Free Will

(Reply to a letter raising objections on this point)

I AM in disagreement with articles published in The Watchtower dated June 1, 1953. There is no such thing as a “free” will; and the only freedom human beings can ever experience is that which is conveyed upon them when they give their hearts to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and are born of the spirit.—J. H. N., England.

The above-mentioned articles in The Watchtower discussed the subject of predestination as taught by the religious systems of Christendom and showed the falsity of their teaching, setting forth, instead, from the Holy Scriptures, that all men are allowed the free exercise of their will to choose the destiny of life and salvation or the destiny of death and abandonment to destruction.—Rev. 22:17.

God does not force an individual to accept either destiny, and in that sense he allows to every intelligent creature the exercise of free will. Here on earth the opportunity is granted by God to all creatures to choose either destiny; and this would not be the case if they did not have the freedom of choice or the power and opportunity of free will. All descendants of Adam are in the fallen, sin-degraded state, and it is to these that the offer of salvation, through God’s way and for his purpose, is made. (Rom. 8:28) If for one to be an imperfect sinful member of Adam’s family meant the loss of free will, then it would be foolish for God to give a single human creature the opportunity to choose everlasting life in God’s new world, for then the sin-dominated creature would have no powers of free will to make a choice for something better from God’s hand but would be held hopelessly enslaved by sin and the Devil. And if any would then gain salvation through God’s way, it would have to be because he forced them contrary to their degraded wills to accept his way of salvation.—John 10:14-16; 2 Pet. 3:13.

Serving sin by obeying it and serving the Devil by obeying his world or system of things, men are not free but are slaves. They think of themselves as free, but in fact they are not free, just as your letter says. But even a slave may have free will, and slaves have been known to rebel and break away and even make a successful escape. So even the slaves of sin and Satan the Devil have free will, and God appeals to their exercise of this free will by having the message of salvation and deliverance presented to them through Christ. (2 Cor. 5:18-20) If this were not the case it would be very unfair for God to present to humans something that he would have to admit they were not free to accept. On the other hand, it is the Devil and his organization (invisible and visible) that try to wash the peoples’ brains, that try to deprive humans of free will, and try to terrorize them against using the God-given freedom of will. Some humans, too, so degrade themselves in sin and corruption (and that out of their own free will or choice) that they have very little strength of will left to incline them toward good and its continuous acceptance.—Rom. 1:20-32.

You mention the scribes and Pharisees and that Jesus condemned them, as a class, and asked how they could escape the judgment of Gehenna, or annihilation. Yet the Scriptures declare that many of the scribes and Pharisees and Jewish priests accepted the Christian message, which fact proves that the individual members of that class had the power, right, opportunity and call to exercise free will by the preaching of Jesus and his disciples. If some had the free will to choose to accept the message of salvation, then all the others of this class had the power to do so, but those others used their free will to choose the traditions of the adulterated Jewish religion and hence deliberately chose destruction in the Gehenna of annihilation. So your argument fails—that, so far from having “free” will, man born in sin is utterly helpless except to follow the devices and desires of his own heart.—Rom. 12:1, 2.

Pharaoh of Egypt, Hitler of Germany and Napoleon of France, whom you cite as men “incapable of doing right,” all had free will to follow the course they pursued. Pharaoh was not, as you say, “powerless to avert his doom,” for in ten cases he showed he had the power to relent or repent. Each time he did relent Jehovah God lifted the plague off Pharaoh and Egypt. He was free to choose to remain in his repentant condition, but chose, instead, not to do so. After the tenth plague on Egypt he did let the Israelites under Moses leave the land of their enslavement; Pharaoh literally hurried them out of Egypt and asked them for their blessing. Had he continued in this repentant, tenderhearted condition he would have been spared destruction with his military hosts in the Red Sea. But as in the previous nine cases, he let his selfishness and pride get the better of him, and he exercised his free will to harden his heart and to take advantage of the seemingly helpless position of the Israelites at the edge of the Red Sea. So without any pressure from Jehovah God, but brushing aside all the lessons that he should have learned in his preceding arrogant defiances of Almighty God, Pharaoh freely willed or chose to go after the escaped Israelites to drag them back to slavery in Egypt. Yes, as you say, “free will implies moral responsibility,” and Pharaoh was morally responsible to Almighty God for his own destruction at the Red Sea as well as for all the ten plagues that he and his people had previously suffered.

True, too, as you add, today the world’s state “would seem to indicate the impossibility of its redemption.” But, as in Noah’s day, so today there is a “small minority of the world’s inhabitants” that will “escape the final destruction,” because they have come out from this world as to their being a part of it. How was this possible? Because of their possession of free will, in spite of their being once sinfully a part of this corrupt world, and because of their exercising free will in response to God’s message of warning and of invitation to salvation. On the other hand, the vast majority of today’s generation (to use Jesus’ own term at Matthew 24:32-39 and Luke 21:29-32) will perish with this world or system of things (upon this planet) that now has fully run its God-tolerated course—not because such victims have no free will but because, out of their own choice, they are preferrers, lovers, of this world and they choose and prefer to remain with it; and they submit to their worldly rulers who incessantly strive to deprive them of the exercise of their free will.

