A reader asked about predestination in response to my sermon, Children of God.
He described predestination as a prison and asked if it were possible to escape it. I asked him why he thought it was a prison. He replied that predestination destroys our free will.
I then asked: “What is free will? What makes it free? What makes it a will?”
He replied:
“I reverse the question. If man is not free to make choices i.e., there is no free will, we are all predestined by God, so anything goes, and we must hope God has predestined us for salvation, despite how we choose to live our lives. That hope will encourage us to be righteous?”
Here is my response. I would recommend listening to it because I go into more detail, adding more color and explanation, but a shorter, written version of my answer follows below.
I got hung up on the question of predestination for years and what helped me to resolve it was an understanding of what the word free means.
The only being which is free is God. By this I mean that there are no limits placed on God, there is nothing contingent in or about God. God depends on no one and no thing.
Will is another of God’s attributes. Being God, God’s will is necessarily free. There are no limits placed on God’s will, there is nothing contingent about His will, and God’s will depends on no one and no thing to be effective.
Thus, the only free will is God’s will.
This cannot be said of man. He is limited, morally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically.
He is contingent. His birth is dependent on the seemingly random coming together of a given man and a given woman, who, if they came together with anyone else, their union would result in someone else.
Of all the possible men who could be born from an act of coupling, this man was born. But he did not need to be born. In no way, then, can this be called free, because this man was derived not of his own will, but by the willing of two others. This man (whoever he happens to be) need not have been, but he is. Therefore, his existence is not free, but contingent.
However, God is free because not only must God be, but GOD IS.
From birth to death, man depends on others.
For these reasons man is not free.
The same is true of man’s will. If man is not free, neither is his will. His ability to choose anything is contingent. I may choose to have a drink of water from the well, but if the well is dry, my choice has no effect. In this case, my will is of no effect. In this case my will is not free. My will is contingent.
Contingency opens up a world of choices for my will to make, but none of them are free, because I can make no choice that is not a contingent choice chosen from a set of possibilities that has already been determined for me by another.
What you are calling free will is better called contingent will.
Now, back to predestination.
If God is free and His will is free and effective, it follows that when He wills something it is not contingent. When He wills something, He does not will from a set of possible wills, rather He wills what is to be.
This is what Paul means in Romans 4:17 when he writes God “calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
If God wills for a man to be saved, then a million contingencies suddenly become effective that stepwise bring that man to his eternal destiny. God not only creates the man and wills his salvation, but He wills an entire lifetime of possibility into actuality.
(It’s quite beautiful to think about this and moving too. I type with tears in my eyes because it means that all of my mistakes have been redeemed.)
What of this man’s so-called free will? Can he resist God’s choice for him?
No. Because man lives out his days in a contingent universe, through a predetermined pathway through a set of all possible events and outcomes which could happen, but do not.
Man can no more choose his path through these contingencies (which he did not create or establish) than my dog can resist eating the plate of scones my daughter made yesterday and turned her back on for five minutes.
Man is simply not God and because of that he does not posses God’s attributes of freedom and willing freely.
What hope is there for man, then?
The hope is this. Man’s will is free when it corresponds in a given time and in a given place to the divine will for that given time and that given place.
This is the requirement of righteousness.
God’s free will is expressed in His law, which is holy, and when that law is fulfilled, man is set free.
That is what Christ came to do.
In Matthew 5:17-20 Jesus says:
“Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
What is free will?