God created man to have free will and to be free but the fundamental difference between God and man is God is entirely self-sufficient, in need of nothing. Man was brought into being not by themselves and their very existence was determined by their dependence on God. He has the ability to freely choose his actions but within a determined, conditioned existence. If he chooses to act according to how he was created, according to his Creator all will go well. If he chooses otherwise, he is set at odds with that which determines his very existence. As long as people remain humbly self-aware that they do not exist in and of themselves acknowledging that they are really nothing at all apart from God their free will, will fall in line with nature without having to stop and consider anything. This is harmony as the Creator meant it to be. Otherwise, man will be at odds with themselves and other individuals. God gave man free will because nothing else could be love. He wanted us to freely choose to love him and his way. Otherwise, we would be no more than programmed machines.
Using his free will wrongly left humankind fragmented and naked (Genesis 3:7). This misuse of his free will made him spiritually corrupt and subject even to physical corruption and death. As St. Macarius of Egypt stated “man’s thoughts became base and material and the simplicity and goodness of his mind were intertwined with evil worldly concerns.” Man became a conflicted soul though created to follow the Way in all things now was set against their ‘free will’ which had decided to depart from the Way. Man now struggled with what was ‘natural’ for them and what was ‘unnatural’ for them. This is what is meant by the ’knowledge of good and evil’ as represented by a tree in the garden of Eden. It was a departure from primal simplicity and brought duality in the world and that was the opening of a floodgate of all that is wrong in the world today, a ‘Pandora’s box’ if you will. This is what is commonly called ‘the fall’. Previous to the fall man acted according to their created nature but now they had to decide and calculate whether they should follow the way God said or not. So, what God originally created as simple now became complicated and inwardly divided humanity constantly having to vacillate between two choices that never should have been. The enemy’s original lie, I would call it THE LIE, that was what the human downfall was when they accepted what the enemy said, “God knows when you have the knowledge of good and evil you will be as gods”. When man decided to be their own god all the ills of man that followed fell upon them. When man decided they could not trust their maker then all came tumbling down. And just like any lie has to be propped up with another lie and another lie so has it been since the beginning of time and the fall. Man fell out of love with God and in love with themselves. People were created to find fulfillment and pleasure in God but by choosing their own way they began to seek pleasure from what was closer to them and their body and physical senses and that which could only temporarily satisfy. And the consequences of these choices have become evident through the ages.
“The heart itself is only a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and lions, there are poisonous beasts, and all the treasures of evil, there are rough and uneven roads, there are precipices; but there too is God and the angels,life is there, and the Kingdom, there too is light, and there the apostles and heavenly cities, and treasures of grace. All things lie within that little space.”
—St. Macarius of Egypt
But God did eventually give humankind hope by coming in the form of a man and giving his very own life so that man could be saved. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever believeth on him shall be saved.” (John 3:16). Now the suffering of this world could become a hope that man might see through their illusion of self-sufficiency and return to their original designation and to pristine simplicity and communion with the Way once again. Is it really that simple? Yes, it is, but more often than not people deny this and continue to prop up the lies and life becomes more and more complex.
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