Yes, it all depends upon your over all understanding of the whole counsel of God. Paul himself does not teach your "free will" view.
Well, again, this is a statement of one who has on the interpretive lenses of a Calvinist. As one without a Calvinist soteriological commitment, I think Paul does confirm genuine creaturely freedom.
Gal 1:15 But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb and called me through His grace
Rom 1:1 Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God
Paul was perpetrated from before birth to be an apostle and to preach the gospel.
Galatians 1:13-16
13 For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it;
14 and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions.
15 But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, was pleased
16 to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood,
Did God decree that Paul should persecute the Church? If God decreed all that came to pass in Paul's life, as Reformed doctrine asserts, then, yes, God was at the bottom of Paul's attempted destruction of the Early Church, as well as the Cause of Paul's conversion. It's a very strange event and conversation that Christ had with Paul, then, on the road to Damascus, isn't it?
Acts 9:1-5
1 Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest,
2 and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
3 As he was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him;
4 and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?"
5 And he said, "Who are You, Lord?" And He said, "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting,
If Calvinism is correct, Jesus knew very well why Saul (later, Paul) was persecuting the Church, the "Body of Christ."
Jesus was the reason for Paul's persecution of the Church. As God, Jesus had ordained (according to Calvinism) that Paul should "breathe threats and murders against the disciples of the Lord." Why, then, does he query Paul about his reasons for pursuing Christians? In fact, why does Jesus bother at all with the whole Damscus Road event? Why not just compel Paul, by sovereign, divine decree, to convert to Christianity? Why did Jesus give the impression, by the extraordinary event on the Damascus Road, that he was trying to
persuade Paul to a different course? If everything Paul was doing was ordained of God, the whole thing on the roadway was a farce and Christ's question ought to have been instead a statement like, "Saul, Saul, you are doing well in acting in just the way I have ordained that you should."
God is powerful enough, I believe, to have decided that Paul would serve Him among the Gentiles long before Paul existed without coercing Paul by divine fiat to do so. God is great enough that He does not have to meticulously control every move His chosen vessels make in order to see them accomplish His will. It certainly doesn't follow
necessarily that, because Paul was set apart unto God in the womb, God therefore
had to override Paul's free agency and coerce him into service to Himself. As I said, God is not so weak that He needs to do this in order to see His will accomplished. This view of God, I believe, makes better sense of the Damascus Road event than the Reformed view does. Under Calvinist dogma, as I said, the whole exchange in the roadway is a misleading farce. But if what God did on the road to Damascus with Paul was persuade Paul to forsake a course He had not ordained, nor approved of, then Jesus's question and the whole manner of the event - the disembodied voice, knocking Paul down, blinding him, sending Ananias to him, etc. - makes much better sense.
Romans 1:1
1 Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God,
The word "called" in Greek is "kletos" meaning "invitation." Not compelled, not coerced, not forced,
invited. Only if one has a Calvinist lens on must "called" mean "sovereignly compelled." And Paul's Damascus Road experience was certainly more in keeping with the former definition than the latter, in my view.
I do not see your "God only ordained a plan, and that plan was that everybody who by their own free will who hears the gospel and then accepts and believes will be saved."
Well, of course you don't. You've got an established commitment to Calvinist doctrine to maintain.
You do see that by default. That is the default position of everybody, even me when I first read the Bible. It takes study, 20 maybe 30 years of wrestling with Scripture to get that human centered understanding out of your head.
No, I think the natural, straightforward, "default" statement of God's word is that Man possesses free agency, bestowed by God. This is what makes us genuinely responsible for our choices. Because we are genuinely response-able (and not forced by God to what we do, or don't do), we are properly responsible. This is so evident in Scripture, that it takes decades of saturation in the Calvinist contortion of Scripture to be convinced that it isn't there.
The ultimate purpose of God is His being glorified, and not man's feeling good about himself.
No one has said otherwise. I haven't, anyway.
