Recently on The Patrick Madrid Show, 9-year-old Aiden called in to ask Patrick an important question about our origins and God’s intentions:
If God knew that we were going to be great sinners, and that we might end up suffering the torments of hell if we chose not to use our free wills wisely, then why did He create us? Why did He even create the possibility of suffering and evil, and the necessity for hell?
The simple answer is, well, love.
God does not need us. He is all-powerful, all-present, all-merciful, all-loving, all-giving, and all-knowing. He has no need for the lowly creatures which He has populated our universe with. He doesn’t need us, the animals, the plants, the planets, or the stars. He can do anything without us. He created all of it because He loves us, and He wanted to give us the opportunity to love Him back. And in so doing, we find eternal happiness and love with Him.
To that end, He granted us a free will and an intellect. Our intellect is a tool for informing our free will how to distinguish between what choices would help us follow God and what choices would help us reject Him. By embracing God, we are accepting His divine providence, His plan for us. We are saying “yes” to the objective of our creation: to be with God in heaven. By rejecting Him, we are denying our divine plan. We are choosing to journey towards the unending torments that Aiden is talking about.
“God is perfect in Himself. So anything He needs or wants is in Himself. He’s perfect. So the only reason He created any of these things, like us and angels, is out of love,” said Patrick. “And in the case of human beings and angels, God wants us to be able to love Him in return. So, He created us with free will.”
But in order to operate that free will correctly, we need to understand it.
“Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility.” (CCC 1731)
“The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to ‘the slavery of sin.’” (CCC 1733)
As Pope St. John Paul II explained, we find true freedom not in doing what we want because we can, but in having the right to do what we ought. And what we “ought” to do is live our lives in such a way that we honor the two greatest commandments explained to us by Jesus in Matthew 22.
“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
Tune in to The Patrick Madrid Show weekdays 8am – 11am CT
