Free Will (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

The Myth of Free Will and the Bondage of the Will

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. This is one of those days where you hope will never end. Right, Pastor Steve? Some days are diamonds. Diamonds on the backdrop of the black velvet. Beautiful. Do you know that is an overused illustration, but still quite effective.

This is No Compromise Radio, and we want to try to push your proverbial buttons. And we would, notice how I said buttons. If you were in Clinton, Massachusetts, you would say buttons. Buttons. President Clinton.

But we want to push your buttons. There are two T's in button. And today we interrupt our series on the five points of Calvinism, the doctrines of grace, Tulip, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

Can you say that faster, please? A total depravity and unconditional... How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if Calvin could chuck Arminians? We've done T, total depravity, the inability of fallen man to save himself.

Therefore, he needs Jesus, the Savior. U, unconditional election. Man is so bad that if God looked down the quarters of time, he would just see the mui malness of the people.

And so today we're on L, limited atonement, right?

But we're gonna just have a little break. Oh. Steve, because if I bring up U... Special bulletin. Yeah, special bulletin. If I bring up U, unconditional election, then we get things that people say like, whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

And they kind of throw in these free will deals. And so today I want to talk about free will since it slides in and under and through and by, unconditional election. You cannot see Pastor Steve's face.

Well, actually, since this is radio, it's probably good that you don't see his face. Oh, ow! You could go to the website and see the airbrushed picture of Pastor Steve from several years ago. They've taken all the wrinkles out.

It's a wonderful thing. So today we want to talk a little bit about the will because there are still people, and I did a show a while ago on the myth of free will, but Gordon Clark has an interesting book on the will.

And so we've taken some extracts of that book, kind of Q and A, true and false, quiz format, whatever it morphs into today, whatever it evolves into, Pastor Steve. I'm feeling very Darwinian. And we're going to talk about the will from a biblical perspective.

And I don't know, Steve, I guess I'll ask the question.

I'll ask the first one. Go ahead and ask and I'll decide if I want to answer.

You can kind of wax or wane eloquently. Have you ever waned eloquently? Not recently, no. Okay. My children know those moons now, Pastor Steve. It's waxing, it's waning.

Wax on, wane off, I guess, I don't know. Yeah, clap.

Total Depravity and Human Inability

True or false? A fallen sinner is totally unable to cooperate with divine grace.

True, and you know, the more I think about this, the less I'm even able to think about a verse that would even suggest you can cooperate. I mean, if you are a fallen sinner and the Bible describes you as being dead in your sins and trespasses, Ephesians 2, chapter one, then how would you cooperate?

You know, it is a bit like, you know, when you take your preaching class over across the street here to the graveyard and you have them preach way to those dead people in those burial plots and they never come forth.

And in the same way, why would we expect spiritually dead people to be able, and that's the key word, able, to cooperate with God's grace?

Well, you think about it, Pastor Steve. T, total depravity, talks about the inability, the unableness, as it were, the cannots of scripture for unbelieving people. And remember, we're talking about the will here for unbelievers to respond to God in a spiritual way.

We're not talking about does he like pudding or does he like Jell-O? We're talking about can he love Jesus when his heart says, Jesus is my enemy. And so we're talking about the cannots. When you were a kid, Steve, did your parents ever tell you or did teachers ever tell you the difference between yes, you may or yes, you can?

Yes, yeah, because, you know, if you'd say something like, well, can I go to the bathroom? The teacher would always say, well, you can, but you may not. You know, in other words, you didn't have permission to do that.

That's right, and you think about the Bible when it comes to the ability of fallen man. Oh, they have the ability to sin. They can freely sin and sin and sin some more, but they cannot freely choose God.

And if they could, why did God the Father send the Son and have him cloak himself with humanity, empty himself by adding humanity, and then die on the cross when human man with some kind of external enticement, some kind of internal inducement, how do you like that?

That was just off the top of my head. That was very good. Somehow have him believe.

It's not easy to get things off the top of your head.

See, tell the audience that's listening today, because here would be the retort back. Well, what about, I have a responsibility to obey. God wouldn't make me responsible to obey, and then I'm now unable to obey, would he?

Well, the error there is the idea that responsibility equals ability. For example, Jesus says in Matthew 5 .48 that we are to be perfect even as our Father in heaven is perfect. And yet, does anybody have the idea that they can be perfect?

Does anybody think they are perfect?

I mean, certainly. Short of Keswick, Wesleyan. Perfectionism, yeah, certainly.

