The Human Will- part 2

Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

This is a follow-up post to the last two I've posted about the human will and choice. I planned to finish these posts sooner, but I'm at ease and don't stress myself, because everything has its own time. This won't be long, it's rather a shorter post. So, today's post is about... 

2. The Human Will's Bondage

In the last post I was writing about the Nature of the Human Will, how it is influenced to have a preference before choosing anything. Then we realized that the source of our choices is our heart, not the will. We received a new heart from God, which yearns to fulfill God's purposes and His will on earth. Let us look at what holds the will in bondage.

After Adam sinned, the human will was biased toward evil and hence it is free in one way, that is the way of evil. What is the bondage then? It is a depraved heart. There's a good illustration to this: let's say I hold an apple in my hand and if I let it fall, it will always fall downwards not upwards. We all know why: law of gravity. If I want the apple to be higher with 20 cm, I have to lift it up, because it can't do it on its own. This is a comparison which shows the relationship that fallen man holds toward God. As long as divine power holds him, he is sustained. If the same power is withdrawn, he falls because his own weight of sin pulls him down. God doesn't push him down, the same way as I don't throw the apple to the floor, I just withdraw my hand. All humanity would be more depraved than we could imagine if that happens over all people's lives. The question that now rises is how then can a sinful man come to God? By his will? No, it's by a power that has to get hold of him and lift him every little centimeter toward heaven. In a sentence, the fallen man is free in one direction: free to fall/ sin. "In those days when you were slaves to sin, you weren't concerned with doing what was right." Romans 6:20

The sinner is free to do as he just pleases (the exception is when he is restrained by God) and as we know, man's pleasure is to sin. Is then a human being totally depraved? This will be the topic of the next post.