What is divine freedom, and is God free?
God's freedom is not a side topic — it decides whether salvation is something we can claim or something He gives. The question splits in two: is there anything outside God that can limit Him, and is there anything inside God that shapes how He uses His liberty?
Nothing outside God binds Him
The writers start by clearing away the idea of a rulebook that stands over God. Commenting on Job, one writer contrasts the fixed laws God has stamped on creation with God's own way of acting:
William KellyThere are no laws discoverable or possible to bind God, in whom alone is perfect wisdom and power in providence. There are laws which He has imprinted on all above our eyes and below our feet, and around us; but the highest, truest law of all, if law it should be called, is that God is free, not bound, to act, free to act as and when He will.
Free, yet true to His own character
Freedom without character would make God unpredictable. Another writer sets the two side by side — no permission needed from man, and no departure from Himself:
G. V. WigramGod has a right to act without man's leave, and in spite of man. None can say to Him, "What are you doing?" But then He has a character of His own, which He will not deny. And if He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy, and will have compassion on whom He will have compassion, He does so in a way that thoroughly vindicates His holiness and His justice.
What God "cannot" do
So the limits on God are not fences around Him; they are Himself. Answering a man who wished God would simply drop His law in order to forgive, one writer draws the line carefully:
A. J. PollockYou may perhaps ask, cannot God do anything that He likes? Certainly, anything He LIKES. But remember, He must always act in keeping with His own nature. He cannot do the things that are a contradiction of His nature and being. For instance, "it is impossible for God to lie" (Heb. 6:18).
Where His freedom saved a nation
This is not theory. When Israel made the golden calf and God said to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy," His freedom was the only thing standing between the people and destruction:
J. N. DarbyWhen Israel had made the golden calf, at a time when God, if He had not retreated into His own sovereignty in which He was free to show grace, must have destroyed the whole nation except Moses and Joshua; so that then, according to the carnal Jewish principle, the Ishmaelites and Edomites must have become heirs of the promises, while Israel would have been shut out.
The cross: freedom exercised without loss
Guilt raises a real problem for God's liberty. If love simply waves sin through, justice is silenced; if justice speaks, love is shut out. The cross, one writer says, is where every part of what God is can be seen at once:
J. N. DarbyAnd God can now act freely, according to what He is consciously to Himself, without any one attribute hiding, or obscuring, or contradicting another. Truth condemned man to death, justice forever condemned the sinner, majesty demanded the execution of the sentence. Where, then, was love? If love, as man would conceive it, were to pass over all, where would be His majesty and His justice? Moreover, that could not be; nor would it really then be love, but indifference to evil. By means of the cross, He is just, and He justifies in grace.
Another writer says the same from the side of what it cost: the offering of Christ "has set God righteously free to act according to His own heart's deep desires" (J. T. Mawson).
Why this is good news, not a threat
The instinct to resent God's freedom is strong, because it removes every claim we thought we had. One writer argues that the moment you see what God's freedom is for, the fear drains out of it:
F. G. PattersonMan would seek to bind God to certain laws of his own, and so restrict His sovereign will, so as to refuse that He should act outside them; but once we know that all our blessing hinges upon His absoluteness — and that this absoluteness is pleased to display itself in mercy, in which He delights — all is changed... We have no more right to claim our soul's salvation from Him than we have power to change places with Him on His throne of glory!... We may find, too — no, we shall find — that our very title to mercy is the absence of any.
Summary
- Free from law. No law can bind God; the highest law, if it can be called that, is that He acts as and when He wills.
- Free to Himself. He can do anything He likes, but never what contradicts His nature — He cannot lie, and He will not deny His own character.
- Free in mercy. At the golden calf He withdrew into His sovereignty in order to spare; His freedom was Israel's only survival.
- Freed righteously. At the cross He acts freely with no attribute obscuring another: just, and justifying in grace.
- Free for us. Since we have no claim on Him, our very title to mercy is having none — and His absoluteness delights to show itself in mercy.