Devotional 53: The Bondage of the Will: Fallen Man Cannot Choose Spiritual Good

The Confession Read

Man, in his state of innocency, had freedom, and power to will and to do that which was good and well pleasing to God; but yet, mutably, so that he might fall from it.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 9, Section 2

Introduction

There was a morning in Eden when Adam woke and everything in him worked. His desires were not a battlefield. His will was not a chain. When he loved, he loved cleanly. When he chose, he chose freely. When he obeyed, no inward traitor whispered mutiny. The faculty that would one day prove his undoing, the will, was in that morning an instrument tuned to the key of righteousness. And yet it was an instrument that could be knocked out of tune. The Westminster Divines pack an entire anthropology into a single sentence: Adam in his innocence had freedom and power to will and to do what pleased God, but that freedom was a perched bird, not a fixed star. It could fly. If Section 1 gave us the anatomy of the will as a created faculty, its natural liberty and its immunity from force and absolute necessity, Section 2 gives us the first room in the four-roomed house of the will's history. Here is the will as God first built it, before the roof fell in. The will in Eden was good, was free, was powerful, and was capable of ruin. It was posse peccare (able to sin) and posse non peccare (able not to sin), but it was not yet non posse peccare (not able to sin). That last liberty belongs to glory alone, and Adam did not yet possess it. He stood, but he stood on ground that could open beneath him. This section is not a mere historical report about a long-dead ancestor. It is a mirror that shows us what we were, what we lost, and what we may become again in Christ. Until we understand the height from which Adam fell, we cannot measure the depth into which we have plunged. And until we glimpse the liberty he possessed, we will not properly long for the greater liberty that the second Adam has secured. Let us walk the ground of Eden once more, not as tourists of an ancient ruin but as heirs of a kingdom that was forfeited and is being restored.

