You make choices every single day. What to eat. Where to drive. Whether to pray or scroll. Whether to bite your tongue or say the thing you’ll regret by Tuesday.
Every one of those choices is genuinely yours.
But here is the question that has split the church for centuries: are those choices free?
This is not abstract philosophy. How you answer this question determines how you understand salvation, sin, moral responsibility, prayer, evangelism, and the nature of God Himself. Get this wrong, and everything downstream bends.
What Do We Mean by “Free Will”?
Most arguments about free will are actually arguments about what the word “free” means. Three positions have dominated the debate for centuries.
Hard determinism says there is no real human freedom. We are puppets on strings. Our choices are illusions produced by prior causes. This is not the Reformed view — and the Bible explicitly rejects it by holding humans morally responsible for their actions.
Libertarian free will says freedom means the power of contrary choice. At any given moment, you could always have done otherwise. No prior cause — not your nature, not your desires, not God’s decree — determines your choice. This is the Arminian, Wesleyan, and Molinist position. It sounds intuitive. It is also, as we’ll see, philosophically incoherent and biblically unsupportable.
Compatibilism says that human choices are genuine, voluntary, and morally significant — and that God sovereignly ordains whatsoever comes to pass. Both are true. Simultaneously. This is the Reformed view, and it is what the Bible teaches.
R.C. Sproul put the distinction sharply: you have free agency — you act according to your desires. But you do not have libertarian free will — you cannot act contrary to your nature. A fish is free to swim but not to climb trees. A sinner is free to sin but not to choose God — until God changes the nature.
The Four States of the Will
Augustine gave the church a framework that has never been improved upon. He identified four states of the human will across redemptive history — and understanding them unlocks the entire debate.
Before the Fall: Able to Sin, Able Not to Sin
Adam in the Garden had genuine freedom in both directions. He could obey. He could disobey. This was the only moment in human history when something resembling libertarian free will existed. He was not enslaved to sin. He was not yet confirmed in righteousness.
He chose to disobey. And everything changed.
After the Fall: Not Able Not to Sin
“Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.” — John 8:34
After the Fall, the will is enslaved. You still choose — every moment of every day you choose — but you always choose according to your corrupt nature. The natural person “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
Luther put it with terrifying clarity: the will is like a horse. It is always ridden — by either God or the devil. It does not stand in neutral.
Calvin agreed: “A bound will is one which because of its corruptness is held captive under the authority of evil desires, so that it can choose nothing but evil, even if it does so of its own accord and gladly.”
Notice: you sin voluntarily. Nobody holds a gun to your head. You do what you want. The problem is what you want. That is not freedom. That is the deepest bondage — to be enslaved to what you desire and to call it liberty.
Regenerate: Able to Not Sin
“I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.” — Ezekiel 36:26-27
When the Spirit regenerates you, He gives you a new nature with new desires. Now — for the first time since Eden — you can choose righteousness. Not perfectly. Not consistently. The old nature still fights (Romans 7:15-25, Galatians 5:17). But the trajectory has changed. You are being freed.
This is real freedom being restored, not yet perfected.
Glorified: Not Able to Sin
In glory, the will is perfected. You will always choose good — and it will be the most free you have ever been.
And this demolishes the libertarian definition of freedom. If “free will” requires the ability to choose otherwise, then glorified saints in heaven are not free. That is absurd. Therefore, freedom is not the power of contrary choice. Freedom is acting according to your perfected nature — a nature finally, fully aligned with God.
The telos of the Christian life is not autonomy. It is the inability to sin. And that inability is not bondage. It is the completion of liberty.
What the Bible Teaches About the Will
You Are a Slave — and That’s the Point
“Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” — John 8:34-36
Jesus defines the human condition in slavery language, not freedom language. You are a slave to sin. The Son sets you free. Freedom is from sin, not from God.
Paul says the same thing in Romans 6: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness… But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life” (Romans 6:20, 22).
You exchanged masters. You did not become autonomous. You never will. The Christian life is not self-sovereignty. It is joyful slavery to Christ.
“Choose This Day” — But Can You?
“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
Doesn’t this prove libertarian free will? God commands a choice. Therefore humans must have the unaided ability to choose God.
