Devotional 52: Adam's Original Freedom: Man's Will in the State of Innocence

The Confession Read

God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced, nor, by any absolute necessity of nature, determined to good, or evil.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 9, Section 1

Introduction

If a man stands before a magistrate accused of murder, the first question the court must settle is not what his hand did but whether his hand was his own. If another man seized his arm and drove the blade by force, we do not call it murder. If a seizure of the brain left him without knowledge of his actions, we do not call it murder. The law of every civilized nation recognizes a principle that lies deeper than statute and precedent: moral responsibility requires moral freedom. A man can only be held accountable for what he himself has willed. Strip away that willing, and you strip away the man. Here is where the Westminster Divines begin their treatment of free will, and the place they choose to begin tells us something about their wisdom. They do not open Chapter 9 with the question that absorbed the medieval schoolmen: How does the will relate to the intellect? They do not open with the question that divided Rome and the Reformation: Does grace destroy the will or restore it? They open with a claim about creation itself: God made the human will with a natural liberty that belongs to its very essence as a created faculty. Before we ask what sin has done to the will, before we ask what grace does with the will, we must understand what a will is. And what a will is, in the biblical vision, is something that chooses without external force and without being locked by an absolute necessity of its own nature into good alone or evil alone. This opening sentence is the basement of the Confession's entire treatment of the will. Everything that follows in this chapter, the fourfold state of man's will in innocence, sin, grace, and glory, rests on the foundation laid here. And the foundation is deceptively simple: the will, as God made it, is free. Not omnipotent, not uncaused, not independent of motive or disposition or character, but free in the sense that when it chooses, the choice is genuinely its own. No hand forces it from without, and no iron law of nature compels it from within to one fixed pole. The Divines are clearing the ground, distinguishing the biblical doctrine from every form of fatalism that would reduce human beings to puppets and every form of determinism that would make moral praise and blame meaningless.

