Horton: God cannot limit his freedom...

This view of the God-world relationship shapes our understanding of “double agency.” God wills and works and we will and work, but at no point do we trip over each other. God’s agency operates over, in, and with creaturely agency, because God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In every external work of the Trinity, the Father is the source, the Son is the mediator, and the Spirit is at work within creation to bring about the appropriate effect. Yet in all of these works, the triune God and his agency transcend us.

Therefore, God cannot limit his freedom any more than he can limit his love, knowledge, holiness, or any other attribute. “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 24:1). Yet this in no way implies that God deprives us of the kind of freedom that he deemed appropriate for creatures. On the contrary, God is generous and liberal in his gifts. Tyrants stalk the earth, consuming the freedom of others in order to amass their own oppressive dominion, but God already possesses all authority in heaven and on earth and can create beings who have their own way of existing, thinking, willing, and acting.

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Horton, M. (2011). For Calvinism (p. 66). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

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