AT THE MOVIES 2020:
“Free Will”
Psalm 139:1-24
ANNOUNCEMENT
Welcome back church! We are still getting into the swing of things from COVID19 and all the isolation we went through. Next week is Father’s Day and we will have a drive-in service at 10:30am so as many people as possible can join us for that great day as we honor fathers. The week after that, the 28th we will be back here. Then… July 5… in the sanctuary and everything as much as ‘normal’ as possible!
We are in a series called “At the Movies.” Last week we saw a clip from Forrest Gump and we focused on the love of Christ and His sacrifice. This week is from 2011’s The Adjustment Bureau which I enjoyed seeing myself in the theater. As a side note, this movie was adapted from an author who also wrote the stories behind Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and the Man in the High Castle. Amazing. Next week we will see a clip from the movie ‘9’ if I can figure out how to do that for the drive-in service and then on the 28th we will see a clip from E.T. Hopefully you consider this a fun and different way to dive into the Scriptures.
PRAYER
READ PSALM 139:1-24
“You have searched me, LORD, and You know me. 2 You know when I sit and when I rise; You perceive my thoughts from afar. 3 You discern my going out and my lying down; You are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue You, LORD, know it completely. 5 You hem me in behind and before, and You lay Your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. 7 Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” 12 even the darkness will not be dark to You; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to You. 13 For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful; I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be. 17 How precious to me are Your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand— when I awake, I am still with You. 19 If only You, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty! 20 They speak of You with evil intent; Your adversaries misuse Your Name. 21 Do I not hate those who hate You, LORD, and abhor those who are in rebellion against You? 22 I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. 23 Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
SITUATION (VERSES 1-18)
This morning as we look at Psalm 139, we find a wonderful passage all about God. We will get to the movie clip eventually, but before we do we have to do some ground work for it all to make sense. The first two-thirds of Psalm 139 focus on how awesome God is.
PERFECT KNOWLEDGE (VERSES 1-6)
King David first reflects in verses 1-6 that God is perfect and ultimate in His knowledge. God has absolute knowledge about all of creation, every creature, and each and every person. It actually doesn’t make sense to us that a Being can know everything about everything all the time. Some of us might act that way… but in fact God is the only One with perfect ultimate absolute knowledge. We are finite and subject to the unknown. God is infinite and is subject to nothing.
I love the part in verse 6 where David reflects that God’s knowledge is “too lofty” for us to attain. We can’t have that type of knowledge. God is eternal and uncreated. We have a certain number of days and we are created and we have limits. God has no limits and we can never ever be Him no matter what we do or achieve.
PERFECT PRESENCE (VERSES 7-12)
King David then reflects in verses 7-12 that God is perfect and ultimate in His presence. God is everywhere all the time. There is no place that is hidden from the presence of God. I want you to note that David does not say that no place is outside of the ‘vision’ of God. God is all-seeing… I suppose… but that is not what David says. David says very specifically that no place is away from the “face” (Hebrew: ‘pane’) of God. He means that God is right there in person face to face in all places. That is amazing.
When I think about this passage I think of…
… Adam and Eve trying to hide from God in the Garden of Eden after they sinned (Genesis)
… Cain trying to hide the fact that he killed his brother Abel (Genesis)
… David trying to hide his adultery and murder (2 Samuel)
… Jonah trying to run from God, but God guided him (Jonah)
… Ananias and Sapphira trying to hide keeping back money from God (Acts)
Nothing and no one is ever out of the presence of God.
PERFECT POWER (VERSES 13-18)
King David finally reflects in verses 13-18 that God is perfect and ultimate in His power. David could have focused on many things that show God’s power: old Abraham and Sarah having a child (Genesis), the plagues in Egypt (Exodus), parting of the Red Sea (Exodus), manna (Exodus), the walls of Jericho (Joshua), the death of Goliath (1 Samuel), or sending and removing judgement (2 Samuel 24/1Chronicles 21) or countless other miracles.
David focused on the absolute miracle of a baby growing and being born in a mother’s womb. Creating an entire human being with a soul is probably one of God’s greatest pleasures. Created. Knit together. Wonderfully made. Wonderful. Woven together. Days ordained. Almighty God is perfect in His power and uses that power among other things to create life. God is a life-giving God and is the source of all life. God is always about giving life.
SUMMARIZE
So just to summarize Psalm 139:1-18 we have a God who is all knowing, everywhere at all times, all powerful, and any ‘omni’ words you want to come up with… omniscient, omnipotent, omnirighteous, omnipresent, omnitemporal. He is the absolute Greatest Being that exists and saying those words do not even come close to describing who He is and what He does and His will and His plans and His interactions with human beings.
COMPLICATION (VERSES 19-22)
Verse 19 throws us a curve ball. Verse 19 is a slap upside the head at the dinner table. Verse 19 is a bird flying smack into your front window for no reason. King David has just been extoling the virtues of God and laying out His complete awesomeness… and then comes verse 19. Then verse 20. Then verses 21 and 22.
David basically says that God is awesomely wonderful and He is without parallel in His power and then realizes if all that is true…why is there such bad people in the world? If God is so great, why is life so hard? God if You are so powerful, how about You smite some of these wicked folks around here and make this a better place? Those of us who are only mildly bad would appreciate some divine clean up on aisle 3! It does not make sense that the world is so bad if God is so good. This gets even more complicated when we are hurt by this bad world and even more complicated than that when it seems like God did not prevent the hurt.
King David sees wickedness. “Bloodthirsty” is a word he uses. These people speak of God with evil intent. There is misuse of God’s Name. There is hate and rebellion. If God is so great, what is with the corrupted awful state of the supposedly good world He created?
