Consider this question for a minute: Does God have free will?

Most would answer yes straight away. After all, isn’t God the freest being there is? But stop and think. Titus 1:2 calls him “God, who never lies.” Hebrews 6:18 adds: “it is impossible for God to lie.” God can’t choose evil. He isn’t able to. His choices only ever run one way.

So if free will means “the power to choose either way at any moment”, God doesn’t have free will. Neither did Jesus. And neither will we in heaven, where sin is finished for ever.

Free will isn’t quite free.

That’s what this post is about. Not whether we make real choices—we do, all day long, and we shall answer to God for them. The problem is the phrase we use. Two small words, “free” and “will”.

Some teachers now suggest we drop the phrase and use a different one: agency. Would that be any better?

First, 4 words explained

People tend to use the following words to mean other things.

Keep the four apart and most of the fog clears. Mix them up and we can argue for hours without ever discovering what we’re disagreeing about.

Five problems with the phrase “free will”

1. The Bible never actually says it

This surprises people, because English Bibles do contain the words “freewill”. But look at what’s underneath.

In all of these passages, the opposite of “willing” is forced. It’s never caused. Those two words may sound similar, but they mean very different things.

Forced means we acted against our desire or will. Someone overpowered or pressured us.

Caused simply means there was a reason behind what we desired.

Picture a man handing over his wallet. If a thief holds a knife to his throat, the act is forced—it isn’t a true gift at all. But if he hands it over because he loves the recipient, the act is caused: his love is the reason. No one would claim the second man didn’t truly choose. The cause didn’t compete with his choice; the cause was the origin of his choice.

That’s the entire difference. Scripture regularly contrasts a glad choice with a forced one—it never contrasts a choice with a cause. When Paul asks Philemon to receive Onesimus back “not by compulsion but of your own accord” (Philemon 14), he isn’t explaining cosmic mechanics. He simply wants Philemon glad rather than pressured.

Every verse offered as proof of “free will” actually proves something narrower: voluntariness. We affirm voluntariness wholeheartedly. But “nobody forced me” isn’t the same as “nothing caused me”—and it’s the second claim that people mean today when they say “free will.”

2. The meaning has drifted

400 years ago, “free will” in a theology book meant something careful and limited: voluntariness. It meant a person acted from his own mind and desire, and wasn’t dragged along against his will. Today, in ordinary English, “free will” means something much bigger: that at the moment of choosing we could equally have gone the other way, and nothing whatsoever settled which way we went.

This matters pastorally. Let’s say a careful teacher uses the old meaning; but the listener hears the new one; every sentence after that would be misunderstood. For readers who speak English as a second language, the problem doubles, because “free will” tends to collapse into the simpler word “freedom”—which is worse.

3. Your “will” isn’t part of your body

We speak as though the will were an organ, like a hand or a knee—a thing inside you that you either move or leave alone. JI Packer put his finger on the mistake: the will is an abstraction. It isn’t a piece of me that I operate. It’s simply me, choosing.

Once we see that, a lot of bad questions dissolve. “Did God override my will?” quietly assumes there’s a little man inside me who had to be pushed aside. But there is no little man. There is only me—my mind, my desires, my heart—arriving at a choice.

Theologian Jonathan Edwards saw this clearly in 1754. If my will is a separate thing that decides what I choose, something must decide what the will decides—and something must decide that, and so on for ever. The chain never reaches the ground. Edwards’ solution was simple: my will is just my mind choosing. I do what, at any given moment, I most want to do.

4. This is no modern complaint

Several of our best teachers warned us about it. They saw the debate coming.

• Martin Luther (1525). In his reply to Desiderius Erasmus, Luther argued “free will” is properly a divine title, belonging to God alone, and that using it of ourselves inflates us. He allowed that men are free in ordinary daily matters—what to eat, where to work—but not in the matter of coming to God.
• John Calvin. In the Institutes (2.2.7) Calvin says plainly he wishes the term were not used at all, because as soon as a man hears “free will” applied to himself he is puffed up. Yet Calvin still defended what the term properly protected: man acts voluntarily, and not by compulsion.
• Augustine of Hippo. Long before either of them, Augustine suggested a formula that still holds: the will is free, but it isn’t freed. Free from righteousness, and a slave to sin.

