Decisions and Influence

Monday, October 17, 2016

I have once again been thinking about the duelling concepts of agency and obedience. It strikes me as odd that God gave us our agency, only to turn around and ask us to yield to His will anyway. However, I've realized that God's plan for each of us is not quite as strict or linear as I had thought. We still have a good deal of leeway, even when we are committed to following God's path.

And there's something else. Besides the many choices that God is okay with us making, there are many other choices that are not acceptable. These are the decisions that Satan tempts us to make. So, on the one hand, we could yield to God's influence and follow one of the many acceptable paths, or we could yield to Satan's influence and follow any other path. With every choice we make, we yield to either one or the other.

I had thought, and hoped, that I could make my own decisions – choose my own path, rather than being told what to do by some otherworldly influence. I felt that I didn't want to be restricted to the one path God wanted me to follow, but I had decided that I didn't want to follow the path that Satan would lead me down, either. However, even with an infinite set of options, those may be my only two choices. There are a host of good things that God would be happy to see me do, and Satan has a myriad of temptations. Between the two of them, every choice I could possibly make is advocated or opposed by one or the other of them.

If you remember a blog post of mine from ages ago, I blogged about agency through an analogy about red and green branches. Each branch on a tree is a choice that we could make. The green branches represent good choices, while the red branches represent bad ones. I had thought that there were at least some brown, or neutral, branches, but I don't think that's the case. I now think that all of the branches are either red or green, that all choices are either good or bad. At one point, I also thought (rather pessimistically) that there was only one green branch and that all the other branches were red, but now I don't think that's the case, either. I think that there are a lot of green branches, but still a lot of red branches, perhaps an even and infinite number of each.

I don't like the idea of having my choices made for me. I don't like the idea of there being only one good path that I'm supposed to follow. Besides, it just doesn't make sense, considering how important God thought it was for us to have our agency. I'm comforted by the belief that there are many choices I could make that would be good, and that I am free to make whichever choice I want. The idea that all branches are either red or green is also strangely liberating. It means that, for every choice I could make, there's someone who wants me to make that choice and someone else who doesn't. They each try to influence my decision, but I ultimately get to decide whom I follow. I always end up following someone else's influence, and that kind of stinks, but I get to decide whose influence I follow and how strongly I let their influence weigh into my decision.

Though rather deeply entrenched in the battle of good and evil, I still have surprisingly many options, and though each side pulls on me more strongly than I would like, I have the final say. I don't have to become a slave to either God or Satan. I can serve God and still be my own man. My freedom to choose is very important to me, just as it was to Him. I want to do the right thing, but I want that to be my choice, not His. In a way, I'm grateful that I don't always feel inspiration. If I did, I'd probably feel like God is always trying to tell me what to do. Instead, He gives me the freedom to make my own choices. I just hope He also blesses me with the wisdom to make the right ones.