Freedom and Consequences.

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Deuteronomy 30:15-20
15 "See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, and death and adversity;
16 in that I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the LORD your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it.
17 "But if your heart turns away and you will not obey, but are drawn away and worship other gods and serve them,
18 I declare to you today that you shall surely perish. You will not prolong your days in the land where you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess it.
19 "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants,
20 by loving the LORD your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him; for this is your life and the length of your days, that you may live in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them." ​

Love is at the heart of our relationship with God. To love God is the First and Great Commandment, given to both the Chosen People of God in the OT and to all children of God in the NT.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9
4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.
5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Matthew 22:36-38
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
38 This is the great and first commandment.

But, in order for us to love God, we must be free to choose to do so. Love cannot be compelled; it cannot be forced. If we choose Him, if we choose to love Him, an abundant life in Christ is ours. In response to our choice to love God, He sends His Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8:9), to live within us and we become "temples of God," bought with the precious blood of Christ (1 Corinthians 6:19-20; John 14:16-17; Titus 3:5). The Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, strength, truth, grace, and comfort (among other things) and as we take the lower place before him throughout each day, we are more and more filled with who He is (Romans 12:1; 1 Peter 5:6). As this happens, our lives shine more radiantly with all that the Spirit is, and we enter into a life of contentment, and joy, and peace in the Spirit that no other manner of living can produce. (Ephesians 5:9; Galatians 5:22-23; Romans 14:17; 2 Corinthians 3:18)

If we choose not to love God, however, the consequences are very, very dire. To spurn God, to choose our own way over His - to sin - results in corruption and death.

Galatians 6:7-8
7 Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.
8 For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.

Romans 6:23
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Philippians 3:18-19
18 For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ,
19 whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things.

James 1:15-16
15 Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.
16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.

For many who are reading this post, what I've pointed out is well-known. What is often purposefully denied (or, at least, ignored), though, is that the "abundant life" God offers to all in Christ is "found" by a comparatively few people. Jesus himself declared this:

Matthew 7:13-14
13 "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.
14 "For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

The freedom to choose, the opportunity to know and love God, carries a terrible potential for destruction. Many Christians want to imagine that God will, at the last moment, perhaps, completely undo a person's freely-made choices to reject Him and live in rebellion and sin. I agree that God can intervene in a person's life very dramatically to alter their course from the Broad Way to the Narrow Way. Paul the apostle is a great example of such an event. But stop now for a minute and ask yourself how common this sort of event was in the New Testament. How many Damascus Road stories are there in the New Testament? Only one.

Why is this, if God can be expected to overturn the free choices of people to live in rebellion and sin? If it is God's common practice to undo a person's freely made choices, how free are they to choose, really? Not very, it seems to me. Real, actual freedom requires that one not only be free to choose between things, but to bear the consequences - for good or ill - of those choices.

Certainly, the Bible does not confirm that God will commonly overturn a person's choices, totally negating their effects, but, instead, offers example after example of the terrible irretrievability of the incorrigible sinner. Think of Jezebel and Ahab; think of King Saul; think of all those who watched Noah build the Ark, for many decades mocking and denying the warning of God that the Ark communicated and being destroyed, finally, in the Great Flood; think of the entire population of Sodom (and Gomorrah) burned to ash by divine fire from heaven; think of Pharaoh, defying Jehovah to the point of destruction; think of King Solomon, drawn into pagan idolatry by his persistent disobedience to God's command not to marry pagan women, trying, at the end of his life, to kill his divinely-established replacement. And so on.

As I've already pointed out, Scripture warns us again and again that sin bears bitter, ruinous consequences, not only down the road, but immediately and seriously in the loss of fellowship with the God of the universe. Ought we, then, to give up hope that the person sold out to sin can be saved? No, of course not. But Christians often rest, I think, on this hope far too much, falling passively silent before sin, cowed by the prospect of being called "prejudiced," or "bigoted," or "legalistic," or "self-righteous," or whatever, when they think to speak out against the wickedness that God promises will destroy people.

Should refusing to be cowed by labels and the objections of the wicked to our calling sin what it is result in angry, Westboro-Baptist-style haranguing of sinners? Obviously not (2 Timothy 2:24-25). At the same time, the believer should not be so mild in their response to sin that the gravity, the terrible danger, of sin is diffused and they appear, even, to accommodate what God has called evil. Too frequently nowadays Christians believe that godly love is always tender, tolerant, all-embracing. But truly godly love inevitably produces holiness:

1 Thessalonians 3:12-13
12 and may the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another, and for all people, just as we also do for you;
13 so that He may establish your hearts without blame in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints.

Philippians 1:9-11
9 And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment,
10 so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ;
11 having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

This relationship between love and holiness is reflective of the nature of God who is love itself but in whom "there is no darkness at all." (1 John 1:5; 1 John 4:8, 16) God rejects and hates sin (Deuteronomy 12:31; Psalms 11:5; Proverbs 6:16-19). He will have no communion with darkness. His love is bound by His holiness which means, in part, that God's love is not all-embracing, totally tolerant, and utterly unconditional. And so, in Scripture we read of Christ calling the Pharisees "hypocrites," "sons of hell," "brood of vipers," and "white-washed tombs full of corpses" (Matthew 23); we read of Paul casting out of the community of Corinthian believers a sinning brother (1 Corinthians 5); we read Peter's description of wicked false teachers within the Church who are like "dogs returning to their own vomit," and "washed pigs covering themselves in the filth of the pigpen" (2 Peter 2:21-22).

As God's children and ambassadors to a lost and dying world, disciples of Christ cannot compromise with sin in an attempt to avoid appearing "intolerant," and "close-minded," and "unloving." They must echo their Heavenly Father, warning stridently that sin destroys, that it hardens, blinds, and deafens people, and that such sin, freely chosen, will not generally be undone by God in its horrible, destructive consequences. Love requires freedom of choice, and freedom of choice necessarily entails bearing fully the consequences of one's free choices - for good or ill.