‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
58th teaching
12.30.2013
“God’s Sovereignty:
Solving the Ancient Puzzles”
The Dilemma of
Free Will
Review:
Last time we held a study, our topic was the Problem of
Evil, in light of our research of God’s Sovereignty. We talked about how
theology isn’t here merely to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, but that
Christianity is a very real system of beliefs, touching on the most elemental
concerns of humanity: such as how we cope we suffering and why we suffer. Can
someone summarize the Problem of Evil? Who was the earliest historical figure
to use this argument? What Christian author originally used this argument when
he was an atheist? What is Evil? The Problem of Evil questions several of God’s
attributes, but how do we answer the Problem of Evil: what solution did we find
to show how evil can co-exist in reality with an all-good, all-powerful,
all-knowing God?
End
of Review
The answer forms the topic of our discussion tonight.
We’ve addressed the Problem of Evil, but tonight’s study is
entitled: “the Dilemma of Free Will”.
Turn to Deuteronomy
30:11-19. Clearly, Israel was presented with a choice: obey and live or
disobey the commandment of the LORD and be cursed. This brings up our subject
of Free Will.
Last time I had said: “The answer [to the Problem of Evil]
is free will. Evil exists as a natural consequence of our own free choices. The
immorality of the world is just the total sum of the individual acts of
immorality you and I commit each and every day... Outside of free will, there
is no answer for the existence and creation of evil.”
Why did God allow the possibility of evil and suffering?
Answer: because He allowed His creatures to make free choices.
As we heard from Christian apologist and mathematician,
John Lennox, who calls the Problem of Evil “the greatest problem Christians
face”… he says: “Why couldn’t God, if there is a God, have created us without the capacity for moral evil?
Could He not have foreseen that things would go wrong and avoided it? Of course
He could! He could have made us automata, robots. But then we would have been
less than human. Robots programmed [to do] what we want them to do would be
incapable of certain things. I have a wife. I’ve been married 45 years. I’m
glad she’s not a robot. If I arrived at home and found the IPAD on the front of
my robotic wife and it had instructions on it ‘kiss’ and I pressed this button
and I got a kiss, it wouldn’t be very exciting, you know? …You see the
difference. You wouldn’t want to be like that. And the interesting thing, we
find ourselves wishing that God would do something that would ultimately mean
wishing ourselves out of existence.”
So the question is sometimes raised: Couldn’t God have
created a world in which evil was not possible? Yes. But it would be a world
without free choice, the ability to love and the ability to hate, the choice to
obey or the choice to rebel. And God, foreseeing that this is the only world in
which there would be any meaning, created just such a world with free creatures
such as we live in, which is unfortunately tainted by our own immoral and
disobedient choices.
As the man of many quotes, C.S. Lewis, once said: “Free
will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible
any love or goodness or joy worth having."
But aha, what if
free will doesn’t exist at all? That will be our first point tonight:
1.
The Existence of Free Will
Does free will exist?
Now there’s a few ways to arrive at this question. For
example, the naturalist can arrive at this question. The naturalist is one who
claims that all there is in reality is the natural world, there’s no super-natural, nothing beyond the
visible universe like God or angels or heaven or hell. What’s more, a
naturalist can also claim that since everything is just the material natural
universe, then everything can be reduced to mere chemicals and laws. Therefore,
all of our thoughts and supposed choices are really just the results of the
chemicals in our brains, brains which were produced through a blind and random
process of natural selection. And thus there isn’t really any free will at all,
it’s all just chemicals acting upon the instincts given us by Darwinism and the
forces of our environment. There’s no such thing as ‘mind’ and there’s no such
thing as ‘free will’.
In the words of atheist Richard Dawkins: “DNA just is. And
we dance to its music”. All we are is chemicals and processes and DNA. Therefore
there’s no free will.
Or as English theoretical physicist and cosmologist,
Stephen Hawking, wrote in his book the
Grand Design: “the molecular basis of biology shows that biological
processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are
as determined as the orbits of the planets...so it seems that we are no more
than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion”.
