Liberating Freewill From Sin

John 8:34 Jesus replied, "Truly, truly, I tell you, everyone who ...

“Whoever sins is in bondage to sin”, says Yehoshua. When sin is committed as an act of freewill, then freewill itself is become the servant, suddenly the slave, of sin. How can it be liberated?

The Good News

We have freewill. This is a truth established by the Torah. Sometimes we will doubt this. People will sometimes go so far as to fear or even believe that all is governed by some kind of fatalism. The reason for this error is the failure to understand the affect that sin has on freewill. The Good News is something that liberates our freewill from sin. In order to understand this, we need to first understand the nature of freewill better.

The Place of Freewill

Freewill is not unconditioned or unconditional. Freewill is conditioned. It is not sel-asserted. It is granted. The conditions in which it is given define its limitations. And those limitations are the definition of its potential. Freewill has a place. If it does not embrace its place, its limitations, it cannot know or realize its potential at all. Freewill is granted by God and its potential is to come to faith in God.

Freewill, having been given through the Garden of Eden, having been lost through sin, was restored through the promise of the Good News of Israel and Her Messiah. Freewill is forever secured in its place. This is the Land of Torah Israel, the place of faith for the whole world. From the ends of the earth, all people will freely lift up their hearts toward Jerusalem and believe in the God of Israel.

Freewill Is Not A Human Attribute

Freewill is a human condition, not a human attribute. What does this mean? We need to clarify two points. First, freewill according to the Torah is not the only form that human will can take. Second, the nature of freewill, as defined by the Torah, is not something that God gave to Adam to have apart from God’s commandment.

Freewill Is Defined By The Torah

All God’s creatures have a will and make choices by nature, human beings included. This form of will is an attribute of a creatures nature. This is not what is meant by human freewill as defined by the Torah. The distinction is this: Adam was commanded to choose between obeying and disobeying God. No other creature was commanded by God in the same way. This does not mean that they have no will of their own or ability to make choices within their realm of life. Regarding the question of choice, human beings would be no different than other creatures were it not for the unique way that Adam was placed under the commandment of God regarding eating from the Trees of the Garden of Eden and not from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God did not plant for them to eat from. This condition created an accountability to God that other creatures were not created to have.

The Garden Of Eden Was Designed As An Environment Of Choice

Being made in an environment that created a choice, a unique choice specially designed for Adam, meant that Adam was given a freedom and responsibility which they could actualize through obedience to God. The Garden of Eden, together with its commandment, was designed as an environment of choice for Adam. This was Adam’s corporate choice in their position as the first Adam, his and her corporate choice, and therefore his and her personal responsibility of choice, to find freewill in obedience to the commandment, or to try to assert freewill in defiance against the commandment of God.

Why was the first Adam made to face this challenge? This environment of choice was meant to give Adam the ability to love and serve God on a higher level, on the highest level possible for a creature. This was not a power that arose from them in themselves, or simply from an attribute that they possessed by their nature. This freedom for Adam is invested only in the authority of the commandment of God itself and could only be realized and actualized through obedience to the commandment. Adam was made for this commandment and to be placed under its authority. But they never could have given themselves this authority to exercise this form of freewill, as they possessed no attribute in their own nature to do so. The power and authority to actualize this freewill comes from outside the Adam, from the commandment that addresses the Adam. Such an attribute is a divine attribute, and any manner of divine attribute that Adam may have possessed was a receptive attribute, not a commanding, originating, attribute of divinity. Therefore, this freewill was not some kind of inherit attribute that Adam carried with them, or could have carried with them even if they disobeyed God. Instead, through disobedience their opportunity and power of freewill could only die.

