Dr. Sproul continues discussing how the will works by discussing Jonathan Edwards' treatise The Freedom of the Will and then the pagan view of the will and the free will of men. We choose according to our strongest inclination and because of our radical corruption we are inclined to wickedness so there is no inclination to come to Christ.

We return once more to our study of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. We are still working in the seventh chapter. Though we looked at a portion of this text last week from an expositional viewpoint, I promised that we would look at it again from a slightly different angle today. So, I will read Romans 7:14–25, and I will ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.

The inerrant Word of God for God’s people. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Our Father, we beseech You that You will help us tonight as we examine this teaching of Your Apostle in which he sets forth the very real and present conflict that we all experience in our lives and in our spiritual pilgrimage. We pray tonight that You would grant understanding and comfort to us through Your Word. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Mechanism vs. Providence

God willing, this will not be the last of our messages with respect to chapter 7. It is my hope and plan to visit it again next week because there are elements of the text I did not get to deal with in an expositional manner a week ago. In the interim, I made a promise to you that this week, instead of looking at the text verse by verse, as is my custom, I was going to take a little break from that pattern and examine this portion of the text from a theological and even somewhat philosophical perspective. We are going to look specifically, but not exclusively, to the work of Jonathan Edwards in his classic treatment of the question of the operation of the human will in his great work, The Freedom of the Will.

Before I look at that, I want to say that we are always susceptible as Christians to having ideas creep into our thinking that are quite contrary to the truth of God, but they slip in unnoticed. We do not plan to embrace pagan notions that are incompatible with the truth of God. But it has been said that if a lie is repeated often enough, people begin to believe it. So much of this information comes our way and sneaks into the crevices of our brain, and we are not even aware of it. This happens particularly with ideas that bombard our minds from childhood. We are taught that certain truths are so self-evident and so well-attested by contemporary science that to question them is to risk the charge of being insane.

There are many such ideas that sneak into our heads that are utterly incompatible with the Christian faith, but there are two ideas that I think are most frequent. The first is a view of nature that, even though now it is somewhat passé in contemporary paradigms of natural science, nevertheless is still pervasive at the common level, which is what we call a mechanistic view of the universe. This view teaches that the universe works something like a machine, and that machine functions according to fixed, inherent laws within nature. We have been told from the time we were infants that the universe operates according to the laws of nature, and the laws of nature are presented to us as if they were immutable, fixed, inherent powers that are autonomous—that is, they operate by their own steam and are accountable to nothing outside of or above and beyond nature itself.

That understanding of the universe as mechanistic is on a collision course with everything that the Scriptures teach us about the nature of God. The nature of God tells us that this world is His creation and that He rules over this world not as an absentee landlord or as a cosmic spectator but through His providence. In His providence, He governs the motion of every atom and every subatomic particle in the universe. Gravity cannot function for a second apart from His providential rule and permission.

From a biblical perspective, what we call the laws of nature are merely descriptive terms for how God usually, normally, and ordinarily governs His creation by His providence. But we have seen in our day a declaration of independence from the sovereign providence of God, and the assumption now becomes that the universe operates by its own steam.

We sang as our opening hymn one of my all-time favorite hymns, the “Old Hundredth.” While we were singing it, my mind drifted back to the first few months after the Berlin Wall came down and the collapse of the Soviet empire. At that time, I spent several weeks lecturing and preaching in Eastern Europe in the Czech Republic, in Hungary, and then in Romania.

The whole time I was there lecturing, I had to have a battery of translators to translate my teaching into the native language of the people. In turn, when they raised questions to me, they had to be translated for my benefit. When I preached in the churches on Sunday morning, every phrase I uttered, I had to pause and wait for the translator to communicate my sermon in the native language of the people in the congregation.

When we sang the hymns in these foreign languages, I did not know a single word of the hymns, but I knew the tune of every hymn that we sang. That is one of the things that troubles my spirit with the revolution in worship in our day, as we have seen an almost wholesale rejection of the great hymns of the church that have been sung in every land in Christendom and in every generation for centuries. We’ve suddenly cut ourselves off from the communion of saints, the whole history of the church. So, there are Christians today who are not even aware of that hymn that we sang tonight, which is called the “Old Hundredth” because it comes from Psalm 100.

In the second verse of that hymn we sang, it reads like this: “The Lord, ye know, is God indeed.” That is not the way we talk today, is it? But it is great the way it comes across in this hymn. It says, “Without our aid He did us make.” This is an idea that so captures the biblical perspective of the relationship of God to His creation: “Without our aid He did us make.” We think in this day and age that God cannot do anything without our assistance or without our consent. But He is the Lord. There is none like Him, and He made us without any help or assistance from us. “We are His folk, He doth us feed.” There is the sovereign providence of God. We are His sheep. He feeds us, and He takes us to belong to Him.

