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Only as Thy Will is.
We find these words of Jesus in Matthew 26:39. as follows:-
When he had gone a little further he fell upon his face in prayer and said:
My Father if it is possible
let this chalice pass me bye;
only as thy will is,
not as mine is.
Now
the will of Jesus was His will,
as apart from God's Will.
While He did share the divine Will He still had a human will as well, for He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity having a divine Nature and a human nature.
We therefore observe here that Jesus begged His Father to spare Him the awful sufferings that were upon Him, but sought the divine Will over and above His Own human will.
This exceptional part of Jesus' life is so important for it clearly highlights the extraordinary importance God places on the human will.
Jesus, being the perfect Man
and being the Son of God,
actually willed to be spared
the horrendous cruelties destined for Him
by the Will of God.
As God the Son, Jesus remained perfectly united to the Godhead during His life on earth,
yet His human will
was fearful before the divine Will!!!!
As well it might!
Following Jesus' example here, all the Saints followed the Will of God rather then their own will, where the choice was necessary.
Adam and Eve in Paradise
In the Garden of Eden, the father and mother of the human race lived in perfect harmony with creation and with the Creator.
God had brought them forth perfectly. They were not subject to a sinful nature. Their spirits, their minds and their bodies functioned perfectly as humans, not corrupted - originally - by sin.
The will of Adam and the will of Eve were perfectly attuned to God's Will and they enjoyed total happiness and lived in pure bliss.
Yet even then, when the devil lured them into disobedience by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
they used their freewill
in opposition to God's Will.
Again we clearly perceive the total amazing regard that God has for the freewill of the human being.
The Angels
The Angels are spiritual beings without bodies and they too were created perfectly, as Angels.
Yet Revelation 12 informs us that
he whom we call the devil, or Satan,
the whole world's seducer,
was flung down to earth
and his angels with him.
They too used their will to defy God, even they, who well might have had superior intellects to humans, if we are to judge by the successful deception of the devil over Eve!
These three points about the freewill of God's creatures clearly indicate that
God gives total freedom
in the use of freewill,
even when in a state
of perfect being,
such as was Jesus; as were Adam and Eve in Eden; as were the Angels - in varying ways.
This of course is required because God desires to share His Divinity with His creatures. He is not going to share His Divinity with robots - no,
each sharer of His Divinity
must be able
to recognise, acknowledge and appreciate
God
in His Goodness, Truth and Love.
To achieve this, the sharer must have total freewill.
I thus come to the point of all this:-
Even in Heaven
the sharer retains
his freewill
absolutely.
He remains an individual who is capable of defying God.
Now of course, once a person achieves Heaven and appreciates all that this entails and is fulfilled in every possible way - even beyond his wildest ambitions - there is no way that he will ever use his freewill in any way but in absolute accord with the divine Will.
However, he continues to remain capable of recognition, acknowledgement and appreciation for that is the whole idea of his being created in the first place.
Just because he has reached Heaven, does not mean that he is suddenly reduced to a robot without freewill!
Born-again Christians and 'The Passion'
I was checking out the internet on possible news following the first public viewing of Gibson's The Passion of The Christ, when I came across a 'born-again' preview of the film.
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