Question is: did these men choose to believe free will is
an illusion? Or did the particles in their brains merely bring them to that
conclusion?
And I’d confront anyone with a naturalistic view of the
universe that they have to throw out free will if they’re going to throw out
God. If there’s no metaphysical, no super-natural, then you very well can’t
have much in the way of immaterial ‘mind’ or free will.
*Another way you might arrive at the question of whether
free will exists at all is not from a secular perspective but from a religious
perspective. We recently studied the attribute of God known as His Sovereignty:
that God controls and ordains and foreknows all things.
But if that’s the case, if everything is already
pre-determined according to God, then how can there possibly be free will? If
God controls everything, then it could logically follow that we control
nothing, not even our choices, and that there is therefore no free will. Now
this is actually the belief of some groups within Christianity. Some have come
to believe that there is no such thing as free will, as ultimate self-governing
freedom to make choices such as about our eternal destiny.
In a universe of ultimate determinism, where God
sovereignly governs every choice, can free will exist? Is free will compatible
with sovereignty? At first glance, it seems not.
Permit me a somewhat self-indulgent illustration from great
American literature: I remember reading a Batman comic some years ago. It was
from a series that involved telling stories from the perspective of Batman’s
villains. Given that most of them are insane or at the very least
megalomaniacal, it’s an interesting read to say the least. A sort of analysis
of what makes some people tick, touching on philosophical issues here and
there.
There was a comic in the series about the Mad Hatter. Batman’s
enemy the Mad Hatter, if you don’t know, briefly, was a neuroscientist who discovered
a way to disrupt the normal functions of the human brain and in effect controls
the thoughts of anyone he wished.
In the comic, you read the Mad Hatter’s talking to himself
like this: “I’m writing a book… It’s about a world without rules. A place where
the colors are always bright and the sun is always shining. It’s about a girl
named Alice. And it’s about me… but it’s not about hats. It’s not about tea. I’m
not supposed to drink the tea. I’m not supposed to wear the hats. I was an
important man. A scientist. A long time ago. My days were filled with
electromagnetic fields and my nights were consumed with the firing sequence of
selected neurons… My life had purpose. And then I made a discovery. I
discovered that there is no such thing as free will. Just synapses and
chemicals and muddled emotions and broken hearts.”
The thing that caused his descent into madness was his idea
that thoughts are reducible to mere chemistry and that he could control that
chemistry and thus control any thoughts. Though once he realized that, he’d
also have to fess up that he himself, while controlling the thoughts of others,
had thoughts of his own which were only chemicals in the end themselves.
Pretty sad, but I think that touches on both the naturalist
and the theological protests against
free will, either that it doesn’t exist because our minds are just chemical
processes or that it doesn’t exist because there’s some great cosmic Being
controlling our thoughts.
But let’s put this question into perspective. What have we
been studying? The Sovereignty of God and the Problem of Evil. We’ve seen that
the only answer, the only solution for the existence of evil is because free will exists. Without free will,
there is no explanation for the existence or the origin of evil. How could evil
have begun to exist? God cannot make it directly or do evil, since He has no
evil in Himself.
And that’s what John Piper, a popular modern Calvinist
preacher, claims. He believes there is no free will, no ultimate self-governing
of our own lives, no free choices, and therefore he has said of how evil came
to be: “I don’t know”.
Clearly so. That’s because if you remove free will, then
you simultaneously remove the Biblical explanation for the existence of evil:
that an angel named Lucifer willingly became prideful and fell, and that Adam
and Eve willfully disobeyed God, bringing about the existence of evil because
they had the capacity for it.
So I hope you can see the steps we’ve taken. We’ve seen
that God is Sovereign, but that He allows evil to exist because He allows free will
to exist. We’ve answered the Problem of Evil, but if you take away free will,
then the whole bit of reasoning falls apart and you’re left with very few
options: Either you say evil doesn’t exist (which we know it does) or that God
is evil (which we know He isn’t) or that there is simply no explanation at all
for the origin of evil, it’s just some irreconcilable religious claim that you
simply must have faith about. No, no, no. This can only make sense, the world
as we know it can only make sense, if we admit that free will exists.