This hymn, like so many of the great hymns, is rich in setting forth a Christian understanding of life and a Christian understanding of nature. But that is not the focal point today.

A Pagan Understanding of the Will

I mentioned that there are many intrusions into our thought from pagan sources of which we are not aware. I would say the idea of an independent, self-ruling, autonomous universe is the second most pervasive pagan idea that creeps into our thinking. Overwhelmingly, the most widespread pagan idea that penetrates our thinking—and many times we never give it a second thought—is the humanistic, secular, and pagan view of the human will, which is about as far removed from the biblical view as it can be.

So deeply are we entrenched is this pagan notion of the will that when we preach about the sovereignty of God in His ministry of redemption, in His work of sovereign election, and the disposition of His saving grace through the good pleasure of His will, people immediately protest, often vociferously, sometimes with great anger and passion that this violates the free will of man. When we begin to probe what is meant by the free will of man, it is this widespread and pagan understanding of the will that is usually expounded.

One thing we agree with the pagan, humanist, and secularist view is that we, as human beings, are volitional creatures. A volitional creature is a creature that has the capacity to make choices by exercising its will. We are voluntary creatures, and we distinguish between voluntary actions and involuntary actions.

Maybe certain Hindu mystics or people like Mahatma Gandhi could stop his heart from beating at will, but the vast majority of human beings have their hearts beating involuntarily. I do not have to make a decision every morning when I get up and say to my heart, “Please start beating.” It beats in an involuntary manner. But if I decide to shave when I get out of bed in the morning or not shave, that is not something that happens in an involuntary manner. To shave, I must make the decision. I must make the choice to exercise my will to pick up the razor and trim my beard, as it were. We understand that difference between voluntary action and involuntary action.

So then, what is the difference between the pagan view of the will and the biblical view of the will? Briefly, the pagan, humanistic, secular view of the will is that the will is so free that every choice it has, it can respond to out of philosophical indifference—that is, to be truly free in the making of decisions and choices, that freedom must be absolute insofar that there is nothing that influences or compels a person to choose to the left or to the right. For the will to be free, it must have no preconceived bias, no previous inclination, and no prior disposition in one direction or the other. That is what is meant by a will of indifference. The will approaches every life situation and every option with true freedom to go this way or that way.

An Inclination to Wickedness

In the sixteenth century, when John Calvin was engaged in a dispute over free will with his opponent, whose name was Pighius, part of the debate focused on this question of the nature of the human will. Calvin made an observation along these lines: “If you mean by free will that all of us, even in our sinful condition, have the power and the ability to choose what we want, to choose by decision to do what we desire to do, then I completely agree with the idea of free will. However, if you mean by free will the ability of a human being to choose from indifference, from a will that is not tainted, influenced or held captive by its propensity for sin, then free will is far too grandiose a term to be applied to human beings.”

Calvin was saying that yes, we have free will in the sense that we have the ability to choose what we want, but that ability to choose what we want is not only mildly influenced but radically conditioned by the human corruption of our hearts, out of which flow the choices that we make. That is to say, we make evil choices not from indifference, but from a prior disposition and inclination to wickedness. As the Bible says, “the desires of our hearts,” prior to regeneration, “are only wicked continuously.”

This was at the heart of the debate between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. In his diatribe, Erasmus attacked Luther’s view of the sovereignty of God and election. Luther responded to the diatribe of Erasmus with his classic work De Servo Arbitrio, On the Bondage of the Will.

Our Strongest Desire

In New England in the eighteenth century, when Edwards undertook dealing with this question of the will, he was defending his position against the rising tide of Arminian theology, which in many respects was married to a view of the will as being indifferent. In his discussion, Edwards began with this question: What is the will? We talk about the will all the time, but what is it?

The will is not an organ that is three inches to the left side of the liver, or the pancreas, or the heart. The will describes a faculty or ability by which human beings are able to make choices. We are not robots. We are not inert stones or logs. We are living, breathing people who make choices all the time. What is that faculty we call the will?

Edwards answered that question—and I think with a profound understanding of this—by saying that the will is simply the mind choosing. An action of the will, a voluntary action, is an action that takes place because in our thinking, in our mental approach to something, we determine what is desirable and what seems good to us at that moment. On the basis of that activity of the mind, we then exercise our choice. In fact, if the mind is not involved in our choices, they would have no moral basis to them whatsoever. A mindless choice is really not a moral choice.

