Page 32 answering me. I believe it’s because we already know the answer. It’s your choice. The Lord said we may freely eat from any tree in the garden except for the forbidden tree. So long as we don’t eat from the forbidden tree, you may prepare these fruits any way that you like. Now there’s a point in this imaginative story. God’s will is like a parking lot. You can miss God’s will by being outside of the parking lot. But as long as you are in the parking lot, then you may freely choose any parking space you wish. Put another way, you cannot miss His will in the parking lot! The parking lot represents God’s moral will. In the garden scene, God’s moral will was to eat from any tree in the garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Beyond that, which tree to eat from, how to eat, when to eat, and how to prepare the fruit was left to the choice of the first man and the first woman. Take a deep breath now, and let that sink in. This raises a crucial question. How do we as believers discover the moral will of God? How do we determine the boundaries of the parking lot? There is a subjective way and an objective way. Let’s first explore the subjective way.
If a doctor, able to help, were at the side of a sick person and promised to help him from his trouble and advised him how to combat his ailment or the poison he had taken, and if the sick person knew that the doctor could help him but nonetheless said: Oh, get out, I won’t accept your advice; you are no doctor, but a highwayman; I am not sick, nor have I taken poison; it will not hurt me; and if the sick person wanted to kill the doctor, would you not say that this fellow, who persecuted and wanted to kill his doctor, was not only sick but demented, mad, and irrational as well?... But this spiritual madness – that we do not want to accept help when God’s Son wants to help us – is ten times worse. Should our Lord God not be angry and let hellfire, sulfur, and pitch rain upon such ingrates? For besides being sinners, we are also so wretched as to reject help and chase away and kill those who urge us to accept it.
Martin Luther