Scripture Foundation

The Bible does not pause to write a philosophical treatise on Adam's psychology, but the scattered stones of Genesis, the Prophets, and the Apostles fit together into a portrait of astonishing clarity. The Scriptures show us a will that was upright, free, ample in its powers, and yet precarious in its stability. Genesis 1:26-27 — "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Before there is a command, there is a constitution. The will's freedom in Eden was not an isolated endowment; it was an aspect of the divine image in which Adam was made. The Hebrew words tselem and demuth denote an image and a likeness, a creaturely representation of the Creator. A stone cannot choose because a stone has no will. A beast chooses by instinct, not by deliberation, because a beast bears no divine image. But Adam was made to reflect his Maker, and part of that reflection was a will that could deliberate, evaluate, and choose between alternatives. When the triune God said, "Let us make man," the deliberative plural of the divine counsel found an echo in the deliberative capacity of the creature made. Adam was not programmed; he was personed. His choices were genuinely his own because he bore the stamp of the God whose choices are supremely His own. The natural liberty that Section 1 defined in the abstract is here given its concrete origin: it is the liberty of an image-bearer, and it is as inalienable as the image itself. Notice also what belongs inseparably to this image: dominion. Adam was made to rule, and ruling requires choosing. A king who cannot decide is no king at all. The freedom of Adam's will was the freedom of a viceroy placed over creation, answerable to the Emperor but entrusted with genuine authority. When the Confession says Adam had "power to will and to do," it is echoing the creation mandate. The will was not a lonely faculty locked in a tower of introspection; it was a faculty with hands, with feet, with a world to govern. Adam's freedom was freedom for something: for love, for labor, for lordship under God. Ecclesiastes 7:29 — "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions." Solomon, after his long tour of life under the sun, reduces the whole history of the race to a single sentence, and the sentence is a verdict. The Hebrew word yashar means straight, level, right. What God made was not bent. Adam's will was not twisted out of shape at the factory. There was no original defect, no constitutional weakness, no hidden flaw in the design that would make the fall God's fault. The Preacher's word is emphatic: God made man yashar, upright, and the crookedness came later. The "many inventions" that followed, the Hebrew chishshevonot suggesting clever devices and cunning calculations, were man's own contribution to the story. The will was straight; man bent it. The instrument was true; the player struck a false note. This verse is the biblical warrant for everything the Confession says about the will in its original state. If Adam's will had been incapable of good, God could not be said to have made him upright. If Adam's will had been incapable of evil, his fall would have been God's doing, not his own. The yashar of Ecclesiastes is the "freedom and power to will and to do that which was good" of the Confession. Adam had what he needed to obey, and he had what he needed to disobey. He was straight, and he could bend. Genesis 2:16-17 — "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." A command presupposes the capacity to obey or disobey. You do not command a stone to sing. You do not command a river to stand still. God's command to Adam in the garden would be a mockery, a piece of cruel theater, if Adam lacked the power to obey it. The generosity of the permission ("of every tree thou mayest freely eat") underlines the reasonableness of the prohibition. Adam was not being starved into obedience; he was surrounded by abundance and tested on a single point. The command was simple, clear, and within his natural capacity. He had the freedom to will obedience, and he had the power to perform it. The Confession's carefully chosen pair, "freedom and power to will and to do," maps precisely onto the Edenic situation. Adam could will the right thing, and he could carry the willing into action. There was as yet no gap between aspiration and execution, no "the good that I would I do not" to lament. Will and deed walked hand in hand. But the command also reveals that Adam's will, however free and powerful, was under probation. The tree was there because Adam's obedience was not yet confirmed. He stood in a state of testing, and the test was real. He could pass it. He could fail it. The command would have no meaning if failure were impossible. When the Confession says Adam's freedom was "mutably, so that he might fall from it," it is taking with full seriousness the reality of the probation. The tree was not a prop in a play whose ending was already scripted. It was a genuine alternative, and Adam's will was genuinely poised between two futures. Genesis 3:6 — "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat." Here is the moment when the possibility of falling became the act of falling. The verse is a psychological autopsy performed with the precision of a surgeon. Three things happened in Eve's soul before her hand touched the fruit: she saw, she desired, she took. The will did not act in a vacuum; it was drawn by the appetite and the imagination. The Hebrew tov, good, is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. The tree was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, desirable to make one wise. The serpent did not force Eve's hand; he rearranged her perception of what was good. The will always follows the perceived good. Adam's will was not overpowered by an external force; it was captured by a false presentation of the desirable. Notice what is absent from the narrative. There is no mention of compulsion. No iron hand seizes Eve's wrist. No external power overrides her faculty of choice. The serpent suggests, the woman considers, the will decides. The choice is entirely her own, and yet it is also entirely ruinous. The mutability of which the Confession speaks is not a theoretical vulnerability; it is the mechanism by which paradise was lost. Adam and Eve fell from a height that was real, and they fell by an act that was free. The tragedy is not that God made them weak but that they, being made upright, chose to bend. The fault is not in the design but in the choice of the creature, and the creature's choice is the creature's own. Paul, writing to the Romans, would later trace every death and every sin back to this single moment: "by one man sin entered into the world." The free act of Adam's will became the hinge on which the destiny of the whole human family turned, the first Adam bringing ruin and the last Adam bringing restoration.