Scripture Foundation

The Scriptures do not present a philosophical treatise on the will, but they everywhere assume what this section asserts: that human beings are genuine agents whose choices are their own. From the first command in Eden to the final invitation of the Apocalypse, God addresses man as a creature who can hear, deliberate, and choose. To trace a few of these passages is to see the biblical foundation beneath the Confession's careful words. Deuteronomy 30:19 — "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." Moses stands on the plains of Moab with the promised land before him and a recalcitrant people behind him, and he does something remarkable: he summons creation itself as a witness. Heaven and earth are called into the courtroom to testify that God has placed a real choice before Israel. Not a charade, not a theatrical performance in which the outcome has already been scripted and the choosing is mere stagecraft. A genuine alternative stands before them, and Moses, speaking for God, commands them to choose. The Hebrew verb bacharta carries the sense of a deliberate, discerning selection: examine the options, weigh them, and choose life. The command would be a mockery if Israel lacked the natural capacity to respond. God does not command stones to dance or corpses to rise from the tomb when He addresses them as moral agents. He commands those whom He has made with the faculty of choice, and He holds them responsible for how they exercise it. The natural liberty of the will is the presupposition of every divine command in Scripture. Matthew 23:37 — "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" Here is a poignant utterance from the lips of the Son of God. Christ looks upon the city that will soon nail Him to a tree, and He weeps over it with the tender image of a mother hen spreading her wings over her vulnerable young. "I would," He says, and then the terrible hinge: "and ye would not." Two wills stand opposed: the incarnate will of the Son of God, which would have gathered Jerusalem under the wings of mercy, and the will of Jerusalem, which refused. The Greek is stark: ēthelēsa — I willed, I desired, I wanted, and ouk ēthelēsate — you did not will, you did not want, you refused. The very structure of the verse assumes that the refusal was genuine. If Jerusalem's rejection were simply the necessary outworking of some impersonal mechanism, Christ's lament would be sentimental theater, a tragedy performed by actors who have no choice but to play their parts. But His grief is real because their choice was real. Here is natural liberty on full display: no external force compelled Jerusalem to reject her Messiah, and no absolute necessity of nature determined her to evil. She chose, and she bears the weight of that choice. James 1:13-14 — "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed." James goes to the heart of the matter with the precision of a surgeon. The human tendency, as old as Eden, is to shift responsibility: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree." But James will have none of it. When you are tempted, the temptation does not originate in God. It originates in you. The two Greek verbs James employs are metaphors drawn from the hunt: exelkomenos means to be drawn out or dragged away, as a fish is drawn from its hiding place by bait, and deleazomenos means to be enticed, lured by the promise of satisfaction. The figure is not of an external force that overpowers the will but of an internal desire that captures and directs it. The will consents, follows, embraces. It is not forced; it is enticed, and enticement presupposes a will that can say yes or no. James grounds human responsibility squarely in the reality that sin arises from within the human heart, not from outside compulsion. The natural liberty of the will is the condition that makes temptation meaningful and sin blameworthy. Joshua 24:15 — "And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD." Joshua's valedictory address to Israel at Shechem sets before the people the same kind of alternative Moses had placed before them at Moab. The choice is stark, the alternatives clear, the command urgent. "Choose you this day." The Hebrew bacharu again signals a deliberate, considered choice, not a reflex or an instinct. Joshua does not add a footnote explaining that the choice is merely apparent and that divine sovereignty has already settled the outcome. He presses upon them the full weight of decision, knowing that the God who ordains the end also ordains the means, and that the means in this case is the genuine exercise of the human will. The compatibilism of Scripture is not a philosophical puzzle to be solved but a reality to be lived: God's decree and human choice are not competitors occupying the same space, for God works through the willing and choosing of His creatures without violating the nature of the will He made. Joshua can call Israel to choose precisely because God made them as beings who choose.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly assembled in the Jerusalem Chamber to draft the Confession, the doctrine of free will was not a blank slate. Nearly every major theological controversy since the apostles had turned in some measure on the nature and freedom of the human will. The Divines composed this opening section with an awareness of those controversies, and their choice of language was a careful act of theological boundary-setting. The first and most pressing error they needed to address was fatalism in its ancient and modern forms. The Stoics had taught that all events unfold by an iron chain of cause and effect, an impersonal logos that binds even the gods. Human choice, in such a universe, is a pleasant illusion: you feel as though you choose, but your choice is as determined as the orbit of a planet. The Manichaeans had divided the cosmos between two eternal principles, light and darkness, and had consigned the human will to a battleground where both forces contended. In such a scheme, the will is not a free faculty but a contested territory. Thomas Hobbes, writing in the generation just before the Assembly, had reduced the will to the last appetite in a chain of mechanical causes, making human beings complex machines whose choices are the necessary output of material forces. Against all these errors, the Divines insisted that the will is "neither forced nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good or evil." The will is not a puppet. It is not a machine. It is not a leaf blown by the wind of impersonal fate. It is a faculty created by God with the capacity for genuine self-determination. The second boundary the Divines drew was more subtle but equally important. They did not say that the will is free from all necessity whatsoever. They said it is free from "absolute necessity of nature." The adjective "absolute" is weighty and deliberate. There are necessities that arise not from the essence of the will as a created faculty but from the moral condition in which the will finds itself. A man in the state of sin, as Section 3 will declare, "hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation." His will is necessitated by his corrupted nature, but that necessity is not absolute in the metaphysical sense; it is a moral necessity that arises from the bent of his heart. The distinction the Divines are drawing here is the one that would later be expounded by Jonathan Edwards: the difference between natural necessity and moral necessity. Natural necessity would be a force external to the will itself, acting upon it as wind acts upon a weather vane. Moral necessity is the internal disposition of the will, which always chooses according to its strongest inclination. The will is not forced from without; it chooses from within, and it always chooses what it most desires. When the Divines say the will is not determined "by any absolute necessity of nature," they are denying the former while leaving room for the latter. The will's bondage in sin is real and terrible, but it is the bondage of a will that freely and eagerly chooses what its corrupted heart loves. A third concern shaped the language of this section: the Divines were providing the theological foundation for human responsibility. If the will were forced, if the will were determined by an absolute necessity of nature to evil, then God could not justly hold sinners accountable for their sin. The Judge of all the earth must do right, and right includes the principle that moral blame attaches only to actions freely performed. The Confession will go on to teach, in the sections that follow, that fallen man is unable to choose spiritual good. His will is in bondage to sin. But that bondage is a bondage of love, a captivity of desire, a slavery of the heart. The sinner does not sin against his will; he sins with his whole will because his will is bent toward sin. His responsibility