Condition vs. Gift

The difference between gift and condition; the danger in relying on our freedom to choose

Condition is the requirement necessary to obtain or receive something. A gift is something received free of any conditions, burdens, obligations or responsibilities of any kind. If one must trade a gift for something in return the gift is no longer a gift, but a purchase, barter, a sale, bribery, extorsion, incentive, motivation, blackmail or whatever else but a gift. In other words, a CONDITION involves the satisfaction of a claim or a demand. Only Jesus could satisfy God's demands and meet His conditions, and we all know it. This is the first thing we must fully understand before we can begin to comprehend God's plan for mankind. God's conditions, then, rested in the person of the Son of God. The first such condition was that He is pure and perfect The next thing we must remember--because we all know this also--is that everything we have we have received from Him. He has given us all things free of charge, including our salvation. Just ask yourself: What would I do if I didn't have this wonderful body, especially my awesome, fantastic and amazing brain? If God had not made what He did when He first created the heavens and the earth, what would I eat, breathe, drink, contemplate, admire, and the zillion things that we see, feel, touch, taste and smell? We were not even around when all that happened. Therefore we were not physically able to so much as ask for them.

He has then given us everything but the freedom to choose between right and wrong, between God and Satan and between salvation and doom. His offer of salvation is absolutely, perfectly free. All Evangelicals know, accept and believe this, but somehow their thinking gets warped and clouded by this freedom of choice malarkey that they attribute to our sovereign Lord. Then they start thinking of conditions and choices without stopping to realize that in so doing they are creating contradictions and confusion that in another era were unacceptable. Unfortunately, as so many other things, today they are perfectly acceptable. The dismal result is that the understanding of the gifts of God--if indeed there is any such understanding at all--has become so foggy in their minds that said gifts need no longer be taken seriously and can in consequence be dispensed with.
Why biblical language appears to be so contradictory
So how come God's holy book is loaded with what appear to be harsh conditions and stiff demands such as, if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land (2 Chr. 7:14)? To begin with, just like a first-grade teacher must descend to the level of her young students and use speech they can understand, so must our God, given the limitations of terrestrial tongues, descend to our level of understanding, putting His celestial speech into words and situations we can relate to in our daily lives. If this is not true, we might as well say that God contradicts Himself when He says He is spirit in several places (John 4:24; Col. 1:15; 1 Tim. 1:17) and yet He speaks of having hands, feet, eyes, ears, nostrils, arms and a face, just like any ordinary human being, in other places. Or that in one place He says He repents or changes His mind (Gen. 6:6, 7:3; 1 Sam. 15:11, 35; 2 Sam. 24:16; Jer. 18:8-10) and elsewhere He says He is no son of man that He should repent (Num. 23:19). Not only that, all of His attributes should be in question, particularly His omniscience. But of course, it is a matter of letting the Holy Spirit of God in us increase our wisdom and lead us to the true intent of the Lord's Word. James wrote that if we lack understanding, discernment and/or wisdom, to ask of God and He will give it to us liberally and without reproach, that is to say that something of that nature does not displease Him in the least, provided of course that we ask with unflinching, unfaltering faith (James 1:5, 6).
Hermeneutics and divine attributes, excellent tools of interpretation
Next, we must NEVER forget the attributes of God. There are many useful and valuable rules of interpretation that most lay persons are not familiar with. Besides that serious limitation, clergy or no clergy alike seem to forget those rules, but especially one or more of God's attributes, both of them tools that would help us arrive at the correct biblical meaning of a particularly difficult text. One of them, crucial to our perfect understanding of such issues as election, predestination, unconditional salvation, etc., is such divine attribute as God's absolute sovereignty. Finally, we must readily admit that the above scripture (2 Chr. 7:14) is not based on the Old Testament law, replete with external forms of worship and requirements so numerous that not even the most righteous of people were capable of keeping it; instead, it is based, at the time of the writing of the passage in question, on the still-in the--future New Covenant's law of grace, God's wondrous blessing to humanity freely bestowed upon us who believe despite our unworthiness. This is the law of love and mercy, faith and repentance and of the pardon He granted those of us He chose to save to show us...His own love toward us, in that while we were still SINNERS, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). What God was really saying in the passage we are now considering was, I wish you would turn away from sin, for then I would shower you with no end of blessings. Unfortunately I know better, and I will reserve those blessings for people that that are not my people (Hoseah 2:25, 26; Rom. 9:25, 26). Otherwise, that verse would read, "If my people...would faithfully observe my moral precepts...and the rest of the entire law of dietary, legal, sacrificial, ceremonial rules, festivities, etc., I will hear from heaven..."
Jehovah's prophetic voice
