- God has given natural freedom to the will of each person so that it is neither forced nor determined to good or evil, by any absolute necessity of nature.
(WCF 9.1)
For the past several weeks we have been looking at the definite atonement that Christ’s mediatory work brings on all God’s elect, or as the Apostle Paul puts it, for those ‘whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.’ (Rom 8:30, KJV). To put it simply, because God is in the work of salvation, Paul can talk about it in the past tense because it is as good as done - that is how sure the salvific work of God is towards his elect (see also Isa 53).
Now one of the things that reformed theology can be accused of, is that God does all the work and kind of works against our will, like we have no choice in our salvation. Well as we see in the part of the confession that we are in with chapter 9, the Westminster theologians want to seek to clarify something for us - and it has something to do with the will and our decisions.
You see, article 1 states that when God made us, he created us with the freedom of the will…so that it is neither forced nor determined to good or evil. Now that simply helps us to understand that God designed us to be able to make decisions freely with the choices that we might be presented with. For example, I was a drum teacher for many years because I was a drummer, and I chose to teach the drums because I made the decision that - with my experience - that would be the wisest choice. I was free to make that decision and I made it by my own will, over teaching the harmonica, which I had no experience with - no one made me teach the drums, I decided to do that for myself.
Now that is true even when it comes to moral choices, like if I want to steal or not, if I want to lie or not because (as we read here) there is no predetermining factor built into my human experience to force me to commit sin or not. It’s not like there is a demonic gun to my head making me make decisions that are totally against my will kind of thing. No I have a will, and that will is not forced to make decisions against itself by some outside factor - which means whatever I decide to do, whatever choice I make, I have really chosen to do that thing, and I have done it by engaging my will and I am the one responsible for making that decision - not something outside of myself. And thus blaming the devil for every wrong move I make is put in its rightful place. Is there demonic forces and dark influences? Absolutely, but the decisions to either give in or walk away is actually my responsibility - we are accountable to the decisions that we make.
Now as always, we need to keep in tension the various things that God’s revelation gives to us. On the one hand, we freely make choices according to the will that God has given us, yet on the other hand, we don’t determine our own futures while God sits idly by waiting to see how and when the future will be written. If we lent just on the side of absolute freedom, then we would fall into the grave error of open theism, which is the teaching that God doesn’t know the future and acts in accordance with our will. Yet if we lent on the other side of absolute determinism, then God is more like a computer programmer, and we are like little robots who have been pre-programmed with no freedom to make a choice.
No, this must all be kept in the tension that the Bible presents to us; God is sovereign over all there is, and he foreordains and brings to fruition all that he has planned to do (and those plans can’t be thwart), yet His creatures freely choose and make decisions from our own will - the theologians call it the doctrine of concurrence (or the teaching of two things working), and this will be the subject that we will be thinking about over the rest of this chapter. And as we’ll see, though God very much chooses us, we very much choose Him as well.