remains intact because his choices are truly his own. The Confession holds together two truths that smaller minds have often set at war: the total inability of the fallen will and the full responsibility of the fallen sinner. Section 1 makes that harmony possible by defining what liberty means and what it does not mean. Robert Shaw, in his early nineteenth-century exposition of the Confession, helps us see the precision of the Divines' language. He observes that natural liberty belongs to the will as a created faculty and is therefore inalienable. Sin cannot destroy it, grace does not override it, and glory will only perfect it. The will is always the will: a self-determining power of choice that is neither forced from without nor locked by an absolute necessity of nature. What changes across the fourfold state is not the nature of the will as a faculty but its moral disposition. In innocence, the will was free to choose good or evil. In the fall, the will lost all ability to choose spiritual good while retaining its natural liberty. In grace, the will is progressively liberated to choose good while still capable of evil. In glory, the will is confirmed in goodness, freely and immutably choosing only what is good. The thread that runs through all four states is the truth established in Section 1: the will, as God made it, is a faculty of genuine choice.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of natural liberty has engaged the finest minds in the Reformed tradition, not as a matter of abstract speculation but as a truth with immediate bearing on how we understand sin, grace, responsibility, and the character of God. Let us listen to four voices that have shaped the church's understanding of this foundational principle. Jonathan Edwards, writing his treatise The Freedom of the Will in 1754, gave the Reformed tradition its most rigorous analysis of the distinction between natural and moral necessity, a distinction that lies just beneath the surface of the Confession's language. Edwards argued that the will always chooses according to its strongest motive at the moment of choice, not the strongest motive in any abstract sense, but the one that appears strongest to the mind at the instant of decision. This is not a limitation on freedom; it is the very nature of willing. A will that chose without any motive, that acted with complete indifference, would not be a free will but a random one, and randomness is not freedom. Edwards pressed his point with a memorable image: a man who is hungry sits down at a table spread with food, and he eats. No one forces him, no external power compels his hand. He chooses freely, and yet his choice is determined by his hunger, his appetite, his preference for this dish over that. Is he free? Yes, in every meaningful sense of the word. Is his choice caused? Yes, by the internal state of his own desires. The two are not contradictory. What Edwards called "moral necessity" (the necessity that arises from the disposition of the heart) is perfectly compatible with genuine freedom. What would destroy freedom is "natural necessity": an external force that acts upon the will against its own inclination. The Confession's denial of "absolute necessity of nature" is precisely Edwards's denial of natural necessity, and the space left open for the will's bondage to sin is precisely Edwards's moral necessity. The will always chooses freely, but it always chooses according to its nature. Augustine, whose wrestling with the will in his own conversion gave the Western church its vocabulary for these mysteries, understood natural liberty as a created good that sin could corrupt but not destroy. In his dialogue De Libero Arbitrio, written early in his Christian life, Augustine argued that the will is a good thing because God made it, and its freedom to choose is part of its created goodness. Evil enters not because the will is free but because the will, being mutable, can turn from the highest good to lesser goods. The turning is the sin; the freedom that made the turning possible is not. Augustine pressed this analogy: a lame man walks, and his walking is good in itself, but his limping is bad. The limping does not make walking bad; it is a defect in the walking. So the will's freedom is good; the misuse of that freedom is evil. And even when the will is enslaved to sin, it remains a will, still choosing, still desiring, still moving. It limps, but it walks. It is bound, but it is not extinct. This insight is essential for understanding why the Confession begins where it does, with the goodness and freedom of the will as God made it. Sin has not turned men into stones or beasts. It has not destroyed the faculty of choice. It has bent that faculty in a wrong direction, and the bending is the bondage. But the faculty itself, the natural liberty of the will, remains, and it is upon this remaining faculty that grace operates. God does not save men by bypassing their wills but by renewing them. Calvin, in his treatment of free will in the Institutes, drew a careful distinction that has often been overlooked by his critics and his admirers alike. He rejected the term "free will" not because he denied that the will chooses without coercion (he emphatically affirmed that it does) but because the term had been loaded with the Pelagian notion that the will possesses an inherent power to choose spiritual good. Calvin preferred to speak of the will as "voluntary" rather than "free." The sinner sins voluntarily, not under compulsion; his will is not forced but it is bound. "When the will is conquered by the vice into which it has fallen," Calvin wrote, "it is not dragged by external force but moves by its own inward impulse." The distinction is vital. The unbeliever who scoffs at the gospel is not a man with a gun to his head. He scoffs because he wants to scoff, because scoffing feels right to him, because his heart despises the things of God. His will is perfectly free from external coercion, and it is perfectly enslaved to his own corruption, and the two facts are not in tension. They are the two sides of the biblical portrait of fallen humanity. When Calvin wrote that the will is "neither forced nor driven by any external motion to the commission of sin but with the full consent of the will," he was saying precisely what the Confession says in Section 1, and preparing the ground for what it will say in Section 3. Francis Turretin, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology served as the standard Reformed textbook for generations, systematized these distinctions with scholastic precision. He identified five senses of the word "liberty" as applied to the will: freedom from coercion, freedom from the necessity of nature, freedom from sin, freedom from misery, and freedom from the possibility of sinning. The first two constitute natural liberty, which belongs to the will as a created faculty and is common to all men in every state. The remaining three belong to the will only in certain states: freedom from sin belongs to grace and glory; freedom from misery belongs to glory; freedom from the possibility of sinning belongs to glory alone. Turretin's taxonomy reveals how carefully the Reformed tradition distinguished between the formal freedom of the will as a faculty and the moral freedom of the will as it is conditioned by sin or grace. The formal freedom (the natural liberty of Section 1) is the necessary precondition for moral freedom to be meaningful. A will that was not free in the formal sense could not be made free in the moral sense, for there would be no will there to liberate. Grace does not create a new faculty; it renews the existing one. The will that God redeems is the will that God made. A.A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, draws out the practical implication of all this theological labor. "The essential nature of free agency," Hodge writes, "consists in the fact that the soul is self-determined in its choices. It always chooses according to its own subjective disposition and prevailing desires. It is never compelled by external force to act contrary to its own prevailing desires." This is the liberty that Section 1 affirms, and it is the liberty that makes a man accountable for every thought, word, and deed that proceeds from his heart. Hodge then makes an observation that cuts against two opposite errors. Against the hyper-Calvinist who speaks as though human beings were mere machines, Hodge insists that the will is genuinely free in its choices. Against the Arminian who imagines that this freedom requires an indeterminate will hovering in perfect equilibrium between good and evil, Hodge insists that the will always chooses according to its own character and disposition. A good tree bears good fruit freely; an evil tree bears evil fruit freely. Neither is forced, and neither is indifferent. The fruit reveals the nature of the root.

