You get up on a Saturday morning, get dressed, and throw open the front door. How are you going to spend your day? You can keep things small and routine: visit a friend, go shopping, watch TV. You might also do something epic: take a spontaneous road trip, withdraw your savings and give it to the homeless, start that novel you’ve been talking about for years. The possibilities are seemingly endless!
But they aren’t endless. There are somethings that you are simply not allowed to do, at least not legally or easily. You can’t throw hand grenades at pedestrians. You can’t declare yourself a police officer and start fighting crime. You can’t drive your car onto an airport tarmac.
Is your “free will” restricted by not having every theoretical activity available to you? Perhaps, but is this really a problem? We generally agree as a civilization that, as a whole, we’re better off if individuals don’t have certain options on the table. We might argue about what those options are, but few advocate anarchy as the ideal state of affairs.
Now let’s get into a specific example. Let’s say you’re a young man with a history of violence, and you really have it out for your mother-in-law. You decide to spend your day of endless possibility by going to her church and shooting up the place.
Would anyone have a problem if this man wasn’t given this particular option? If God placed an invisible wall around the church, preventing the man from entering or firing through, would we be any worse off? Indeed, wouldn’t this in fact be a powerful testimony of God’s protection? Imagine if someone got a video of a gun-wielding madman smacking into absolutely nothing!
Instead, in the aftermath of yet another gun massacre, we are forced to assume that God must have his reasons for not interfering – just like in Columbine, Paducah, Killeen, Austin, San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Orlando, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Aurora, Charleston… and on and on.
sleeping in sundays 