Board index ‹ Free Will

[All True]

If Christianity allows for a God who intervenes, adjusts, blesses, and punishes, how is there free will? If you're being blessed by God's grace because of your faithfulness, or dealt a difficult life because of your lack or worship or lifestyle, how is God giving you free will? He's intervening in your life - thus messing with free will.

[jimwalton]

Free will doesn't demand non-intervention, only self-direction. You may punch me in the face, and I have a choice as to what to do next. You may know something about me, but your knowing that doesn't doesn't cause any behavior in me; I get to choose what I'll do regardless of what you know. I may punish my child for something he did that was wrong, but he still gets to decide whether to submit or defy, and how to act afterwards, whether to make a change or not, and what kind of a change to make. When we discipline a child, or even educate them, our goal is to bend the will to conform with what we consider to be a healthy and/or true path. That's a very different agenda than trying to break someone's will, or to eliminate it altogether. As it stands, I can bless someone else (give them food, money, help them with some work), and that doesn't take away their free will. I can do my best to make a course correction in their behavior, like convince them not to drink so much. I am trying to change the way they make decisions, but my efforts don't take away their will (believe me, I know it so often doesn't work). I've even been punished (gotten some speeding tickets), but that doesn't take away my free will. It just makes me drive with more alertness so I don't get caught!

God's intervention doesn't deprive me of free will any more than my wife's intervention in my decisions and my life doesn't take my free will away. I still get to decide, regardless of what she thinks and does. But since I love her, I try to mould my will to be pleasing to her. But that's my choice, too. Same with God.