But I mean, the whole idea that everything commanded in the Bible is something that we could do. Well, if we could obey the law fully, then we'd be right back where you were saying earlier. Why would God then send his Son to take on the massive punishment that we deserve for our sins if we could simply will ourselves to goodness, if we could simply will ourselves to perfection?

God wouldn't do that. To quote Steve Cooley, that's right.

That's right. Gracias. And so you, De Nada, when you think about it this way, listening audience, listening congregation, those on the iPod waves or the airwaves, if you think about it this way, there's a factor that most people forget about, and that factor is a huge factor, which is called the fall.

Adam and Eve had fallen, and they, Adam specifically, is our federal head, and what he did affected us. And so before the fall, Adam was responsible and Adam was able. After the fall, God didn't say, well, you've fallen and you can no longer obey me, so I'll change my plan, I'll change my will, I'll change my standards, I therefore will change myself and my holiness.

No, God didn't do that. God had the same standards of obedience and perfection, the same glorious holy law that he did before that man was required to fulfill, although he couldn't. So because of the fall, man is no longer able, but he still is responsible, therefore we need, drum roll, the second Adam who was able to fulfill the law of God, and his name is Jesus Christ.

And you know, I just want to say this. Think about the history of the church. You know, people act as if this idea of men and women not having a free will is a new idea. No, no. The historical, in fact, the historical theology is such that the new idea is that a free will, and it's not that new, but it comes in much later than not having a free will, which actually originates in the Bible, believe it or not.

And once that fall takes place, once the fall that you were describing takes place, then man is no longer free to choose to obey God. Why not? Because he is born spiritually dead. The Old Testament describes it as estranged from the womb.

In other words, we're separated from God from even conception. And so this idea that, you know, free will has always been God's plan, that's just not accurate. And it's not biblically supported. It's not supported in terms of solid theologians in church history.

In fact, when we look at the most heretical teachers of today, what do they all support? The sovereignty of God in salvation or the sovereignty of man in salvation? That's true.

I would say by default, man, because of his pride and his individualism and his autonomy and his desire to rule himself and have no King, but himself, by definition, by nature, by birth, everyone is born thinking somehow free will exists and is King.

And Pastor Steve, I think you'd agree with me. If people would just study church history, of course the Bible is the key, but you watch the people in church history who study the Bible and you watch whose side you'd like to be on, the free will side or the sovereign grace side.

I always choose the people who are on the sovereign grace side. If it's Augustine or Pelagius, that's a no brainer to me. Even though Augustine had some issues, he didn't have an issue here. Luther and Erasmus, what do you want?

Humanist or do you want to have someone who believes in the bondage of the will? Luther? And even in New England area and of course on the border states here in the Eastern seaboard, Whitfield or Wesley arguing these same issues.

This is not a new debate. And by the way, the Roman Catholic church is the purveyor today of the glorious idol of free will. They love free will so much, Steve, that they consider you and anyone else who believes in sovereign grace damned to hell for all eternity.

That's right.

They say basically that if you don't believe in some combination of works and free will and the grace of God kind of all mixed together, that you are accursed. And that's just not what the Bible teaches.

And again, I've even had, of course, unbelievers love the doctrine of free will because that's what they would choose. But I've had unbelievers tell me that they cannot even imagine a God who would set the bar so high and then not give every person the free will to do things.

And that's the exact same argument I hear from some believers. It just should not be. We should be able to look at the Bible and see what it says. And when Jesus says, we talked about this the last time when we talked about total depravity, but when Jesus says, no one can come to me, it means no one has the ability.

Nobody has the capacity. No one has the physical, mental, spiritual ability to do what they ought to do.

Yes, but no one can certainly mean no one can it. It's like what Mike Martin Luther said about nothing. You can't add nothing. You don't add nothing to salvation. That is no thing. Add no thing to salvation because it'll turn wonderful grace into the putrid porridge of works.

Nasty. Let's talk about number two. Otherwise, this is gonna turn into a miniseries within a miniseries, but that's okay. We like to do that here on WVNE 760, nocompromisedradio .com. Actually, there's a new website.

There's a new website. Look, nocompromisedradio .com. Josh has done a good job there, and I told him this week that we need t-shirts. They should be out, hopefully within just a couple short weeks. Question number two, salvation is exclusively the result of divine monergism.

Let me repeat that. Let me repeat that one more time. Salvation is exclusively the result of divine monergism.

Monergism, mon meaning one, erg meaning work. It just means one working. In other words, it's God who does all the work. If we look at even back to the Old Testament, Jonah 2 .9, you know, salvation is of the Lord.

