The notion of it ministers to the pretension of the natural man not to be entirely lost; for this is just what it amounts to. All who have never been deeply convinced of sins, all those with whom this conviction is based on gross and outward sins, believe more or less in free-will. It is the dogma of the Arminian, of all reasoners, of philosophers; but it completely changes the whole idea of Christ and entirely perverts it.
If Christ came to save that which is lost, freewill has no more place. Not that God prevents man from receiving Christ, far from it. But even when God employs all possible motives—every one that is capable of exerting influence over the heart of a man, it only serves to prove that man will have none of Him. His heart is so corrupt, and his will so determined not to submit to God (however much it may be of the devil who encourages him in sin), that nothing can induce him to receive the Lord, and to forsake sin.
If, by liberty of man, they mean that no one forces him to reject the Lord, this liberty exists in full. But if it is implied that, on account of the dominion of sin of which he is the slave, and that voluntarily, he cannot escape from his condition and choose the good (even while acknowledging it to be good and approving it), then he has no liberty whatever. He is not subject to the law, neither indeed can be; so that they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
This is where we mostly touch upon the root in question. Is it the old man that is changed, instructed, and sanctified? or do we, in order to be saved, receive a new nature? The universal character of the unbelief of the present day is this: not formally rejecting Christianity as in former times, or rejecting Christ openly; but receiving Him as a Person (they will even say divine, inspired, but as a matter of dogma), who re-establishes man in his position as a child of God. The Wesleyans, as far as taught of God, do not say so: faith makes them feel that without Christ they are lost, and that it is a question of salvation. Only their fear with regard to pure grace, their desire to gain men, a mixture of charity and of the spirit of man, in a word their confidence in their own strength, makes confusion in their teaching, and leads them not to recognize the total ruin of man.
As for me, I see in the word, and I recognize in myself, the total ruin of man. I see the cross is the end of all the means that God had employed to gain the heart of man, and consequently that it proves the thing to be impossible. God has exhausted all His resources; man has shown that he is wicked, past recovery; the cross of Christ condemns man—sin in flesh. But this condemnation having been expressed in that Another has undergone it, it is the absolute salvation of those who believe; for condemnation, the judgment of sin, is behind us: life came out of it in resurrection. We died to sin, and are alive to God, in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Redemption, the very word, loses its force when we entertain those ideas of the old man. It becomes an amelioration, a practical deliverance from a moral state, and not a redeeming by the finished work of another. Christianity teaches the death of the old man and his just condemnation, then redemption accomplished by Christ, and a new life, life eternal, come down from heaven in His Person and communicated to us when Christ enters into us by the word. Arminianism, or rather Pelagianism, pretends that man can choose, and that thus the old man is ameliorated by the thing it has accepted. The first is made without grace; and it is the first step which truly costs in this.
I believe that we ought to keep to the word; but, philosophically and morally speaking, free-will is a false and absurd theory. Free-will is a state of sin. Man ought not to have to choose, as being outside of good. Why is he in this state? He ought not to have a will or any choice to make; he ought to obey, and enjoy it in peace. If he has to choose good, then he has not got it yet. He is without that which is good in himself, at any rate since he is not decided. But in fact man is disposed to follow that which is evil. What cruelty to propose a duty to man who is already turned to evil! Moreover, philosophically speaking, he must be indifferent: otherwise he has already chosen as to his will. He must then be absolutely indifferent. Now if he is absolutely indifferent, what is to decide his choice? A creature must have a motive: but he has none, since he is indifferent; if he is not, he has chosen.
But in fact it is not so. Man has a conscience; but he has a will and lusts, and they lead him. Man was free in paradise, but then he was in the enjoyment of good. He made use of his free-will, and consequently he is a sinner. To leave him to his free-will, now that he is disposed to do evil, would be cruelty. God has presented to him the choice; but it was to convince the conscience of the fact. In any case, man would have neither good nor God. That people should believe that God loves the world is all right; but that they should not believe that man is himself wicked beyond remedy (and notwithstanding the remedy) is very bad. They know not themselves, and they know not God.
