Grace Gate

Premise: 

This section speaks to the incorrect notion of Libertarian Free Will in salvation.  Although this section speaks to salvation, this explanation is relevant to all areas.  

Take the example of walking up to an ice-cream freezer where you are presented with a wide range of flavor options.  Although it may seem as if you have the freedom to choose whatever flavor you want; you will actually only choose the one flavor which you most want.  You will never choose the flavor that you do not most want, because if you choose it – you then most desired that flavor.  Also, whatever flavor you most want, and therefore choose, you will have a reason for choosing that particular flavor.  Perhaps you will choose strawberry because it tastes best to you.  Or perhaps you will choose a nasty flavor, in order to try to disprove this principle.  But if you do…you have chosen the nasty flavor because you most wanted it, in order to try to disprove this principle.  We can never escape the fact that we do what we most want to do AND there is a “choice-specific” reason why we chose it.

Those that hold to Libertarian (instead of Compatibilist) free-will in salvation would say that after a person has heard the gospel, they can either choose to accept or reject Christ at that moment; without their decision being predetermined by anything.  However, as we see in the ice-cream example, their choice would always be based on a reason.  No matter what the reason would be, God would still be the orchestrator of the reason; and therefore the determiner of the choice.  Perhaps they choose to reject Christ because they had a bad earthly father; who gave them their father?  God did.  Maybe they reject Christ because they wanted a Savior of the same ethnicity as their own.  Who made Jesus Jewish and them whatever they are?  God did.  Perhaps they were influenced for Christ because they had Christian coworkers.  Who gave them the coworkers?  God did.  God orchestrates all circumstances and therefore all reasons for all choices.

Some might argue that through a special grace given by God, He takes away all the determining power of previous influences and brings a person to a point of perfect neutrality; not swayed by any previous circumstance or influence.  It would be like a giant see-saw, hinging on a microscopic needle point. However, even here the principle remains.  No matter which decision they then made, they could only make the choice for a reason; and whatever influenced even that singular reason would have been because of the circumstances that God had caused to be in their life.

It is seen in this logic, that indeed God is the logical determiner of all things.  This is not to say that God saves us through circumstances alone, but instead through a supernatural regeneration of the heart.  This section simply provides evidence that the Libertarian idea of free-will cannot actually exist.

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ITEM 1 OF 2

C.H. Spurgeon (on the origin of his conversion)

Well can I remember the manner in which I learned the doctrines of grace in a single instant. Born, as all of us are by nature, an Arminian, I still believed the old things I had heard continually from the pulpit, and did not see the grace of God. When I was coming to Christ, I thought I was doing it all myself, and though I sought the Lord earnestly, I had no idea the Lord was seeking me. I do not think the young convert is at first aware of this. I can recall the very day and hour when first I received those truths in my own soul—when they were, as John Bunyan says, burnt into my heart as with a hot iron, and I can recollect how I felt that I had grown on a sudden from a babe into a man—that I had made progress in Scriptural knowledge, through having found, once for all, the clue to the truth of God. One week-night, when I was sitting in the house of God, I was not thinking much about the preacher’s sermon, for I did not believe it. The thought struck me, How did you come to be a Christian? I sought the Lord. But how did you come to seek the Lord? The truth flashed across my mind in a moment—I should not have sought Him unless there had been some previous influence in my mind to make me seek Him. I prayed, thought I, but then I asked myself, How came I to pray? I was induced to pray by reading the Scriptures. How came I to read the Scriptures? I did read them, but what led me to do so? Then, in a moment, I saw that God was at the bottom of it all, and that He was the Author of my faith, and so the whole doctrine of grace opened up to me, and from that doctrine I have not departed to this day, and I desire to make this my constant confession, “I ascribe my change wholly to God.”

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ITEM 2 OF 2

Bruce Ware on Moral Neutrality and God’s Two Wills

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