Therefore we must distinguish between free will and Christian freedom. The only freedom is, as you yourself aptly emphasize, the Christian freedom. Jesus in support said: “If you remain in my word, you are really my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” “Every doer of sin is a slave of sin. Therefore if the Son [of God, i.e., Christ Jesus] sets you free, you will be actually free.” (John 8:31, 32, 34, 36, NW) It is because of the possession and exercise of free will that many slaves of sin and the Devil come into the Christian freedom, through yielding themselves to the force of the truth and, under its transforming power, becoming doers of Almighty God’s word of command and counsel, not hearers only—not mere absorbers of that word for relaxing or diversionary purposes of their own and without a due and wholesome regard for the great Giver’s purpose. (John 15:8) Such doers of Almighty God’s word choose to obey other thought forces (Ps. 118:17; 139:17, 18; Isa. 55:8, 9) than those of their former worldly slave masters.—John 13:17.

Frankly, it is because of your difficulty in discerning that the free will of humans, even now in their sinful state, is a fact demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who have come into God’s way of truth since Jesus’ day, that you feel the need to cast about for something outside the Bible. That is your difficulty—your not accepting fully what, and all that, the Bible says; but, instead, seriously entertaining preconceived ideas of other humans and your own. For instance, you refer us to Jonathan Edwards of the 18th century, who, as you remark, “except for illustrations, made no appeal to Scriptural authority.” Why, therefore, should God-fearing persons seriously choose to read this American philosopher’s products in hope of acquiring sound enlightenment when such God-fearing persons, even as we, firmly believe in “Scriptural authority” (John 14:10-17) and gratefully and constantly appeal to it as the only guide to true understanding—choosing of our own free will to “let God be found true, though every man be found a liar”? (Rom. 3:4, NW; Luke 24:25-27, 32) Feeling for a way out of your perplexity and difficulty, you write: “We could reasonably suppose, without offending any earnest theologian, that there might possibly be some omissions from the Bible, which has passed through the distortion of translation many times, and that after death the period of probation may be extended to the eternal spiritual world, and that poor suffering human beings, with their frailties and longings for happiness and peace, may be free to expurgate more completely the sin which besets them, and that He who ‘came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance,’ may have other places of refuge for the lost, not recorded in the Scriptures.”

Here, again, in a procedure wholly unlike that of Christ Jesus himself (Luke 24:25-27, 32), your desperate appeal is outside the Holy Scriptures. Today we do not have to be content with, nor rely upon, distorted translations of Almighty God’s sacred Record. We have the original texts of the Bible available for us to consult—the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek; and the Watchtower-published New World Translation has been painstakingly provided for willing users, to give them as faithful a rendering of these original texts as possible, so readers may come to an accurate knowledge of the truth. There are no “omissions” that allow for such a thing as you wishfully suggest. Indeed there could not be such omissions, because the things you suggest as possible omissions are contrary to the teachings of the Scriptures that we actually have on record in black and white. And the accumulated findings, to date, of palaeographers prove beyond controversy or reason to doubt that we have received the original Scriptural records substantially unchanged, practically as from the hands of the original writers.

It is unscriptural and unreasonable to hope for a spiritual future world for sinful but honest humans where such may hope to expurgate their besetting sin and have an extended period of probation there. That is akin to the Roman Catholic teaching of “purgatory,” an intermediate spirit place between heaven and earth, but for which there is not a shred of evidence or proof in the written Word of God. When human creatures die, they die and they do not enter the spirit realm. (See Ezekiel 18:4, 20; John 11:14.) Only the 144,000 members of God’s congregation under their Head Christ Jesus will gain life in the spirit realm; and this is by God’s special arrangement through Christ and by a marvelous resurrection from the dead when only such persons experience a change from their original human existence and, by Almighty God’s power, are raised to life as immortal, spirit creatures, to everlasting life and activity in the invisible heavenly realm with their Bridegroom Christ Jesus—this at his second coming and the establishment, earth-wide, of God’s kingdom under him, for which kingdom he taught his disciples to pray.—Matt. 6:9-13; John 14:1-3; 1 Thess. 4:15-18; Rev. 14:1-5.

Others of mankind, who choose willingly to obey Almighty God’s perfect, righteous requirements, may soberly entertain no other hope of life but that of life on this planet earth in human perfection—in God’s new world with its paradise earth. Never fear or entertain the “horror of the thought of the creation of sentient beings, foreknown to be doomed to an eternity of pain”—to quote you. Jesus Christ, at Matthew 25:41-46, did not refer to such an “eternity of pain,” but to an eternity of absolute destruction, annihilation of the “goats” that he described there. The everlasting fire reserved for the Devil and his angels is the everlasting destruction that awaits them and all who use their free will to follow such demonic adversaries of Almighty God. In this teaching, Jesus was in harmony with the God of the old Hebrew Scriptures, “whose name alone is JEHOVAH.” (Ps. 83:18, King James Version) Jesus’ own name, as translated out of the basic original text, means “Jehovah is salvation.” Jesus did not reveal a Supreme Being different from the One described in the Hebrew Scriptures. (See, again, Luke 24:25-27, 32; also Isaiah 53 and Acts 8:26-39.) No, Jesus did not reveal a different, a “better” God; indeed Jesus could not, his own heavenly Father, Jehovah, being in fact the only living and true God, even as Peter was reminded by Jesus.—Matt. 16:13-17; John 20:17.

