If Our Will Is Not Free, Are We Accountable?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:05.500 | Pastor John, you said humans do not have free will, as in having ultimate self-determination

00:00:11.000 | in choosing Christ. That was last time in episode 307. And so if there is no free will

00:00:15.960 | in this sense, and therefore God is the ultimate determining cause that finally decides my

00:00:19.940 | choice of Christ, then how are sinners held accountable for what they cannot do?

00:00:26.000 | Right. So we saw last time from Romans 8, 7 and 1 Corinthians 2, 14, we cannot, we don't

00:00:36.500 | have the moral ability to grasp and submit to God's will in Christ. We don't have the

00:00:45.040 | ability to see him as beautiful. He is not compelling to us. We are spiritually blind,

00:00:52.400 | and can we then be held accountable? That's the question now. The Bible says that we are

00:01:01.040 | accountable for what we can't do in this regard. And so what we're really asking is, is there

00:01:10.760 | a way to understand that? I mean, clearly we are accountable, and clearly we can't come

00:01:18.600 | up with the kind of freedom we have to have in order to embrace Christ as compelling.

00:01:25.160 | That's the question. And I think there is some help in the Bible for understanding how

00:01:28.880 | this works. In Romans 1, 18, it goes like this, "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven

00:01:35.800 | against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress

00:01:41.280 | the truth." So that's what we do. We suppress the truth. "For what can be known about God

00:01:47.120 | is plain to them because God has shown it to them." So everybody knows God. Everybody

00:01:52.600 | has seen God and knows God. Verse 20, "Therefore, so they are without excuse, for although they

00:02:02.040 | knew God, they did not honor him as God or give him thanks." So, I mean, that word "therefore"

00:02:07.440 | is theologically really packed. "Therefore, they are without excuse." Therefore, they

00:02:13.320 | are responsible for suppressing the truth. So the Bible does address the terms of accountability.

00:02:21.800 | There's something before that "therefore." What are they? Well, here's what it appears

00:02:26.120 | from the text. You must have access to knowledge you're expected to respond to. "Therefore."

00:02:32.800 | They have that knowledge, therefore they are without excuse. If you didn't have the knowledge,

00:02:36.680 | you would have an excuse, evidently, because they know about God. They are without excuse

00:02:43.480 | when they don't worship him. And the second thing is, and this is implied, I think, in

00:02:48.840 | the first, the mental or the natural ability to know him. If you don't have a brain, it

00:02:55.200 | doesn't make any sense to say you're responsible to know him. So an infant, for example, would

00:03:01.560 | seem not to fit this criteria. A little tiny infant who doesn't have the mental capacities

00:03:07.360 | to fulfill the criteria of being without excuse, namely, or being with excuse, namely to see

00:03:15.360 | and know God. So from this and other texts, Jonathan Edwards and others pointed out that

00:03:23.520 | there's a kind of inability that excuses us, and there's a kind of inability, a kind of

00:03:32.160 | can't, bondage, that doesn't excuse us. And he called the one that excuses us natural

00:03:41.400 | inability and the other one moral inability. So let me try to unpack that. Natural inability

00:03:49.760 | means that you can't do what you most deeply will to do. If that happens, you're not responsible

00:03:59.060 | for doing it. If you're a quadriplegic, lying on the floor and are told to get up with no

00:04:07.160 | help, you're not responsible to. But if you are lying on the floor because you love lying

00:04:14.840 | on the floor so much, you love it so much that you can't even want to stand up, you

00:04:22.320 | are responsible. In other words, there is a real can't, a real moral can't that leaves

00:04:32.080 | you still responsible. Disliking something so much we can't do it, that leaves us responsible.

00:04:40.840 | That's the kind of can't in the Bible that says we can't come to Christ, we can't submit

00:04:48.080 | to Christ, we can't receive Him as our treasure—not because we're chained physically, but because

00:04:54.880 | we are morally corrupt and dark and rebellious, and we love, we love darkness rather than

00:05:02.680 | light so that we can't come to the light, which is why the grace of God is so precious

00:05:09.280 | and so necessary, overcoming our blindness, overcoming our hardness of heart that keeps

00:05:15.320 | us from seeing Jesus as beautiful. So that's what the new birth is. In the new birth, the

00:05:23.280 | wind blows where it wishes, you hear the sound of it, you don't know where it comes from

00:05:27.360 | or where it's going, so is everyone who's born in the Spirit. You don't make the new

00:05:30.920 | birth happen. The Holy Spirit blows over you, and suddenly you are rational, you're seeing

00:05:39.000 | Christ is beautiful, heaven is bright, hell is horrible, the way of salvation is glorious,

00:05:46.080 | and you believe. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. We have

00:05:53.760 | to have Jesus overcoming this bondage to sin that we've been in all our lives. When we

00:06:02.520 | were blind, here's what happened. God who said—this is 2 Corinthians 4:6—God who

00:06:07.640 | said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light

00:06:12.080 | of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Suddenly, by the new birth,

00:06:16.440 | by this divine call of God into our lives, "Let there be light," we see for the first

00:06:22.160 | time Christ in a compelling way, and thus freely act rationally for the first time in

00:06:27.960 | our life and embrace the one who is infinitely glorious.

00:06:32.640 | So maybe next time we could turn to what this freedom is like, but the point here is, yes,

00:06:41.680 | we are responsible, and yes, we are in bondage, because our bondage is a moral bondage, not

00:06:49.200 | a physical one.

00:06:50.200 | Yes, so we'll go ahead and stop here for now, but let's pick up this topic of Christian

00:06:54.040 | freedom on Monday. Thank you, listeners, for all the questions related to free will that

00:06:58.720 | have been sent in over the months. If you'd like to ask Pastor John a question about the

00:07:02.240 | Bible, theology, Christian living, sports, or anything else on your mind, please send

00:07:06.400 | us your questions via email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Have a great weekend.

00:07:12.960 | [END]

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If Our Will Is Not Free, Are We Accountable?

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