Fate or Choice?

They said to Him, "We were not born of fornication; we have one Father: God." (John 8:41)

Arguing over circumstances that we have no control over while trying to ignore the most important relationships that we do have choices about is one of the great diversions of the enemy. People sometimes obsess over judging others about their parents, their color, their looks or talents etc. But from heaven's perspective, in the true reality which we need to pay most attention to, it is the character you develop that is shaped by the choices you make over time that determines what identity you end up with. Jesus has made His own identity available for all of us but if we refuse to allow Him to adopt us by allowing Him full access to our heart, we will end up being judged by the results of the identity we have carved out on our own.

The only way that we sinners can have the identity and value needed to live in heaven safely is to be 'in Christ' through embracing the salvation provided for us. To choose any other method is to reject the only qualification that can align us with the conditions needed to survive and thrive in the atmosphere of heaven in God's presence.

I have no choice as to who my parents were, what race I came from or even how my parents raised me. God does not hold me responsible for any of those things that have had such a dramatic effect on my life. But I am held responsible and I need to accept responsibility for the choices I make about how I relate to the circumstances I find myself in and how I relate to the offer of Jesus to transform me from what I am currently. I cannot change the past events of my life, even what happened minutes ago. But I can make a difference on my future and I have a great deal of potential to shape what I am going to look like, particularly inside, in the future. If I allow Jesus access to live within me my future can become radically different than my past.

These Jews, like most of us today, were assuming that their value and character were mostly determined by their ancestry and religion. Jesus declared that our identity and character and our relationship with God are totally dependent on how we respond to and what we believe about the One that God sent as His primary representative to this earth to reveal the heart of the Father. This the Jews found very offensive because it destroyed the very foundation of their religious ideas. It is still highly offensive to us today if we believe that our ultimate relationship with God is determined by the church we belong to or is affected by the race we were born into or any other external measurement we mistakenly use to judge each other.

Is it important who your father is? Absolutely! But the issue in this passage is, how do you determine who your real father is and do you have any options about it.

Jesus was unique in that He actually did have a choice as to who His earthly parents would be because He was fully preexistent before He was born. Some religions have mistakenly used this idea and teach that all of us are preexistent before birth and that we too chose our parents. That is a false teaching that attempts to place us on a par with God just as New Age beliefs attempt to do. But that still misses the whole point in this passage, for it is not your physical parents that determine your fate nearly as much as the choices you make from within the context of your life.

Heaven does not measure us with the kind of scales we use with students in school. We are measured more on a scale that is relative. It is sort of like the difference between using percentages or hard numbers. As Jesus pointed out with the poor woman who gave a very small offering that in His eyes was more valuable than all the expensive offerings of the affluent, our characters are also measured by where we started and what we did with what we had, not by comparing us to other people who grew up with very different gifts and opportunities. The only way to better appreciate our responsibility and what we are doing with it is to look to heaven, to the Word of God and to measure our lives and choices using heaven's system of evaluation rather than the counterfeit system of grading we were subjected to by the world throughout our school years.

God is not judging us based on who our parents were, what race we belong to or any other external identification we use so often. God looks at the heart and how we respond to the level of awareness about Him that we are exposed to over time. In this way every person in the world has equal opportunity to respond to God though many may not even have His name associated to them. God's Spirit works with every heart and draws all to Jesus whether they ever learn His identity or not. How we respond to the drawing of the Spirit in our heart at whatever level of awareness we have of God's plan of salvation determines whether we are drawn closer to His light or we incapacitate our ability to respond and be changed. Because this applies to every human being everywhere on earth, God will ultimately be discovered to be totally fair and just in all that He is doing to save humanity irregardless of how much they know about Him.

If we choose to respond to the Spirit's drawing in our hearts we can be mentored by a new Father through the ministry of that same Spirit. We can be adopted into the family of God with the level of awareness which our life opportunities have allowed us and God honors and respects these choices of our hearts far more than the level of knowledge we may have amassed about religious topics. God's ways of evaluation do not penalize us for the parents we were stuck with growing up or any other handicap, but everyone must make the choice to be adopted into the new family of humans in Christ if they wish to enter into real life that will last for eternity.