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines sat down to write this second section of the chapter on free will, they were not composing in a vacuum. Behind them lay the Pelagian controversy, the semi-Pelagian debates, the Reformation's clash with Rome over the bondage of the will, and the Arminian challenge that had erupted within Reformed churches themselves. Each of these controversies had left a deposit of precision in the vocabulary they inherited, and their task was to say neither too little nor too much. The first thing the Divines wanted to affirm was that Adam's original state was good. Against every form of the ancient error that matter is evil or that the physical creation is inherently corrupt, the Confession insists that man in his state of innocence possessed real righteousness. Adam was not a neutral creature suspended between good and evil, waiting to tip one way or the other by sheer chance. He was positively disposed toward the good, inclined toward God, capable of loving his Maker with heart and soul and mind and strength. The "freedom and power to will and to do that which was good and well pleasing to God" was not a bare capacity that needed supplementing from outside; it was a functioning reality. Adam could please God, and not only in theory. He actually did so, walking with his Creator in the cool of the day, naming the animals in glad obedience, tending the garden as a priest in a temple made of leaves and light. But the Divines were equally careful to deny that Adam's original righteousness was immutable. Here they drew a line against two opposite errors. On one side stood the notion, found in some strands of medieval theology, that Adam was created with a supernatural gift of grace (donum superadditum) that elevated his natural powers and rendered his will incapable of sinning unless the gift were withdrawn. On that scheme, the fall becomes a problem of God's administration: He withdrew the gift, and Adam fell because he was left with mere nature. The Confession will have none of it. Adam's original righteousness was natural to him, not a foreign supplement, and his mutability was part of his created constitution, not a defect introduced by the withdrawal of grace. He fell because he, possessing genuine freedom, freely chose to sin. The fault lies with the creature, not the Creator. On the other side stood the error that would later crystallize in various forms of perfectionism: the idea that a free and good will could not possibly sin. If Adam was truly free and truly good, the reasoning went, his fall is either impossible or inexplicable. The Divines answer with a single word: "mutably." The goodness of Adam's will was a created goodness, and all created goodness is contingent. Only God is immutably good, because only God's goodness is His essence. The creature's goodness is a gift that can be lost because the creature is not self-existent. Adam's will was good, but it was good as a creature is good: dependently, finitely, and therefore losably. The mutability was not a flaw in the design; it was the necessary condition of being a creature rather than the Creator. What Adam needed was not a better will but a confirmed will, and confirmation comes only through the successful completion of probation. Adam was on probation in the garden, not because God doubted him but because God ordained that the creature's righteousness should become an established righteousness through the exercise of obedience under testing. The Divines were also subtly addressing the Arminian use of Adam's freedom. The Remonstrants had argued that if Adam possessed a free will capable of both good and evil, then all men must possess the same liberty, including the liberty to choose spiritual good. The Confession's careful tracing of the fourfold state cuts this argument off at the root. Adam's will in innocence is not the same as fallen man's will in sin. The freedom to will good was lost in the fall, as Section 3 will declare, and the liberty that remains is the natural liberty of Section 1, the formal freedom from coercion, not the moral power to please God. By distinguishing the states of the will so carefully, the Divines prevent anyone from arguing backward from Adam's powers to our own. What Adam had, we have lost. What Adam could do, we cannot do. The only bridge between his state and ours is not a recovered capacity but a new birth. Robert Shaw, in his early nineteenth-century exposition, makes a crucial observation about the phrase "freedom and power to will and to do." The two are not identical. Freedom concerns the absence of constraint; power concerns the presence of ability. Adam had both. He was not merely unforced in his willing; he was able in his doing. The fall stripped away the power while leaving the formal freedom, so that fallen man still chooses without coercion but cannot choose spiritual good. The Confession's careful vocabulary prepares the reader for the grim diagnosis of Section 3: man has not ceased to be a free agent, but he has ceased to be a capable one in the realm of righteousness. The will still moves, but it moves in only one direction, the direction of its fallen inclination.