physician Paul Tournier explained, “The first law of life is the right of the individual to choose for one’s self, i.e., self-determination—to be free, is to choose for one self.” To be fully alive, to live, is to choose—every second of every day.
We have been given the responsibility by our Creator to control our own affairs. Dr. Rollo May said this is what separates us from animals. Animals are bound by a rigid stimulus/response system, but we are able to rise above that.
Do you know that your mind can handle a variety of different impulses and choose to follow the best one? Our freedom to make a creative decision when faced with multiple conflicting possibilities is a basic element of what it means for us to be a human being.
The freedom of choice
The Author of Life created you with the freedom of choice, the responsibility to choose for yourself. In the Garden experience, God gave Adam this freedom: he could choose from any of the trees in the garden to eat from—except one. God even warned him about the danger of eating from that one tree because it would cause his death.
From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die (Genesis 2:16-17).
In light of what happened in the Garden, I can understand why Erich Fromm called freedom a terrible gift. Perhaps this explains why so many of us run away from this freedom of choice.
Do you want this freedom?
Freedom is the fundamental condition for our growth, however the sad reality is that many of us do not want to be saddled with it. Why is this? Is it because we are afraid of too much responsibility or of making the wrong choices? Too lazy? A coward?
For most of us, it seems easier to blame someone else for what is going wrong in our life— like Adam blamed Eve—rather than take the responsibility for our own life. We want someone else to be responsible for our lives.
Often people have trouble deciding things on a very simple level, like what do I want to choose from that menu. Others have trouble deciding if they want to marry so and so. Some people don’t have a clue about what they want in life or what they want to do in life.
And there are some people who are so terrified of freedom that they end up living their lives in cages they built for themselves—afraid to come out, afraid of life itself.