What is divine freedom, and is God free?

In God only can we rightly speak of free will. He is absolutely free to do as He sees fit, and never pleases to do save what is good and holy. With the creature it is wholly different; his only place is obedience. God can create, the creature is acted on by motives. It is true that God never hindered his choosing the good, or compelled his choice of evil, any more than He made it impossible for him to fall. It is one thing to be free from external restraint, another to be free internally, which no sinner is. Man indeed never was the blank sheet which the speculative imagine: innocent, he was inclined to good; fallen, to evil. When converted and delivered in Christ, there is not only life, but power.

Yes, the mystery of God's permission of evil remains. The mystery of His will is another thing, revealed now, not then, and only to be manifested at the coming of the Lord, when all things shall be gathered in one under His Headship. (Eph. 1:9-10) It is not yet the time to order all as the expression of His will, though He is the maker and sovereign disposer of all. Undoubtedly experience has its place, as each has his own measure of discrimination which should profit by length of days; but there 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. So He acts with man as with the elements, with the more and the less wicked, with counsellors, and judges, and kings, with priests, and heroes, and senators, with whole nations, reduced or aggrandized, with their chiefs infatuated to utter ruin. God is sovereign.

274 Now I refer to an absolute will, as an image of God, though exercised in a subordinate sphere, and a contrast with a perfectly blessed state, such as Angels. It may be a title to have one without restraint from another, but till I have chosen, I have no will - what gives me one? If God and good, it is grace; if not, it is something else that is evil and self. Freewill belongs to God only, in its true sense - the right to please Himself identified, as it is, with the essential goodness of His nature; it belonged to man, in a finite way, within the limits of obedience. To say he was free to do evil, save as not outwardly hindered, is an abomination; now he is certainly inclined to sin, to say he is free to continue in it, equally so. He is bound to turn to good, but finds hindrance in an evil nature.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." If God had been bound to create at any moment before that in which He was pleased to call into being the heavens and the earth, His character must have been denied; He would not thus be the Absolute after all. For absolute means that He is not tied to conditions. That He was pleased, therefore, to exert His own divine energy at the particular time when He chose flows from the very fact that He is God. Even a man has a will. Is God to be deprived of His will? What sort of a God would that be?

9 Goodness or love, omniscience and omnipotence, involve in them perfect wisdom; only all this supposes a God, with a free will to exist, before any attribute can be assigned to Him. If not free to act, omniscience and omnipotence are simply null.

But further, choice has nothing to do with freedom. A nature in perfect accordance with the order in which I am set, is free - such is called, morally, the law of liberty, when I will in nature what God wills in authority - so Adam, setting aside the forbidden fruit, was free in the garden, but had no choice to make; God chose to put a matter of choice before him, as a probation or test, but His doing it specially, and by this ordinance, proved it was not so otherwise. Nor is there any difficulty in God's full foreknowledge, only it supposes what is - our nature - and He supplies the occasion in which man shows himself without any influencing at all, and then God shows Himself in grace.

God’s sovereignty needs no proving. “Of Him … are all things.” There is but one God, supreme and alone. Nothing exists or could exist, but what came into existence “through Him.” If He were alone, the only will in the universe, then He could only act in sovereignty. For sovereignty means power to exercise will without reference to any.

I would muse and rest a little upon this. As to God, His irresistible power knows no check whatsoever. But as sure as this His power is irresistible, so sure likewise is it that He has a character of His own, which in no case will He violate. Morally, He could not violate His own character. He knows, as God, how the well-being of dependent creatures throughout the universe hangs upon, in their various measures of capacity, their knowledge of Him, and so being cheerfully subject to Him.

But it is evident that the addition of boundlessness changes everything morally, so that the application of a limited nature to judge of a boundless one by is moral nonsense. If boundless love and boundless power go together, the result must be entirely different in kind from the responsibility by which I judge my conduct, who have but very limited power.

30 The title to use goodness sovereignly is a different thing from obligation under which I lie to God (if, indeed, Mr. N. admits any); for I am bound in my use of that by the obligation. Infinite goodness, coupled with infinite power, is free to act from itself.

136 But this thought of God's acting according to laws involves a great fallacy from using the term in a double sense. God does act according to His nature, or, if you please, according to the laws of His nature, that is, its uniform unchangeable principles when He acts, and the manifestations of which constitute His glory. He is righteous and holy; He cannot lie, and He cannot be not Himself. His acts manifest Himself. Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father; but this was no physical effect of a cause operating without will in itself. God has ordered a system of cause and effect, but there is no will in it. We call its laws, established fixed laws, because the effect is uniform, regularly and always produced, though I doubt not the causa causans is always operative, and necessary to the effects. But in the acting of God, though all such acts are consistent with His nature, and must be so, it is not the cause of acting. God's will is the cause, though we readily understand His will cannot act contrary to His nature; nay, His nature may set His will in activity.

"God so loved the world, that he gave," etc. This is not a material necessity imposed apart from will in what acts; it is moral, displaying a nature by a will. "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord"; but this does not make holiness something necessarily producing an effect, as gravity acts universally in matter. There is nothing to do with cause and effect in it. So miracles of goodness prove God's nature when wrought because He works them, but they are not always wrought as a natural consequence attached to anything. God acts. These, when they are wrought, are according to, and display, His nature: but they are not the necessary and constant effects of that nature as a producing cause. God is always such, and, if He acts, so acts as not to deny Himself — it were impossible; but He does all things according to the counsels of His own will. To confound the physical laws of the creature, always operating as constituted by the Creator, with the sovereign power who constituted that order, to whom none can say, What doest Thou? is a great moral blunder.