Understanding the Will

This was originally published in Antithesis, Vol. II, No. 4, July/Aug 1991

Free will. Who could be against it? But there is a better question than this to ask. Free will. What is it?

Many of the staunchest advo­cates of “free will” encounter immediate difficulties when they are asked to ex­plain what they defend — the embar­rassment of Erasmus in his debate with Luther may be the archetypical example. Upon any close examination of proposed explanations it soon be­comes apparent that “free will” (as commonly understood) is a philo­sophical chimera — it will be a long time before there is a rigorous apolo­getic in defense of this, the evanescent god.

Fortunately, the Bible does not leave us without teaching on this important subject of human choices. Jesus explains, in very plain terms, the mechanics of the will—and it is not what many suppose. In Matthew 12:33­37, Christ says:

Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree bad and its fruit bad; for a tree is known by its fruit. Brood of vipers! How can you. being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things. But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.

Christ teaches here that choices come from the heart. The will does not command the heart; rather, the heart commands the will. Consider these key points of Christ’s doctrine:

• Choices and actions are the fruit of our human nature—they are a revelation of that nature. A good na­ture will result in good choices, and an evil nature will result in evil choices. Good trees produce good fruit, and evil trees produce evil fruit. Our words and actions, therefore, are not determined by an autonomous will, but rather by the nature of the tree.

• Consequently, Jesus says, someone with an evil nature is inca­pable of speaking good things. But this inability, this bondage, is caused by the nature of his own heart. He is bound by what he wants; it is a self-limitation. It is not external compul­sion. Evil men are therefore free to do what they want, but they are not free to do what they should.

• Moreover, the fact that our choices proceed from our hearts does not limit our responsibility before God in the slightest. Our words are deter­mined by our hearts, and we will be judged on the basis of our words. In­deed, we are judged on the basis of our words because they proceed straight from our hearts.

Suppose I offered a man a bowl of cockroaches to eat, and he refused. Why did he refuse? Because he didn’t want them. Suppose further that I therefore accused him of having an enslaved will. He wonders why I think this. I reply that I think he is enslaved because he didn’t use his will to decide to eat the cockroaches. He replies, quite justly, that his will is working perfectly well. The will chose just what the man wanted, and he didn’t want a cockroach.

Jesus used another example besides that of fruit-bearing trees. If a man were to reach into a chest, he could only bring out what was already inside the chest. Different chests con­tain different things, and consequently, different things are brought out. Dif­ferent hearts contain different things, and consequently, different choices are made. The will is simply the arm God has given us to reach into our treasure chest (our heart), in order to bring out the contents. The will has no power to determine the contents of the chest; it only has the power to reveal the con­tents, and this it does very well.

So when God saves a man, He does not give him a new will. There is no need; the old will works just fine in doing what wills were meant by God to do — which is to bring out the contents of the heart. What God does in salva­tion is this: He gives us new hearts. As a result, the new Christian begins making new choices.

No man is capable of making a choice contrary to the strongest de­sire of his heart. This is an inexorable law; there are no exceptions—even God’s choices proceed from His immu­table and holy nature. A person may certainly has other desires, and they may be very strong desires (Romans 7:18-23). But what he finally does is what he wanted to do most, and he is therefore responsible for the choice.

If the choice were not his strongest desire, he would not have chosen it. Let us return to our example of the bowl of cockroaches for a mo­ment. Suppose a man said, in order to refute this teaching, that he didn’t want to eat a cockroach, but that he was going to do so anyway—so there. Is this a refutation? Not at all. It simply means that his will acted on the basis of his strongest desire, which is now to win the debate.

If we take these factors to­gether, we see that it is nonsense to talk of a freewill, as though there were this autonomous thing inside of us, capable of acting in any direction, re­gardless of the motives of the heart. If there could be such a thing—a crea­ture who made choices not determined by the desires of its heart — we would not applaud this creature as a paragon of free will, but would rather pity it as a collection of random, arbitrary, insane choices. Such a creature would not be, and could not be, a free and responsible agent. We would recoil in horror from an exhibition of such autonomous free will. Choices made apart from the de­sires of the heart? They would be an exhibition, not of freedom, but of in­sanity. “Why did you throw the vase against the wall?” “Because I wanted to go for a walk.”

So a far more Biblical way of speaking is to speak of free men, and not of free will. And what is a free man? He is someone who is free from exter­nal compulsion and is consequently at liberty to do what his heart desires.

This is a natural liberty, and all men are in possession of it. It is the only kind of liberty possible for us, and it is a gift to us from God. Under the superintendence of God, all men. Christian and non-Christian, have the freedom to turn left or right, to choose chocolate or vanilla, or to move to this city or that one—depending entirely upon what they want to do. The foreor­dination of God does not violate this; it is the cause of this—but more on this in a moment.