That's the way it's always been. No one ever saved themselves or cooperated with the grace of God. It is a work of God who takes a dead sinner, brings him to life. Many passages that talk about God granting life, John 3, where it talks about the spirit causing people to be born again.

First Peter chapter one, where it talks about God causing us to be born again. This is the reality of it, is that God causes us to be born again. It's God's work and his alone.

Yes, but what about second Assumption chapter 16, Steve, that says, I am what I am by my own free will. First Corinthians chapter 15 talks about people are who they are and what they are by the sovereign grace of God.

And when you consider Titus chapter three, five, he saved us, not on the basis of deeds, which we have done in righteousness, but according to his mercy. But what about our free choice? Where's that? By the washing of regeneration and by the renewing of the Holy Spirit.

By our own free choice. We do not believe that somehow God believes for you. You do believe, but in response to, your belief does not drive, initiate, or force God to do anything. God gives you a new nature.

He alone regenerates and you respond because you have a new nature. And that new nature says, I love God because it's a divine nature. It's a fallen nature that's now been made new. And so we're not saying that you don't have to believe.

You must believe. But we're saying when we tell unbelievers, you must believe, we realize they can't believe. And therefore we point them to the one who can be the one who grants saving faith. And so Pastor Steve is right.

Divine monergism is something God alone can do. Pastor Steve, when people pray for the salvation of their loved ones, do they pray to the God of the philosophical free willers or do they pray to God to act with divine monergistic work?

It's so clear. I mean, if you are out there and you're like, what are these guys talking about here? You know, I would give you the dead man's challenge. That's what I'm gonna call it. You know, you find me a verse that says dead men can, of their own free will, believe then we'll change course here.

But it is, as you said, in second assumptions that people believe, they fundamentally, they take as a baseline that we have a free will and then they impose that on everywhere else in scripture. And so that idea is not found anywhere.

And I've even forgot what your question was.

Well, you know what, Steve? It's found in second Nephi in the book of Mormon. You are saved by grace after all you can do. That's right. That is true, but that is a different religion. And so when you think about it, I said this Sunday from the pulpit, Pastor Steve, and I know you would concur.

You might find someone on a bridge someplace on the Bourne Bridge, ready to jump over the bridge to commit suicide because of all their problems in life and they just have to end it all. And you might be able to talk them down from the ladder so they don't commit suicide.

That's a possibility. They still might jump, but it's possible to convince someone to get help. But it is not a possibility. It is a sheer, impossible thing to swim down to the bottom of the river where somebody jumped off 10 years ago and say to the bones of the dead person, live, they cannot live on their own.

You need someone who's powerful enough to create life, our new life in a person.

Well, and I certainly wouldn't want anybody to jump down to the bottom there looking for old bones. Scuba diving. Yeah, that would be ugly. All right, number three.

Christ's Work, Monergism, and the New Birth

Number three. Because today it's my turn to ask the question. Okay, you go ahead. And number three, which is technically number four on our page. To say that a fallen sinner has the power to cooperate with divine grace is a denial of the necessity of Christ's work.

Oh, that's an interesting nuance. Now here, we'll repeat it again. To say that a fallen sinner, the sin unbeliever, has the power to cooperate, to work with God's grace. If you say that, you're denying the necessity of Christ's atonement.

True or false? True, and I think that gets back to what you were saying earlier. If it were not for the work of the second Adam, in other words, our second representative, Jesus, then the work of the first Adam, which was falling, I mean, what does Romans 5 say?

It's through the work of one man that we were all plunged into sin. And it is by the work of another man, even Jesus Christ, both man and God, that we are delivered from that, really from the wrath of God.

So, this idea that somehow we would have the ability to cooperate with divine grace would have to be a denial of the necessity of Christ's work because it would say that the impact of the fall, it had no effect, that we're still morally neutral or even bent towards obeying God.

Well, Pastor Steve, what happened at the fall was reversed by Christ because then Christ took away the original sin through our baptism as an infant in one of our local churches, and now the original sin has been all taken away.

Oh, well, thank you, Pope Mike.

You know, this is an unknown fact here at Bethlehem Bible Church and in the studios at No Compromise Radio. Pastor Steve wouldn't dare let this out. So, he's gonna turn 50 here in just a very short time.

And so, this is my 50th birthday present to Pastor Steve. Oh, thank you so much. Did you know Pastor Steve, behind closed doors, calls me Papa?

