While reading Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm this morning, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a thought: God created us with far more power than we realize.
Free will is a superpower.
We are allowed to choose what we think, what we do, and how we respond to what happens to us. We can reason, understand, create, and act. God placed us here with an astonishing degree of freedom and, within that gift, called us to love Him—for who He is and for what He has freely given us.
Our imaginations often begin with Eden, as though God came into existence when He created Adam and Eve. He made them, placed them in the garden, and then sat back to watch the show. But God was God before humanity took its first breath. What He was doing before He created us, I do not know. What I do know is that the power He placed in human hands was immense.
Human history proves it. We have built a world so complex that no single person can fully comprehend it. We have created civilizations, technologies, medicines, music, literature, and machines capable of reaching beyond our planet. That is power.
Yet for all that power, we cannot seem to clean up our act.
With all our intelligence and freedom, we still struggle to choose goodness, kindness, compassion, and love. We kill. We abuse our bodies, wound our families, and exploit one another. We hold extraordinary power in our hands—and that is before we even consider the power of God at work in a willing human heart. Yet we so often live as though we are helpless and without purpose.
We do not even recognize the Creator who placed us here and gave us this superpower.
Free will. Who would do such a thing? Why give a created being the freedom to refuse its Creator? It is a dangerous gift. Human choice is literally capable of destroying the planet, yet we rarely recognize its magnitude. We reduce it to a declaration: I have the right to do as I please. My right—not yours, but mine.
Free will is the ability to choose, but it is more than choice. It allows us to reason, understand, decide, and then act. It enables us to ask not only, “What do I want?” but also, “What is right?”
The Creator placed this gift in our hands as though saying, “Here. Open this. You are going to love it.”
And as soon as we opened it, we forgot Him.
That takes a terrible kind of power—to face your Creator and forget His face. To receive everything and forget the One who gave it. Yet He did not walk away. He did not leave us here or abandon us as we abandoned Him.
This is where superpowers are measured.
We possess great power, but ours is not the greatest. It takes a greater power to create something, see it become damaged, and refuse to destroy it.
That power is love.
We like to believe we possess that superpower too, and in some measure we do. But we do not wield it well. We are damaged creatures running corrupted operating systems, yet we still hold immense power in our hands.
To us, free will can look as reckless as placing a loaded weapon in the hands of a child. The danger is obvious, yet God does not revoke the gift. From our limited point of view, that does not sound wise.
But God knew what we would do with our freedom, and He made a way to repair what we would break.
Then we used our superpower to kill the very One who came to restore us. We put Him in a tomb and believed that took care of that.
It did not.
Once again, we failed to recognize Him. He stood directly in front of us, and still we could not remember His face. The Creator entered His own creation to repair what we had broken, and we used the freedom He gave us against Him.
I do not even want to imagine how difficult that must have been. I have looked into my children’s faces, seen that something in them was broken, and wanted desperately to make it whole. When I could not repair the damage, the helplessness felt like physical pain. I have looked at sick loved ones and wished I had the power to go back and undo whatever brought them to that moment.
But my superpower could not do it.
Yet He did what I could not.
We were not worth such a sacrifice—not from my limited point of view. But I do not see as He sees. To Him, we were worth saving. He still made a way for us to repent—to change our minds, turn our hearts toward Him, and return to Him.
We have been entrusted with a superpower, even though we barely understand it. Perhaps that is why the enemy works so hard to corrupt our freedom, distort our desires, and persuade us to use God’s gift against Him.
Free will is our superpower.
Love is His.