In addition to this, Edwards began to probe more deeply into the dimension of human choices, and he came to a conclusion that I would like to spend a little time thinking about. The fundamental principle of Edwards’ analysis was this: Choices do not occur in a vacuum. Choices are not uncaused effects. They do not just pop up like Athena out of the head of Zeus.

All choices have a cause, and the antecedent cause for every choice that we make is what Edwards called inclination or disposition. The principle he set forth was this: We not only choose according to our desires, but we must choose according to our desires, and we always choose according to the strongest inclination, disposition, or desire that we have at the moment of choice.

If you grasp this principle, keep it in your thinking, and understand it, this can help you avoid a multitude of serious errors of how the Christian faith works. We always choose according to the strongest inclination that we have at the moment. If we understand that, we will understand that never in our lives have we ever chosen to do something that we did not want to do. This is the ugly power of sin. The reason we choose to sin in a given moment is because that is what we want to do. We sin because we want to sin. The devil does not make us do it; we cannot make that plea on judgment day. Every sin that we commit proceeds from our own internal desire.

Ice Cream Flavors and a Donkey

Now let us look at it again from a different angle. I will challenge you to go home this week, think about it, cogitate on it. Take out your pen and paper and come here next week, if you will, and show me just one—I am not asking for thirty examples—just one example of anything you have ever done in your life that was not according to your strongest inclination at the moment.

You might say: “I don’t have to go home and think about that. I can tell you right now if you really want me to be candid about it, preacher, I didn’t want to be here tonight. But I came.” Why did you come? “My wife was after me about it all afternoon, and she told me it was my duty to be here. I thought it would be easier for me to sit here for an hour and listen to you preach than listen to my wife rebuke me for the rest of the week. So, all things being equal, I didn’t want to be here.” But all things were not equal, were they? When push came to shove and the moment of decision came, though you may have had no basic desire or inclination to be in church tonight, you did have a desire and inclination not to be out of sorts with your wife, and so you would rather bear the ills of listening to the preacher than disappointing your bride. Therefore, your greatest inclination at the moment was to come to church. Do you see how it works?

I would like you to find a choice you have made that was not exactly like that. You could work hard this week to come up with some of those choices that were not according to your strongest inclination at the moment, but I can save you lots of time, trouble, and investigation by just telling you now: You are not going to be able to do it. Every choice you have ever made, even when the choice itself may have seemed absolutely repugnant to you, you chose it because not choosing it was even more repugnant than choosing it. That which seemed most pleasing to you at the moment is what dictated your choice.

You might say: “Are you saying that our choices are determined? This sounds to me like pure determinism. As Christians we’re not determinists. We don’t believe that we’re robots, that we’re puppets.” I have looked at a number of different views about human beings. I have never thought of human beings as being made of wood or manipulated by strings. I have never thought of myself as a puppet. I never thought of anyone else as a puppet. Puppets do not make choices. Puppets do not have good desires; puppets do not have evil desires. They have no inclinations whatsoever. Why? Because they do not have minds. Without a mind, you do not have a faculty of choosing. No mind, no will—it is as simple as that.

We live constantly not with decisions made between two options, but with a multitude of options pressing against our lives, vying for our attention and our submission. It would be so much easier if, when we decided to have an ice cream cone, there were only two flavors to choose from: vanilla and chocolate. But the ice cream companies outdo each other for fifty-something flavors.

If we had indifferent wills, we would be like the donkey that had a bucket of oats placed to the left and some hay to the right, and he was very hungry. But having an indifferent will with no preference for oats or hay, and the two being equal distance from each other, what happens to our poor donkey? He starves to death because he would have no reason to choose the oats or the hay. That is the way we are. When we order ice cream, we tend to order the flavor that is most appealing to us.

Just One Piece of Cherry Pie

How does all of this work out with what Paul is saying Romans 7 regarding Christian experience? “For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” He is describing here a conflict, sometimes between rival goods. That can be the most difficult decision of all—not just between good and evil but between two different goods. That can really paralyze us. But Paul is thinking in terms of all things being equal.

Last week, I asked a question: How many of you want to be perfectly obedient as Christians? I will ask it again: How many of you would like to be perfectly obedient? Is that not something you desire? That is an inclination you have in your will. So then, why are you not perfect? The new man in your heart has a desire now to please God, but there still lives in your members the vestigial remnants of the old man of the flesh, who has declared war on the leanings of the Spirit.

Many times, when the conflict comes, you would rather follow the old man than the new man. There is no other explanation for sin than that in the moment, it is more desirable for us to sin than it is to obey Christ. Part of me wants to obey Christ but not all of me. There are still inclinations and desires that have not been totally put to death, and they bump up against our good intentions.

