40. Can God's Will Be Set Aside?

Can God’s Will Be Set Aside? In the next place, then, the enforcement of God’s law can be accomplished only by securing the conquest of all that makes possible the ill-being of the sinless. This is also self-evident.

What condition, then, will make ill-being possible? The opposite of that condition which insures well-being. And again we see, as we have seen from different angles, that the enforcement of God’s will is the inescapable demand of His love, for failure to enforce it would work the ill-being of those He loves. He must therefore never allow His will to be set aside. But is it really possible for God’s will to be set aside? He certainly will not set it aside Himself, and there is no one else to set it aside but the creature of His own hand, and how can a puny creature set aside the will of the omnipotent Creator?

If some of the self-evident truths already brought to light are recalled and given a setting in the present thought, the answer will be easy.

Happiness is possible to moral beings only. Moral being is possible only to those having the power of choice. The power of choice, or the ability to choose and act in harmony with preference, is the capacity to love and to respond to love. Love is the sole moral force in existence that can determine, and by the action of the will, can create moral character. But two types of moral character are possible: the selfish and the sacrificial. Either character is created by a choice between, and a final committal of love to, either God’s will or the will of self.

Now a reaction of some kind, when a choice is made between opposites, is inevitable. If the choice is between God’s will and one’s own, the reaction will be that of antagonism against every active approach of the will refused.

Then since reaction is always the recoil of action, there must be the reaction, that is, the recoil, of love, against the will not chosen, and the recoil of love is hatred.

Every lover is inescapably a hater. His love compels him to hate in one direction in the exact measure in which he loves in the other, when compelled to choose between two objects that are antagonistic. He will, for example, hate that which would harm a loved one according to the measure of his love, since reaction always equals action. This shows with perfect clearness that if one chooses his own will, he will hate God’s will and put it out of his life. That is, even though only a creature, he sets aside the will of the Creator.

It shows also how a moral being can get out of that realm where his moral welfare and happiness are forever secure, and into the realm where moral ill-being and unhappiness are humanly inescapable.

It is impossible for God’s love to operate in the realm from which His will has been excluded. For His love can accomplish nothing in any life that refuses to receive it. Those sentimental souls, therefore, who assure us that we can never get beyond the reach of God’s love are talking nonsense. It is terribly true that we can get so completely out of the reach of His love acting in mercy, that He will be compelled to say to us as He said over Jerusalem: “How often would I—and ye would not. Behold, your house is left unto you desolate” (Matthew 23:37-38). Desolate indeed is the soul that has shut out the only real love in existence!