Question: What does the Law of God teach about free will?

“You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules, if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the LORD.” Leviticus 18.5

Implied in the Lord’s command to Israel, signaled by the conditional, “if”, is the ability to choose. In the context God sets forth three options for the people: how the Egyptians lived, how the peoples of Canaan lived, and how He commands His people to live. “If” the people do as He commands, they will live. “If” not…

God’s words clearly indicate that Israel may or may not keep His statutes and rules. How they chose to live would be determined by the kind of life they desired, based on the options before them and the inclinations of their hearts toward those options. And it is in this confrontation with options that the question of human freedom and free will arises.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “free will is the ability to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling some desire.” Are human beings free to choose, based on nothing more than their own desires, however these may be shaped (reason, necessity, passion, spur of the moment, pressure from without, etc.)? Or is the human will not free to make such choices? Are our wills determined by factors beyond our control, so that we cannot act as we will but only as we must, given the circumstances and choices confronting us?

The answer to this may seem obvious, but it is not. Philosophers and theologians have debated this question for centuries, and even to this day no consensus exists. Most of us, I suspect, tend to think of ourselves as free and independent moral agents, capable of deciding for ourselves what’s best between the options before us at any moment. Except, of course, when it is convenient to shift the blame for our actions on others or on “circumstances beyond our control” (“The devil made me do it!” – Flip Wilson).

But a moment’s reflection on the subject will immediately reveal that there are limits to our freedom. For example, I may strongly desire to have or possess something which is beyond my ability, whether physical or otherwise. I may like to fly like a bird, travel the world, compose like Bach, or any number of things which simply are beyond my ability at the moment. Thus what I will, though I desire it ever so strongly, will not be possible, because my freedom of choice is constrained by my physical or other limitations.

Which raises the question: What “other” limitations might be constraining my ability freely to choose? And if these are real, what are the implications of such constraints for me and how I “choose” to live?

The importance of this question should be obvious. It is quite possible that, by merely assuming we are free moral agents – that we have free wills – we are deluding ourselves, and that we are actually being constrained to choose as we do by forces or factors other than our desires, so that we are not actually free at all. And if this is the case then, as we shall see, the implications for life in society are large.

So, given that the Law of God is the cornerstone of all Scripture, we might expect it to speak to so large an issue. And, while the specific question of the freedom (or not) of the human will is not addressed in the Law, enough is contained there to help us in understanding the nature of the will and its freedom within the context of the divine economy.

T. M. Moore

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