Notice that this natural lib­erty is not the same thing as the free­dom from sin, i.e. moral liberty. In Romans 6:20, 22, Paul makes the dis­tinction between natural liberty and moral liberty. He says:

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righ­teousness… But now having been set free from sin, and hav­ing become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life.

Slavery to sin is true slavery, but even sin does not negate natural liberty—the slave to sin is free from righteousness, but is still not free from his own desires. This slave to sin is one who loves sin, and consequently obeys it. As a creature, he is free to do what he wants, which is to continue in sin. But he is not free to desire righteous­ness. Why is he not free to do right? Because his sinful heart does not love what is right. Like all men, he is not free to choose what is repulsive to him, and true godliness is repulsive to him. So in the realm of morality, he is therefore free in a limited sense—free from the control of righteousness. When God, by grace, liberates him from the bond­age of his own sin-loving heart, he is then a slave to God. As a slave to righteousness, the Christian freely, out of a new heart, follows Christ.

The True Ground of Freedom

Some people almost auto­matically yet mistakenly conclude that any assertion of foreordination along with any clarification of “free will” im­plies that human beings have no true freedom at all. This is quite false, and can easily be shown to be false. For example, when the Westminster di­vines affirmed the sovereignty of God’s eternal decree, they went on, in the same breath, to say this: “…nor is violence offered to the will of the crea­tures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.”

Now the writers of the Confes­sion were not merely saying that creaturely liberty was consistent with the Bible’s teaching regarding God’s sovereignty (although it certainly is), but rather that the Biblical doctrine of divine sovereignty was the foundation for human liberty. Consequently, ac­cording to this view, those Christians who dispute the doctrine of divine sovereignty are attacking more than God’s sovereignty; they are attacking the only ground and foundation of true human liberty. So the debate is not between those Christians who want to affirm the liberty and responsibility of creatures, and those who do not. It is between those who consistently ground the liberty of creatures in the strength and power of God, and those who in­consistently ground it in the strength and power of man.

I have been in discussions where this affirmation of creaturely liberty was dismissed as something “tacked on” to the Biblical position—as sort of a sop to common sense. It is important to note the word “dismissed,” and remember that it is not a synonym for “argued.” The reason it is dismissed is because it is easy to assume that divine sovereignty is inconsistent with true human responsibility—but to argue for it is ultimately impossible.

For example, I have been told that to assert divine sovereignty and true human freedom is “illogical.” There is a very simple answer to this: If this is illogical, then what is the name of the fallacy? There is a vast difference be­tween logical contradictions and those high mysteries which must necessarily be contained in the infinite wisdom of God.

It is true that this sort of ob­jection is quite a natural mistake to make, and people have been making it since the time of Paul at least (Rom. 9:19). When we consider the relation­ship of the infinite Creator to the finite creature, we do have a problem under­standing how true natural liberty can co-exist with a sovereign God superin­tending all events in the universe. But the reconciliation of these two Biblical truths is ultimately to be found in the mind of God; it is not a problem that is keeping Him up nights, and we must recognize that our finite minds are not capable of penetrating the glories of the infinite. The sovereign prerogatives of the Creator, and the natural liberty and true responsibility of creatures are not inconsistent. How could they be? The Bible teaches them both, some­times in the same verse.

We can, however, approach the subject obliquely. Instead of dem­onstrating that human liberty and di­vine sovereignty are consistent, it would be far more fruitful to show that all denials of divine sovereignty destroy true human liberty. In other words, it can be shown that the only hope for any kind of true human liberty is in the exhaustive sovereignty of the living God.

In the previous section, I ar­gued that choices proceed from our hearts. It is impossible for a true choice to be autonomous in the sense of being independent of our heart desires. If there were a choice for which no reason at all could be given, we could no longer call it a choice. We would have to say it was a random event—Henry random-evented chocolate instead of vanilla. To say “autonomous choice” is as contra­dictory as to say “round square.”

Now because all the influence is from the heart to the will, and not the other way around, the question is now this: since the will does not determine the direction of the heart, what does? The Bible teaches that God superin­tends the choices made by men. He may do so immediately through provi­dential intervention or mediately through the use of secondary agents. What is the alternative to God’s sover­eignty over all events?

We have already shown that a man cannot autonomously choose to push his heart in a certain direction. And if we remove, for the sake of ar­gument, God’s personal and loving sovereignty from the one choosing, what is left? Only a blind, rigorous, inexo­rable, deterministic fatalism. Picture cupped hands around a guttering candle in a strong wind. This candle flame is the human will. The wind is the typhoon of the world around us. The cupped hands are the Lord’s. Within Christianity, advocates of “free will” want the Lord to remove His hands so that the candle may burn more brightly. The history of modern phi­losophy should teach us better than this. Those who begin these optimistic crusades in the name of free will al­ways end up in the fever swamps of blind behaviorism and determinism. The candle is out.

The conclusion then is that man, as creature, is free to do as he pleases. He has this freedom only be­cause God grants and sustains it—and perfectly controls it.