No. The command reveals the obligation, not the ability. God commands what only grace can produce. “Be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16) does not mean you can achieve holiness by willpower. “Choose life” does not mean fallen humans can choose God apart from regeneration.
Jesus said it plainly: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). The word “can” (dunatai) is a word of ability. You lack the capacity. Not the invitation — the capacity.
God Works in You to Will
“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” — Philippians 2:12-13
This is the most compact compatibilist text in the Bible. Both halves are in the same sentence. “Work out your salvation” — genuine human agency. “God works in you, both to will and to work” — divine sovereignty over the will itself.
Paul does not feel the need to resolve the tension. He simply states both truths and moves on. So should we.
Edwards, Calvin, and the Reformed Tradition
Edwards’ Argument
Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of the Will (1754) is the most devastating philosophical treatment of this question ever written. His argument is simple and lethal.
The will is not a standalone agent floating free of causes. It is “the mind choosing.” You always choose according to your strongest inclination at the moment of choice. Before regeneration, your strongest inclination is sin. After regeneration, it is Christ.
This means your choices are determined by your nature — and yet they are genuinely yours. You are not coerced. You do what you want. That is freedom. The problem is what you want.
Edwards called the Arminian notion of a self-determining will “absurd and self-contradictory.” A will that determines itself without any prior cause is not freedom — it is randomness. If your choice has no cause, no motive, no inclination driving it, then it is arbitrary. And arbitrary is not free. It is chaos.
The Confessional Standard
The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 9, summarizes the doctrine in four paragraphs that track Augustine’s four states precisely:
- God has endued the will of man with natural liberty — not forced or determined to do good or evil.
- In the state of innocency, man had freedom to will what is good and pleasing to God, but was mutable and could fall.
- By the Fall, man has wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good — the will is dead in sin and not able by its own strength to convert or prepare itself.
- When God converts a sinner, He frees him from bondage to sin and enables him to will what is spiritually good — yet the corruption of nature remains, so that the will does not perfectly will only good.
This is the full-orbed biblical teaching. The will is real. The will is voluntary. The will is not autonomous. And the will is being progressively freed by grace.
Why This Matters
For Salvation
If you have libertarian free will, you saved yourself. Your decision was the decisive factor that distinguished you from the person who rejected Christ. Boasting is possible. Grace is merely an offer that you were smart enough to accept.
If the Reformed view is correct, salvation is entirely of grace. God changed your will. You believed because He made you willing. The decisive factor was not your choice — it was His regeneration. “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Romans 9:16). All glory goes to God.
For the Anxious Believer
If your salvation depends on the strength of your decision, you will never have assurance. You know how weak your decisions are. You break promises to yourself before lunch.
But if your salvation depends on God’s sovereign regeneration of your will, your assurance rests on His faithfulness — not yours. “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). That is a promise to cling to when your faith feels thin.
For Evangelism
You preach freely because the Spirit effectually calls. You are not trying to overpower autonomous wills with clever arguments. You are delivering the Word that God uses to raise the dead. Plant the seed. Water it. God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6). Your job is faithfulness. His job is results.
For the Person Struggling with Sin
The bondage you feel is real — your will is not neutral. But if you are in Christ, God has given you a new nature with new desires. The old nature still fights. But the war is won. The Spirit is rewiring your inclinations. “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4).
True freedom is not autonomy from God. It never was.
True freedom is slavery to Christ — because when Christ is your master, you finally want what is actually good. You are freer now, as a regenerate believer, than you ever were as a “free” sinner. Because now, for the first time since Eden, you can choose what is right.
And the day is coming when your will is perfected — and you will never sin again. That is not the loss of freedom. That is its completion.
The One who freed your will is faithful. Trust His work more than your choices.
You’re in my prayers.
This article is part of the Know Your Faith series. For how sovereignty and free will relate to suffering specifically, see “Sovereignty and Free Will: How Both Explain Suffering.” For the doctrine of election, see “Unconditional Election.”
Sources and Recommended Reading:
- Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754)
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, Chapters 2-5
- Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will
- R.C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Tyndale, 1986)
- R.C. Sproul, What Is Reformed Theology? (Baker Books, 2005)
- D.A. Carson, Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility (Wipf and Stock, 2002)
- Augustine, On Grace and Free Will
- Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 9: Of Free Will
- Canons of Dort, Third and Fourth Head of Doctrine