In the course of talking about this, I have made fun of myself. Twenty years ago, I joined Weight Watchers. I lost forty-some pounds, and I won the blue ribbon. I gained my lifetime membership in Weight Watchers, which means you have to watch your weight for the rest of your life, I found out. I have lost during my lifetime membership, I believe, about two thousand pounds—that is a ton.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, in the days of tickertape when baseball games were not being broadcast live but on the basis of teletype, Pittsburgh had an announcer named Rosey Rowswell. He had his favorite expressions, and we all came to understand what they meant. If a pitcher walked an opposing batter and gave him a free trip to first base, then the next batter hit into a double play, erasing the error of the base on balls, Rosey Rowswell’s expression was, “Put him on, take him off.” That is how my diet has been: Put them on, take them off.

When you get on a diet, you say: “Enough is enough. I’m going to lose so many pounds, and I really want to do this.” I’ll enter into a program, practice discipline, and things begin to go well, until someone puts a piece of cherry pie in front of me. I’ll look at the cherry pie and say: “I really want to lose weight. If I eat that cherry pie, I’m not going to get very far with my diet. But that cherry pie looks good. One piece of cherry pie isn’t going to hurt.”

Have you ever seen those comic strips with the devil talking in one ear and an angel talking in the other? That is what happens in our lives every single day. We are called to be disciples, which means we are to be people of discipline. We talk about self-discipline, but do you know that self-discipline, in the vast majority of cases, is nothing more and nothing less than the extended habit of disciplines developed while you were under the authority of someone else? Someone forces you into patterned behavior, you build the pattern, and after a while, it becomes part of your life.

Feed the New Man

I said that I was going to give you some practical suggestions on how to beat this dilemma Paul is speaking about here. A couple of decades ago in pop psychology, a book was written called Psycho-Cybernetics. The metaphor of the book was that the human self, the human person, is like a computer. The GIGO principle was involved: garbage in, garbage out. The idea was that people live their lives on the basis of how they are programmed, which is not altogether true. It is not altogether false, but it is not altogether true either.

I mentioned earlier that there is a danger of determinism: If my choices are caused by the greatest inclination that I have at the moment, my choices are determined. But they are not determined by the stars. They are not determined by the fates. They are determined by me, by myself, by what this self is inclined to do, what I desire. That kind of determination is what we call self-determination, which is just another word for freedom. The essence of freedom is to be able to determine your own choices. The essence of our fallen condition is that we determine our own sinful choices.

Let me go back to Psycho-Cybernetics for a moment. The idea being considered there can be translated into the spiritual realm. I know that for me to grow spiritually, I need to develop a deeper prayer life. I also know myself: I can make one hundred resolutions that I will become a prayer warrior, but I know that one hundred times out of one hundred, I am going to fail in that discipline. Knowing my own weaknesses, what can I do about it? When I am on that spike where I have a strong desire at the moment to become more proficient in prayer, I can enroll myself in a prayer group. I enroll myself in an environment where all the factors that surround me will be helping and aiding me to overcome my own lax disposition towards prayer.

We might say: “I’ve determined many, many times to learn the Scriptures, and I started well. I read the first chapter of Genesis, and the next day I read the second chapter of Genesis. The next day, well, that day we had to go out, so I missed it that day. I had to make it up the following day, so the next day I read two chapters. The next day, I gave up.” Does that sound familiar? If you have failed time and time again to master the Scriptures, how much does it cost you to enroll in a Bible study? Get in a class where the discipline of the group and the commitment you make in advance strengthen your resolve to grow in your understanding of the things of God.

Make a family resolution that unless you are running a fever, have indigestion, or are in the hospital, you are going to be in church on Sunday morning. You are not going to make the right decision every Sunday morning if you think: “Should I go to church today or should I not go to church today? Let me see. What am I inclined to do this day?” No, you establish a principle in your family. You say “In our family, one of the things we do is make sure we are in the Lord’s house every Sabbath day. We do not have to make decisions or sweat over it.”

That is Psycho-Cybernetics from a spiritual perspective. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul is talking about in terms of our spiritual pilgrimage and our spiritual growth. He is saying that we have to put to death the old man. We have to feed the new man. So, when you are inclined, when you are on a spiritual high, say: “Okay, I’m going to change my diet. I’m going to change my routine, and I’m going to get into a pattern and into a group where there is discipline that will help me put to death the old man and feed the new man.”

