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Posted By Joe Haynes on February 5, 2010

When working on digging up Scripture references for use with a local ministry’s confessional statement today, I came across the chapter on “Free Will” in the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), which is adopted from the same chapter in the Westminster Confession of Faith. I’m going to quote the WCF chapter in its entirety below, but first let me share a couple of observations.

Most people I talk with about God’s sovereignty and human free will assume that we all have free will. This is a huge assumption. Yes God created us with free will. But doesn’t the Scripture say we, before being born again, were “slaves to sin”?

Romans 6:17   But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed…

Romans 6:20   20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.

 

Hmmm. We were slaves to sin. That means we were not free. Since when? It must be since Sin. When did Sin come along? At the Fall of Adam. So we all were slaves to sin since Adam’s time. What did we do when we were slaves to sin? We sinned. Did we sin because someone forced us to? No. We sinned because we wanted to. It was our “will” that was enslaved to sin, to “want” only what Sin wanted. Before we were born again, we did not have free will to want righteousness. God changed all that. That’s why Paul begins Romans 6:17 with the words, “…thanks be to God”!

Here’s the Westminster Confession of Faith on “Free Will”.

• 9.1  God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced, nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined, to good or evil.(1) (1)Matt. 17:12; James 1:14; Deut. 30:19. 
• 9.2  Man, in his state of innocency, had freedom and power to will and to do that which was good and well-pleasing to God;(1) but yet, mutably, so that he might fall from it.(2) (1)Eccl. 7:29; Gen. 1:26.
  (2)Gen. 2:16,17; Gen. 3:6.
• 9.3  Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation;(1) so as, a natural man, being altogether averse from that good,(2) and dead in sin,(3) is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.(4) (1)Rom. 5:6; Rom. 8:7; John 15:5.
  (2)Rom. 3:10,12.
  (3)Eph. 2:1,5; Col. 2:13.
  (4)John 6:44,65; Eph. 2:2,3,4,5; 1 Cor. 2:14; Tit. 3:3,4,5. 
• 9.4  When God converts a sinner, and translates him into the state of grace, He freeth him from his natural bondage under sin,(1) and by His grace alone, enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good;(2) yet so as that, by reason of his remaining corruption, he doth not perfectly nor only will that which is good, but doth also will that which is evil.(3) (1)Col. 1:13; John 8:34,36.
  (2)Phil. 2:13; Rom. 6:18,22.
  (3)Gal. 5:17; Rom. 7:15,18,19,21,23.
• 9.5  The will of man is made perfectly and immutably free to do good alone in the state of glory only.(1) (1)Eph. 4:13; Heb. 12:23; 1 John 3:2; Jude 24.

Categories: Theology
Tags: free will