God's Sovereign Will vs. Our Free Will

This is a blog I wrote months ago here and recently it keeps being brought up in multiple conversations - not by me, I promise.  Other people mention it and I chime in my thoughts on what  I've studied.  I believe this is important because it affects the way we view our relationship with God. I believe all of those that love God and seek Him would all agree that God is Sovereign. However, there are different views on what sovereignty really looks like.

Some believe that God is sovereign and in complete control of everything, even to the extent of what we say and do. In other words, they see God as a puppet master and we are His little puppets; He is in control of everything we say and do... even the sin we commit. They believe we have no say in what happens in our lives, because God is in complete control. An example of this would be a horrific situation like being hit by a drunk driver - they believe God conducted all of that happened in that horrific accident. {I do not believe this. It is by our own poor choices that things happen and we have consequences for those choices. We ask God for direction and wisdom, but we make the choice to follow Him or not. The drunk driver makes a sinful choice putting others at risk and there are consequences}.  

Others see God as Sovereign and believe He is a relational being who longs for us to know Him and love Him by our own free will. they believe He is all powerful. His sovereignty is in His character of ALL that God is - His power, His grace, His wisdom, His strength, and His glory, and His character - full of compassion, full of LOVE because He is LOVE - all that about God does not change.

Question is... is free will really free will? An old companion of mine argued that Numbers 23:19 is clear that God does not change. I questioned this scripture and wanted to look a little deeper - looking at the context of who is speaking, the history, and what they might be specifically referring to.

Numbers 23:19 “God is not a man that He should lie or change His mind…”

Numbers 22-23 is the story of Balaam and Balak and their plot to curse Israel. Balaam is known as an evil "rent-a-prophet."  Balaam was rash in his decisions, he loved money and God actually calls him perverse because he chooses to run toward evil trying to curse Israel out of greed despite multiple warnings from God. In chapter 22 we see Balak, king of the Moabites, hears that Balaam can put blessings and cursings on people and it will come to pass. Balak wants to put a curse over Israel so that the Moabites can defeat them in battle. In order to get Balaam to prophesy for you, you had to pay a service fee.

Balaam reminds me of a creepy, money-hungry, TV evangelist. We see that Balaam cares more about money than he does about God’s will. Balaam is approached by Balak’s men and he let’s them stay the night so he can pray about it. Pray about what? He’s praying whether or not it’s ok to curse God’s people. Seriously?! He may have a "gift" here, but he’s obviously not sincerely seeking God’s will.

In vs. 9-12, God warns Balaam to have nothing to do with these men. God tells Balaam “you shall not go with them, you shall not curse the people for they are blessed.”  God reminds Balaam that He has blessed Israel and the covenant cannot be broken, because God will not go back on His Word. Balaam goes back to the men and tells them “the Lord has refused to give me permission to go with you.” It’s like a kid saying “my dad says I can’t go, but I really want to.”  In other words, he can be persuaded and that’s exactly how the men took his answer because they actually went back to Balak with the message, then it says in the scripture that he specifically sent wealthier men to persuade him. Balaam entertains their offer a second time after God already told him no. Why is he doing this? Because this dude is greedy.

In vs. 20-21 we see God change his way by allowing Balaam to go with the men, but God was angry with him. God had just told him to have nothing to do with these men. Is this unfair? I don't think so. God already warned him, but he consistently rejected God’s answer (his choice). He kept pushing for the answer he wanted because of greed. Balaam has free will and he makes his own choices, as we all do, and this ties in with God’s permissible will. God wants him to have nothing to do with these men, but God changes His way as a reaction to Balaam’s poor choices and allows him to go, but God is angry with him.

Does this mean that God is going to break His covenant with Israel and allow this evil prophet to curse the nation? Absolutely not. God never breaks a promise/covenant, because He is Sovereign. He never goes against His Word. God’s character does not change; WHO God is does not change. His glory and His power do not change.... but God does change His mind or His decisions because out of His great love for us, He gave us free will and the chance to have a relationship with Him. I believe this is brought up multiple times throughout the Bible and it's wrong to look at only Numbers 23 and say 'God never changes His mind.' This is an evil prophet speaking and he is only referencing God's covenant with Israel in this particular scripture.

God's Response
When God changes his ways, it is always a response to His people - whether that be His response to a prayer, to our repentance or when He regretted making Saul king over Israel (1 Sam 15:35) because of Saul’s poor choices… God's response is a reaction. It’s not because God is indecisive, but more so because He loves us and He has given us the gift of free will. We make good and bad choices, we sin, we repent, we pray, we worship... God reacts to our choices. Even with our choices to sin and be disobedient, God may be angry with us, but He changes from anger to showing us compassion when we repent… and that is a change that does not contradict anything in scripture or of His character, but in fact, it only proves Him more true.

