I've been on a Jonathan Edwards binge lately. It started with reading his sermons, and since then I’ve plowed through a 600-page biography and started into Edwards’ treatise, “Freedom of the Will”. My plan is to follow that up with “The Religious Affections”. It’s becoming an obsession, if you couldn’t tell.
Why do I mention this? Aside from my desire to recommend Jonathan Edwards, I also wanted to comment on Edwards’ “Freedom of the Will”. I’m not finished with the book, but it’s already changing the way I see the Christian life. Let me explain.
Edwards’ basic argument is that the human will is not free. Yes, the will has the power to choose particular actions. However, the choice itself is governed by a logically prior desire or motive – over which the will has no power.
In other words, some things are under the jurisdiction of the human will, like choosing what to eat, whether to stand or sit, and even whether to give money to the poor. And yet, despite this power to choose certain actions, the will has no power over the ultimate motive lying behind its choices. That is, the will does not choose its desires. Rather, desires (which we do not choose) move the will.
As much as we may try to change our motive by choosing to do this or that, only the actions change – not the ultimate motive of our choices. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Who or what is my ultimate motive in life? To put the question in more explicitly biblical terms: Who or what is my god?
In the end, the answer to that question can be found by asking, What do I love most? According to Edwards (and I think he’s right), the answer given to that question is not something we choose with the power of our will. As much as we may try, we cannot choose to love someone or something. Rather, we simply love whatever we believe is lovely, and we love most whatever we believe is most lovely.
So if we simply love whatever we find lovely, and if our wills have no power over what we find lovely, then what do we do with the command, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength”? The only way someone can fulfill this command is if he finds God lovelier than anything else.
But that begs the question: How does one come to believe that God is infinitely lovely? At this point, I think the only possible answer is that God – who is infinitely lovely whether we believe it or not – must reveal himself to us. Want to love God? Don’t rely on your (fallen) will, but truly pray (which means a complete surrender) that God would reveal himself to you in all his loveliness.
I’m talking in abstractions, I know, but this becomes very concrete when we consider God’s actual self-revelation. I’d bet that anyone who has ever encountered the living Jesus (the revelation of God) would say that he is infinitely lovely. And the one who sees such loveliness cannot help but love him. Maybe I’m teetering on the edge of “irresistible grace”, but the point still stands: We love what we find lovely, and when God shows us his infinite loveliness in Jesus, we cannot help but love him.
So the concluding question is this: How do we come to see the loveliness of Jesus? The answer: God must re-create our hearts, which have turned to lesser loves and degrading passions. Only then will we find Jesus – the crucified Christ – lovelier than anything else our hearts have ever seen.
As God’s revelation of his loveliness changes what we find most lovely, then our wills will be changed and our ultimate motive will be to love God more than anything else (which also means loving one another, for that is what our lovely God desires). And then we – whose wills were once in bondage to lesser loves and degrading passions – can say quite freely: “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
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