What Will I Do?

God’s Sovereignty and Man’s Will

Rob brought up a good question a week ago in class.  The question revolves around the will of God and how I exercise my will.  If God knows what He will do then why should I pray?  In other words, if God is sovereign then how can I be free?  Particularly in the light of my statement that you can pray and see things happen that would not otherwise occur.  As we discussed the actions and reactions of Jonah and God we found a good example of the interaction of man’s will and God’s will.

I’m sure that I’ll raise more questions here than I answer but some material that I’ve been listening to over the last week addressed some of these issues so I thought it might be good to get the material into the blog for the class.  

In what I consider to be an odd argument … the philosopher Sartre argued that there must not be a God because man, in order to be man, must have an autonomous will.  Sartre begins with the existence of man.  He says that if God is sovereign then man can’t be autonomous.  He says that for man to be man that his volition or will must be unencumbered and free from all influences.  I think that Sartre had an exalted view of his own will and the gaping flaw in the argument is in the definition of an autonomous will.  Sartre was an existentialist and felt that the exercise of his will was what validated him as a human.  The will for an existentialist becomes something of a demigod because it lets a human know that he is alive and can change the world around him.  But if I have an autonomous will then I am free to do whatever I please.   The word autonomous means that I live by my laws alone.  Sartre would say that if there are laws outside myself then I must not be independent and therefore I must not have a free will and therefore I am not a man.  Sartre is convinced by the exercise of his will that he is a man so he decides that must mean there is no God.  

Our wills are simply not autonomous but since Adam we have acted as if they were autonomous.  I was born with a fallen will but I’ve been born again and God is working within me.  However, every time I sin I’m saying, “My will trumps the will of God.”  Our wills are constrained in so many ways that it is strange that someone as smart as Sartre would argue that to constrain his will would make him less than a man.  The fallen nature produces a desire to reject a sovereign God in our lives.  This urge is so strong that even a smart man may grasp at straws.  If we stop and think about our lives for a minute we will realize that our wills are constrained by all sorts of things.  I can’t simply exercise my will to fly or walk through walls.  Physics and biology constrain me at every moment of every day.  In truth, God is sovereign and grants a degree of freedom to me.  I can’t have absolute freedom because God is still on the throne.  Sartre says that unless we are autonomous then we are not truly free.  He says true freedom requires autonomy and therefore God must not exist.  The argument he makes is false and is the argument of a desperate man who tried hard to eradicate God from his conscience.

My parents had two children with free wills but they placed limits on my will and on my brother’s will.  I had a chemistry set and I was allowed to do almost anything I wanted with the chemicals I bought at the hobby store.  Once, my brother and I wanted to buy some potassium nitrate while my father was on an assignment in Germany.  My mother was talking to him on the phone and asked him why his two children would want to buy that chemical.  He simply asked for her to put us on the phone and explained that if we tried to make gun powder he was going to come home and after his wrath fell on us our rear ends would glow in the dark and we would not be able to sit down for a longtime.  We only wanted to make a little gun powder.  He constrained my will.  He constrained my brother’s will.  And yet the truth was that we had free wills.  We considered his admonition and discontinued our efforts to acquire the last thing we needed to make gun powder.  My father was well within his rights to tell his sons what they could do and couldn’t do.  Even the Atlantic Ocean was not a great enough separation for me to violate the law he gave that day because I knew that some day I would be standing in front of him.  I had freedom to use my chemistry set almost anyway I could conceive of but my dad was still in charge and set limits and penalties for violating his rules.

I wish I could tell you that I never disobeyed my dad.  I disobeyed plenty of times.  However, I’ll freely admit that when I disobeyed it was because I set my will above his will.  When my father exercised authority over me it didn’t make me less human.  On the contrary, it was a lesson from God preparing me to be a man who would walk with Him.  I know my dad could sometimes guess when I was going to disobey.  While growing up many of us felt like our parents could read our minds.  God can read our minds and because of His transcendent nature He knows which action His children will choose.  He isn’t predicting our behavior like our parents did from their longsuffering exposure to our natures.  God sees the end from the beginning but that doesn’t take your decision away.  God gives us tremendous freedom in living.  He rejoices as we exercise our wills but our wills are not a law unto themselves.  He tells us to exercise our will within His sovereignty.  As we saw in Ephesians Paul urged the church in Ephesus to “… pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.” (NIV; Eph 6:18-20).   Paul wasn’t wasting his time or the time of the Ephesians when he encouraged them by saying, “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (NIV; Eph 3:20-4:1).