Calvinists teach that no one has the free will to make their choice, it’s God that does the picking and choosing. Everything is ordained and planned by God.
However, the Bible fully disagrees with that. If we look up in the Bible, it shows everyone has his own will, proving that man has the free choice themselves.
Genesis 2:16 “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:”
Ezra 7:13 “I make a decree, that all they of the people of Israel, and of his priests and Levites, in my realm, which are minded of their own freewill to go up to Jerusalem, go with thee.”
Ezra 7:15-16 “And to carry the silver and gold, which the king and his counsellors have freely offered unto the God of Israel, whose habitation is in Jerusalem,And all the silver and gold that thou canst find in all the province of Babylon, with the freewill offering of the people, and of the priests, offering willingly for the house of their God which is in Jerusalem:”
Judges 5:2 “Praise ye the LORD for the avenging of Israel, when the people willingly offered themselves.”
1 Chronicles 28:9 “And thou, Solomon my son, know thou the God of thy father, and serve him with a perfect heart and with a willing mind: for the LORD searcheth all hearts, and understandeth all the imaginations of the thoughts: if thou seek him, he will be found of thee; but if thou forsake him, he will cast thee off for ever.”
2 Chronicles 31:14 “And Kore the son of Imnah the Levite, the porter toward the east, was over the freewill offerings of God, to distribute the oblations of the LORD, and the most holy things.”
Let’s start from the beginning. Ever since the beginning when mankind fell, it was not God’s plan purposely making that happen for Adam and Eve to eat the fruit. That’s what Calvinists teach, they teach that we can’t blame mankind for their own sin upon this world, all this bad stuff that happened when Adam and Eve picked the fruit off the tree. It’s not mankind’s fault, it’s God’s fault because God planned it that way.
But these verses disprove their theory:
Genesis 2:16 “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:”
Notice that mankind had the choice to freely pick and choose which fruit he can eat.
Ezra 7:13 “I make a decree, that all they of the people of Israel, and of his priests and Levites, in my realm, which are minded of their own freewill to go up to Jerusalem, go with thee.”
Ezra 7:15 “And to carry the silver and gold, which the king and his counsellors have freely offered unto the God of Israel, whose habitation is in Jerusalem,”
v13 mankind has their own free will. v15 even the rulers, of their free choice, gave it.
That should be plain enough that man has free will.
To teach that man does not have free will is blatantly calling the Bible a lie and deliberately ignoring verses.
The verses repeatedly mention free will, willingly many times in just one passage. How can we just blindly ignore that?
Calvinists will come back with their argument on those verses and they’d say ‘Those verses might say man has his own will and he does it willingly. We’re not denying that. What we deny is that man has a free, independent, rebellious, individualistic will. That’s what we deny but we don’t deny man has his own will. For the elect people, our will is the righteous will under God’s control. For the lost people, it’s the sinful will under God’s control, thus God is still in control of our will.’
The easy answer to this is that they deny libertarian will, but what does liberty mean? It means individualistic, it means free. Do you know how many times the Bible said freewill? It says libertarian, free will 17 times in the Bible. It specifically said that, not abstractly: free will.
Ezra 7:13 “I make a decree, that all they of the people of Israel, and of his priests and Levites, in my realm, which are minded of their own freewill to go up to Jerusalem, go with thee.”
The verse says ‘their own free will’.
Calvinists will often accuse Bible believers of misinterpreting their beliefs. The reason why they keep saying that is because they know that we debunked them. So they will say ‘we’re not denying this, what we really mean by this is ….’. What they’re doing is that they’re lying and trying to come up with new ideas.
One silly argument that they’re going to use is that God didn’t say that, it’s just Cyrus the king saying that and he doesn’t know any better.
Leveticus 22:18-19 “Speak unto Aaron, and to his sons, and unto all the children of Israel, and say unto them, Whatsoever he be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers in Israel, that will offer his oblation for all his vows, and for all his freewill offerings, which they will offer unto the LORD for a burnt offering;Ye shall offer at your own will a male without blemish, of the beeves, of the sheep, or of the goats.”
This is God speaking and it shows it’s their own free will.
This should be plain enough that man has his own free will and it’s not God taking control and making sure that every choice man makes, it’s going to be the way He wants to do things. When a murderer commits a murder and when a saved Christian commits one of the most wicked things, that’s not something that God wants.