We use this term so freely used in everyday life that we seldom stop to think through about what it is that we are talking about. Free-will may be understand from three different angles.
1. Morally and psychologically speaking, free-will is the power of unconstrained, spontaneous, and/or voluntary decision and choice. Understood this way, free-will is the presupposition that we are responsible and answerable before God and fellow humans for our actions.
2. Philosophically—or metaphysically—the term affirms that the "future acts" of a person are not already bound and determined by his/her past or some external "programme" (e.g., karma, the stars, Satan, etc.). While the Bible neither affirms nor denies this understanding of free-will, it assumes that nothing in our future is not already known to God. At the same time, whatever He wills, or has willed, He does not prevent us from doing what we will to do, so that no one can assert that God "made me" do it.
3. Theologically—biblically—the term refers to the state of a person who is not, or no longer, "a slave to sin," or a "slave to the self." In this sense, what we have witnessed in North America in recent days, when—response to the measures instituted by the government to contain the Covid-19 pandemic—people refused to wear masks because it impinges on their "freedom," their "freedom" is an extreme and practical example of being a "slave to the (sinful selfish) self."
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