“While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” — Luke 15:20
When Jesus told the story of the prodigal son, He was not simply describing repentance. He was revealing the freedom of His Father. This is the kind of freedom that exists only where love is real.
The Father does not stop His younger son from leaving. He gives him everything he asks for, knowing full well what will follow. He does not withhold, control, or compel. That is what divine freedom looks like—love that gives space to choose, even when that choice will bring sorrow.
God’s freedom is not the absence of care; it is the presence of love so complete that it never manipulates. The Father’s restraint is not distance—it is holiness expressed through patience. He is the freest Being because He never acts from fear. He lets love have its way.
Freedom and the Heart of Relationship
The younger son uses his freedom to escape love. He mistakes possession for independence and leaves the Father’s house to define himself. The older son uses his freedom to earn love. He stays, but his obedience is transactional—motivated by resentment rather than affection.
Both sons misunderstand the Father’s heart: one seeks autonomy, the other approval. Both distort freedom—one through rebellion, the other through performance.
Yet the Father’s love holds steady. He honors both choices. He waits for one to remember who he is and goes out to find the other who has forgotten what love means. The homecoming is not a negotiation; it’s restoration. The Father’s joy is not in being obeyed or vindicated, but in being known.
“My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” — Luke 15:31
That is the foundation of all relationship—love that cannot be taken, only received.
Freedom as the Nature of Divine Love
We often treat free will as a problem—as if human choice were a flaw in creation. But Jesus’ parable shows that free will is part of God’s image within us. Love must allow freedom, or it ceases to be love.
The Father mirrors God’s own nature: He gives life, sustains it, and allows it to turn away. His greatness is not shown in power to prevent but in power to wait. His omnipotence is expressed through mercy.
When the son returns, the Father runs. That movement—sudden, unguarded, undignified—reveals the truth of divine freedom. God is not bound by pride or protocol. He is free to love beyond measure.
The True Son and the Restoration of Will
Jesus is the living expression of that freedom. He leaves the Father’s side not in rebellion but in redemption—stepping into the far country of humanity to bring us home.
“The Son can do nothing by Himself; He can do only what He sees His Father doing.” — John 5:19
That is not submission born of servitude but of oneness. In Him, freedom and obedience are no longer opposites. The Son’s will and the Father’s will move together in love.
In Gethsemane, He prays, “Not My will, but Yours be done.” (Luke 22:42) That prayer restores the broken freedom of Eden—not by erasing human will, but by aligning it once more with love. Where Adam’s choice fractured relationship, Jesus’ choice restores it.
Divine freedom is not about autonomy. It is about union. The Father and the Son are perfectly free because they are perfectly one.
The Freedom That Waits
God’s sovereignty is not control; it is communion. His rule is not domination but relationship. He governs through love that honors freedom—through patience that allows the heart to awaken on its own.
When we speak of free will, we are not speaking about the power to defy God, but the invitation to love Him freely. The parable shows that every act of true freedom draws us closer to His heart, not farther from it.
Both sons must learn this—that freedom without love leads to ruin, and obedience without love leads to resentment. Only when freedom is rooted in love does it become life.
The Father’s waiting is the silent rhythm of that truth. He waits for both sons, not to prove a point but to complete a relationship. He waits because love, to be real, must be chosen.
The Gardener of Freedom
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” — John 15:1
If God is a gardener, then freedom is the soil where love grows. Seeds cannot be forced open; they yield to warmth and time. The gardener’s patience is not inactivity—it’s the discipline of trust.
The Father in the parable is that gardener. He tends both sons—one wild, one withered—and waits for each to bear fruit in its season. His freedom is creative, not coercive. His love allows what it longs to heal.
“The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.” — Mark 4:28
Love grows the same way—unseen at first, then visible, then ripe with joy.
True freedom is not the power to choose against love, but the courage to choose for it again and again.
In Genesis, humanity’s first calling was not conquest but cultivation. We were made in our Father’s image “to work and keep the garden”—to participate in His ongoing act of creation. Cultivation is not labor alone; it is worship. It is how we mirror His freedom: by tending what He entrusts to us, nurturing life instead of grasping at control.
We are literally called to cultivate and keep God’s garden. That vocation has never changed. To care, to restore, to bring forth beauty and fruitfulness from what He plants—these are not peripheral acts. They are the essence of being made in His image.
We were not made to build towers of our own greatness, but to cultivate the soil of His love. Every act of care, every reconciliation, every creative tending of the world is a return to that first worship—the work of the gardener, done in freedom and love.
What Calvin Missed
The tragedy of later theology is that it tried to engineer what Jesus left as mystery. Calvin sought to defend God’s sovereignty, but in doing so, he diminished the wonder of His love. Predestination became a system instead of a song—a diagram of control rather than a revelation of the Father’s heart.
Paul spoke of predestination not to restrict God but to magnify His intent: that “we were chosen in love before the foundation of the world.” (Ephesians 1:4) It was never a mechanical decree—it was the language of affection.
To turn that mystery into mathematics is to forget that God is not an engineer but a Father. He is ineffable—revealed not through logic but through love.
Like the sun, He is known through His attributes—light, warmth, gravity—but never reduced to them. Light gives sight, warmth gives life, gravity gives order. Yet none of these explain the sun itself. So it is with God. His mercy, justice, power, and wisdom are radiant expressions of a Being whose essence is love.
God’s freedom is the freedom to love—to give Himself without compulsion, to wait without despair, to forgive without limit. That is the freedom the Son came to reveal.
The Father is free because He is love. And those who live in His love are the freest of all.
