Luke 22:42 “saying, "Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not My will, but Yours, be done.”
The third part of the inner man which we will discuss is the will of man. Unlike our spirits which become new creations when we are born-again, the will of man does not change after salvation. In other words after we are saved we have the same will that we had before we were saved. Let me say at the outset of this discussion, that if God had created us without a free will we would be no better than an extremely sophisticated machine, incapable of having true fellowship with our Creator. Sadly there is a strong belief among many ministers in the church that the sovereignty of God precludes any possibility of any of His creations having a free will, for in their carnal thinking they naturally assume that the moment God gives any of His creations free will then He loses sovereignty over that creation. However God is well able to give His creations free will and still maintain His sovereignty over them. Without realising it these same ministers almost accuse God of narcissism. So why do I say that? I say that, because when these individuals accuse God of being incapable of creating any of His beings with a free will they therefore imply that God pretends that His creations desire to worship and have fellowship with Him, whereas all they are doing is simply what He has “in His sovereignty” programmed them to do. I have noticed that “ministers” of the gospel that hold this view are very intellectual in their arguments, but display no close relationship with the Lord. And the reason for that is obvious, for their erroneous belief forces them to view their relationship with God as one of Master and slave, not Father and Son and certainly not friend. So what about the free will of man? We all know the account of how Adam and Eve sinned against God by rebelling against their creator. Because God knows everything, when He created Adam He knew that Adam would rebel against Him, but He gave Adam his free will anyway. And so we see from that account that man’s will reigns supreme in the makeup of man, to the point of even being able to rebel against his maker, for it was as an act of Adam’s will that he rebelled against God. As revealed to us in the above quoted passage of scripture, the Lord Jesus who came to the earth as the Son of Man also has a free will. Unlike Adam however, who as an act of his free will rebelled against God, our Lord Jesus, as an act of His free will, submitted Himself wholeheartedly to the will of God our Father. The will of man also uses the physical organ of the brain to operate through, and is therefore located in that part of man. Nevertheless the will as part of the soul is also not a physical component of the brain.
Michael E.B. Maher
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