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of the will in its original state has drawn the sustained attention of Reformed theologians across the centuries. Let us listen to four voices that illuminate different facets of this diamond. Thomas Boston, the Scottish pastor whose Human Nature in Its Fourfold State has nourished Reformed piety for three centuries, devoted his entire first book to the state of innocence. Boston understood that you cannot preach the gospel of recovery unless you first preach the height from which man fell. He pictures Adam in the garden as a ship fully rigged and seaworthy, launched upon a calm sea with a fair wind. The ship was not defective, Boston insisted. It was perfectly equipped for its voyage. But it was not unsinkable, and the captain, by his own free choice, steered it onto the rocks. Boston was particularly careful to distinguish between the natural liberty of the will, which Adam shared with all men in every state, and the moral power that was peculiar to his unfallen condition. Adam's will was free in the formal sense that it was neither forced nor determined by an absolute necessity of nature, and it was free in the moral sense that it could choose spiritual good. The second freedom was lost in the fall; the first remains. This distinction, Boston argued, is the key to understanding why fallen man is fully responsible for his sin and yet fully unable to escape it. He sins freely, but he cannot will the good freely, because the power to will the good was the treasure he squandered in Eden. Boston pressed further: Adam's will was not merely capable of good in some abstract sense; it was actually inclined toward good. The original righteousness was not a neutral capacity waiting to be activated; it was a bent of the heart, a disposition of the soul, a habitual orientation toward God. When Adam loved God, he loved Him naturally, the way a healthy eye sees light without effort. The fall was not the mere exercise of a capacity to choose evil; it was the corruption of that bent, the twisting of that disposition. What was once a habit became a scar. Boston's pastoral instinct drove him to make this point vividly: do not imagine, dear reader, that you are simply Adam with a few bad habits. You are Adam reversed. The bent that once inclined toward God now inclines away from Him, and only omnipotent grace can reverse the reversal. Herman Bavinck, writing his Reformed Dogmatics at the turn of the twentieth century, brought the full resources of biblical theology and historical theology to bear on the question of the imago Dei and its relation to Adam's will. Bavinck insisted that the image of God in man is not a static possession but a dynamic orientation. Adam was not made in God's image as a statue is carved in the likeness of a king; he was made as a living reflection who actively mirrored his Maker in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. The will was the executive faculty of this reflection, translating the mind's knowledge and the heart's righteousness into concrete acts of obedience. Bavinck noted that the Hebrew tselem and demuth are not synonyms but complementary terms: tselem suggests a representation, a copy; demuth suggests a likeness, a resemblance. Together they describe a creature who is not God but who reflects God, and the will is the hinge on which the reflection turns. A will that cannot choose is not a reflection of the God who chooses. A will that cannot love is not a reflection of the God who is love. Adam's will, in its original freedom and power, was the clearest creaturely echo of the divine freedom. Bavinck also addressed the question of mutability: why did God not create Adam with a confirmed will? Because a creature whose will is as unchangeable as God's would not be a creature but a rival. Adam had to grow from posse non peccare to non posse peccare, and probation was the divinely ordained path to that confirmation. The mutability was not a defect; it was the condition under which confirmed righteousness is attained. Geerhardus Vos, whose Biblical Theology traces the unfolding of redemption with careful attention to the organic development of revelation, placed Adam's will within the broader framework of the covenant of works. For Vos, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not an arbitrary test but a sacramental focus of the whole probation. The tree represented, in concentrated form, the choice that lay before Adam in every moment of his existence: acknowledge God as God, trust His word, submit to His authority, or seize autonomy, determine good and evil for yourself, and become a law unto yourself. Adam's will was not tested by a thousand commands but by a single, clear, simple prohibition that contained the whole principle of obedience. Everything hung on one choice because that one choice revealed, with perfect clarity, whether Adam's heart was oriented toward God or toward self. Vos emphasized the eschatological dimension of the probation. Adam was not placed in a static paradise that would endure forever without change. The garden was a beginning, not an end. Beyond the probation lay a higher state, a confirmed righteousness, a glory into which Adam would have entered through faithful obedience. The covenant of works was not a trap designed to catch Adam in failure; it was a ladder designed to lead him upward into the unlosable life of confirmed fellowship with God. The fall was not a slip on a flat road; it was a refusal to climb. Adam chose to descend when God had offered him ascent. The mutability of his will was the necessary condition for the probation to be genuine, but the probation was itself a gift. The testing was the path to the crown. William Perkins, the father of English Puritanism whose Golden Chain traced the order of salvation with scholastic rigor, contributed a vital distinction that illuminates the Confession's language. Perkins distinguished between the liberty of the will and the liberty of the man. The will, as a faculty, is always free in the formal sense: it is never forced, it always chooses according to its own inclination. But the man whose will is bent toward sin is not free in the moral sense: he cannot choose the good, not because his will is broken but because his will is bent. A clock whose mainspring is twisted does not cease to be a clock, but it ceases to tell the right time. Adam's will in innocence had a straight mainspring; his liberty as a faculty and his liberty as a moral agent coincided. In the fall, the mainspring was twisted. The liberty of the faculty remained; the liberty of the man was lost. Perkins's distinction helps us see why the Confession can speak of natural liberty in Section 1 as belonging to all men while speaking of the loss of moral power in Sections 2 and 3. The language of "freedom and power" in this section describes the coincidence of formal and moral liberty that Adam enjoyed and that we, apart from Christ, do not.