2.
The Biblical Case for Free Will
If you thought we were going to talk about philosophy and
reason and chemical processes all night, you’re mistaken. This is a Bible
study.
So can the case be made from the Bible for the existence of
free will? If so, that ought to be enough for us. As Christians, we hold to the
inerrancy and the authority of Scripture, so clearly if Scripture clearly shows
that free will exists, then it exists. Fair enough?
Then let’s examine 8 Scriptural proofs for the existence of
Free Will:
I.
The
Biblical language
Does the Bible teach free will? Consider that it uses words
that could only make sense if free will actually existed. Earlier we read the
passage in Deut 30, where it says “choose life, that both you and your
descendants may live”. I submit to you that it would be unintelligible for
the Lord to tell Israel to choose if
there was no such thing as free will.
Furthermore, the Bible uses the terms like obedience, which implies the possible choice
of disobedience; giving, which
implies the possible choice of withholding; and rejection, which implies the possible choice of receiving rather
than rejecting. See the Bible uses human language just like we use human
language, and our language is all based around the concept of free choice.
Rejection, obedience, choosing and giving would all be meaningless terms if
there was no possible alternative to choose instead.
So at a basic level, the very structure of the Bible shows
that free will is a part of reality. The language it uses indicates all kinds
of free and possible choices. The Jews rejected
Jesus rather than accepted Him. They chose
to.
II.
The
Fall of Lucifer
Turn to Ezekiel
28:12-19. This passage concerns a prophetic lamentation for the King of
Tyre, but it’s clear from the language it begins to adopt that its talking
about a figure whom the King of Tyre symbolized, that figure being the serpent
in the Garden of Eden, Satan Himself. And so Ezekiel 28 gives us a rare glimpse
into the Fall of Lucifer. Now turn over to Isaiah
14:12-15. Similarly, the prophet begins with a proclamation against the
King of Babylon, but then it’s clear that the prophecy begins to address a king
above even the king of Babylon, the king of darkness.
But notice specifically how FIVE times Lucifer said “I will”.
Exalted in pride, Satan fell because he thought he could be like the Most High
God. And his own free will to make that rebellious decision is all over this
passage.
Clearly, Lucifer became the fallen angel Satan because he
freely and willfully decided to do so when he was lifted up in pride. There you
have the origin of evil. If free will does not exist, then God made the perfection creature Lucifer
sin, but that’s not what this passage indicates. Instead, it stresses the “I
will’s” of the devil. Therefore, it’s clear that Satan willfully fell and that
evil began to exist in the willful act of Satan’s rebellion.
III.
The
Heresy of Universalism
There’s another problem that you have if you eliminate free
will. If there’s no free will, then why will some people end up in hell?
I Timothy 2:4 says
that God our Savior “desires all men to
be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” II Peter 3:9 says that the Lord “is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that
all should come to repentance.” Couple that with verses like: “Our God is in heaven; He does whatever pleases
Him” (Psalm 115:3) or “Whatever the LORD pleases He does, in heaven
and in earth, in the seas and in all deep places” (Psalm 135:6) or “But He is
unique, and who can make Him change? And whatever His soul desires, that He
does” (Job 23:13).
So if God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and wants everyone to be saved on one hand…
and then on the other hand we read that God does everything that He wants… doesn’t that mean that nobody
will perish? Does this mean that everyone will be saved?
This idea that everyone is going to be saved in the end is
a doctrine called universalism or universal salvation, and it is totally
false. Note it would be true if there was no free will, since the only active
free choosing would be God’s choosing and its clear from Scripture that God
wants everyone to be saved. Yet, it is also clear from Scripture that not
everyone will be saved, not because God doesn’t want to save, but because man
doesn’t want to be saved.
There will be a final judgment. There will be the
punishment of hell. And free will is the only way to account for some people
not being saved although God Himself wants everyone to be saved.
IV.
The
Nature of God
Turn to Luke 13:34.
