Some people believe that if we have free will in Heaven, we will have to be free to sin (like we do now) or we will be tempted to sin and have to choose to overcome our sin by surrendering to Christ (like we do now).  Note, this article is written for the born again Christian who is saved from the penalty of sin by salvation in Jesus Christ.  If you have not accepted Christ as your savior you are not going to Heaven when you die, your sin debt remains on your head and yet though you continue to selfishly sin and curse God in the Lake of Fire, there will be no pleasure from sin … only pain.

Now, the moment the believer is saved from the “penalty” of sin, the Holy Spirit seals the believer and comes to dwell in the soul of the believer.  This is a great thing because the Holy Spirit can overcome the  power of sin that remains within the believer, “only if” the believer choosing to die to self and live by the leading of the Holy Spirit within him.   The is the daily “die2live” lifestyle that this web site is dedicated too discussing.  The question proposed by this article is “when a believer dies and goes to Heaven or is raptured to Heaven and is free from his sinful body and therefore free from the presence of sin, will the believer still have a desire to sin?”  And if the believer no longer has a desire to sin in Heaven will the believer have any free will at all?

Some people suggest our free choice is a temporary condition for the present life and we won’t have a free will and freedom of choice in Heaven.  But it seems to me that the capacity to choose is part of what makes us human and what gives us the ability to love God and love others.  It’s hard to believe God would be pleased by our worship if we had no choice in offering our worship to Him.  Christ woos His bride into a loving relationship with Him.  Jesus doesn’t knock His bride (us) over the head and drag us away against our will or “fix” us so we have no choice but to love Him.

Love is choice.  Without choice there is no love.  Imagine a husband who desires his wife’s love and to insure that love, he injects her with a chemical to make her love him, like the Stepford wife.  This is not love; it is coercion.  Or image a robot that is designed to flatter and serve you.  This kind of “programmed response” might please and amuse you for a while but eventually you would grow tired of the predictability and crave a response from a “real” person. 

Once we are in Heaven and we become what the sovereign God “originally created us to be” then we will see all things, including sin, for what it is.  God won’t need to restrain us from committing sin because sin will have absolutely no appeal to us.  It will be illogical and impossible to sin, just as it it illogical and impossible to make rock so big that God can’t lift it.  The inability to sin in Heaven will not violate my free will but my free will be “fulfilled by Christ” so that my desire will be to love God with all my heart, soul, body and mind at all times.

My current inability to be a rabbit or a flower is not a violation of my free will but it is simply a limitation of the present reality that I accept and understand as not being the highest and best for me.  And in the reality of Heaven, when we have the fullness of Christ within us and be in the presence of His fullness.  We will accept and understand the futility and foolishness of sin.  My friend once said the first too words we will say in Heaven is “of course“.  And all the questions and struggles we experience in this life will answered and make sense in the presence of King!

In summary, sin is rebellion toward God, a stealing from God and a destruction of what God has made.  We sin because we don’t have the Spiritual life of Christ with us (as an unbeliever) or we sin because we don’t trust the power of Christ within us (as a believer) but in Heaven, without of body of sin and the fullness of God’s Spirit in us we will simply not desire to sin.  It won’t make sense to sin anymore than it would make sense to cut off the limb of a tree that we sitting on.

+8^) Rogersings

Theologian Paul Helm says, “The freedom of heaven, then, is the freedom from sin; not that the believer just happens to be free from sin, but that he is so constituted or reconstituted that he cannot sin.  He doesn’t want to sin, and he does not want to want to sin.”

– Randy Alcorn  <— Some of the information for my article was borrowed from Randy Alcorn, the author of the book “Heaven”.  Click the link to read the article he wrote on this topic.

0

0