Where He Leads I Will Follow: Adam and Agency

 

And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”  Genesis 2:16-17

 These verses describe the institution of human agency. God could have made us as automatons that would blindly obey Him, but He didn’t. He gave us choice. He gave us independent minds that could understand our options and weigh our decisions. Later this week, we’ll look at what humanity did with that gift (spoiler alert, it wasn’t good), but for today I want to focus on the gift itself.

 Why did God make us with the ability to choose for ourselves? Well, I’m not God, so I can’t speak for Him, but I have a pretty good guess. I wrote a long time ago about how forced love isn’t love at all. If you were to use a love potion, as happens in movies, on the person you desired and they instantly became infatuated with you, you’d know they didn’t really love you. Why? Because they didn’t have a choice in the matter. Another term for this is agency.

 There are a lot of definitions for agency, but I’m specifically looking at the philosophical and sociological concept meaning, “the capacity of individuals to act independently, rather than being solely shaped by external structures such as social norms, economic conditions, or cultural expectations.”* Basically, what it means for Adam to have been created with individual agency means that God was not controlling him, making him eat or not eat the fruit, and neither was Eve, and neither was the serpent. He had a choice. Yes, there were pressures. Yes, there were temptations. But nothing made him do it.

 Likewise, today we also have individual agency. We are presented with rules, whether from the Bible or from the government or from organizations we interact with, and situations in which we have to decide if we will follow those rules. We are told that the highest speed, the speed limit, we can go on the freeway is 60 miles per hour, but our cars can go faster than that. If all vehicles were limited in their ability to drive more than 60 miles per hour, we would not have agency in this area, but we do. So, every time we drive on the freeway, we have a choice. Do we follow the rule, or do we do otherwise? Sometimes we may believe that the “spirit of the law” is directing us, giving us a guideline about how fast we should travel but encouraging us to maintain the flow of traffic. Occasionally, we will face a situation where driving 60mph or less would be truly dangerous and safety directs us to go faster. In any case, the choice ultimately falls to us, which is why we are given the ticket if we choose to break the rule.

Here’s the Thing: God knew what He was doing. He had a plan, and He started out the world intentionally and purposefully. He made Adam, and gave him the ability to make choices, knowing that he would make some good ones and some bad ones. He loved Adam enough that He wanted Adam to be able to love Him back, and He knew that this could only come from giving Adam individual agency, the ability to make his own choices.

*Hartwell, E. (2026, May 31). The concept of agency: what it means in law, philosophy, business, and more. The Chronicle of What Matters. https://chrncle.com/the-concept-of-agency-what-it-means-in-law-philosophy-business-and-more/