“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.” - Montaigne

I dread the time each night when Tommy turns out the light. The dark has come to represent the suffering, fear and violence that rages outside beyond my bedroom curtain. My heart becomes anxious and my dreams are most often filled with all the terrible “what if’s” and “could happen”. I woke up from one particularly troubling dream acutely aware of my need to address this growing night time fear and anxiety.

A few nights ago, I pulled out my worn copy of Calm My Anxious Heart by Linda Dillow. I re-read the chapter entitled “Worry is like a rocking chair” where she describes how anxiety will cause our spirit to rock back and forth over the same things without going anywhere. “Worry never changes a single thing except the worrier. History has no record of worry warding off disaster.” Dillow then quotes Matt. 6:25-34 and reminded me that worry is a sin. Five times in that passage Jesus exhorts us “Do not worry!” She then quotes Oswald Chambers, “It is not only wrong to worry, it is infidelity, because worrying means that we do not think that God can look over the details of our lives.” Dillow reminded me that God is the one in control, “All the tomorrows of our life have to pass Him before they can get to us.” We have one choice, to worry or to trust. We cannot do both.

Meditating over this today, I am affirmed in my conviction that Arminianism and similar theologies dangerous enough to be bold and firm in speaking against. My grief over my sister caused me to again question truth concerning human free will. As I pray to God for her salvation, does she resist His hand? What is the bottom line in this horrible situation: her choice or God’s will? Does she resist and God can do nothing until she gives because of the ultimate reality of free will, or is God absolutely in control, working His plan and His timing? Is His Grace and Cross powerful enough to overcome her own resistance? If I believe as an Arminian does, I am lead to constant despair. There is no resting in the soverignty of God, because a person could resist Him until the day she dies; that’s her choice. To believe such is to doom myself to perpetual anxiety.

The remnant of the Arminianism I was raised with steals away the comfort of scripture from me. Every time I read a promise of God or a blessed proclamation of His soverignty, the voices of doubt, the humanistic insistance on human choice as the bias and basis for all soteriology robs any comfort I might find. Though I maintain that phenomenologically and experientially human will remains an undeniable reality, yet it exists in paradox and ontologically subordinate to the soverignty of God. Theism itself logically affronts our notion of free choice. If God as a soverign creator exists, then my every breath depends upon His moment by moment soverign sustinance. The fact that He chooses not to obliterate me at every moment implies the inverse (or is it converse?) fact that He moment by moment chooses to sustain my life.

This is why I love theology. My daily peace and victory over anxiety directly relates to my theological understanding and conviction (i.e. faith). It is the Truth that sets us free.

Note - Of course, not everyone need have complex theological understanding to have salvation or peace! God’s truth is as simple as it needs to be for the simple, yet also as complex and nuanced as the complex thinker needs it to be. I would be of the latter, and I would not say that it is necessarily better than the former!)