A Tremendous Revolutionary Reality
Humans never had a nature by themselves. They were both created and later redeemed to express in simple spontaneity and naturalness Him who is God in us and who, Scripture says, “dwells in us and walks in us” (2 Cor. 6:16). Likewise, after the Fall, when we had freely joined ourselves to Satan, we had no nature of our own either. So there never has been a “human” nature.
Therefore there is no point in considering whether we believers have two natures or one! No, we humans have none, but tragically or gloriously, spontaneously manifest the nature of the deity in us. But as we investigate this actual, factual relationship between God and man—in which man is nothing but the agency by whom God reveals Himself as God, and God in love-action—it becomes obvious that man is not a robot, with no free expression of Himself as a person. It is precisely the opposite. We see the total freedom of the Divine Person fulfilling His love-purposes through the total freedom of the human person. And how can that be? It is no paradox that freedom must make its choices and the free will then love to be controlled by its choice. We still do what we want to do. There is no need to force a person’s will. All the other person need do is to attract and captivate our “want,” and then we will love to act in harmony with him. Give a child another toy, and his crying after the first one disappears.
People often ask, How can we conceive of God changing a person’s will, if he is free? The answer is that God changes our “want,” and the will follows spontaneously. Once God has captured our wills by drawing us back to Himself through Christ, then it is He in us who “wills and does of His good pleasure” (and it is always good!) and it is we who naturally, gladly, freely work it out (Phil. 2:13-14).
Taken from: Yes, I Am, By Norman Grubb
