Articles

Romans Chapter 9​​​​​​​

Free will is the ability to exercise a personal decision independent of any external influence or control – unlike a puppet or a machine. Being made in the image of God, the free will Man has is superior to that of animals, thus we are given the ability to decide whether to accept or deny God. Just as our ancestors, Adam and Eve, were created with free will, they also had the ability to decide whether to listen to God’s command and choose to eat or not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Even after sin had entered the world, mankind still has to exercise their free will to decide whether to listen to God’s commandments. Moses had to call upon heaven and earth as a witness against the people of Israel and made them decide and choose whether to obey or disobey the laws of God. The Lord Jesus once answered a scribe, saying that the foremost commandment was to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ Loving God ‘with all your mind’ implies that we should use our will to love Him – and the decision to love God must come from ourselves and not controlled by God. Otherwise, in the first place, He would not have made such a demand from us in His laws. Throughout the history of Israel, we observe that the Israelites were blessed when they chose to obey God’s Law; however, when they chose to rebel against His Law, they incurred curses upon themselves. These choices were made entirely out of their free will, God had never attempted to manipulate their decisions behind the scene, or else He could not even mete out His punishments.

Whosoever loves God would surely obey His commandments, and whosoever obeys His commandments would come to Christ. This is because the purpose and conclusion of the Law is Christ, to lead all who seek God to find eternal life in Him. When we believe in Jesus, we also receive His spirit – the Spirit of God, into our hearts; even thereafter, God does not interfere with our free will. In the book of Galatians, chapter 5, verse 13, it clearly says: “But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature.” Even after we have received the Lord Jesus, we are fully liable to exercise our free will in choosing whether to give in to our fleshly desires or to obey the Spirit and live a sanctified life.

We know from the bible that God has never intervened with our free will – be it before we have sinned, after we have sinned, before we have received Jesus, or after we have received Jesus. This is consistent with our real-life experiences, that all the choices we make come from our own free will, no one would feel an invisible hand controlling their decisions behind the scenes. Nor would God control us without our knowledge, and secretly make us do according to His will. Unlike man, God does not lie, in Him there is no darkness; if He has done it, He would surely have told us plainly. God would not, on one hand, instruct us to love Him with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind; but on the other, control some to love Him and some not to do so.​​​​​​​

What then is the function of free will with regards to a person believing in Christ? Could mankind be so utterly depraved that even after hearing the gospel, they are incapable of believing the Lord Jesus? So much so that God has to step in to interrupt man’s free will, putting in them the desire to receive the Lord, and deciding who would and would not be saved? In doing so, resulting in those who did not receive the ‘God imputed desire’ to be unable to come to faith in the Lord even after hearing the Gospel. According to Calvinistic teaching, it speaks of this as a total corruption of mankind in their first point ‘Total Depravity’ – influencing even that of our free will, where no one can rely on his own will to believe in Christ. Therefore, God had to select some people according to His sovereignty and impute in them the desire to accept Christ, so that they could be saved.

To better understand whether God does indeed interfere with the decision of a person believing or not believing in Christ, let us first consider how a sinner is saved by God. The Father prearranges, the Son redeems and the Spirit regenerates, the triune God works hand-in-hand in the salvation of a sinner, where one cannot do without the other. The Heavenly Father pre-plans the events in our lives, allowing us to experience pleasant or unpleasant situations, so that we may come to realise the transience and emptiness in life and recognise we need something more, that which is spiritual. The Son became flesh, to reveal to us the truths concerning salvation – we are all sinners that need to be saved by Him. The Spirit works in our hearts by guiding us, moving us, and enlightening us to understand spiritual matters.

