“But if you do not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.” Deuteronomy 28.15

The people of Israel knew what God desired of them: obedience. They understood that obedience to the Law of God would ensure a just society, in which love for God and neighbors would abound and the blessings of God would fill every area of their lives.

But the people did not have a heart for God. They were the heirs of a spiritual condition, as Paul explains in Romans 5, which descended from their (and our) first parents, Adam and Eve. Sin had so affected the hearts of the people of Israel, that no amount of sensate experience of God, history of His faithfulness, testimony concerning His will, nor threat of His judgment could keep them from disobeying His will.

Their hearts simply weren’t in it; they preferred the sinful, pagan ways of the peoples of Canaan to the just ways of their Redeemer and Savior. They would not obey the Lord as He commanded, yet they would not be able to point to anyone but themselves as being the cause of their rebellion.

They were responsible to choose the way of obedience, but their hearts were not free to do so. Nevertheless, they were, as God saw the situation, freely irresponsible in choosing not to obey Him.

So did they have free will? Yes. And no.

They were free to obey God, and sometimes did, though never completely. But they were bound to sin and to rebel against Him, because of the sinful condition of their hearts.

But they were held accountable for every such act of rebellion and were called to repent and return to the way of obedience. And they were provided the means – sacrifices, offerings, courts, and the like – whereby such a return might be accomplished.

The people of Israel were in many ways like us. They lived in a tension between freedom and responsibility in which their experience of the grace and goodness of God, and knowledge of His will, was striving continuously with their natural inclination to selfishness and sin. The freedom they knew before the Lord was real, but within restraints; nevertheless, is was a freedom to which God expected them always to incline, even though He knew they would not.

They had a problem they could not fix which kept them from the freedom they would not choose. And they were responsible for that condition before the Lord.

T. M. Moore

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