But as usual, no sooner Jehovah lifted a sentence over His people than they would turn back to idols and dissolution time and time again. So the promise He made to them in 2 Chronicles 7:14 does not mean that He was under any delusion or false hope that the people would comply. Rather, that was a prophetic announcement of that very pact of grace that some day He would make manifest with the advent of the promised Messiah, whose mission was to die unjustly for the sins of His people and for those of the whole world. Still, far from being moved to compassion and gratitude, the Hebrew nation as a whole has been unable, to this day, to comply with the law of love, faith and repentance either (the law of grace written in our hearts and minds, not on tablets of clay--Jeremiah 31:31-33). On the contrary, the Jews raised an almost unanimous voice to have Him crucified, the cruelest form of death penalty known to the world of that day. In their turn, those of His followers who did not join the populace in its murderous and insane pursuit were filled with fear, dispersed and hid, with the exception of John among His original twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed Him and another one denied Him three times after swearing undying loyalty to Him. That is what freedom of choice does.
The urgent necessity of consistency in our faithful and accurate interpretation of Holy Writ
All of the above explains why so many declarations God makes sound so much like impositions or demands to our human ears, when all they are is warnings or counsel: "If you do such and such, such and such will happen." That is a mere statement of fact. It is different from, "If you don't obey me I will spank you, but if you do obey me I will take you to the movies." This last statement is more than a simple statement of fact or warning. It is more like a threat, a deterrent or prohibition on the one hand and an inducement or incentive on the other. It is the offer of a choice between a reward and punishment, an alternative between "do or die." When God does the same thing, He is not really offering us a choice. He repeatedly warns us of the consequences that will follow our bad decisions, just as He warned Adam and Eve. When Jesus says, "if you believe in Me, you have eternal life; if not, you go to hell," (Mark 16:16; John 3:16, 18; 5:24-29) He does sound as though He is offering an option or an alternative. Our personal perception notwithstanding, He privately knew that only the elect will believe and remain saved, but at the time His immediate concern was not with theological subtleties, but to deliver His message using speech suitable to finite minds. He left that responsibility to men like Peter, John, James, Jude, Luke and especially Paul, the leading interpreter of God's most profound mysteries. Otherwise, what reason would we have to acknowledge His divine qualities or characteristics, beginning with His omniscience? This is the only interpretation consistent with everything else that has to do with the concepts of grace, the election, predestination, divine foresight and the preservation of the saints.
Why we must still announce the Gospel even though we may feel secure in our salvation
Although He knows who is going to believe and who is not, we don't, not by a long shot. We do not even have any sure-fire way of recognizing the truly elect, although Jesus said that by their fruits we will know them; that perception, however, is relatively possible after conversion, not before (Mat. 7:16, 20). Any way we want to look at it, our Lord has charged us with the responsibility to sound the alarm to the unregenerate (Mat. 28:19; Mark 16:16). In turn, if some of them heed the message, it's either because they are among the chosen few or because they are among the many who will believe for a time and then voluntarily relinquish their Savior's gift to them. The latter God will not elect for glory but reserve them for His wrath (Rom. 9:22). If we insist that our sovereign Lord does give us choices and it is up to us to heed Him or not, we should immediately try to remember His omniscience and His sovereign judgments, in fact, all of His attributes, and see if we can harmonize choices or conditions with gifts. If we do that, what would we find in the matter of free choices?
The sadly unsuspected tragedy of relying on our (God-given?) free will: A time bomb and a monstrous blasphemy
To start off, we find, to our horror, that God foresaw the fatal error Adam and Eve made. Being their Creator, and especially the author and grantor of freedom of choice, as is the prevalent assumption, why did He make them accountable for their enormous blunder when He knew beforehand that they would misuse their free will in the first place? That's just like giving a killer or an unarmed enemy soldier a weapon. Or like a father who does not want his teen-age daughter to become a prostitute but allows her to make her own decisions even though he can predict the inevitable and undesirable end result. So she elects to go partying unsupervised till all hours. When as a result she ends up selling herself, her father shifts the blame on her and makes her responsible for all her subsequent miseries as well as all the grief and shame the rest of the family must endure. Does that make any sense to anyone out there at all? As to the question of why God did not make a move to reverse the outcome in Eden, when it was in His power to do it, wouldn't that have been an admission on His part that something went awry with His original plan? What reason would we then have to believe that He is an all-knowing, reliable, trustworthy, perfect and infallible God? And by the way, none of us is any different from Adam and Eve when trying to make up our minds for or against God. But for His gifts, such as the Gospel of salvation and faith in the same, we will err every time, exactly the same way as our original ancestors did; most certainly, we would not do any better.