Skip to main content

Free will and Man’s Moral Culpability.

 Man has complete free will. God doesn’t restrict man’s free will. If the Lord suspended or controlled man’s free will at any point, mankind would no longer be fully responsible for their sins. In this case God would have had an active role in conditioning our choices. It would also eliminate the punishment and existence of Hell because mankind could say to God that they weren’t totally responsible for their choices. 

In Christ man submits their will to the will of the Creator, and obeys and follows the will of God through the Holy Spirit’s help. At any time, a man in Christ can take up their free will again and choose not to follow the will of God. This is why Heaven is a reward for the souls in Christ, who surrendered their will to the Saviour right until the end. 

In Heaven the sinner’s will is actualized or ratified where they can no longer take up their free will ever again to choose to follow Satan. In the same way the Angels choice to follow God was actualized after the fall of Satan. In other words, there are no restraining limits on man’s free will to choose. God is sovereign without interfering with man’s free will. 

Man is less morally culpable when Satan aggressively conditions the will of man to sin against their natural inclination to choose the good. Through willful disobedience man is more morally culpable for their sins. Through the misuse of free will man chooses unbelief, and becomes fully culpable. Free will was given to man to understand the revelation of Jesus Christ to propel him to make the choice of belief. 

When man rejects his right to understand the revelation of Christ, he forfeits his freedom to experience and actualize the gospel in their lives now, and consequently in eternity later. Faith must be substantive.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Catholic Identity.

  I was born into the Catholic Church and was baptized as an infant, I had my first communion and reconciliation as a child, and was confirmed as a teenager. Although I was never devout, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour when I was 21 through an evangelical Christian radio ministry, which in turn gave new life to my Catholic faith. Although I remained a Catholic, I identified as a born again Christian. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I learned the difference between the two denominations and what they taught about being born again. Regardless, there was a significant change in my life back then, which continues to this day. Being Catholic is much like an identity to me and I remember growing up under the papacy of St. Pope John Paul II. The culture I grew up in was largely affected by his papacy, and the way the culture viewed the church was significantly different from the way the current culture views it. Growing up, the pope didn’t try to be rele...

Age of Brokenness.

  We are living in an age of brokenness, no matter what age you are, you probably have been touched with relationships falling apart, which causes more and more people to live in isolation. In this generation there is less of an incentive to heal and reconcile relationships, but that doesn’t excuse the amount of people who are broken. Why people don’t seem to be motivated to heal relationships is because our beliefs about faith and God have changed, really giving us less of an incentive to do what our religion says. If I act from my personal beliefs, but the person that I am responding to has abandoned religious beliefs, than the response to my wanting things to be better can be misinterpreted and rejected then by someone else. Generally when a society has expectations about broken relationships, loneliness and isolation, and the beliefs are generally accepted, society becomes a more compassionate society, because all value the same things. When religious values are undermined and ...

The Biblical Meaning of “Life in the Spirit.”

  “Life in the Spirit” is an example that the Apostle Paul gives in the book of Romans starting in chapter 5 and going through to chapter 8. He begins by telling us we are justified by faith (5:1), and have gained access by faith into the grace of God (5:2). We have been delivered from God’s wrath (5:9) and we have been reconciled to God through the death of His Son (5:10). He goes on to explain that through Adam all die (5:12), and that the free Gift of God brings justification and righteousness to the believing sinner (5:15-17).   Through our conversion we are baptized into Christ and into his death, which frees us from the law and makes us dead to sin (6:2-4). He explains that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we are given new life in Christ (6:4). Our old unregenerate self was crucified with Christ so that our body of sin might be done away with (6:5-6). Because we have died to sin, we now submit ourselves to God being that we are now under grace, not the law (6:8-1...