This brings us to our movie clip for today from the movie “The Adjustment Bureau.”
THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU
A man glimpses the future Fate has planned for him and realizes he wants something else. To get it, he must pursue through the streets of modern-day New York the only woman he’s ever loved. On the brink of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, ambitious politician David Norris played by Matt Damon, meets beautiful contemporary ballet dancer Elise Sellas, played by Emily Blunt. She is a woman like none he’s ever known, but just as he realizes he’s falling for her, mysterious and powerful men conspire to keep the two apart by purposely adjusting his life away from her. In the face of overwhelming odds, he must either let her go and accept a predetermined path…or risk everything to defy Fate and the agents of Fate and be with her.
You see, David Norris has unwittingly discovered the secret and powerful "Adjustment Bureau," whose role is to adjust circumstances in humans' everyday lives to keep them on a master plan devised by "the Chairman." The Bureau is creating one roadblock after the next to keep Norris from the woman he loves, because their relationship is deemed "off course." Frustrated and confused, Norris waits for a confrontation with the Bureau, hoping to get some sort of explanation as to why he and Elise cannot be together.
SHOW PURCHASED VIDEO CLIP FROM WINGCLIPS
https://www.wingclips.com/movie-clips/the-adjustment-bureau/free-will
Thompson, the Adjustment Bureau agent says to David Norris, “You don't have free will, David. You have the appearance of free will.” The whole movie is about free will. Believe it or not, the whole Bible is also about free will. “Free will” is a real thing that the Almighty Awesome God has given to us.
Freewill begins at the very beginning of creation. Genesis 2:16-17 says, “And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” God let us choose. We chose poorly, but it was our free choice nevertheless.
Joshua 24:15 says, “But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” The people of God did not have the appearance of freewill, but had actual choice to serve God or not. Joshua wanted his family to serve the Lord.
Mark 8:34 says, “Then He called the crowd to Him along with His disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me.” I hope you realize that Jesus did not force Himself on anyone to be His follower then and does not do that now. If we want to follow Him, we can.
Galatians 5 talks about freewill and the choice we have between a spirit filled life and one driven by the flesh. Galatians 5:13-17 = “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 14 For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. 16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.”
Revelation 3:20 = “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with Me.” Again, you can open the door of your heart to Jesus or you can keep it shut. You have free will.
I want you to know that freewill is not an illusion. God created human beings with free will because ultimately His glory is greater when we see Who God is and we worship Him out of love. God is diminished if we are all robots who have to love Him. True love is a choice. True love is an act of the will… free will.
The complication that David saw was that our free will has messed everything up. We choose to sin. We choose to be selfish. We choose to be hateful. We choose to ruin. You and I do not always use our free will to pursue our Heavenly Father and His way of life.
RESOLUTION (VERSES 23-24)
A little later in the film “The Adjustment Bureau,” one of the Agents of Fate says this: “Most people live life on the path we set for them, too afraid to explore any other. But once in a while people like you come along who knock down all the obstacles we put in your way. People who realize freewill is a gift that you'll never know how to use until you fight for it. I think that's the chairman's real plan. That maybe one day, we won't write the plan, you will.”
The phrase “free will is a gift we don’t know how to use” stuck out to me. It stuck out to me in 2011 when I saw the movie and it sticks out to me now. Most of us just use our freewill to sin. We do what we want when we want and then wonder why our life is terrible at times.
What is the purpose of our freewill?
What are we to do with the God-given ability to choose?
I want to remind you of the end of Psalm 139.
RE-READ PSALM 139:23-24
“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
What is the purpose of our freewill? The purpose of our freewill is to give us the option to have a real personal relationship God and for Him to know our hearts. We are free to pursue and know the God of the universe. It is sort of a mystery that the all-knowing all-powerful God of the universe is personal and we can interact with Him. Sort of a mystery… the all-knowing all-powerful God of the universe loves us so much that He makes Himself known. Love solves the mystery. Freewill is meant to lead us into a loving relationship with God.
What are we to do with the God-given ability to choose? God wants us to choose the way everlasting which is abundant life in His Son Jesus Christ. The way is available. I want to plead with you this morning to choose God! Choose Christ! Choose to follow the teachings in God’s Word and the example of Jesus Christ. We can use our freewill to be better tomorrow than we are today.
MOVIE SUMMARY & FURTHER APPLICATION
The movie, “The Adjustment Bureau,” depicts a sort of uncertain force that is "adjusting" the course of the world as it goes on day after day. In the movie, there are "agents" everywhere, trying to keep up with certain humans and adjust their circumstances as needed to keep them on a predetermined course.
In the clip we watched today, the Adjustment Bureau agent Thompson accurately described a list of atrocities as the result of free will. What he failed to tell, however, was how God Almighty sovereignly uses atrocities, tragedies, and poorly made decisions of humanity to providentially draw people to Himself and even to bring about His greater purposes for individuals, families, and nations.
The mysterious and beautiful thing about God and His power and His will and His providence is that rather than being at odds with our free will, God works with our mistakes and issues and obstacles and also our right choices because He loves us. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.”
* God granted human beings free will at the moment of our creation and He has never taken that away. We are free to love Him and pursue Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
* God has provided His own way for our salvation working within all of our freewill so that His will is done anyway for our eternal benefit. We are free to choose to be saved from this world.
* God promises that He will be with us in the midst of the turmoil of life even though, yes, He does not stop all of the bad choices that are made. We are free to choose to have God in our hearts in the midst of each day.
CONCLUSION IN PRAYER
