Thoughts on Free Will and God's Sovereignty

In almost every instance where I hear (or read) someone defending the "law of free will" I cannot escape the sense that they desire, very greatly, to say that they chose God themselves, as though they had done at least one good and wise thing that was their own. Certainly this is not so. I've heard many people explain the nature of sin by stating that "we're not all as bad as we could be, but we're as bad off as we could be". It would be more accurate, I think, to state that we're all as guilty as we could be because we're all just as enslaved to sin. The Bible doesn't make much of free-will...in fact, strictly speaking it is an un-Biblical idea. Your will is in bondage; you are either a slave to sin or a slave to Christ (see John 8:34 and Romans 6:19). If you have not, say, brought about a holocaust that resulted in the murder of millions, that is not to say that you are less sinful than Adolf Hitler, and only to say that by the mercy of God and sovereign outworking of his plan, you were given less opportunity and perhaps divinely held-back more than he. If you are free to choose, it is a one-sided freedom, for you are only free to choose evil. A vast set of choices may spread out before you, but all lead to damnation. Only the direct, divine and sovereign intervention of Christ can result in your righteousness: and if it comes from God, it's not really your righteousness, but His. That is the Gospel, after all.

People do not like to believe that our futures are not in our own hands. Somehow we feel that if our destiny is not chosen beforehand by God, then we have more hope than if it were laid out before us. It's a bizarre view, one that puts more hope in what is out of God's hands, rather than what is in them. For my part, as my wife and I are bringing a child into the world, I find far more hope that my child's eternal destiny lies with God than in any idea that it lies within its own "free will". Why? Only for what seems to me to be the most reasonable of assumptions: that if my child's eternal destiny lies within the divine, unchangeable and absolutely sovereign will of God, there is far more hope for it than if it lies within its own broken and sinful nature, because I must conclude that if our destinies lie within the hands of ourselves, or anyone else on this planet, then the outcome is certain: we are all of us damned. There is hope in no one but God, in no will but His, and so I will raise my child to know Him, and pray that He will show it the same grace that He has shown to me and my wife, trusting that whatever takes place, takes place because it is His best.