Puritan Application

The doctrine of natural liberty, properly understood, is not a footnote for theologians but a foundation for daily Christian living. Let us draw out several ways in which this truth shapes the life of faith. First, let this doctrine deliver you from the paralyzing fear that God's sovereignty turns you into a puppet. Many sincere believers, when they first encounter the biblical teaching that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass, feel a cold dread creeping over the soul. If God has ordained all things, they reason, then my choices are not really mine. I am merely a character in a story already written, a piece on a board already played. The Confession's opening words are the antidote to this error. The God who ordains the end also ordains the means, and among those means are the genuine choices of genuine agents. When you choose, you really choose. Your deliberation is real deliberation. Your decision is your decision. The sovereignty of God does not cancel the liberty of the will; it establishes it, for the God who ordains all things is the God who made the will with natural liberty in the first place. Do not permit a misunderstanding of one doctrine to undermine another. Hold them together as Scripture holds them together, and as this Confession holds them together: God is absolutely sovereign, and you are genuinely free, and the second truth is grounded in the first. Second, let natural liberty deepen your sense of responsibility for sin. The most common strategy of the fallen heart is to shift blame: "The serpent beguiled me." "The woman Thou gavest me." "My circumstances made me do it." "My temperament is simply this way." "I was provoked." The Confession strips away every excuse. Your will is not forced. No external power compels you to sin. No absolute necessity of nature determines you to evil. When you sin, you sin because you want to sin. Your will consents, embraces, and acts. The desire that entices you is your own desire. The choice that damns you is your own choice. This is a humbling truth, and it is a truth we need to hear without softening. The jailer does not force the prisoner to love his cell; the prisoner has learned to call it home. Your sins are yours, freely chosen and fully owned. Confession begins where excuse ends. Until you can say with the prodigal, "I have sinned," without adding a qualifying clause, you have not yet understood the nature of your will or the depth of your guilt. Third, let this truth illuminate the mystery of your conversion and fill you with gratitude. If the will is not forced, then why did you believe the gospel while your neighbor, hearing the same sermon and facing the same evidence, remained in unbelief? The answer is not that your will was better disposed or more wisely directed. The will in its natural state, as Section 3 will teach, is wholly unable to choose spiritual good. The answer is that God, in the mystery of His grace, so worked upon your will that you freely chose what you could not have chosen apart from that work. He did not overpower your will; He renewed it. He did not force you against your inclination; He changed your inclination so that you would freely come. The language of the Confession makes this possible: because the will has natural liberty, grace can operate through the will rather than bypassing it. When Christ said to Lazarus, "Come forth," Lazarus came forth. He was not dragged from the tomb by an external force; the command carried with it the power to obey, and Lazarus's will, quickened by that power, freely moved his limbs toward the light. So with every believer: the effectual call does not violate your natural liberty but heals it, so that you run to Christ not as a captive dragged in chains but as a bridegroom hurrying to his wedding. Fourth, let the natural liberty of the will inform your approach to evangelism and your prayers for the lost. Because the will is not forced, you cannot argue anyone into the kingdom by sheer logic. The intellect may be convinced while the will remains obstinate, for the will is not a deduction but a desire. Arguments clear the ground; only grace changes the heart. Because the will is not determined by any absolute necessity of nature, however, you need not despair that some people are constitutionally incapable of faith. The problem is not a lack of natural capacity but a corruption of moral disposition, and moral dispositions can be changed. Pray, then, not that God would overpower the wills of the lost (for He does not work that way) but that He would sweetly and powerfully renew those wills, making Christ appear so beautiful that they cannot but choose Him. Pray that He would remove the love of sin that binds the will to destruction and plant in its place a love for holiness. And when you speak the gospel to an unbeliever, speak to the whole person: to the mind with truth, to the conscience with the law, to the heart with the beauty of Christ, to the will with the call to decision. The will is a real faculty, and God uses means to reach it. Your words, carried by the Spirit, are among those means. Fifth, find here the ground of your dignity as a human being made in the image of God. The natural liberty of the will is a reflection of the Creator in the creature. God is the supremely free being, whose choices are not determined by anything outside Himself. He has endued man with a creaturely echo of that freedom: a will that is self-determined, that is not the puppet of external forces, that can deliberate, evaluate, and choose. Sin has marred this image but not erased it. Grace is restoring it but has not yet completed the work. Even the most hardened sinner still bears the dignity of a choosing creature, and this dignity is the ground of every call to repentance. You are not a beast, driven by instinct. You are not a machine, governed by impersonal forces. You are a human being, made with a will that is genuinely your own. Live, then, in accordance with your nature. Do not drift through life as though decisions did not matter. Do not surrender your will to appetite or crowd or custom. Choose, and choose deliberately, and choose as one who will give an account to the God who gave you the power to choose.