The will is indeed free, but not liberated. —Augustine of Hippo

5. It doesn’t travel

Finally, a practical point that matters for an international readership. “Free will” is an English idiom carrying centuries of English philosophy inside it. Translated into most other languages it flattens into “freedom” or “free choice”, losing every distinction that made it useful. “Agency” and “voluntary” survive translation far better.

Is ‘Agency’ Better than ‘Will’? What ‘Agency’ gets right

• It talks about persons, not parts. Agency belongs to you, not to a faculty inside you. Packer’s advice was to drop the word “will” altogether and say it in the first person: I am the one who chooses. I am the slave whom Christ must set free. I am the one who, left to myself, only ever chooses against God.
• It matches how the confessions actually speak. The Westminster Confession (3.1) says God ordains everything that happens, “yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.” Read that last phrase again. God’s plan doesn’t cancel our acting; it establishes it. “Agency” is exactly the word for that. “Free will” is not.
• It allows degrees. Agency can be created, damaged, restored and perfected. Popular “free will” is a switch: we either have it or we’re a robot. That switch is what forces people into false choices.
• It’s everyday language. Ethics, psychology, law and the whole current conversation about artificial intelligence already run on “agency”.

Where “agency” falls short

Now the honest half. If we are going to hold this view we should hold it with our eyes open.

• It’s not a Bible word either. If our complaint against “free will” is that it doesn’t appear in Scripture, “agency” fails the test too. The argument has to be that it communicates better.
• It has its own drift. In modern speech, “agency” is soaked in ideas of independence and self-authorship—”taking back my agency”. Used carelessly, it smuggles in the very autonomy it was meant to shut out.
• It says nothing at all about ability. A man can be a complete agent and still be unable to want God. Agency is silent on that decisive point.
• Used alone, it cuts us off from our own history. Chapter 9 of the Westminster Confession is titled “Of Free Will”. Retire the phrase entirely and our readers can no longer read Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards or Francis Turretin with understanding.

The other words on the table

“Agency” isn’t the only candidate. Here’s the scorecard.

The case, in 6 steps

Step 1: freedom isn’t the ability to go either way

Go back to the question we started with. If freedom means “could have done otherwise”, then look who fails the test:

• God, who cannot lie (Hebrews 6:18).
• Jesus Christ, who was tempted in every way yet without sin.
• The angels who never fell, now settled in goodness.
• Every believer in heaven, where sin is impossible for ever.

The freest beings in existence have the least ability to go either way. That’s not an awkward exception. It’s the clue.

The Westminster Confession says it in one line: in glory the will is made “perfectly and immutably free to do good alone” (9.5). Perfectly free—and unchangeably good. If freedom meant openness to evil, that sentence would be nonsense.

Step 2: 4 states, 1 agency

Augustine mapped human history in four stages, and later teachers kept his map because it explains almost everything. Watch what changes down the table—and what does not.

The right-hand column never changes. Agency is constant. Ability is what moves. That one table settles more disputes than any amount of shouting, because it shows you can lose your ability to choose God without losing one gram of your responsibility for not choosing him.

Step 3: 2 very different kinds of “cannot”

Jonathan Edwards gave us the tool that makes this work. He said there are two completely different reasons a person “cannot” do something.

Jeremiah puts it as a matter of habit: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jeremiah 13:23). Notice—the inability grows out of what you are used to loving. That is why it is blameworthy.

Step 4: what the Bible actually says

Now the texts. Not a shower of verses, but the ones that carry the weight.

