Sovereign Grace and Free Will

One of the more persistent objections to Calvinism is that if predestination is true, then free will, moral responsibility, evangelism, or our first coming to Christ in prayer are all rendered meaningless. 

What about free will?

Our first difficulty here is one of ambiguous terms. A serious definition of the freedom of the will would mean (1) the ability to do what one most desires, (2) given all relevant natural limitations, including (a) limitations on one’s own psychological or genetic capacity, (b) limitations of available options—known or unknown—external to one’s choice. 

So the Reformed doctrine does not deny the freedom of the will per se in the unregenerate, but rather the soundness of that will. Unbelievers make very real choices. They choose according to their highest desire. No one compels them by some alien force. But what is it that sinful human beings desire? According to Genesis 6:5 it is only evil all the time. Such a will is a will indeed. What an unregenerate will cannot do is to raise itself from the dead to perform truly spiritual works unto God (Rom. 8:7-8).

“Must we not believe though?” Indeed we must. In regeneration, God gives us a new heart (Jn. 3:3-8), and that new heart is capable of belief. Thus we do believe. God does not believe for us. However that new heart and faith would never have happened apart from the grace of God. 

But isn’t there a tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility?

What we would say is not that there is an actual logical “tension” between the two truths. Rather we would draw attention to a philosophical assumption that is unbiblical, an assumption that is behind the notion that these two truths (divine sovereignty and human responsibility) are at odds to begin with. Such presuppositions have God and man competing for the same job description. This is not the way that the Bible speaks.

Man is very much responsible to choose Christ primarily because of the worth of Christ, not because of his ability. Man is free to choose according to his own nature. But in sin, man’s choices are always made out of a wicked heart (Gen. 6:5; Ps. 14:2-3; Jn. 8:34; Eph. 2:1-3). The ancient heresy of Pelagianism taught that God would never command of us what we cannot perform. Its maxim was that “If I ought, then I can.” But the law commands perfection (cf. Lev. 11:44; Mat. 5:48). We ought to be perfect because of God’s perfection, not our own. We ought, but we cannot.

As a last point about man’s responsibility to choose Christ: like all of our other obligations, this too we lack the ability to do in our old nature. So God not only sends his Son to fulfill the law for us and pay the penalty for us, but He also sends his Spirit to give us that new heart, and with it the gifts of repentance and faith. So the conditions remain. They must be met. Yet the conditions are impossible. But because of God’s electing love, he meets those conditions for us in Christ.

What is the point of evangelism?

If the only answer to this question was: “Because God has commanded it,” that would actually be reason enough! However, we are given far more information here. The same God that ordained the ends of salvation ordains the means like preaching, evangelizing, missions, believing, and so forth. This all brings great glory to God. 

It is instructive that Romans 10 about the necessity of the message comes right after Roman 9 on the sovereignty of God in salvation. This is no accident. Paul evidently saw no conflict between them. Neither did the Spirit who inspired his words. 

The reason that it glorifies God can be seen in the Parable of the Wedding Feast in Matthew 22, namely, that Christ must be worshiped by the maximum, and that “must” is a passion communicated from God to the evangelist, and not any hint of a need in God. He is glorified both in the mercy and in the justice that results, as Romans 9 labors to show (vv. 22-23).

Is it wrong to pray for repentance and faith then?

No it is not wrong to ask for this at all.

While God grants that faith as a gift, once born again, as mentioned above, it is truly the new heart that believes. What that amounts to is that there is no conflict between God’s job description (regenerating us by his sovereign grace) and our job description (believing in response to his command and gospel promise). If and when a sinner comes to faith, he or she will find out some day soon enough that God was the giver of that new heart. It may turn out that he did so before we ever prayed the prayer in question (see Jam. 1:17-18, 1 Cor. 4:7).

The Bible speaks in the imperative and the indicative, and never confuses the two. In the imperative, he says things like, “Come to me” (Matthew 11:27) and “Believe in the Lord Jesus” (Acts 16:31). And in the indicative, he says things like: “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37). One tells us what to do, and the other tells us how it happened. Where he commands and invites, we should respond right away, and the doctrinal understanding will follow in due time