The idea of surrendering to God can be difficult for those of us raised in cultures like ours where the individual will is held in the highest esteem. We have taken so much trouble to cast off those external authorities who wielded power over us: we dethroned the kings, removed the nobles, and even overcame the unjust and oppressive opinions of our peers. Though we now find ourselves at the mercy of new forces that are more powerful than us—corporations, the State, the new force of public opinion reanimated by the Internet—we trust that our own sovereignty and rights will, if not overcome, then at least check these forces. Further, there is no question whether we as individuals are in any sense morally inferior to these forces; if we acquiesce to them, it is only regarding the practical matters of outward life, not anything that fundamentally compromises our dignity. Why would we grant our total submission to a God, then, when we have taken so much trouble not to have to submit to anybody else?
In life, we always have to choose which people, organizations, ideals are worth supporting and defending. It is not possible to be absolutely sovereign because the pressures and structures of the world around us mean that cooperation is essential; nor is it clear what the idea of absolute independence would mean. We collaborate with outside forces constantly in the process of living life in a complex society—we already have to choose which political leaders to support, which people to trust with the most important relationship roles in our lives, which economic sectors to engage with, and so on. But collaboration and support are much weaker than “surrender”; when you collaborate with or support a favored politician, business, musical artist, or even relationship partner, you remain separate and sovereign and do not commit yourself to carrying out their will regardless of your own preferences. That is, the surrender that God demands seems to be much greater than what is required by even the closest human relationships, which may well make it intolerable.
The question remains—why should we give up our hard won individualism and our power to a God, this unknown and potentially untrustworthy force? Perhaps we should do this because of the be benefits we will eventually receive—regions of peace, glories of bliss and power. And it’s true that, in time, these things do come. But just as often, especially in the short term, surrender can lead to difficulties, where circumstances go differently than the way that we expected or wanted them to. That’s what makes surrendering to God different from merely “going with the flow”, which encourages the most apparent or expedient choice, inevitably leading to following something lower than the highest force of God. Besides the difficulties that come before the rewards, there is the infuriating but perhaps understandable paradox that God does not grant his highest rewards to those who only cooperate with him only because they are looking forward to their own gain.
We could surrender to God because we love him and that’s what he asks of us. But isn’t that one sided? After all, love is a two way street. We may love God, but does he not love us back? So shouldn’t he surrender to our wishes also? But it is known that this is not a solution, as God does not fulfill our arbitrary demands, which come from our lower ego. We could perhaps surrender to God because God is a form of our highest self, making God-surrender a sort of super-individualism; the problem is that if we use this argument in our lower, egoic state, we’re just as likely to surrender to a magnified form of our own ego as to our highest conception of God, which risks the unbalanced path of the Nietzschean “superman”.
If surrender is to work at all, it must be that God is a being who is worth surrendering to. This sounds tautological, of course. But the reason why we have always bristled at—and eventually overthrown—all the various human forces that have tried to lord over us is because of the manifest unworthiness of their claims of superiority. But God truly is something greater than us—not an unjust tyrant or haughty and oppressive prince of the universe, but rather an all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful force. It does not take away our dignity to admit that he has these qualities. We need to conceive of God as the greatest possible thing; and in acknowledging that, we acknowledge that we ourselves are not that greatest possible thing, that in all our individual power and sovereignty we still have flaws. By admitting that we are not yet the greatest thing and that God is greater, we open the door towards further progress.
When we trust that God is great, that he is good and loving beyond our current highest conceptions, we open ourselves to the thought that our own current ideas of progress may not yet be the highest ideals. One of the most important reasons we need to surrender to God is that so often, our ideas of how things should be are not at all the way they are, and the way they are is the way that God has made them. We need to continually surrender our ideas and preferences to be able to see what the world really is, and then to be able to see what God wants the world to be and what God wants us to be.
This does not mean a total loss of our individuality requiring us to give up our ability to think independently, our moral sense, or our conscience wholesale in order to become a rigid automaton, God-robot, or passive and featureless pushover. It is true that we may be guided towards acceptance or change, but we may also be strengthened in what our conscience and convictions told us in the first place. Individualism is a powerful idea that has given us the strength to combat injustice and oppression, as encouraged us to discover the unique thoughts, talents, and personality traits that lie inside each one of us. And its work in the world is nowhere near complete, as there are still billions of people who have not had the opportunity to receive its benefits. But eventually we discover that there is, in fact, a greater and more sovereign force in the universe than the human individual. Luckily, when we realize the Good and Love that this force represents, we understand that the task is not to destroy or efface that human individual but rather to become the greatest version of it by growing into God’s likeness and doing his will.
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