• John 6:44—”No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” The word is cannot, not may not. It is a statement about ability.
• John 8:34, 36—”everyone who practises sin is a slave to sin… So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” Notice the order. Freedom is not something you were born holding. It is the result of what the Son does to you.
• Romans 6:17–18—you were slaves of sin; now you are slaves of righteousness. Paul offers no third option, no neutral middle where a person stands unowned, weighing masters. There is no such place.
• Romans 8:7—”the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.”
• Ephesians 2:4–5—God “made us alive together with Christ” while we were dead. Dead men do not cooperate with their own resurrection.
• Ezekiel 36:26–27—”I will give you a new heart… And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.” God works inside the wanting. He does not stand outside it, pushing.
• Philippians 2:12–13—”work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Here is the death-blow to the whole zero-sum instinct. Paul does not say God works despite your willing, or around it. God works your willing. And therefore you must work.
• Joshua 24:15 with 24:19—the famous “choose this day whom you will serve” is a favourite proof-text. But read four verses on: “You are not able to serve the LORD.” Joshua himself removes the ability he seemed to assume. The call is real; the inability is real; and Joshua sees no contradiction.
• Genesis 50:20 with Acts 2:23 and 4:28—one act, two authors. “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” Peter says Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” and that you crucified him “by the hands of lawless men”. The plan does not thin out the guilt by a single degree.

Step 5: the freest act in history

If you want to see what real freedom looks like, do not look at a man in a shop deciding between two brands. Look at Gethsemane.

“Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). Here is a choice made in agony, with full knowledge, entirely voluntarily—and made by the one person who could not possibly have chosen otherwise, in fulfilment of a plan already fixed before the world began (Acts 4:28).

Maximum freedom. Zero uncertainty. The two are not in tension. They never were.

Step 6: the verdict

So, is “agency” the better word? Here is the settled answer.

4 objections, answered

“This makes God the author of sin.”

No. Look again at Genesis 50:20. One act, and two intentions running through it—the brothers meaning evil, God meaning good. God ordains that the act will occur; the evil in it comes wholly from the hearts of the men doing it. The Westminster Confession states both halves in a single sentence (3.1): God ordains whatever comes to pass, and God is not the author of sin. We are not required to explain how; we are required not to deny either.

“This makes people puppets.”

The Canons of Dort answer this directly, and rather beautifully. God’s grace does not treat people as “stocks and blocks”—it does not remove the will or destroy its properties. It quickens, heals and corrects the will, and then sweetly and powerfully bends it. A puppet has no wants. You have wants, and grace changes what you want. That is the opposite of puppetry.

And notice the hidden assumption in the objection: that if something causes your choice, the choice is not really yours. But that is the very point being disputed. State it as an argument and it looks much weaker.

“But if you ought to do something, you must be able to.”

This sounds obvious and it is not true—not in daily life, and not in Scripture. A man who gambles away money he owes you genuinely cannot repay it, and is more guilty, not less. His inability is the shape of his wrongdoing.

Scripture says one purpose of the law is to expose exactly this: “through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20). God’s commands tell you your duty. They were never a survey of your strength. Augustine prayed the honest prayer: give what you command, and then command whatever you will.

“Then why bother preaching, warning and pleading?”

Because God appoints the means along with the end. The preached word is not a survey asking whether people feel able; it is the instrument God uses to make dead people live. Ezekiel was told to preach to dry bones, which is about as unpromising an audience as exists—and the bones lived. If we believed a sermon depended on the listener’s native strength, we would have every reason to be nervous. Believing it depends on God, we can preach to anybody.

So: is “agency” the better word?

Yes—as our everyday word. It’s clearer, it’s humbler, it survives translation, and it names precisely the thing every human being keeps from the cradle to the judgement seat: we are the ones who choose, and we will answer for our choices.

But don’t let it stand alone. On its own, “agency” tells us who acts and says nothing about what he is able to want. Add the two missing pieces—that our choices are truly voluntary, and that a fallen heart is morally unable to want God—and the picture is complete.

And when we preach it, let’s reach for the Bible’s own words rather than any of ours. Scripture doesn’t ask whether our will is free. It asks who owns it. Every person alive is a slave of sin or a slave of righteousness, and the only door between those two houses is a Person: “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

That isn’t a smaller freedom than the one people imagine they have. It’s an infinitely larger one.

Related Reads

• Biblical Compatibilism: God’s Sovereignty vs Human Choice
• The Synod of Dort: The Debate That Gave Us TULIP
• Does Calvinism Make God the Author of Sin?
• Is Calvinism Unbiblical? Revisiting Wesley’s Classic Objections
• What Is Provisionism? A Reformed Response to the Flowers Challenge
• Does Colossians 1:20 Teach Universal Reconciliation?