Those who choose to live without God cannot by doing so set themselves free from God’s eternal purpose. Since it is his will that the earth should be cursed because of sin and since that curse includes the imposition of vanity on all human endeavour, then the idea that the unbeliever can do anything new and can rise up above the limitations that God has placed on him and create real purpose and meaning for himself without the Lord is self-delusion. Without God, we are locked in by circumstances and behind those stand the unchanging purposes of God. This is not our world but God’s. The world is not our playground in which we can amuse ourselves to our hearts content; it is our prison from which only repentance and faith can set us free. Until conversion, the door is so securely locked that no dream, no aspiration, no endeavour can enable us to escape. Not only is the present known but also the future, so that even there we have no hope of escape. Man remains accountable in spite of trying to free himself from God’s purpose. Man makes choices and those choices are known to God in advance, but man will be brought into judgment on the basis of the choices he has made. Once made they cannot be unmade, therefore we had better take care over every step we take.
The object of the last phrase is a passive participle which literally means ‘the thing pursued’ or ‘the thing chased away’. That it is a reference to time is obvious from the two other references to time in the same sentence, and it can only refer to the past. The term the Spirit has chosen emphasises that the past is beyond our reach and therefore impossible to change, however much we would like to go back and correct what we have done.