God Sits Down To Read His Own Law

A human judge, after delivering a guilty verdict, or hearing it from a jury, often reads the sentencing guidelines to determine leniently or strictly the severity of the sentence he or she will pass. This practice of justice is based on the way in which God acts as a judge. After a verdict of guilty has been passed in the heavenly court, God sits down to read his own law, as it were, to decide how he wants to read what he has written concerning the sentence that should be expected for the crime that was committed, how leniently he wants to read it or how strictly, and for what purpose. The freewill opportunity created for Adam, that was created to give Adam opportunity to freely obey, was abused by Adam to disobey. The verdict was in. They were found guilty. After they sinned, only the authority of God himself could mercifully read his commandment to Adam, and the sentence for transgression of the commandment that he had already stated, in a way that could temporarily extend the life of their freewill by decreeing it to be a sentence that allowed an opportunity for repentance, thereby temporarily extending the corporate and personal life and lives of Adam.

A Choice Is Something That Is Given

We should first, therefore, attempt to rid ourselves of any notion that freewill was carried over after Adam and continued in Adam’s life after they sinned due to it being an inherent element or attribute of Adam’s nature, like intelligence, or emotional capacity, or work skills, etc., as if this Torah defined freewill were an autonomous attribute of Adam’s from the start, which they could use in any way they wanted, and simply continued to be as long as they lived. Through our attempt to do this, we can open our minds to think in a different way about freewill, in the way that the Torah speaks about it. We may start by saying that we have the capacity to make choices, but we must pause there. If we want to make a choice between eating and not eating we can only do this if we find ourselves at a time and place where there is food available. If we find ourselves alone a hundred miles into a barren wilderness we do not have the choice. It is basic. For any given choice to be made there must be first be the conditions that provide the opportunity for that choice. Ultimately, only the Creator can provide us or any of his creatures with the opportunity to make choices. He must have first created the conditions and substances for these choices and he must have also chosen himself to allow us to make the choices. Far from being an autonomous power we were created with, choice must be in ever case intimately designed and orchestrated by God, our Creator. In some cases it is better for us to be more conscious of his presence with us when we face a choice, and at other times it is better for us to be less conscious of his presence with us when we face a choice. This is true in the case of all choices for all creatures that God has created, all of which make choices of some kind in their own realm of life. It was most critically true in the case of Adam in the Garden, when God’s commandment to Adam concerning receiving all their needs from the Garden which he had personally planted for them, when Adam’s opportunity of choice was designed and orchestrated by God to give Adam opportunity for completely free faith and obedience.

“You Will Be Like Gods…”

We should attempt to rid ourselves of any notion that Adam’s freewill was something given to them, a power created in them, to be exercised independently from God, because this is the notion that the serpent insinuated in its conversation with Eve in the Garden. “God knows that your eyes will be opened and you will be [see that you are] like gods…” The insinuation was that Adam’s freewill was something independent of any conditions or situations of choice. If Adam chose to know and do good, or if Adam chose to know and do evil, it would not affect their freewill either way. This is what was insinuated by the serpent’s assertion, “You will be like gods…” The idea being created by this thought was that freewill was a power inherent to Adam’s unique nature, a power like that of gods. All, the serpent suggested, keeping them from realizing this was to acquire the knowledge of good and evil, which would allow them to create for themselves any choice that the wanted to, which they then could take by the supposed inherent power of their autonomous freewill. The temptation was to believe this notion as conveying the right understanding of freewill.

It was through Eve and Adam’s succumbing to the temptation to believe this idea about freewill and human nature that sin and death entered the world, sin and death and alienation from true freewill, which is found only through maintaining obedience to have faith in the commandment of God and in the providence of God in all things. When that commandment was broken that very commandment became a sentence of death. The very worse aspect of death is the deadness of the spirit of our heart to the knowledge that it was only obedience to the commandment of God that could have given Adam complete independence, as an individual man, as an individual woman, and corporately as the parents of all Humanity in all generations. Only God could give Adam complete maturity and independence, and this was the purpose of God in giving Adam a commandment in the Garden. Rather than receiving this gift through the obedience of faith, Adam tried to take it for themselves through an act of defying the word of God. Now, unless there is repentance for this, no human can even understand, or even believe, what would have been, the joy, the responsibility, the fellowship, the service. For death already grips the soul and spirit and darkens the heart.

