Man’s Free Will
Image via WikipediaBecause the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be
(Rom. 8:7).
One of the most common objections to the doctrine of election is that it “violates man’s free will.” To answer this, we must look at man’s ability to choose and what is meant by free will. Once again we turn to the Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689: “Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation, so as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able by his own strength to commit himself, or to prepare himself thereunto” (chap. 9:3). Earlier this century Gresham Machen wrote, “A man’s choices are free in the sense that they are not just determined by external compulsion. But they are not free if by freedom is meant freedom from determination by the man’s own character.”
People possess free wills in the sense that everyone acts according to their nature. Our choices are dictated by who we are. We do not, therefore, have the freedom to be anything we are not. We do not have the freedom to be infinite or to be in more than one place at once. We do not have the freedom to be holy.
God also is bound by His own nature in this way. He freely acts in accord with His own nature. For example, God cannot choose to be finite. He cannot choose to stop being God. He cannot choose to sin. Likewise, fallen men, because they are totally depraved (Scripture says not one is good), cannot choose to be righteous. For a fallen person to choose to have faith in Christ (which is contrary to man’s fallen nature) would mean he has righteousness remaining in his nature. But the Bible and our historic confessions uniformly affirm, and our experience universally confirms, that fallen man does not have this ability.
Election clearly does not violate man’s free will. Fallen man freely chooses according to his nature. If God never changed man’s nature, he would continue to sin because that is all he is able to do. Unbelief is the only result his free will can produce. Only when God changes his nature, regenerates him, makes him a new creature in Christ is he able to put his faith in Christ. Once his nature is changed, that person freely chooses to love Christ and to depend on His righteousness in redemption.
Read Matthew 7:16–18. How does Jesus’s analogy of the tree apply to fallen man’s ability to choose the good? Read John 3:3–8. What does Jesus say must happen in order for a person to have faith? Is this something man can do on his own? Why is this necessary to salvation? Could you have come to Christ without His changing you first?
