Conversations in "Free Will"

It seems like every theological conversation I have eventually comes around to someone asking the question, "what about our free will?"

Without getting into a conversation about Arminian Vs. Calvinist theology, I just want to discuss the sovereignty of God and how it relates to the topic of "free will."

I will start by saying this: the reason people always fall back on the question of free will is because they are unable to break away from the idea that we are robots in God's little game called "Life." Instead of admitting that God is in total control over all creation, our sinful pride forces us to rationalize that our lives have meaning outside the will of God. So let's first understand exactly what God's Sovereignty is, and then we can come back to this thought.

Above all things, God is Holy. And His holiness is perfect. This means that God is perfect in everything He does. He is perfect in His creation, love, grace, mercy, wrath, justice, sovereignty, and everything else God does. To say that God is perfect in His Sovereignty means that nothing happens outside of God's decrees, and He is providential in everything that comes to pass.

The Bible tells us that God has a plan. He has always had the same plan and He will always have the same plan. Ultimately, the chief end of God's plan is to glorify God. This seems very selfish at face-value, but in reality, God's plan to glorify God is the foundation for our salvation. As John Piper put it, "Therefore, God is the one being in the universe, for whom self-exaltation is the highest virtue AND the most loving act."

God's plan to glorify God is carried out through Jesus, and His saving work on the cross is the most loving act in the history of the world. So as it relates to man-kind, our salvation in Christ is rooted in God's Sovereignty. It is all part of His perfect plan to glorify himself through the Son.

With that said, we must recognize that God has given man life. For natural man, this means the ability to think and reason. No human acts purely out of instinct. We may engage in hasty actions at times, but every action is orginated in a thought, no matter how retarded or advanced that thinking process may be. So we are temporal creatures based in a time sequence, and we can inevitably understand that our actions have an effect on our futures. For example, I know that if I stab myself I will most likely bleed, and I will most likely end up in the hospital, barring some sort of devine intervention. Ultimately, I know that I might die, and it's inevitable that I will consider these consequences as I ponder whether or not to carry out my original idea. BUT we can not say that the consideration given to these consequences is apart from God's Sovereignty.

Here is why: if we say that God is not sovereign over every thought and every action, then we say that he is not God. God can not be omniscient, omnipotent, and ominpresent and not be in total control. It is not logically possible! God can not be limited in any way, otherwise, that which is limiting God would be God. Either God is not God, or He is perfectly sovereign over ALL things. We are forced to pick one! We either believe in God's Sovereignty or we are atheists.

Now that we've hopefully picked perfect sovereignty, we still have to explain: how did we pick that? It is here that we arrive at the only logical conclusion: God's Sovereignty and the ability He gives us to live are parallels headed in the same direction, and they ARE related, but we will never understand how they are related. In His perfect mercy, God has chosen not to reveal some things to us because the weight of their knowledge is too heavy for us to carry. Just as a good father waits to tell his son the birds and the bees because it's too heavy for the boy to shoulder, our Heavenly Father waits to reveal this mystery.

As good Christains we have to accept that this is a mystery we will never understand in this life. That is the essense of faith itself. If God had chosen to reveal everything to us in His Word there would be no such thing as faith. We would have ALL the questions and ALL the answers. But since we realize there are some things we can not explain, we take them on faith, and rejoice in the mercy God has shown us.

Instead of trying to understand this mystery, we ought to spend our time thanking the Lord Jesus, the holy and innoscent Lamb of God, the founder and perfector of our faith!