Without the Father to prepare for us real-life situations to go through, all spiritual truths concerning the Son could only remain as mere head-knowledge and would not translate into true repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. When the Son says “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin,” the Father will need to lead us in our daily lives to help us understand that we are indeed powerless against sin, to realise that we are truly the slaves of sin. Only in this manner would we come to seek Christ to free us from its bondage (Jn 8:34-36). We often find it easier to lead children to faith in Christ, but we also notice that they have the highest numbers without genuine faith. Why do we observe such a situation? This is because most children lack real-life experiences to reconcile with the gospel they have heard; therefore, the gospel truths simply remain as head-knowledge and could not translate into true faith in Christ. The Father would need to give them sufficient life experiences so that these truths would no longer stay as abstract concepts, but would become a reality to them. Only then would they be able to come to true saving faith in Christ.

However, without the spiritual truths from the Son, even with the most diverse and complete life experiences provided by the Father, one still would not be saved. In fact, no one can depend on his experiences in life to discover the mystery of salvation – that God has appointed His Son Jesus to be the Saviour of the world, and the sinner will just need to believe in Him to be saved. The book of Acts records the account of how the family of Cornelius came to be saved. Cornelius himself was already a God-fearing person, yet God still had to send Peter to preach the gospel message to him before he knew that he had to believe in Jesus to be saved. Without knowing the gospel truths of the Son, no one can be saved.

The Holy Spirit is the power of God. At the point of our conversion, we are born again by the Holy Spirit and given a new spiritual life. With this new spiritual life, we are able to gain entry into the kingdom of God (Jn 3). Oh, how great is the power of the Holy Spirit, who can deliver a sinner from the depth of hell into the glory of heaven! Without the renewal of the Holy Spirit, we still could not be saved even with the Father’s life experiences and the spiritual truths from the Son. 

Thus far, we have seen that without God’s active efforts to save mankind, no one would be saved. Should God allow the whole of humanity to seek Him on their own after the fall of Adam and Eve, they would surely have perished in their sins. Salvation is of God alone, we are powerless to do anything. God persists with great efforts, to even sacrifice His Son and lead us step by step unto His salvation – what does God want from us in the end? Could it be that after we have heard the gospel, God would press a button (to impute the desire) to make us receive Christ? God forbid! If this is the case, it would have rendered the whole gospel futile and all the efforts of God void. Beginning with Adam, God’s expectation for mankind has never changed, all He wants from us is that we will obey Him out of our free will. From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Old Testament Law and finally the Gospel of Jesus Christ, all that God wants is for us to make a personal decision to obey Him. God has planned our life so that everyone will come before Jesus, and the final thing we ought to do is to exercise our free will to accept Him as our saviour. This is what God deems as most precious and He has sacrificed all that He has in order to achieve this goal.

Regrettably, Calvinism’s overemphasis of God’s sovereignty took away the only work that God requires us to do – that we use our free will to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ whom He has sent (Jn 6:28-29). By taking away man’s free will, salvation plan itself has become meaningless, rendering all of God’s painstaking efforts worthless. The decision to believe in the Lord would no longer lie within the person, but would be a pre-programmed response orchestrated by God Himself behind the scene. To persuade someone to believe in Christ becomes redundant and a lie by itself, because the final decision lies not with man but within the remote-control held in God’s hand. This is precisely the reason why hyper-Calvinists do not preach the gospel, and they have done this out of complete devotion to the teachings of Calvinism, so that they would not accidentally share the gospel to those not elected by God.

During the marriage feast of the Lamb in the new heavens and new earth, there would no longer be laughters of joy because everyone knows that it is a sham. The bride did not marry the groom out of love but because she had a remote-control receiver affixed on her back. The Lamb also no longer rejoices, because He had realised what He had sacrificed His life to be wedded to was in fact a robot – when she said that she loved Him, she was actually programmed to do so.

For Calvinists to be consistent in their teachings and ideologies, they are compelled to take away man’s free will in salvation, and this has led to many conflicts and confusions. The most harmful of all, is to have changed God’s truths into lies. Though they may have done it with the good intension to exalt God’s sovereignty, they have made Him out to be a hypocrite – a God who does not honour His words. In the Bible He says, ‘whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life’ (Re 22:17), but actually in the dark, He had already controlled these ‘wishes’ – only those whom He has imputed the desire, will come to receive this life-giving water.