Jesus laments over the city that would later turn out in droves to crucify
their own Savior, saying that He longed to gather them to Himself but that they
were not willing. This is one of the strongest claims in Scripture for the free
choice of mankind and our God given ability which we can even use to reject
Him.
We often hear that “God is a gentleman” and that He won’t
force Himself upon anyone. But that’s not a strong enough statement. It’s much
deeper than that. Just as truth cannot be forced but must be discovered, so
too, love cannot be forced but given freely. What gives love meaning at all is
that it is a free and willful response. Love becomes meaningless without free
will and meaningless if it is forced.
What can we call forced love? Forced love is rape. And God
is not a divine rapist. He will not force anyone to love Him or accept Him, but
sovereign allow and agree with the choices that man makes, whether that
involves accepting or rejecting. And that’s an incredible thought. It’s a part
of the nature of God not to force love and thereby make His own love toward us
meaningless, as if He were holding a gun to our heads and forcing us to say the
three words “I love you”. Rather, the Loving God is interesting in our receiving
and reciprocating His love. God doesn’t want robots and He isn’t a divine
rapist. He wants His love and our love to be meaningful, and that can only
involve free will.
V.
The
Nature of Worship
Psalm 100 says “Shout for joy to the LORD, all the
earth. Worship the LORD with gladness;
come before him with joyful songs. Know
that the LORD is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people,
the sheep of his pasture. Enter his
gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and
praise his name. For the LORD is good
and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all
generations.”
Talking about the human response to God’s love, the idea of
worship certainly involves free will. Consider that without free will worship
would be meaningless, just as meaningless as if you typed up a paragraph about
how great you are, how much everyone loves you, and how beautiful you are and
then let a computer text-to-speech program read it off to you. You typed up the paragraph. You told the computer to read it back to
you. You told the program to praise
you. There’s nothing in that which involves real worship. God knows that.
Isaiah 29:13, “These people come near to me with their
mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” God
sees right through insincere worship, let it be known. He is interested in the
real, loving response of the human heart.
The universe is not some galactic computer program in which
God types in every act of worship. What kind of a God would that be, who was
only interested in superficial, fake self-deluding worship? Not the God of the Bible.
Rather in worship and in prayer, we surrender our wills to
God’s own will, we submit to the authority of God, and each of these things
would be meaningless if we did not have the free choice to choose to do them.
It is only meaningful to desire God if you
are the one who freely desires Him.
VI.
Man’s
Moral Responsibility
That the Bible holds men and women morally and personally
responsible for their actions is clear. Because they chose to disobey rather
than obey, therefore they were punished. Yes, there is the clear plan of the
Sovereign God but there is also the free choice of man to will evil or to will
good. Luke 22:22 says “For the Son of Man is to go just as it has
been determined, but woe to that man by whom He is betrayed”. The Bible
held Judas morally responsible for betraying Christ, even though it was part of
God’s determined plan that Christ be betrayed, yet it remains that Judas chose
to do so.
But hold those horses! You cannot place moral blame if
there is no free choice. We often are grieved and pained when we strike our
toes against some hard object in the dark of the night, but none of us hold
that object morally responsible. It didn’t mean
to hurt you. It didn’t choose to hurt
you. It was merely there.
And if there’s no free will, then we are merely there, or
to phrase it in the naturalist’s words again: we’re merely biological machines,
and nobody holds machines morally responsible.
Case in point: I read an article recently about a woman who
was arrested for murdering her own 13-year old daughter on Christmas Day. All
the outrage that wells up within us in hearing just that brief sentence, all
the sense of justice within us that rises up, bears upon our innate and
inherent sense of moral responsibility. For if naturalism is true and free will
does not exist, then contrary to the most basic emotions of our core feelings,
you cannot blame that woman for murdering her daughter on Christmas. It’s all
just particles and chemicals, you see.
So the only way that there can be a moral responsibility
and a judgment coming from God is if there are free creatures who can choose to
do good or evil, otherwise God is judging creatures for sins that they could
not but choose to do, which means God Himself in fact made them do sin.
VII.
