A Debate Over Free-Will, Part 1

I'm involved in an interesting debate over "free-will" with a guy on an online doctrinal forum. (This is the same guy I made reference to here). I asked him to give his rationale for why he believes that free-will is the best way of understanding the relationship between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. Responding to him has become a lengthier project than I first thought, but it has been interesting. Let me share his argument here, and I'll post my responses to it later:

Ok, let me start by God's grace like this;

We cannot understand when, where and why the first sin was commited but logically it had to be because of a certain kind of freedom in the will of the bieng that comitted it or else you will have to be like the gnostics that believed that God was both good and evil and you will also have to blot out many scriptures that say that God tempts noone and that God is light and in him there is no darkness.

It may be that God gave these angelic biengs from the beginning a knowledge of good and evil without having to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil like adam and eve, therefore having a knowledge of doing wrong and right from the beginning of thier existence.

It also may be that satan himself asked God permission to tempt adam and eve to eat the fruit because of the way they had been created and the way he had been created. They were created without the knowledge of good and evil but satan had to be created with the knowledge of good and evil or else there would be no more logical explanation for his sin.

Since he was created this way then God's justice would demand that satan be given a chance to tempt Adam and Eve to test thier obedience since they had not known sin because they had no knowledge of good or evil but satan did know right and wrong from the beginning of his creation but the problem rests in that he submitted to the evil side of his knowledge and iniquity was found in him.

Now what happens to man is that after he eats of the fruit of the tree, he is seperated from God and this seperation makes him evil in nature and spiritually dead because God said that he would surely die.

Since satan is called the father of all lies then this would have to mean that he was created with a knowledge of good and evil from the beginning knowing what was right and wrong but you see this is where this free-will thing comes in right here. He chose to follow the evil that he knew instead of following the good that he knew and yet God knew he would do this before he made him because this was all part of God's plan to glorify Christ in the end.

You see free-will does not blow down God's sovereignty at all because he knew it was going to happen all along and it was already planned from eternity past. Everything was planned out and decreed by God from eternity past and it came into action after God started creating everything.

You see God is so sovereign that if he didn't want any of it to happen the way it happened then he just didn't have to create anything. Everything happened because God wanted it to happen that way even if the choices that these biengs made by thier will were free because even thier free wills and choices were seen in eternity past in God's mind and these free choices went along with God's ultimate plan and decree which was to glorify Christ on the cross and in the resurrection from the dead.

So you see every sin that mankind commits are already planned out and decreed by God from eternity past but the sin commited is of itself from the freedom of the will of the creation. So every sin commited goes perfectly with God's plan and purpose even if they are done with a free-will because God knew all that was going to happen from beginning to end before he even began to create the heavens and the earth.

Just put it this way, if God didn't want it to happen then it woudn't have ever been created or else it would have thwarted God's plans and purposes. The reason lucipher was created was because he fitted into God's purposes, the reason mankind was created was because they fitted into God's purposes even if both creations have a free-will, every decision they make was already forseen by God and carefully planned out in such a way that no free-willed decision can thwart God's purposes.

I can write down more but it's kind of late and this is all that i can come up with for now, I'll be happy to see your response, maybe we can both work this out to a better knowledge of God's soveriegnty and creation's responsibility.