Limited Free Will

“Our God is in heaven, and He does whatever He pleases” (Psalm 115:3).

Your free will is not on an equal footing with God’s sovereignty.

God has a free will, and so do we, but God’s will is more free than ours. Ours is a limited freedom. It is not the same as autonomy, which is self-law or self-rule. If you put human autonomy next to God’s sovereignty, then you have an immediate problem. These two oppose each other, such that God’s sovereignty always limits human freedom whenever the two differ. That is why Jesus taught us to pray for God’s will to be done, not just our own.

The Bible teaches free will for humans, but not unlimited free will.

God gave free will to Adam and Eve, but it was limited by His sovereign will, “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you may not eat”. Human free will is always subordinate to the divine will, and because of HIs intrinsic goodness, we can trust that His will is always the wisest and the best. Even when we use our free will to make wrong choices, God exercises His greater will to bring about good results anyway (see Genesis 50:20 and Romans 8:28).

The ultimate example of all of this is the cross: death by human will, salvation by divine will.

Thank God that He is sovereign and we are not.