Pastor John, you said humans do not have free will, as in having ultimate self-determination in choosing Christ. That was last time in episode 307. And so if there is no free will in this sense, and therefore God is the ultimate determining cause that finally decides my choice of Christ, then how are sinners held accountable for what they cannot do?

Right. So we saw last time from Romans 8, 7 and 1 Corinthians 2, 14, we cannot, we don't have the moral ability to grasp and submit to God's will in Christ. We don't have the ability to see him as beautiful. He is not compelling to us. We are spiritually blind, and can we then be held accountable?

That's the question now. The Bible says that we are accountable for what we can't do in this regard. And so what we're really asking is, is there a way to understand that? I mean, clearly we are accountable, and clearly we can't come up with the kind of freedom we have to have in order to embrace Christ as compelling.

That's the question. And I think there is some help in the Bible for understanding how this works. In Romans 1, 18, it goes like this, "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth." So that's what we do.

We suppress the truth. "For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them." So everybody knows God. Everybody has seen God and knows God. Verse 20, "Therefore, so they are without excuse, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give him thanks." So, I mean, that word "therefore" is theologically really packed.

"Therefore, they are without excuse." Therefore, they are responsible for suppressing the truth. So the Bible does address the terms of accountability. There's something before that "therefore." What are they? Well, here's what it appears from the text. You must have access to knowledge you're expected to respond to. "Therefore." They have that knowledge, therefore they are without excuse.

If you didn't have the knowledge, you would have an excuse, evidently, because they know about God. They are without excuse when they don't worship him. And the second thing is, and this is implied, I think, in the first, the mental or the natural ability to know him. If you don't have a brain, it doesn't make any sense to say you're responsible to know him.

So an infant, for example, would seem not to fit this criteria. A little tiny infant who doesn't have the mental capacities to fulfill the criteria of being without excuse, namely, or being with excuse, namely to see and know God. So from this and other texts, Jonathan Edwards and others pointed out that there's a kind of inability that excuses us, and there's a kind of inability, a kind of can't, bondage, that doesn't excuse us.

And he called the one that excuses us natural inability and the other one moral inability. So let me try to unpack that. Natural inability means that you can't do what you most deeply will to do. If that happens, you're not responsible for doing it. If you're a quadriplegic, lying on the floor and are told to get up with no help, you're not responsible to.

But if you are lying on the floor because you love lying on the floor so much, you love it so much that you can't even want to stand up, you are responsible. In other words, there is a real can't, a real moral can't that leaves you still responsible. Disliking something so much we can't do it, that leaves us responsible.

That's the kind of can't in the Bible that says we can't come to Christ, we can't submit to Christ, we can't receive Him as our treasure—not because we're chained physically, but because we are morally corrupt and dark and rebellious, and we love, we love darkness rather than light so that we can't come to the light, which is why the grace of God is so precious and so necessary, overcoming our blindness, overcoming our hardness of heart that keeps us from seeing Jesus as beautiful.

So that's what the new birth is. In the new birth, the wind blows where it wishes, you hear the sound of it, you don't know where it comes from or where it's going, so is everyone who's born in the Spirit. You don't make the new birth happen. The Holy Spirit blows over you, and suddenly you are rational, you're seeing Christ is beautiful, heaven is bright, hell is horrible, the way of salvation is glorious, and you believe.

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. We have to have Jesus overcoming this bondage to sin that we've been in all our lives. When we were blind, here's what happened. God who said—this is 2 Corinthians 4:6—God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

Suddenly, by the new birth, by this divine call of God into our lives, "Let there be light," we see for the first time Christ in a compelling way, and thus freely act rationally for the first time in our life and embrace the one who is infinitely glorious. So maybe next time we could turn to what this freedom is like, but the point here is, yes, we are responsible, and yes, we are in bondage, because our bondage is a moral bondage, not a physical one.

Yes, so we'll go ahead and stop here for now, but let's pick up this topic of Christian freedom on Monday. Thank you, listeners, for all the questions related to free will that have been sent in over the months. If you'd like to ask Pastor John a question about the Bible, theology, Christian living, sports, or anything else on your mind, please send us your questions via email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Have a great weekend.