One of the most frequent charges levelled against Reformed Theology is that it reduces man to little more than a robot. “If God is completely sovereign, then I have no part in things,” is a typical response. Such statements are often followed with some “unexpected” gesture like a wild flailing of the arms or a dropped pen followed by the defiant question “Did God make me do that?”

Yet, try as we might, we cannot escape God’s sovereignty in Scripture Psalm 115:3 says that “Our God is in the Heavens, He does all that pleases Him.” Job 9:12 asks: “Behold, he snatches away; who can turn him back? Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’ Job 42:2 says that no purpose of God can be thwarted while Jeremiah 32:17 says that nothing is too hard for Him. Acts 4:24, 1 Timothy 6:15, and Revelation 6:10 all speak of God as sovereign.

Scripture not only presents God as sovereign but sovereign over men and women. Proverbs 16:9 says: “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps” and Proverbs 21:1 says: “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will.” Both Acts 2:23 and 4:28 portray Christ’s death on the Cross as the result of God’s guiding Hand over men and women. Yet this is exactly where we rail against the Scriptures, decrying “free will.”

But we must define “free will” appropriately. Scripture and reality simply don’t defend the way most of us think about free will. Most of use the term as though we can do whatever we want however we want whenever we want (we might use the term “libertarian free will“). But I simply don’t have the “free will” to jump to the moon, do I? No, I exist within the confines of gravity, therefore my will is free only in the sense that I can do what I want within those confines. Similarly, outside of Christ, we exist in the confines of sin. Genesis 6:5 says that God looked down and “saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Romans 3:23 says that everyone is guilty of sin, while Jeremiah 17:9 says that sin even affects our ability to reason (the “noetic effects of sin“) and Ephesians 2 describes us as “spiritually dead.” Sin is so severe that, prior to salvation, it is our “gravity.”

While many insist that Reformed Theology holds that we have no “free will,” that is simply untrue. Instead, we hold that free will must be defined biblically. That means that, outside of Christ, prior to salvation, one’s will exists only within the confines of sin and one only has freedom to act within those confines. In other words, we not only don’t come to Christ on our own, we don’t want to. We are “free” to make daily choices, but in a sense, even these “free choices” are controlled by God.

The doctrine of compatibilism forces us to consider this tension rather than try to escape it. Scripture teaches that man is free while God is sovereign. It is a “both/and” not an “either/or” scenario. In addition to the already mentioned verses regarding the Cross, one of the clearest examples of the coming together of human freedom and divine sovereignty comes in Genesis 20. Abraham, for the second time, has lied about Sarah not being his wife. This time, Abimelech has taken her and finds himself in an encounter with God. Once Abimelech has taken Sarah into his harem, God comes to him in a dream. We find the account of their exchange in Genesis 20:3-7:

But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, “Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man’s wife.” Now Abimelech had not approached her. So he said, “Lord, will you kill an innocent people? Did he not himself say to me, ‘She is my sister’? And she herself said, ‘He is my brother.’ In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this.” Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her. Now then, return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, so that he will pray for you, and you shall live. But if you do not return her, know that you shall surely die, you, and all who are yours.”

After Abimelech’s appeal, God tells him in verse 6: “Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her.” Notice what God says to him; that Abimelech did what was right but only because God was guiding him. In other words, God was controlling Abimelech’s freedom without negating it. God is sovereign while man is free, Scripture forces us to hold a tension without offering a resolution.

It is simply inaccurate to argue that Reformed Theology teaches that we are robots. It is also inaccurate to argue that our free will is unlimited. In our attempts to be honest with Scripture we admit that there are some things we cannot fully reconcile. But our inability does not mean that we can negate or change the truths of Scripture to fit our system. We are the finite trying to comprehend the infinite, the creature trying to study the Creator. If we could make it all work, if we could fully understand it all, would we still truly be studying God?

• Read Debating Calvinism: Five Points, Two Views by Dave Hunt and James R. White
• Read Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge and Grace by Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce Ware
• Read The Five Points of Calvinism by Robert Lewis Dabney