Sunday School Today: Free Will and Sin

MAN’S FREE WILL

There are other beings in the universe, which God has created. These are angels or spirits. They do not have human bodies or souls. They are mightier than we are. They were also created to serve God, but like man, they have a free will.  Some of them fell into the sin of disobedience. Isaiah 14:12-15.

God could have made a number of machines to do His will mechanically. Instead He chose to create beings who could, if they wished, serve Him voluntarily and love Him freely. We cannot quite understand why He would desire to have it so, but the evidence clearly abounds throughout history. Man makes his choices, and God delivers the consequences.

MAN’S SIN

When God created free beings, able to do His will or refuse to do so, He must have known that some would choose the wrong way. And so it turned out. A great angel called Lucifer, now known as Satan, decided to set his will in opposition to God’s. The first sin was not committed on earth but rather in heaven. He was immediately cast out of heaven. Many other angels joined Satan and were cast out with him. From that time on, Satan has sought to hinder the plans of God in every possible way. When man was created with a free will, Satan immediately planned to tempt him from the path of obedience. God had warned man, but Satan succeeded only too well in drawing him into sin as well. The well-known story is found in Genesis 3.

Now God, as the moral Governor of the universe, cannot tolerate in His presence any being who deliberately disobeys His commands. This is why Satan was cast out of heaven when he defied God’s will. The same treatment was necessary for man, and so Adam was driven from the physical presence of God. Genesis 3:23-24.

Sin had entered the human race, and Adam’s nature has been passed on to every member of the human race. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, in this way death spread to all men, because all sinned.” Romans 5:12. We are all born with a tendency to sin. This nature responds to temptation from without and so we yield and grievously sin against a holy God.

Content courtesy of BBN International.