Making a Choice is Freedom

[Wilber]

Jesus came to set the captives free, but in order for that to happen you must believe in Him. You have to make a choice to allow Him to set you free or to remain in bondage to sin and death.

Freedom is all about the choice. Adam and Eve had a choice to eat from the tree or not to eat from the tree. Our choice is to accept the free gift of salvation that Christ offers.

Paul told the Ephesian Christians: “[God] hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love” (1:4).

That's all of us. In order to be saved You must be free to choose Jesus. That is salvation, you have to believe in what Christ did on the cross for that to happen.

God's answer to our loss of freedom has always been Jesus.

The core message of the Christian faith—the Gospel—is that Jesus Christ rescues us from the slavery of sin and offers true freedom in this life and beyond. This is what Jesus said:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

The Good News—the best news ever—is that faith in Jesus frees us from the death we deserve for sinning against God.

“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” John 8:31-32

“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” John 8:34-36

 

[praise_yeshua]

We don't care about anything that we don't choose ourselves. If we do not choose it, it has no meaningfulness to us. It is nothing more than mere compliance.

God isn't looking for compliance. God is too smart to believe puppets have value.

 

[Clay]

The OP goes along with from Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

First of all, certain Scriptures teach us that it was in God’s mind and plan before the foundation of the world—there is an eternal aspect to what happened on the cross on Calvary’s hill. Take Acts 2:23: ‘Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.’ It was the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God that sent Him to the cross.

Or 1 Peter 1:20 says: ‘Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you’—it was planned before the foundation of the world. And again we read in Revelation 13:8, ‘And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.’
There are some who say that that should have been rendered, ‘… whose names are not written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb slain’. It does not matter which, the fact is that names were written in the book of life before the foundation of the world and when He did that, He did it because He knew that that person was to be covered by the death of His only begotten Son.

But let me end by giving you this specific statement which literally tells us that it was God who was doing this thing on Calvary: Isaiah 53:6: ‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.’

But have you ever realised that John 3:16 says this? ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son’—to the death of the cross—it is God who gave Him. Take again Romans 3:25: ‘Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God’—there it is again. Or Romans 8:32: ‘He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?’ He, God, He ‘spared not His own Son but delivered Him’—it was God who did it.

Then there is that great statement in 2 Corinthians 5:18–19, ‘And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation. To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself …’ It was God who was doing it, God the eternal Father. God was doing this by means of the cross, through Christ.

And then, above them all there is the last verse of 2 Corinthians 5, ‘For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him’ (21). You will never find anything stronger than that and any view you might hold of the atonement must cater for that. Indeed, I feel that that one verse is enough. There it is, a specific statement of the eternal Father: He made Him sin, He imputed the guilt of our sins to Him; He put them upon Him; and then He tells us that He punished them in Him. Any idea or theory of the atonement must always give full weight and significance to the activity of God the Father.


Martyn Lloyd-Jones, God the Father, God the Son

 

[TomL]

The OP goes along with from Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

First of all, certain Scriptures teach us that it was in God’s mind and plan before the foundation of the world—there is an eternal aspect to what happened on the cross on Calvary’s hill. Take Acts 2:23: ‘Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.’ It was the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God that sent Him to the cross.

Or 1 Peter 1:20 says: ‘Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you’—it was planned before the foundation of the world. And again we read in Revelation 13:8, ‘And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.’
There are some who say that that should have been rendered, ‘… whose names are not written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb slain’. It does not matter which, the fact is that names were written in the book of life before the foundation of the world and when He did that, He did it because He knew that that person was to be covered by the death of His only begotten Son.

But let me end by giving you this specific statement which literally tells us that it was God who was doing this thing on Calvary: Isaiah 53:6: ‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.’

But have you ever realised that John 3:16 says this? ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son’—to the death of the cross—it is God who gave Him. Take again Romans 3:25: ‘Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God’—there it is again. Or Romans 8:32: ‘He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?’ He, God, He ‘spared not His own Son but delivered Him’—it was God who did it.

Then there is that great statement in 2 Corinthians 5:18–19, ‘And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation. To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself …’ It was God who was doing it, God the eternal Father. God was doing this by means of the cross, through Christ.

And then, above them all there is the last verse of 2 Corinthians 5, ‘For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him’ (21). You will never find anything stronger than that and any view you might hold of the atonement must cater for that. Indeed, I feel that that one verse is enough. There it is, a specific statement of the eternal Father: He made Him sin, He imputed the guilt of our sins to Him; He put them upon Him; and then He tells us that He punished them in Him. Any idea or theory of the atonement must always give full weight and significance to the activity of God the Father.


Martyn Lloyd-Jones, God the Father, God the Son

Verse 21. For he hath made him to be sin for us] Τον μη γνοντα ἁμαρτιαν, ὑπερ ἡμων ἁμαρτιαν εποιησεν· He made him who knew no sin, (who was innocent,) a sin-offering for us. The word ἁμαρτια occurs here twice: in the first place it means sin, i. e. transgression and guilt; and of Christ it is said, He knew no sin, i. e. was innocent; for nut to know sin is the same as to be conscious of innocence; so, nil conscire sibi, to be conscious of nothing against one’s self, is the same as nulla pallescere culpa, to be unimpeachable.

In the second place, it signifies a sin-offering, or sacrifice for sin, and answers to the חטאה‎ chattaah and חטאת‎ chattath of the Hebrew text; which signifies both sin and sin-offering in a great variety of places in the Pentateuch. The Septuagint translate the Hebrew word by ἁμαρτια in ninety-four places in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, where a sin-offering is meant; and where our version translates the word not sin, but an offering for sin. Had our translators attended to their own method of translating the word in other places where it means the same as here, they would not have given this false view of a passage which has been made the foundation of a most blasphemous doctrine; viz. that our sins were imputed to Christ, and that he was a proper object of the indignation of Divine justice, because he was blackened with imputed sin; and some have proceeded so far in this blasphemous career as to say, that Christ may be considered as the greatest of sinners, because all the sins of mankind, or of the elect, as they say, were imputed to him, and reckoned as his own1

1 Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible with a Commentary and Critical Notes (vol. 6, New Edition.; Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2014), 338–339.