To Study And Learn The True Nature of Adam’s Freewill

Accordingly, through the mercy of God the commandment given by God in the Garden of Eden, to trust in his providence in all things and to be sustained by his Hand, has for a time been leniently read not as a sentence of condemnation but a commandment taking a new form as a commandment to repent. That there should be this time to repent is the sentence that all Adam is now under. With the calling of Abraham and the creation of Israel through God’s covenant promise, the commandment of repentance to Adam began to be subject to the judgment of the heavenly court. Time, the time for repentance, began to be measured.

The measuring rod, the measure of time, would be, is, the Good News of Israel and Her Messiah. Now, the measure is at its greater reach. The delay of the sentence of death as the sentence of the opportunity to repent is coming to an end. Certainly now, if we hear the Voice of God’s Divine Presence, it is time to become transformed by the renewing of our minds and no longer be influenced by the insinuations of the serpent about the nature of our freewill. It is time to study and learn what it means that Adam was made with a capacity for divine freewill but that freewill could only be realized through obedience, not through disobedience, to the commandment of God. Certainly, it is time that with we obey the first commandment of God and liberate our freewill from bondage to sin and our fearful denial of God’s sentence of death. Certainly it is time that, through the obedience of faith to the commandment of God, we entered into the life that consists of nothing but joyful service to God.

How Do We Believe In Ourselves?

There is a way to believe in ourselves that is based in thankfulness to God. In this world we often believe in ourselves in a different way. The spirit of sin is to believe in myself in a way that replaces belief in God, my Creator. The dream of sin in the Garden was, and is today, to believe that I can be like God, making my own decisions for myself independently from any outside source. Ultimately, is the idea that on the deepest level I make all decisions autonomously. This idea is, in other words, that we are like gods. So long as there is sin in us, this is in us. Instead of condemning us for this, God has acted to save us from this error.

Yehoshua overthrew sin by freely accepting the sentence of death for Israel. He did this as the God ordained heir of the world. In response to his doing this, God gave him new life and a new creation. He gave him the inheritance of a redeemed corporate body, the body of Jerusalem, and in Redeemed Jerusalem all Israel.

If we believe this good news it is because our soul is found in the new creation given to him. All things are being converted through his death and through his resurrection into the new creation, in which there is only truth, only righteousness; in which there is only eternal life and only his love and his Torah to grow into. All that we do can be redeemed. We can learn to do all that God instructs us to do for the sake of love and of life. Our freewill obedience can be entirely liberated from the power of sin. The conversion is corporate and organic, beginning at the head, Israel's Mashiach, and working out through the branches to reach every stem. It is first spiritual and then physical. Like small stems, from which come leaves and flowers, we do not see the whole tree, the whole Vine, neither trunk nor root. We see only that which is near us — until the day when we stand eye to eye with Mashiach.

The Imperative Of Life

Life itself requires that we seek to be self fulfilled. But how we seek this is what is important. We can do so in a self-centred way or in a God-centred and other-centred way. Where the corruption of sin remains in us, where we have not yet been converted, where we have not yet died to sin and been made alive to Mashiach, sin will tempt us to think in a self-centred way, whether it is in the most ancient way of the presumption of Adam toward God or in some modern way, holding to a replacement construct for understanding the gospel about the Messiah of Israel, a construct that makes Israel simply a placeholder and makes me the Center of the picture. But it is a defeated sin that entices us to want to think this way. It is a sinful dream from which we are being woken. It is a defeated replacement theology. No one who comes to Yehoshua will be left in the captivity of sin. We will learn that to be self-fulfilled is to accomplish,( by God’s help and not on our own), the purpose for which we came into the world. The mystery being revealed , as has been said, is that salvation is corporate and organic and the whole body of the new, redeemed humanity will stand whole in beauty and health before God as included in the redeemed nation of Israel, the bride of Mashiach. Every stem will bring forth flower and fruit. Not one will be cut off and left behind.