Steve in Lake Charles, Louisiana, listening on Immaculate Heart Radio, you
are on with Jimmy Akin. Yes, hello. First off, I don't believe in Sola
Scriptura, but I often get questioned by Protestants, so my question about free
will is, is it scriptural? And secondly, on this program, this week, I've heard
people say that God cannot lie and that Jesus could not sin.
So my question about that is, does God have free will? Okay.
In regard to the first question, the term "free will" is a theological term. It
developed in theology after the writing of the New Testament, so you won't find
the term "free will" in Scripture, but then you won't find a lot of other
theological terms in Scripture, either. You won't find the term "Trinity" in
Scripture because that's--even though the concept of the Trinity is in Scripture,
the word is of later origin. Similarly, the word "Bible" isn't in Scripture. That's
another term that came along much later. And so even though the books of the
Bible are Scripture, they don't use the word "Bible" in them. So it's the same with
free will. "Free will" is a later theological term, but it describes a
reality that is found in Scripture. And this is indicated by a number of
passages. One of the things that happens all over the place, in both the Old and
the New Testament, is: people are exhorted to do stuff. Thus, for example, in
Deuteronomy, you have God telling the Israelites that He set life and death
before them; "therefore choose life." Well, that means they have a choice. He's not
forcing them to do one or the other. And so that presupposes that they have a
choice, or a genuinely free choice, or free will. In the same way, whenever the
New Testament exhorts anybody to do anything, rather than
something else, you know, that's another illustration of the
Biblical reality of free will, even though that term hadn't been invented
yet. So yes, it's a Biblical concept. In terms of God having freedom:
again, you know, the term is a later one, but God clearly has freedom, and this
is something that is emphasized particularly in some later theological
documents that talk about how, for example, God didn't have to create the
world. That was a free choice on His part, He did it out of love for us and to
display His glory; but He didn't have to create the world. He was all-sufficient
in and of Himself, and so He had no need to create the world. However, God's
actions are consistent with his nature, and His nature is to be all-good. And
that explains why God can't lie or otherwise sin, because those would
involve logical contradictions. Divine omnipotence means that God can do
anything that is logically consistent. It doesn't mean He can do anything you can
say, because there are some things you can say that contain logical
contradictions, and if you think about them, they're just gibberish. For example,
the concept of a square circle or a married bachelor. Both of those concepts
involve logical contradictions; something can't have both a square perimeter and a
circular perimeter and have only one perimeter, so a square circle is nonsense.
Same thing with a four-sided triangle or a married bachelor; you can be married or
bachelor, but you can't be a married bachelor. So statements like "God can make
a married bachelor" is just logical gibberish, and so God could make married
people, God could make bachelors, but it's not within the scope of omnipotence to
say God could make a married bachelor. That's just gibberish. And in the same
way, the idea of an all-perfect, all-good being sinning,
whether it's the sin of lying or something else, it's also gibberish. "An
infinitely holy God that sins;" you know, that's logical gibberish. And so
consequently God can do anything that's logically possible, but He can't sin,
because that would contradict His nature as an all-holy God, and so the
idea of an all-holy God sinning is just more conceptual incoherence, just like
four-sided triangles and married bachelors. Thank you, Steve. But that--
there's lots of choices that don't involve sin, however. Exactly, any
choice that's not logically contradictory, God could
make.