Prayer

O Lord, Thou who didst form man from the dust of the ground and breathe into his nostrils the breath of life, we praise Thee for the dignity with which Thou hast endued our nature. Thou hast given us a will that is neither forced from without nor locked by absolute necessity, a will that can deliberate and choose, a will that reflects in creaturely measure the freedom of its Maker. We confess that we have misused this gift more times than we can count, choosing evil when we should have chosen good, loving darkness rather than light because our deeds were evil. The liberty Thou didst give us we have employed in rebellion against Thee, and the faculty Thou didst create for righteousness we have bent toward sin. Yet we bless Thee that Thou hast not extinguished the will Thou madest, nor reduced us to brute beasts incapable of knowing Thee. Thou hast preserved in us, even in our fallen state, the natural liberty that makes us accountable creatures, and Thou hast dealt with us not as stones to be hurled but as sons to be reclaimed. We thank Thee that when Thou savest a sinner, Thou dost not bypass his will but renew it, that when Thou drawest a soul to Christ, Thou dost not drag it by the hair but draw it by the heart. The grace that saves is a grace that liberates the will, setting it free from the bondage of sin so that it may freely and joyfully choose the good for which it was made. Grant us, we pray, to understand these things not as distant speculations but as daily realities. When temptation presses upon us, remind us that we are not helpless victims but responsible choosers, and give us the grace to choose aright. When sin has entangled us, grant us the honesty to confess that we have sinned willingly, without excuse or evasion, and lead us to the cleansing blood of Christ. When we marvel at our own salvation, let us marvel not at the decision we made but at the grace that made our decision possible, the hand that turned our will without violating it, the love that conquered our resistance without crushing our humanity. And for those who have not yet come to Thee, those whose wills are still bound in the chains they have chosen, we pray that Thou wouldst shine into their darkness with the light that brings life. Renew their wills, O Lord, not by force but by the sweet compulsion of grace. Make Christ so beautiful in their eyes that they cannot but choose Him, so precious that they cannot but treasure Him, so sufficient that they cannot but rest in Him. And bring us all at last to that blessed state where the will is made perfectly and immutably free to good alone, where we shall serve Thee without weariness and love Thee without reserve, in the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.