God gave Adam and Eve a choice to eat or not eat the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:16-17).
Is “free will” that which gives us the capability to sin or not sin? Or, as it has been said, that at the heart of biblical freedom is not the ability to sin or not to sin – but the ability to obey God? Freedom is the ability to do what you want. If you don’t want to sin but you must, this is slavery. To be set free in such a way where you will always obey God is to have the purest form of human free will. God has free will and yet we know God cannot sin.
When Adam and his wife, who were one flesh (Gen. 2:24), sinned against God, all of their descendants (that is, the entire human race in their loins) would share in that sin and the alienation from God and subjection to death that were its consequence.
That depraved nature has accumulated and intensified throughout the ages of human history. Instead of evolving, as humanists insist, man has devolved, degenerating into greater and greater sinfulness.
God did not desire for sin to enter the world through the fall of Adam and Eve, yet He allowed it. The free will of each person is the only power in the universe which God temporarily allows to supersede His will. “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” 2 Peter 3:9.
God does not desire anyone to perish. He desires all to come to repentance (Luke 13:3,5). At the same time, God knows that not everyone will come to repentance and most will perish (Mat. 7:13–14).
Despite Adam and Eve’s great failure, those who have put their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ have hope. No hope exists for man outside of Christ. Those who have believed the Gospel (1 Corinthians 15:1-4, 20-22) have eternal life and the hope of resurrection and freedom from sin.
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