In vs. 22-27 we see that an angel of the Lord meets Balaam on the road as he is on his way to meet Balak. The angel has his sword drawn and ready to kill him, and the donkey freaks out because she sees the angel. Balaam loses his temper and beats her three times. God uses the donkey to speak to Balaam, but unfortunately Balaam won’t listen. In vs. 31-35 the angel has his sword drawn and tells Balaam "turn around and go back now because your way (choice) is perverse (running towards evil).”
Then Balaam says “if it displeases You, I will turn back.” IF? He’s questioning? He’s still hoping for the answer he wants to hear from God. Seriously dude? There’s an angel in front of you with a sword drawn ready to kill you and you’re questioning. Really? This dude is stubborn.

Again, God allows him to go but it says again,“God was angry with him.” He’s allowing Balaam to make the choice and fall to his own sin; he has already rejected God multiple times. From my reading, most theologians seem to agree this is judgement on Balaam unless he repents.

Now, Balaam meets Balak, king of the Moabites, and I’m thinking he was probably very excited to see him because he’s expecting Balaam to put a curse on Israel so he can win the battle. Balaam tells him “I will try but this is not in my hands, but in God’s hands” – as if to say, "if I fail, (which I’m thinking I will because God already said NO) I blame God.”

Balaam tries to curse Israel (evil punk) as he repeatedly goes back and forth trying to get a different answer from God so that he can finish the job he’s paid for. He bosses Balak around, he even gets Balak to build altars (at Balak’s expense, not his, although he does take credit for it). Where does he think he has this authority? God never told him to do that.

Sovereign Will vs. Permissible Will
Most theologians have agreed there is a difference in God’s permissible will and His sovereign/providential will. God’s sovereign will refers to things that happen no matter what - things that we can not change, and we don’t have to pray to make it happen because but God will do (has done) it regardless. This includes creation, the promise/covenant of a Savior - a fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies, God’s covenant with Israel and the covenant/promise of our Lord’s return and the new earth. This also includes His covenant/promise to love us, to be faithful, to hear our prayers...

God made a covenant with Israel and Balaam cannot break that. He cannot curse them because God has not cursed them.  However, God can and does use people to fulfill His sovereign will. For example, we see God use Mary to fulfill the promise of a Savior and we see Abraham used to fulfill the promise He made with Israel.

God’s permissible will refers to things such as who we choose to marry, our degrees, careers and the schools we attend… or when someone chooses to take a job to help a king kill off God’s chosen people. These are things we choose by our free will. We can choose to be like the great King Solomon and seek God's wisdom and ask Him to direct us in our decisions, but ultimately it’s our choices, our free will, and far too often it is our screw-ups.

The Puppet Master?
For those that say God never changes - to say that nothing about God changes, not His decisions, not His ways - it actually contradicts scripture (I'll come back to this). It breaks my heart to hear that someone believes that no matter what they pray, God already has his mind made up. So, why do you pray?

What kind of relationship is it if you don't have free will? Do you believe you are being controlled by a puppet master? Yes, even in your moments of sin, you believe God is controlling that sin too? If God is controlling your sin, that would contradict His holiness. 

Also, if you believe that God is a puppet master, then how is that true love? Think of it this way, if a husband goes up to his wife, shakes her saying "you will love me. I will make you love me. I will force you to love me. I will control you to love me."  That, my friends, is not true love. That is manipulation. True love is by choice. There's freedom in love.

I just hope those reading this understand that your prayers do touch the heart of God. He has given you the freedom to choose Him and to love Him.

Calvinists will not agree with this blog post and I don't understand their interpretation of the scriptures. For example, when Jesus teaches us to pray in faith, how do they interpret that? According to their interpretation, God has already decided everything. If He’s going to do it regardless, then their prayers don’t make any difference. According to their belief, their prayers don’t influence the heart of God at all. OMGosh! There’s so much that they’re missing out on with their heavenly Father! How sad it is to view God as only a Puppet Master with no emotion, no reaction, no feeling, that they can’t have true fellowship with Him. 

Some look at Numbers 23:19 and claim that God cannot change based on this scripture. I believe that with all scripture, we should look at the history in that chapter; look at the surrounding chapters. Look at who is speaking because we need to know specifically what they are talking about and if they are a man or woman of noble character. In this verse, I highly recommended looking at the surrounding issue and why this (evil) person is saying this (and how this angered the heart of God).

We know from reading the earlier chapters that Balaam is a money-lovin’, perverse rent-a-prophet who was hired to curse God’s people and he tries to multiple times. Numbers 23 begins with Balaam bossing Balak around, getting him to build altars as he is praying for God to curse Israel. In verse 19, Balaam is specifically talking to Balak about Israel.  He’s saying ‘I can’t curse them because God has not cursed them and God will not repent, change or break His covenant with them.'  God’s covenant is unbreakable, unlike ours, as we go against our words all the time.

IMPORTANT ** The Greek word used here for change or repent is nacham:  to relent, to have compassion on, to feel sorry for, to change or repent.  Here’s a good explanation for nacham and here is the original text. (This has to be one of the best sites I’ve found! It allows you to click on the word in question and pull up the definition based on the original text). God is not going to repent, change or be sorry that He has a covenant with Israel.

The Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown Bible commentary interprets Numbers 23:19 as, “The counsels and promises of God respecting Israel are unchangeable; and no attempt to prevail on Him to reverse them will succeed, as they may with a man.” If we try to use Numbers 23:19 to say that God never changes in anyway, then according to the original Greek word, nacham, that would be saying that God never has compassion, He never forgives and that He never relents. That would contradict everything in scripture! God changes as He reacts to us, but He will not change something that contradicts His word or breaks a promise, or that goes against His character and His sovereignty.


Exodus 32 - The prayer of Moses 

The same Greek word nacham is used in Exodus 32 as it is in Numbers 23. Do these scriptures contradict each other? No. Balaam was specifcially talking about God’s covenant with Israel. In Exodus 32, Moses’ prayer moved the heart of God and God relented, as He was moved from anger to compassion.  In Exodus 32, God is angry at the Israelites because of idolatry and sexual immorality and He tells Moses He will destroy the people and build a new nation through him – is this a threat to break His covenant? Absolutely not. The covenant would still be fulfilled because Moses was a seed of Abraham. Moses was a descendant of Levi, who was a descendant of Abraham. God would not be violating the covenant because it would still be fulfilled through a seed of Abraham. {Booyah!}

I believe Moses’ prayer is very important and one thing that stands out to me is that he prays for God’s glory to be known among the Egyptians. He was raised by Pharaoh, he grew up among the Egyptians, he cares about the people and he doesn’t want them to view God as this evil, horrible god who frees His people from slavery only to kill them later. He wants them to know God as loving and compassionate, and for the God of Israel to be great among the people. God changes (nacham) His decision as a reaction to Moses’ prayer.

Commentary on Exodus 32 ~ “God expresses the greatness of his just displeasure, after the manner of men who would have prayer of Moses could save them from ruin; thus he was a type of Christ, by whose mediation alone, God would reconcile the world to himself. Moses pleads God’s glory. The glorifying God’s name, as it ought to be our first petition, and it is so in the Lord’s prayer, so it ought to be our great plea. And God’s promises are to be our pleas in prayer; for what he has promised he is able to perform. See the power of prayer. In answer to the prayers of Moses, God showed his purpose of sparing the people, as he had before seemed determined on their destruction; which change of the outward discovery of his purpose, is called repenting of the evil.” Source)

** Here are some other scriptures to look at that mention God changing as a reaction to our decisions, He either relents, regrets or changes in His decisions:  Judges 2:18, Jeremiah 18:8, 26:13, Psalm 106:45, 1 Chronicles 21:15, 1 Samuel 15:1-35, and 2 Samuel 24:16.

A friend of mine sent me this passage from a book by Walter Kaiser, Hard Sayings of the Bible: 

Here in 1 Samuel 15:29 we have a clear statement about God’s truthfulness and unchanging character. But elsewhere in the Old Testament we read of God repenting or changing his mind. Does God change his mind? If so, does that discredit his truthfulness or his unchanging character? If not, what do these other Old Testament texts mean?


It can be affirmed from the start that God’s essence and character, his resolute determination to punish sin and to reward virtue, are unchanging (see Mal 3:6). These are absolute and unconditional affirmations that Scripture everywhere teaches. But this does not mean that all his promises and warnings are unconditional. Many turn on either an expressed or an implied condition.


The classic example of this conditional teaching is Jeremiah 18:7–10: “If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.”


This principle clearly states the condition underlying most of God’s promises and threats, even when it is not made explicit, as in the case of Jonah. Therefore, whenever God does not fulfill a promise or execute a threat that he has made, the explanation is obvious: in all of these cases, the change has not come in God, but in the individual or nation.
 Of course some of God’s promises are unconditional for they rest solely on his mercy and grace. These would be: his covenant with the seasons after Noah’s flood (Gen 8:22); his promise of salvation in the oft-repeated covenant to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and David; his promise of the new covenant; and his promise of the new heaven and the new earth.

So what, then, was the nature of the change in God that 1 Samuel 15:11 refers to when he says, “I am grieved that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions”? If God is unchangeable, why did he “repent” or “grieve over” the fact that he had made Saul king? God is not a frozen automaton who cannot respond to persons; he is a living person who can and does react to others as much, and more genuinely, than we do to each other. Thus the same word repent is used for two different concepts both in this passage and elsewhere in the Bible. One shows God’s responsiveness to individuals and the other shows his steadfastness to himself and to his thoughts and designs.

Thus the text affirms that God changed his actions toward Saul in order to remain true to his own character or essence. Repentance in God is not, as it is in us, an evidence of indecisiveness. It is rather a change in his method of responding to another person based on some change in the other individual. The change, then, was in Saul. The problem was with Saul’s partial obedience, his wayward heart and covetousness.

To assert that God is unchanging does not mean he cannot experience regret, grief and repentance. If unchangeableness meant transcendent detachment from people and events, God would pay an awful price for immutability. Instead, God enters into a relationship with mortal beings that demonstrates his willingness to respond to each person’s action within the ethical sphere of their obedience to his will.

When our sin or repentance changes our relationship with God, his changing responses to us no more affect his essential happiness or blessedness than Christ’s deity affected his ability to genuinely suffer on the cross for our sin.


Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Ph.D., Hard Sayings of the Bible (Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity, 1997, c1996), 209.

Thoughts?  Questions?