I am a Christian and therefore have Christian beliefs, which I pray are guided by the word of God. A subject I have found fascinating is that we, as humans, have different attributes than God himself. We are able to sin and therefore give up our authority of being blessed fully by God. God cannot be bad and therefore He cannot choose to do bad; He does not have a free will when it comes to the opportunity to commit evil. God can do anything he pleases and therefore anything he pleases must be good. Then how does God not have free will? God cannot be something he is not in which he has no free will in that. God has promises and orders to mankind (in which He made freely).
In the story of Adam and Eve, God ordered “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die (Genesis 2:17 NIV).” At that moment God limited his will by making a promise that the promise keeper (God) shall hold true by his being. This order is a good order because it was made in protection of man, who cannot claim that he was never warned that ‘this death’ would happen.
God being just by sustaining his orders and promises makes it impossible for man to avoid punishment from sin by his own means. The only way man can get beyond such a decree is by having a future that brings about life beyond death. The first sin wasn’t from the tree itself as it was the disobeying of God by breaking man’s trust in God (Eve with Adam eating from the forbidden tree).
It is not man’s position to determine and follow through with consequences that invoke sin. God is held by his personality being a promise keeper and cannot eliminate his promise. Do not take this as, “If God promised then I can do anything I want.” Well, many of Gods’ promises gives a deposition (command) to the faithfulness of his people (such as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). This deposition, which brings a dependency on your action of trust for his promise to work. However, there are many promises that God has made that have no dependency on mankind such as Genesis 8:21 NIV — “Never again will I curse the ground because of man.” Anything we encounter as bad must be originated from first the disobedience to God then branches out through the consequences of man’s decision to continue to trifle with his sin. While God may not have a free will; He has a sure will that is a good will, and has free reign.