5c) Continued

i. Will We have Free Will in Heaven?

The question is asked, "When God recreates some of us as "glorified beings", will we still have free will? Will we still have an option to sin? Will there be a chance / need for sin to arise again? I suggest that there will still be free will, as I believe the angels are enjoying now. There would be the choice to choose temporary gratifications, but since we'd already have eternal gratification, there would be no desire to settle for less. Also, the three sources of temptation to do contrary to the will of God would be gone: Our sinful nature would be changed; the world around us would be heaven, not the sinful Earth; and the fallen angels would no longer exist.

Compare this to having the option to smoke in your house. Even if you don't like it and don't want to smoke in your house, you still have the option. You may have enjoyed smoking at one time, even though you knew it was not good for you. However, now you have changed. You no longer want that, because your heart has been changed from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh. Free will is having the option. Heaven is for those who chose Life.

Some suggest that we don’t like to “obey” God now, but we will learn to love obeying God once we are in heaven. I say that connotes the wrong idea. We do not “obey” God, ie only doing what He directs us to do. Instead, we live “in accordance with” God’s will, ie our choices are consistent with His intention that we live happily ever after instead of self-destructing.

Beyond this, however, I say that God’s plan is to live happily ever after with thinking, free-willed beings. He wants them to have free will so they can have an unlimited variety of different experiences. If He wanted only robots, He would have made more grass. If He did not want them making their own decisions, He did not need to go through the Sin Drama here on Earth. God’s entire Plan of Salvation was only necessary because He wanted free-willed beings.

Therefore, again, I suggest that we definitely will have free will in heaven. We will be making our own decisions but sharing our experiences with God, because we want to.

There is another aspect of this, which was addressed in earlier chapters as well. I suggested there that the original angelic beings would never choose to sin if they really understood that those choices were evil. I suggested the problem was originally that these super beings were naïve regarding the nature of evil. Just like children they were bound to make choices that would be self-destructive, which is what I say is meant by “evil”. So, once this sin drama has played out on Earth among humans, the remaining good angelic beings, who observed everything, are no longer naïve’. Likewise, once those of us, who are translated into angelic beings ourselves, have had the 1000 years with the Glorified Christ to learn what they learned (ie by judging the world/reviewing the archives of the Sin Drama), we will no longer be naïve’ either. Hence, we will have free will yet we will be wise enough to never make choices that lead to problems and heaven will continue to exist, “happily ever after”.

22 August 2001, updated 9 November 2001, 25 May 2003 ß back home next à