God
turning things to good (Pro 16:9
Proverbs 16:9
says “A man’s heart plans his way, but
the LORD directs his steps”. One clear way in which God’s remains Sovereign
over the co-existing free choices of man is that God can use the choices of man
for His own ultimate purposes. We read in Romans
8:28, “And we know that all things
work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called
according to His purpose.”
Case in point, the cross. Acts 4:27-28 says “For truly
against Your holy Servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius
Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel were gathered together to do
whatever Your hand and Your purpose determined before to be done.”
Certainly it was God’s plan before the foundations of the world to send His Son
to be the sacrificial atonement for the sins of His free creatures, but also,
and just as certainly, those who condemned and crucified the Lord of Glory were
morally responsible for their free actions.
The Apostle Peter says in Acts 2:23 that although Jesus was “delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have
taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death…” There’s definite
moral responsibility there. But what man meant for evil God turned into good.
What were the most heinous and diabolical actions in all of human history, the
crime of crucifying the innocent One, God turned into salvation for all of
mankind.
God remains sovereign over free acts of men, not excluding
the free acts of men, by turning even the most evil human decision into
ultimate good.
VIII. Christ’s Prayer in the Garden
Perhaps the ultimate example of free will illustrated in
Scripture is in the submission of the will of the Son of God to His own Father.
Look at Matthew
26:36-46.
Clearly, Jesus Himself demonstrates that He is submitting
His own will to the will of His Father though that involves all the torture and
all the humiliation and all the pain of crucifixion that was to immediately
follow. This whole sequence here would be meaningless without free will. Even
the Son of God had to surrender His own will to the will of His Father.
*So then, 8 proofs from Scripture that free will exists.
How then do we reconcile it with the Sovereignty of God?
3.
The Balance of Free Will
C.S. Lewis wrote: “If you choose to say, ‘God can give a
creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have
not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words
do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other
words, 'God can.' …nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”
So then how can God be both Sovereign and man be free to
choose? How are these compatible? Simply, in the same way that God and evil are
compatible, in that God allows evil through the allowance of free will, thus
God allows free will.
God remains Sovereign because He sovereignly choose to give
us choices. God gave you and I the ability to decide between alternatives,
between obedience and disobedience, love and hate, good and evil. And the best
answer I think to show how God remains Sovereign and man remains free is that
God sovereignly allows man freedom. And what God has chosen to allow is no
limitation to His power, since He allows it in the first place.
So while there are so many views out there, whether you’re
a Calvinist or Arminianist, whether you’re a hard determinist or an
incompatibilist or libertarianist… I think a good case can be made from
Scripture that both God’s Sovereignty and Man’s free will are true.
God Sovereignly gives us free will and Sovereignly uses
even our worst choices to further His own purposes.
4.
What to do with Free Will
So then we have this gift of God. We find ourselves made in
God’s own image with a capacity to choose. What do we do with this ability?
We come back to the ancient image of Christ in the Garden
of Gethsemane, praying unto His Father “thy will be done”.
Though we have our own free wills, the greatest thing you
can do with your will is to ironically submit it to God’s will. Recognize that
His is the most perfect, His is the loving, His is the wise plan. All we need
to do is submit ourselves to our God, to do as He says in His Word, even when
our flesh doesn’t feel like it.
How often we call Him Lord. How often we claim Him as King
of kings. But how often do we surrender our wills to the perfect authority of
His own?
I conclude with a quote out of Andrew Murray’s excellent
book, Absolute Surrender: “God has a
plan for His Church upon earth. But alas! we too often make our plan, and we
think that we know what ought to be done. We ask God first to bless our feeble
efforts, instead of absolutely refusing to go unless God go before us.”
Here we are at the threshold of a New Year and the closing
of an old year. How can you use your own will differently this next year? How
can you avoid making the same mistakes that you did this past year? How much
more can you submit yourself to God this new year? Can you purpose right now to
surrender this next year to God and allow Him to have His way done, rather than
you merely getting in the way?
Do not use your God-given gift of free choice to stand in
God’s way.
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