When you picked that box of cereal off the supermarket shelf out of the many varieties you could have chosen, were you employing your own freedom to choose, or was your selection determined long ago, before you were even born?
The subject of free will fascinates me, particularly as many within the Church, in other religions, and in the faithless half of the worlds of science and philosophy, are of the opinion that there is no such thing.
MEANT TO BE
The conviction that all things are determined, ordained or fated, and that free-will is an illusion, is more common than you might think. Even if you aren’t one of those consciously holding to the extremity of this view, you may catch yourself occasionally thinking that some occurrence in your life was “meant to be”. I can certainly go along with that to an extent, and I’m a firm believer that sometimes what we might be tempted to call “coincidence” is nothing of the sort. Some things are, without doubt, sent into our lives from the forethought of God, or from His enemy, or by the laws of nature.
Like it or not, we’e constrained by nature, by our genetic code, by law, obligation and the will of God. Our lives are “channelled” to an extent, in ways beyond our control. I cannot, however, accept the idea that God, the universe, nature, The Way or The Force have pre-determined all the events and outcomes of my life or anyone else’s lives, so that we have no genuine free will of our own.
There are varying degrees of determinism to the minds of those who deny free-will. We may be able to choose which box of cereal to buy at the supermarket, or which movie to watch tonight, but we don’t really choose who we marry or where we’re going to live. Others believe every single detail was ordained or determined before the world began.
Naturalistic scientists are convinced that our brains and minds are all chemicals and electrics. The properties of matter and evolutionary forces dictate which cereal box we will pick up, no matter how much we believe we’re making a choice.
TWO EXAMPLES FROM SCRIPTURE
Some Christians are sure that you cannot choose Jesus: he chooses you. He rejects the majority. They are ordained for destruction and hell, with no option to seek salvation. None of us has a say in the matter. In this regard I want to comment on two of the multitude of Scriptural situations in which our free will must, to my mind, be an extensive reality.
In John’s gospel we see Jesus dealing with the religious leaders of his time, after one of his most notable healings. As usual they were opposing him, and he said to them,
You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life (John 5:39-40).
Those in the Church holding to Reformed theology will tell us that we cannot come to Jesus by our own will or choice, because that would be “works”. Never mind that Paul separated the two, like chalk and cheese. To these people, divine grace means that God decides which of us will come to salvation and who will not: we don’t and can’t decide for ourselves.
I’m sure they would have some sort of an answer as to why Jesus is talking about people being “unwilling” in this text, but it seems to me they need to juggle vigorously with language and logic to convince us that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said, and that those religious Jews were incapable oc coming to Christ by their own will. If they could not, Jesus’ accusation is little more than an act; a sermon which had no valid purpose. It’s like criticising your spouse for not winning the lottery.
It seems pretty clear to me that Jesus was upbraiding them for being unwilling to turn to him. That’s the simple, plain reading of the text. Unwillingness is the opposite of willingness, or to put it another way, they had choice, and were using it to reject him.
ALL, NOT SOME
I agree with our Reformed friends that God draws us to Himself, and that without Him we are completely helpless. We cannot save ourselves. However, He does not force some of us to be His children while sending the rest to hell with no option. Instead, He draws all of us to Himself, and the step of faith and love is taken by our own free-will. This is the most complementary view of God’s grace. Taking away our part in the salvation process is an insult to the grace of God.
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32).
BEING WILLING
In my second example, Jesus is weeping over Jerusalem, the city in which those who claimed to be the people of God had persistently rejected God, and now were rejecting His son. He said to the city,
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing (Matthew 23:37).
Did you catch that last phrase: “You were not willing”. The reason Israel as a whole had not repented and turned to the Father or the Son was that they were not willing. In other words, they had a will of their own which they used to reject Him. So then, had they been willing, they would have accepted Him by their own free will.
This is the most simple, logical explanation of the consequence of Jesus’ words. To try to explain them any other way presents a host of problems. If they in fact had no choice in the matter at all, Jesus is hiding the fact: he’s being somewhat economical with the truth, so that he’s actually deceiving them and us into thinking they had a choice when they didn’t. In this case, the entire scene is a sham, and Jesus is not to be trusted in his words. Why go into such a tirade; a spectacle; an empty, pointless, fruitless attention-getting speech, which is what this is if they didn’t really have free will in the matter?
Jesus is also being unfair on a cosmic scale in judging Jerusalem over a decision that they had no choice in. Can it really be that thanks to a God who is Love, they had been chosen to reject him, and now he’s going to judge them for the choice that He Himself had made?
Can we imagine that Jesus didn’t know the Jews had no choice in the matter? In this case, he was also being kept in the dark by his own Father.
This makes no sense to me whatsoever. The idea that “all things are ordained” as I recently heard a prominent radio and online minister say, is at best disgustingly, shockingly unfair, and at worst, a deception of universal proportions.
Fuel for Faith, Food for Thought 