Free Will
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?
Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay them?
For from him and through him and for him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.”
Today’s Text: Romans 11:25-36 (Living Life Daily Devotional)
People sometimes ask, “Why did God allow sin and evil and death to enter into the world?” They ask that, as if to put God on trial. One way to answer the question is that the nature of love is such that it requires a free-will response. If we do not freely choose God’s love—to be His child in His household in His kingdom—then our response is not really a response of love.
But the biblical answer to that question is found in this passage at verse 32: For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.
God has offered His mercy to all people, but not all people are saved. Each person has to make a conscious choice to receive God’s mercy. And in receiving God’s mercy, not only do we attain the benefits of mercy, but we also attain the blessings of being His children.
In the final analysis, the answer to that question is “free will.” In a sense, to say that God is sovereign is to say that God is free will. And when God created humanity in His image (Genesis 1:27), He imparted a limited degree of His free will in us. That is to say, when God imparted to us a limited sovereignty over the earth, He also imparted to us a limited free will.
And with that limited free will, Adam and Eve chose, not to know (that is, to experience) the goodness of perfect fellowship with God in His perfect creation, but to know evil (Genesis 3:4-7). And so with that choice came the knowledge (that is, the experience) of sin, evil, and death and a broken world.
The first Adam (and Eve) could have chosen the good by remaining obedient to God’s word. But they chose evil because they wanted God’s blessings on their own terms. They wanted to be like God on their own terms, not on God’s terms.
As we often say, you don’t know what you don’t know. And their choice to know the evil that they didn’t know is the reason why every single human being since then knows evil and sin and death. And since then, no single human being, except Jesus Christ, has known the goodness of perfect fellowship with God.
In the new heavens and the new earth, after Jesus returns, we will still have free will. But it is the free will that we exercise in this life that determines whether our free will in the next life will operate in the goodness of perfect fellowship with God or be bound in the evil of hell for all eternity.
Other people might ask, “Why does God condemn people to hell at all?” And the answer is that God does not condemn people to hell, strictly speaking. God offers life. People choose hell.
Father, Your thoughts and Your ways are high above ours. I don’t know what I don’t know. But You know all things. And You are patient with my limited thinking. I long to know the goodness of perfect fellowship with You in Your perfect creation. In the meantime, may my imaginings of heaven be guided by the real hope I have in Christ. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