More likely to call him Papa Frita. For those of you who speak Spanish,.

You know what a Papa Frita is. I think it's a French fry. It's a French fry. I think the Parisians might call that Pommes Frites. Si. All right, question number four. Question number four. Studio audience.

Union with Adam and the Bondage to Sin

The human will is in bondage to sin because of our union with Adam in his fall.

Absolutely true. And you know, when I read this Romans chapter six, again, you know what I would encourage anyone listening to do? You take out the book of Romans and you read it from beginning to end and you cannot, cannot come to some kind of conclusion that we have a free will or that the fall of Adam didn't have an impact on us.

Romans chapter six is very clear. There are two states in which we can find ourselves. One is enslaved to sin and the other one is in a slave of righteousness. And you can only be a slave of righteousness.

That is a kind of a euphemism for a slave of Christ, for his bond servant, for a slave of God. You can only find yourself in that state if you have been saved. Otherwise you are a slave of sin. You are captured by Satan to do his will.

Second Timothy 2, 24 and 25. There is no way around it. We are in one of those two states.

Why does No Compromise Radio continue to harp on this topic? The answer is because it is A, so misunderstood. B, the religion of choice here in New England, Roman Catholicism teaches it with full force.

C, the majority of evangelical churches also believe in this false doctrine that ultimately, that eventually, that mandatorily distracts and detracts glory from God alone. God alone is to receive all the glory for salvation in his work in eternity past at Calvary and in his work today.

And Pastor Steve and I are dedicated to the fact that we don't want to see people rob God of glory. Pastor Steve was an LA sheriff for 20 years and he arrested robbers and he put handcuffs on them and put them behind bars.

He actually took me into jail once for calling him Papa. No, he took me into the jail just to show me. Now what we want to do with our words, we want to arrest those who steal from the glory of God by saying man has to let God work and man has to allow God and God has to do some kind of secondary work and that does not give glory to God.

That distracts glory from God and it puts it onto the wrongful owner of that glory, created, sinful, finite, fallen man himself.

Yeah, it sort of reminds me of one man on the radio who says that God is too much of a gentleman to impose his will on someone and I'm just like too much of a gentleman. Well, if he's that much of a gentleman, then he needs to A, change a lot of the words in scripture because things like he caused us to be born again in 1 Peter 1.

That sounds pretty much like he didn't really care what we wanted. I mean, that's just brutal because left to our own devices, what would we do? You know, here's light comes into the world and men love darkness.

They don't choose light. They don't choose Christ. They don't choose God. They choose their sinfulness and so God is enough of a gentleman as it were with a giant G to understand that apart from his work, we would be dead and have no hope at all and so he transforms our wills, those who have been saved, so that we love him.

Well, when you read the book of Hosea and see this great spiritual love that God has for his people in a mirror of Homer's, Homer, of Hosea's love of Gomer, the adulteress, you don't see this kind of free will deal.

You see God alone initiating and I've got a little comment to make here that I think it actually is the coup de grace, Steve. I think it is the final bullet to the head of the ugly doctrine of free will and here's the bullet.

Those who believe in free will, ultimate autonomy, when you're in heaven and you aren't able to sin, you can't sin, you won't want to sin, but you will not be able to sin. You will not have a free will in heaven.

You will only have a nature that's glorified and you can only choose things according to your glorified nature. You could only choose to love and serve and worship and work for the Lord Jesus Christ for all eternity and you will have no free will.

Will you be fully human in heaven, in a glorified body that will not give you free will?

Yeah, and you know what? Nobody's gonna be complaining about it going, you know, I want my free will like they want their MTV. You know, why do we keep,.

Why do we keep harping on this? I'm ready for some big guitar riff right now. I want my MTV and Sting singing in the background.

Why do we keep harping on this? It reminds me of when, you know, I think it was Luther, somebody asked him, you know, pastor, why do you keep preaching the gospel to us? And he said, because I'm gonna keep preaching it to you until you believe it.

And we're going to keep proclaiming the doctrine of God's sovereignty and salvation until we get a flood of emails that say, okay, we all believe it. Every single one of us in New England, we believe it.

Stop it, you know, move on to something else. And you know what? Then we'll still keep doing it because you'll listen and you'll go after you, after you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you'll say that is the sweetest doctrine there is.

Well, when you read some of these Psalms and these hymns, you'll realize those men and women knew that God alone saved. So this is Mike Abenroth with Steve Cooley, No Compromise Radio. Write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

Write of your own free will.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abenroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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