Puritan Application

The doctrine of the will in its original state is not antiquarian theology. It bears with immediate weight on how we understand ourselves, our sin, our Savior, and our sanctification. Let us draw out its practical force. First, let the height of Adam's original state humble you to the dust. We are not merely imperfect people who need a little help. We are ruins. The grandeur of Adam's original righteousness, his freedom to will good, his power to perform it, his unbroken fellowship with his Maker, is the measure of what we have lost. When you find yourself unable to pray as you would, unable to love God as you ought, unable to resist a temptation that you know will poison you, you are not experiencing a minor malfunction. You are experiencing the aftershock of Eden. The will that was once a thoroughbred stallion, responsive to the lightest touch of its Rider, is now a broken-down nag that stumbles at every stone. This is not an excuse for your sin; it is the diagnosis that makes sense of your struggle. Before the gospel can be good news to you, the law must be bad news about you. And the bad news is that you are not Adam. You are Adam's heir, and the inheritance is corruption. Second, let the mutability of Adam's will teach you the danger of standing in your own strength. Adam fell from a state of innocence, surrounded by the goodness of God, equipped with a will that was upright and powerful. If he could fall, what makes you think you cannot? Every sin begins with the presumption that we are stronger than Adam. Every temptation that we toy with assumes that we can handle what he could not. But Adam fell in paradise; you live in a wilderness. Adam fell before sin had entered the world; you carry a traitor in your own breast. Adam fell while walking with God in the cool of the day; you stumble through a world that is hostile to everything holy. If Adam's mutability proved fatal under the best conditions, what hope have you under the worst? The answer is none, unless you are kept by a power that Adam did not yet possess. The lesson is not despair but dependence. The will that is not yet confirmed, and that in this life will never be fully confirmed, must lean hard on the grace that holds it. "Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe" is the prayer of a saint who has learned what Adam learned too late: the creature cannot stand unless the Creator holds him. Third, let the contrast between the two Adams fill you with adoration for Christ. The Confession's language about Adam's will, its freedom and power to do what pleased God, is a portrait of what Christ's will was perfectly and uninterruptedly. Where Adam's mutability became his downfall, Christ's immutability became our salvation. He was "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." His will never wavered. His obedience never faltered. The tree that was Adam's ruin became Christ's throne. Where the first Adam grasped at equality with God, the last Adam "made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant." The will that Adam bent toward self, Christ straightened toward the Father. And this is the gospel: that Christ's obedient will is credited to all who are united to Him by faith. When God looks at the believer, He sees not the twisted will of the fallen Adam but the perfect will of the risen Christ. The righteousness that Adam lost is restored in a form that cannot be lost, because it rests not on your mutability but on Christ's immutability. Rejoice in this, believer. Your standing before God does not depend on your will's performance but on Christ's will's perfection. Fourth, let the promise of confirmation in glory sustain you through the instability of the present. Adam's will in innocence was posse non peccare, able not to sin. The believer's will in grace is posse non peccare in principle, but the principle is contested by remaining corruption. The will in glory, however, will be non posse peccare, not able to sin. This is the hope set before us: a state in which the will is made perfectly and immutably free to good alone. You will one day love God without distraction, serve Him without weariness, choose righteousness without the counter-pull of remaining sin. The mutability that proved Adam's undoing and that still afflicts your best obedience will be swallowed up in the immutability of confirmed holiness. Let this hope steady you. Every battle you fight against indwelling sin is a skirmish in a war whose outcome is already decided. The will that now struggles and stumbles is being prepared for a liberty it cannot yet imagine. The mutability that makes you weep will one day be removed, and you will stand where Adam should have stood, confirmed in righteousness, free to love and unable to fall. Fifth, let the reality of the probation shape your understanding of the Christian life. Adam was tested, and he failed. Christ was tested, and He prevailed. The believer's life is a testing too, not to determine whether we will be saved (that was settled at the cross) but to prove the genuineness of the faith that unites us to Christ. The trials that beset you, the temptations that assail you, the long stretches of obedience that feel like drudgery, are the forms that probation takes in the life of grace. They are not punishments; they are refinements. Every test passed is a step toward the confirmation that awaits in glory. Every test failed, repented of, and returned from is a lesson in dependence that drives you deeper into the arms of the One who cannot fail. Do not despise the testing, and do not presume upon it. Walk through your probation as Adam should have walked through his: with the word of God in your ear and the fear of God in your heart, knowing that you cannot stand a moment without grace and that grace is sufficient for every moment. The God who permitted Adam's fall to display the riches of His mercy in Christ will not let you fall finally, for you are not under a covenant of works but under a covenant of grace, and the Surety of that covenant has already passed the test.

Prayer

O Lord God, Maker of heaven and earth, who didst form man from the dust and breathe into his nostrils the breath of life, we adore Thee for the original uprightness in which Thou didst create our first father. We confess with sorrow that the height from which he fell is the depth of our shame, and that the will which Thou didst make straight we have bent beyond all human straightening. Apart from Thee, we love what we should hate and hate what we should love, and the faculty that was made for liberty has become an instrument of bondage. We have no excuse, for Adam sinned freely and we sin freely, confirming his choice with every act of rebellion. The fault is ours, the ruin is ours, and the judgment is just. Yet we bless Thee that Thou didst not leave us in the ruin we chose. Where the first Adam fell, the last Adam stood. Where the first will bent toward self, the will of Thy dear Son bent toward Thee with an obedience that death could not break. We thank Thee that the righteousness we could not produce, Christ has provided; the confirmation we could not attain, Christ has secured; the glory we forfeited, Christ has restored and will bring to completion on the day of His appearing. Not by our will's strength but by His will's perfection are we saved, and this is our only comfort in life and in death. Grant us, we pray, to live as those who have been rescued from the mutability that destroyed our race. Keep us from presumption, for we are no stronger than Adam. Keep us from despair, for we are held by a hand that cannot fail. When we are tempted, remind us that the will is never forced and that we choose what we love; then give us new loves, holy loves, loves that fasten on Christ and refuse to let Him go. When we have fallen, grant us the repentance that confesses sin without excuse and the faith that returns to the fountain opened for sin and uncleanness. Sanctify our unstable wills, O Lord, by the indwelling of Thy Spirit, and bind them ever more closely to the will of our Savior. And bring us at last to that blessed state where mutability is no more, where the will is made perfectly and immutably free to good alone, where we shall see Thee as Thou art and love Thee as we are loved, without distraction, without division, without end. Hasten that day, O Lord, for the sake of Jesus Christ, the faithful and true, who ever liveth to make intercession for us. Amen.