Free Will, Part 3

In earlier blogs (Part 1 and Part 2), I answered the first question asked by a friend concerning the free will of man. Here is his follow-up question and my efforts at answering it.

I must admit that I did not intend for this answer to become one concerning irresistible grace, but that is the way the answer went. I pray that this answer helps others come to an understanding of this seemingly difficult and controversial concept in the larger study of God’s sovereignty in election.

Question 2

If man has free will before salvation, what about after salvation? Can he decide to leave the faith?

Answer 2

No more than he could will himself to have two legs after having one amputated.

No more than Adam could “unwill” his decision to rebel by intentionally disobeying God’s commandment not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Adam may have been sorry that he rebelled. He probably repented of his rebellion. But that did not undo the fact that he had actually rebelled. It was a fact of history that could not be repealed.

Man has the ability to make a decision for righteousness – and the ability to acknowledge Christ as Lord for the purpose of salvation – only after he is empowered to do so by the Holy Spirit at the discretion of the Father. (John 3:3)

Man, by his very nature, will never cease to resist the will of God in his own strength and by his own will. (Romans 3:10-12) He is only able to make a decision for righteousness when he is overcome by an infinite grace that is irresistible to the continued defiance of man’s will – thus, irresistible grace and irrevocable atonement (Romans 11:28-29).

Irresistible grace does not mean that God chooses a man and bowls him over with grace against the man’s will, but that God is persistent in applying infinite grace toward the finite and defective will of man until God’s grace, by its very definition overcomes man’s ability to resist.

Here is where evangelism comes into the picture. Here is where there is room for preaching and persuasion. The fact that God’s grace is irresistible once applied should prompt every Christian to a renewed effort at reaching out to lost people.

If He wanted to, God could speak a word and every man would be saved. But God does not work that way in the plan of redemption. God works through men. God causes one man to be saved by the hearing of the Word from one who already knows Christ as Lord.

Our persistence in sharing the Gospel with a lost person equates to the grace of God bearing more and more weight  of grace against the resistance that is natural to man’s being until that man can no longer naturally resist.

Once a man is enabled to see the kingdom of God – more specifically, the person of Christ – he is then able to choose something that he never had the ability to choose before – righteousness!

By the gift of faith from God that now becomes effective in his heart, he can no longer resist plunging full-depth into the previously unperceived riches of the grace of God’s redemption and is immediately baptized into the spiritual realm of eternal blessing and the presence of God.

Then with Paul, he begins to sing, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!” (Romans 11.33)

He would no more give back or abandon the gift of faith that redeemed him than he would the new leg he had willed in the place of the one that had been amputated (if such a thing were possible).

In fact, he cannot give back his salvation or abandon his faith, because he is forever preserved within the state of grace by the earnest of the Holy Spirit who now indwells his heart and bears upon his will. (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5)