Will We Lose Free Will in Heaven?
Q:
I heard a church leader say we won't have free will in heaven. Is this true?
A:
It bothers my spirit to hear someone say this with such confidence. It is obviously a deep and potentially, unknowable thing.
Let’s look at how important our free will is to God and to us. In order to do that, we must go back into the very beginning of the human story. (Please read Gen. 2:4-17)
The first thing we may want to know is who wrote this? If no human beings were around yet since the details include the creation of humanity...and no forms of writing had yet been needed on the earth... who wrote all of this down? There are so many vivid details! Well yes, the Holy Spirit, the third member of our Trinity God was there; “Let US make man in our image,” said God to His three parts in Genesis 1. Therefore, the Holy Spirit supervised the writings of this account since He was there. Alas, the theologians believe the author of Genesis is probably Moses. No one knows for sure who wrote the Book of Genesis, but “probably Moses” is what they say. Why?
Because Moses spoke to God face to face, as is documented in Exodus 33:11. (The Bible tells us that Jacob (who predates Moses) saw the Lord face to face in Genesis 32 while he was on his journey to Uncle Laban’s house... but Moses is the only one who ever spoke to God face to face.) Moses, being an ancient person and patriarch, thousands of years closer than we are to the days of the Garden of Eden, apparently wanted to know how the whole thing started. And he wrote it down. That is the educated guess of how the Book of Genesis came about; Moses asked God and God told him. The truth is, we don’t know.
What we do know is what those scriptures say: God made the planet, then he made a nourishing mist to come up like a greenhouse and water the ground of the whole planet, and then the Lord molded a human form out of that moist dirt and breathed His “Ruach” (breath of God) into the man’s nostrils and a living being came forth out of the mud in the image and likeness of its Creator.
The next thing that happened is that God crafted a paradise place, a garden and put the man named Adam in it. The Lord then crafted food for Adam from the vegetation, now coming up out of the ground, and fruit-trees began to appear. These trees then provide the reason for mankind to have free-will. God speaks to the man and commands him to do something:
Genesis 2:16 & 17, NKJV
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
If the Lord was giving a command for obedience to Adam, this indicates clearly, that Adam had a choice about it: He could follow the command of God, or not. And the Lord built-in consequences so He knew that humanity’s free-will was already in play.
The woman was formed next of course, a partner for Adam so that he would have a companion like all the other animals... and the woman was deceived by Satan and since she had never seen evil before in their paradise world. The Devil, who doesn’t play fair, knew she was vulnerable, so he persuaded her to eat forbidden fruit from the wrong tree. Eve had no defenses against evil except a command from God that she got second-hand. She was duped, and then condemned. Thank God that we now live in a world where Jesus made everything right again.
Free Will was the first thing given to mankind. Even before the woman was created, God explained to Adam the boundaries attached to his freedom of choice.
So what is Free Will? It’s the capacity we all have to choose without coercion. We have freedoms to think the way we want; to act and behave however we want to; to speak, yet in this country, with freedoms of opinion; to worship whatever and whoever we want and to live a lifestyle of our absolute choosing.
When we look at all those God-given freedoms, it’s a miracle that the world hasn’t descended into complete anarchy and chaos a million times over. Right there is the doctrine that proves there’s a God. Humanity is free to do whatever it wants to, yet something, or someone, is preventing total destruction.
There’s a scarlet thread of redemption which holds the world together. Jesus is alive and well and His blood made a way for creation to fall in line behind the Savior. Even before Jesus came, that redemption story... God chose for Himself a people, through Abraham, who, though highly imperfect, would choose Yahweh and keep choosing His goodness... until Jesus came to redeem everything.
Free will is woven into the spiritual creation of human beings. We were free to choose since the moment Adam was breathed to life and placed in the Garden. And we were originally designed to be eternal beings. God said it right there in Genesis 2:17 that we just read, physical death would not come unless disobedience to the command of God occurred. On that scripture alone, it’s clear that we have no idea, timewise, how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden before they sinned and were exiled. It could have been millions of years, since they were designed to live eternally, and that would match the earth’s fossil record.
Now, our bodies die. But our spirit... because it came from the RUACH, the breath of God, which is not fleshly but eternal, remains intact. So our spirit goes on to an eternal place; heaven or hell—we actually get to choose which place we want.
And we take that God-given free will, which was breathed into our spirit, with us into heaven. The question of free-will is now in play--what happens then? Do we need free will if we are not on earth anymore? The Bible gives us some hints:
(Please read Revelation 21:3-7)
There won’t be any crying, mourning, pain, death or tears. But our free-will on the earth causes all that. It’s because of free will among humans that we hurt each other. So does this mean we won’t be ourselves anymore? Or does it mean we won’t have free will? Let’s look at some more hints before we answer that:
1 Corinthians 15:52
“In a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”
Philippians 3:21
“Who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”
Those are the scriptures about our physical transformation when we enter heaven, so we do know that will happen. In other words, we can’t get into heaven with this flesh on, we’ll need a physical presence on our spiritual frame that can handle the atmosphere of glory. John also had a handle on what happens to our inner man when we are transformed heavenward... and this has some bearing on our free will:
1 John 3:2 & 3, NKJV
Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.
What Paul and John are both pointing out is that in heaven, we will retain our freedom, but we will no longer be choosing anything sinful, because there is no darkness in heaven. Satan has already been ousted, so there is no evil to choose from! We’ll have new, glorified minds and hearts that are so thoroughly enmeshed with the righteousness in Christ... “we shall be like Him” said John... that it won’t even occur to us to use our free will to sin.
So the answer is YES, we will have our free will in heaven. We will still be who we are. And the goal between now and then is grab onto that purity; that righteousness that Jesus offers and get a head-start on becoming more like the Lord every day.
Photo by Slav Romanov on Unsplash
Adrienne Greene is pastor and author of "Kryptonite: The Killing Fields of Christianity's Acceptable Sins". (Amazon or Barnes & Noble) Contact for inquiries or bookings is found at info@adriennewgreene.com
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