Half Baked And Splattered

Throughout the next few days, I will be posting a smattering of odd and probably incomplete thoughts. This coming Sunday evening I will be delivering my conference message on the providence of God in pain, and before that my Wednesday youth group message will be on human freedom and responsibility. I will need to spend my mornings preparing for those two items and so will be posting things related to those two subjects.

In our youth group class, we are studying different doctrine. I am mostly at this stage reading through John Frame’s Systematic Theology and explaining certain things that seem relevant to the youth in our church. So lots of the thoughts that I post here will have been birthed on some level by his teaching. That being said, let me say some things about human responsibility.

The Bible teaches both that God is sovereign and man is responsible. The biblical writers see no contradiction between declaring God is sovereign over everything and yet man is responsible over every area of his own life. It is helpful at this stage to make some distinctions so we might see more clearly what it means to say that man is responsible.

Man is responsible to God in the sense of being accountable to him as our covenant Lord who has authority over his creation. This is God’s world. And because this is his world, all of creation is accountable to him for what they do, say, and think. The kids and my youth group class are accountable to me as their teacher. Yet this accountability is very minimal in comparison to the accountability they have toward their own parents. But they are more accountable to me then they are to Joe Blow who walks down the street. So you see there are levels of accountability; The highest level being accountable to God our covenant Lord.

Man is also responsible to God based upon his own particular ability. It will be more tolerable in the day of judgment for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah than that of Tyre and Sidon because Jesus gave more information to the latter cities. They had a higher ability to sin because of the increased information they had. Christ walked and talked among them.

Like I said, things are going to be kinda half baked and splattered this week. My lunch break is over and I must get back to work. Maybe more on ability tomorrow.

Blessings,

Scott