My position is that Man has a need to know the difference between good and evil. Perhaps to be truly free, men must know the consequences of what they are free from. And so God gave man the freedom to choose knowing what men would choose. In that sense, God handed men over to disobedience.
Clearly God permits that which He doesn't actively endorse, and offers choices He knows men won't make. That is for our benefit. So that we might learn about the nature of God (by nature merciful and loving) and ourselves (by nature rebellious).
Now the question is how merciful is God and how merciful does he have to be. The freewill position says that God only has to be merciful enough to offer men a choice that they can freely accept or reject. Basically we go back to the garden of Eden. The tree is still there, men can choose to rebel again. Men can come and go as they please. Presumably there is a point where God locks the door, when men reject so many times that they effectively harden themselves against ever coming in. Likewise those inside always have the choice of walking out until death. At death a man's decision is irrevocably frozen in place for all eternity. There are some open questions. What about infants? What about those who never heard the gospel? To handle those situations, one has to reason a case, with little direct Biblical evidence.
The sovereignty position is that man is dragged back into the Garden of Eden and discovers that the forbidden tree is chopped down. Man is a prisoner in the Garden of Eden. Some might say that is unfair. But there is great comfort to being a prisoner in the hands of an infinitely loving God. Why would anyone see it as anything other than great comfort unless they wanted to eat the fruit and get tossed out again.
If eating from the forbidden tree is a bad thing isn't it a good thing that I can't do it, even inadvertently? But it's only because I see the difference between good and evil that I see that goodness. Man's original perfection still lacked the understanding of what to contrast perfection with. Our rebellion made that distinction clear. So God sovereignly allowed us to do what we wanted to do, so that we might see why what we want to do is wrong. Then, having seen that, He has mercy upon us by dragging us all back to perfection.
Does God drag us all the way back in, or just to the door where we can see clearly enough to make a truly informed freewill decision? My position is that one would have to be insane to choose hell over grace. Is a decision based on insanity really a freewill decision? In fact the sovereignty position says that men are insane spiritually, so far gone (dead in their sins) that even if they were standing right at the door looking into the fullness of God's mercy, they would still turn around and run the other way unless God dragged them into His kingdom and out of their insanity. We are too insane to take the cure of our own freewill.
The next question is, if God will cure all of the insane against their will? God certainly doesn't have to do that. Perhaps the cleanest text on that subject is:
For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. (1 Corinthians 15:22-27 NIV)
Death here is not the cessation of existence (life doesn't end at the grave for any man), but spiritual separation from God. Once death is destroyed, no one will be dead. All will be alive in Christ. But there is an order to that process. The church is the next-fruits of that process. This coming to life is not the spiritual transformation of becoming a believer. That was past tense to Paul and his readers when this was written. But a coming to life in a glorified body, the subject of the rest of 1Co 15.
Jim
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