That was the genius of Weight Watchers. I wish they never would have changed their system, because I knew the old system. I do not understand the new system. But I have tried everything else. I used to hate to drive every Tuesday to those meetings where there would be fifty women and two men, and I would have to step on the scale every week, and the scale would not lie. They would ask us in front of everybody, “How did you do this week?” I’d have to say, “I put on a pound.” And they’d say, “That’s okay, but next week we want to see less of you.” The group dynamic is a beautiful idea. That is why so many people have been helped by it, because if left to yourself, self-discipline tends to lose its passion and zeal.

Diligent Use of the Means of Grace

If we understand how the will functions and how we are involved in the kind of conflict the Apostle sets forth here in this letter to the church in Rome, there is a way out. When we join the church, we say, “I’m going to make diligent use of the means of grace.” The means of grace are the instruments God gives us to help us overcome the weaknesses of the flesh. But understand, you will always choose what you are more inclined to choose at the moment of decision. To make diligent use of the means of grace is really to program yourself with worship, with prayer, and with Scripture so that your desires are actually sanctified.

Dear ones, if you knew how much God hates your sin, and you had any affection for Him at all, you would never want to displease Him to that degree. But we get our information from different sources. We read the Scriptures, and the Scriptures set before us what God delights in, and we read it and say, “I want my life to be like that,” and the rest of the week we hear voices from every side telling us that sin isn’t a big deal and God does not really care what we do. We lose sight of what is pleasing to God. We hear what is pleasing to our friends. We hear what is pleasing to the culture.

When we begin to lose sight of what is pleasing to God, our delight in God begins to lose its passion. That is one reason that we must keep the doctrine of justification by faith in our bloodstream, because there is enough continuing sin in my life to remind me that without the righteousness of Christ I have no hope whatsoever.

Natural Ability and Moral Ability

There is more to be said regarding the will. I have written a book on it called Willing to Believe, in which I go back through history and look at Augustine’s explanation of the will. Then I look at the Roman Catholic Church’s view, Luther’s view, Calvin’s view, Edwards’ view, and so on, down through the ages. In that book, I talk about another important distinction Edwards made regarding the will. He said that fallen man has the natural ability to please God, but not the moral ability. That is a critical distinction.

A natural ability is an ability with which you are endowed by nature. For example, a bird has the natural ability to fly unaided through the air because God, in creating the bird, gave it the natural equipment to fly. God gave him wings, a very light bone structure, and various features so that he can ride the drafts of wind in the air. All that he needs to fly, God has given to him naturally. As the bird has the natural ability to fly, so the fish has the natural ability to live underwater, because God gave him gills, scales, and so on. Humans do not have the natural ability to fly. If we want to fly, we have to ride an airplane. I suppose we can fly in one direction—down—though sometimes the landings are a little tough. We do not have the natural ability to fly. We do not have the natural ability to live underwater.

When it comes to obeying God, we do have the natural ability to do so in the sense that we have the equipment or the faculties that are necessary to be obedient creatures. We have a mind that God gave us, and we have a will that God gave us. He has given us the equipment that we need, naturally speaking, to be obedient to Him.

What we had before the fall alongside that natural ability was the moral ability to choose God. After the fall, that moral ability was lost. This is what Augustine was teaching to Pelagius. We had free will and we had liberty before the fall. After the fall, we still have free will, but we have lost the liberty. We have lost the desire to please God. That is why Jesus says in the sixth chapter of John, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44).

The Great Arminian Error

This is the great Arminian error: The Arminian thinks that fallen humanity still has the ability to incline themselves to God. They say, “You have an offer of grace, and if you say yes to the gospel, you’re saved, if you say no, you aren’t.” But no one seems to ask this question: Why does one person say yes, and another person say no? The obvious answer is because one is inclined to say yes, and the other one is not inclined to say yes.

Then you have to go deeper: Why would you ever be inclined to say yes to Christ? It is because God the Holy Spirit changed the disposition of your soul, because in your fallen condition you have no disposition towards Christ. That is what Jesus meant when He said, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44). We are in bondage to sin. That is what Augustine understood. That is what Luther understood. That is what Calvin understood. That is what Edwards understood. That is what Spurgeon understood. Unless the Holy Ghost changes the disposition of our heart through regeneration, we will never be inclined to come to Jesus.

If you have come to Christ, if you have exercised your will—and you have if you have embraced Christ—you received Jesus because you wanted to, because you were inclined to, because you were disposed to—but not by nature. The only way you were inclined to Christ and disposed to come to Him was because of super-nature, because God reached down with His grace and changed your desire. He changed your heart from a heart of stone to a heart that began to pulsate and beat with affection for Him and set you free. Let us pray.

Father, help us to understand how we choose what we choose and why we choose what we choose. Help us so to be diligent in making use of the aids You have given us to strengthen the new man and starve the old man that we may have an ever-growing disposition and inclination to please You. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.