To use as we will, within God's created limits of our free-will choices. Which, on God's eternal, universal scale is border-line impotent, unknowing, and almost nonexistent, compared to His eternal, holy ethos. In His infinite universe we are in all ways finite... except for three things ... He created us, our race, a miniature version of His own image and likeness, He loves us with an immeasurable love, and He has a purpose in life for each of us. He is "all and in all", Eph.4:6. This fact, regardless of our minuscule power, presence and mental capability, tells us that we should be thinking, talking and living, as nearly as possible, as His Son, our Master, Jesus Christ, set the example.
When our Father, God created us, "In his own image and likeness" (Gen.1:26), he was giving us tiny measures of his own immeasurable Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omni-Creatability.
Immediately upon Adam and Eve's creation, the first command God gave them was the very next verses ... "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and prepenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over ... every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Gen.1:28. And so they did. As God created them, they, in turn, produced a likeness of themselves... "And Adam ... begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth." Which name means "Sprout", a carbon copy.
Adam and Eve initiated the begating and naming, within their free will "likeness" to their Creator, but God did the borning within his own immeasurable, immutable powers of Earth's original, created nature... "after their own kind", which was inaugurated in Gen.1:25.
Humanity's divine commission, under God's blessing, was to multiply, replenish, subdue and have dominion
over this earth. That includes the earth and its contents. All of that was God's assignment and man's responsibility limited only by the smallness of man's likeness to God. As finite as our likeness to our infinite God is, so is our potential to do good or bad. But which road we take, the high or the low, is within our own choice, our own will. As our infinite, free will Creator has always chosen the good, our own finite, free will shall choose our own course, within its created limits. And so it is that every person senses, searches and speculates on the mystery of life, its darkness, light, circumstance, suffering, destiny and eternity. Is there a God, a heaven or a hell? Will some part of me exist beyond death? These questions are in the minds of every human being until Jesus brings in faith to enlighten the darkness.
And so it was with the master poet, William Earnest Henley. Though hopeless, in his doubting, yet haughty and insolent, in the face of God, he declared himself master of his own fate and captain of his own soul. His Cavalier claim in his poem, "Invictus", meaning unconquerable, exposed his intellect as a poet and ignorance as a soul, at the same time. And this, as he lay dying of TB, and about to meet the God in the shadows of his mind. And so his words of doubt, loneliness, fear, pride and self-praise poured out of his inner being.... but changed nothing. He took himself to the hell of his doubts... and disbelief. Within his own will he made his choice and turned left away from the narrow gate in the Valley Of Decision.
Invictus (Unconquerable)
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
This last verse reveals his knowledge of the Biblical "strait gate" which leads to life and the "wide gate" which leads to destruction according to that which is written in God's eternal "scroll". Matt.7:13.
Henley, in the last two lines, may have been slightly right in a finite sense, but was massively wrong in an infinite sense, and that was his problem. He chose himself as master of his fate and captain of his soul ... instead of His Creator. He did have "will" and "choice", but he could not save himself. Only faith in Jesus could do that. Oh the darkness of willful, spiritual blindness. RB
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