Fairy Tale Spotlight: Was the Free Will of the Apostles Violated by God?

Humans are crazy, little, superstitious idiots when it comes down to it. We are ready to put the next supernatural god in charge if only they can prove that they are the real thing. And even so we may end up hating him, but at least we know he is real. Angels could come and show us great power, and we would try and worship them, even if that was not the angel's intention. We are silly creatures after all.

If God would give you ultimate proof of his existence, most of us would believe. Many of us would be jaded though. At the end of the day, we never really had a choice. We never really could choose one thing over another. The power of God is just so massive and great, who could dare stand up against it? But the thing is... God has not really bothered to do that. At least, He did not go so far as to make it blatantly obvious.

God chose the subtler solution. He left all the clues of his existence and expects us each individually to act as investigators. If we dig around enough, we may find God. If we don't bother to... we won't.

But then there was Jesus. He was a man, yet also God in a very real sense. He performed terrific miracles which were witnessed by 12 apostles who had no choice but to be smacked in the face by the very real fact that they were in the presence of their Lord. And here the question must be asked: Did God violate their free will? And once this is asked, you may wonder: What does free will have to do with any of this?

Free will was dealt with in the first part of this blog. Because how sticky human curiosity is, if you just give humans the proof, they have no choice but to accept it. They are given no chance to love it however. It's like being injected with the God drug. There was no choice in the matter. Free will was overridden. This is why God always seems just subtle enough to require actual effort on your part to figure out.

The apostles were not provided such subtlety. They saw Jesus for who and what he was. They could not deny it. Their free will was overridden and, frankly, it ruined their lives. Once presented with the complete truth, they spent the rest of their lives doing absolutely everything counter-culture, or rather in respect to God, so that the world basically flipped out and turned against these weirdos. When you come to realize that there is a true point to human existence, one tends to stand up to the slings and arrows of life and head to that ultimate goal... the house of God.

But knowing there is a God does not mean you'll accept it, but it will bring your ultimate choices to bare. In the case of Judas, he saw his relationship to God as a chance for power. The worst in him was brought entirely out into the open where he acted. He acted with all of his heart as he saw God and hated him. Judas would have been a fan of one of the Fallen Angels who claimed similar providence. The one true God was not the one he was looking for, and in his hatred, he acted against Him and shortly realized that his own existence had become absolutely pointless, and so he acted once more, ending his life. In the end, I don't think he really had much of a choice. The advent of God merely made him out to be who he always was. It might have been better if he had never been born at all.

But to the other apostles, they lost their free will. And here we might ask one more question: Is that a bad thing? No. It isn't. Number 1: God has license to do what he did. And 2: Most other people never really bothered to take notice. Even at the time, people just thought the remaining apostles were nuts. They went out of their way to destroy their lives because there really was no choice. They knew God was real. They knew Heaven was on the other side. They acted entirely on the truth and not by faith. No longer normal human men, but future citizens of Heaven.

But when God took away the free will of these few men, it served as only a subtle hint for the following generations of humanity. It was clearly enough to go on, but nobody was there. Nobody could see it. They had to research it and find out about the truth. People had to bother to find out about this amazing thing that happened. You have to bother.

Human beings were granted free will so that we could investigate these things and figure it all out for ourselves. You have to look before you find anything. If someone just tells you that God is real; that means nothing. Seek and you shall find. Do not seek, and you will find nothing, but you will also have no one else to blame but yourself.

The answers to God, the universe, and everything are out there. Get off your butt and look into it. You aren't an apostle; God's not going to just give it to you like he did them. And honestly, when you think about it, we're all better off that way.

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