In the ancient Hebrew Scriptures (now commonly though inaccurately designated “Old Testament” of the Bible) are preserved Jehovah’s declarations of his judgments against the wicked. Jesus was in complete harmony with those declared judgments of his everliving Father, Jehovah; and Jesus referred with approval to those written judgments and added his own authoritative warning, in referring as Jesus did to the flood of Noah’s day, to the fiery destruction by Jehovah of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the first destruction of Jerusalem, which also foreshadowed that city’s second destruction in A.D. 70, etc. (Luke 17:20-32; 21:20-22) Jesus’ apostles and other faithful disciples of his also were in complete accord with those declared judgments which subsequently, in ancient time, were executed by the everliving God, Jehovah; and those faithful followers of Jesus repeatedly referred to those remarkable ancient occurrences by way of warning to sin-inclined persons living upon earth during this Christian era.—See 2 Thessalonians 1:6-10; 2 Peter 2:4-22; Jude 5-16.

Those typically executed judgments will be realistically and fully performed, earthwide, in Jehovah’s anciently foretold, and now impending, battle at Armageddon: Revelation 16:13-16. After that battle comes God’s permanent new world under Christ Jesus. (2 Pet. 3:13) That unprecedented battle (also anciently foretold in Jeremiah 25:32-38, in Daniel 12:1, and other prophecies Jesus quoted) a minority of men of free will now living upon earth shall survive, according to God’s promise. (Zeph. 2:1-3; Luke 21:28) Then Christ Jesus will reign for a thousand years. He will utter his voice, and there will be a resurrection of the dead, not from the Gehenna of annihilation into which many humans will already have gone, but from the memorial tombs, mankind’s common grave, the Bible “hell” or Sheʹol or Hades. (John 5:28, 29; Rev. 20:11-15) This resurrection, or restanding to life upon this planet earth, will include also the many unjust, unrighteous, of many past ages, who still are susceptible to the appeal of Jehovah’s goodness. From the state of the dead they will come forth as human creatures, having undergone no change in personality during their period of sleeplike unconsciousness and total inactivity in the memorial tombs.—Eccl. 9:5-10; Acts 24:15.

Then the heavenly government of Jehovah under Christ Jesus, anciently foretold at Isaiah 9:6, 7, will busy itself with helping earth’s inhabitants to get completely out of and away from their sin-ridden condition. Then there will be at large neither Devil nor any angels of his to hinder and thwart the well-aimed efforts of earth’s inhabitants to respond to the uplifting influences and perfect ministrations of Jehovah’s kingdom under Christ Jesus, for all those incorrigible adversaries of the Most High God and his permanent government for the entire earth will have been silenced; yes, bound for the thousand-year term of Christ’s unhindered reign. Earth’s inhabitants will be at liberty to use their free will to respond—to conform themselves merrily and gratefully to Jehovah’s perfect requirements. Such as do thus respond then will be blessed and enriched with ultimate uplift to perfection as humans. Any, on the other hand, who then choose to use their free will to rebel against the sole earth-wide government of the Most High God and who then prefer to turn to the ways of the old destroyed world (or system of things) will then themselves share in the Gehenna of everlasting annihilation which Jesus authoritatively said his Father, Jehovah, had “prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matt. 25:41) Those joyfully obedient humans who, on earth, then live on and on to the very end of Christ’s thousand-year reign will have been uplifted to human perfection.

There, then, at the end of that millennial reign will be applied a great, final test of the free will of each and every surviving human then inhabiting the paradise earth. Satan and his demons then will be loosed from their abyssed state of deathlike inactivity, but for only a brief period. Thus loosed, those chronic rebels again will range forth in their wicked deceitfulness and craftiness to mislead and bring about the destruction of mankind. Those who then exert their free will in loyalty to Almighty God to resist these wicked hordes will be preserved by God and justified for everlastingly living in the unending paradise earth. Those others, though, who after all the enlightenment and uplift that they have had choose under that final test to yield to selfishness and then of their own free will follow Satan and his demons will be destroyed by God’s casting them into the Gehenna of irreversible destruction, “the second death.” About this read in Revelation, chapter twenty.

The above is the Bible portrayal of man’s situation and prospects. It all agrees with what was presented in The Watchtower, that men have free will now. They are morally responsible, therefore, to use it according to their opportunities by God’s undeserved kindness. Happy now are those who, being conscious of their spiritual need, exercise their free will to come into the Christian freedom in the present-day New World society.

Cordially,

WATCHTOWER BIBLE AND TRACT SOCIETY