The idea that there is free will is usually defended by believers, who think that idea is need to defend the existence of evil in the world despite a God be all benevolent.
What is contradictory is not punishment that supposedly results from the misuse of free will, but why it is good for humans to reduce the evil, but not good for God to do precisely the same thing? Just as we have a duty to curtail another person’s exercise of free will when we know that they will use their free will to inflict considerable suffering on an innocent person, so too does God have a duty of this sort. Do you think that one should not intervene to prevent someone from committing rape or murder? Free will is merely the ability to choose among available options. The ability to have all options available is not free will but omnipotence. Humans are not able to kill each other by simply wishing it; does the lack of this ability mean that humans do not have free will? There are already restrictions on humans' ability to kill each other. People in heaven are not capable of harming each other; otherwise, it would not be heaven. So, do people in heaven lack free will? God does not have human free will as high importance. According to the Bible, God killed millions of people. Surely that interfered with their free will, considering that they did not want to die. Furthermore, the Bible suggests that God knows the future and predestines people's fates. That, too, may interfere with human free will. In addition, there are many obstacles to free will in our present world (famine, mental retardation, grave diseases, premature death, etc.) and God does little or nothing to prevent them.
What is the evidence of moral lessons to learn from evil? If God's lack of moral development does not take away from his perfect goodness, then why would we place such a high value on our moral development, as opposed to always being this way? The justification and value of the qualities developed through experience with evil is precisely because they are useful in overcoming evil. If there were no evil, what is the value of God to permit evil in the first place? What are the chances that we can know what God wants we learn, when he allows for example a one-year-old orphan to be killed by a natural accident and is never found or missed?
If evil is necessary because it secures a greater good, then we humans have no duty to prevent it, for in doing so we would also prevent the greater good for which the evil is required. God must permit the man to do evil for the sake of a greater good without the man to expect to know for which greater goods the evils are needed, because God is inscrutable and morally perfect. We have no duty of the placing of lightning rods. We have no duty of cancer treatment. The loss of inference from our behavior to its moral real effects turn God commands indiscernible from no goodness at all. Since clearly exist evils that we prevent or try to prevent, because we suspect that there aren't such greater good from evils, it follows that the evidence is that we do not trust that God's goodness or omnipotence exist. If is precisely the prevention acts what God wants, we would rejoice in each new evil because it would give us an opportunity to prevent future instances of that evil. We would be celebrating the AIDS epidemic, because the thousands or millions who have died and will die agonizing deaths from this disease will give us the 'outweighing good' of the opportunity to prevent future instances of AIDS. This lead us to see every conceivable evil state of affairs as compatible with the existence of God's goodness, and in that case the notion of God's goodness is rendered meaningless. We don't have any warrant for thinking that God is behind everything instead of a Perfect Devil.