Usually, when we speak of “free” and “can,” the absence of compulsion and the presence of power are confounded. Take a plain case to show what is meant. I say, “Everyone can come to the meeting,” meaning it is open to all: and I am told “It is not true for such a one has broken his leg and cannot come.” Thus when the Lord says, No one can come to Me, except the Father who sent Me draw him, it is not that God prohibits or hinders, but that man is so wicked in will and corrupt, that, unless a power outside himself act on him, he cannot come. He is never morally so disposed. Man is perfectly free to come now, so far as God is concerned, and invited to come—yea besought; and the precious blood of Christ is then on the mercy-seat, so that moral difficulty is removed by God's own grace as regards the Holy One receiving a sinner. In this sense he is perfectly free to come.
But then there is the other side, man's own will and state. There is no will to come, but the opposite. Life was there in Christ; but “ye will not come that ye might have life.” “All things are ready: come to the marriage “; but “they all with one consent began to make excuse.” Man does not wish to be with God. “There is none that understandeth; there is none that seeketh after God.” “Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? When I called, was there none to answer?” “The carnal mind is enmity against God.” The crucifixion of the Lord is the proof that man would not have God when come in mercy and relieving even every present misery. “For my love I had hatred.” “They hated me without a cause.” “Now they have both seen and hated both Me and My Father.” And the Lord gives the reason: whatever the love (and it was infinite and perfect), God is light as well as love, “and men loved darkness rather than light.” They reject a love that humbles their pride as they detest a light which awakens their conscience. Therefore we find, “As many as received Him, to them gave He right to become children of God, even to them that believe on His name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
It is simple nonsense to talk of freedom when applied to man's actual condition, if he is already inclined to evil, admitting him more than free to come, invited and besought by every motive, all made ready—but that which he will not, and no motive induces him. I have yet one Son says God; but this is over. To say, he is not inclined to evil is to deny all scripture and all fact. To make him free to choose, he must be as yet indifferent to, having no preference for, good and evil; which is not true, for evil lusts and self-will are there, the two great elements of sin; and, if it were true, it would be perfectly horrible. But there is more; when he (being converted) does will good, evil is present with him. How to perform that which is good he finds not. There is a law in his members bringing him into captivity to the law of sin which is in his members. No doubt (thank God) there is deliverance, deliverance in Another. But deliverance is not freedom, but what is effected and granted by Another, because I have learned by experience under divine teaching that I am not free and cannot free myself.
Hence in Rom. 6., where this question is treated in its roots, we are set free by having died with Christ, the Adam nature crucified with Him. Then he can say but not before, “yield yourselves “: a blessed and true principle when I reckon myself dead to sin and alive to God, not in Adam, but in Jesus Christ our Lord. This is resumed in chap. 8:2, 3. “The law of the Spirit of life.... made me free from the law of sin and death “; so that I was not free before I had Christ. And He adds, “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” Freedom is the fruit of deliverance by Christ. First in His death the old man, sin in the flesh, is dead for faith. I am crucified with Him, yet I have life by the power of the Spirit in Christ, and then I am free.
But the facts of man's state, and the scriptural history of his responsibility, put this matter on another ground altogether. That history will bring out more clearly the facts of his state. The purpose of God was always in the Second man, not in the first. The first promise also was to the Seed of the woman, not to Adam who was not that. The Seed of the woman was to destroy Satan's power, as Adam had succumbed to it. All promises are made to Christ, to Israel as a chosen people or to Abraham and to his Seed, none to man as such. But God began with responsibility, first in the first Adam, not with a purpose or promise.
This responsibility was fully dealt with in every way, after the fall, without law, under law, and after the prophets by Christ's coming in grace according to the word. “Having therefore one Son, His well-beloved, He sent Him also last unto them.” Thus man's responsibility was fully dealt with; and the Lord says, “Now is the judgment of this world.” Stephen sums this up, saying (Acts 7), “ye have received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted and slain, who testified beforehand of the Just One, of Whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers? Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers, so do ye.” And he, full of the Holy Ghost, thereon goes to heaven; and earth's tale is told.
(To be continued).