Predestination!?

 

 

Is our fate written before we are born? If life is written and predestined before it happens, we will be hopeless actors in God’s prewritten script. We will kill because it is written, we will lie because it is written, we will steal because it is written, and our holiness/rightness will be also predestined. God plans evil and good, writes it in his book, and we act accordingly because it is written, without any freedom to choose otherwise. If this is so, God will be playing with dull and mindless poppets, who live without free will.

Adam ate the forbidden fruit because it was written in advance. The devil became the devil because it was written in advance. The Jewish people and the Roman Empire crucified the lord because it was written. All seems predestined and planned so that some of us should play villains, some us heroes, and some are cast to play supportive roles in this big drama written by God. In this setting, we, the hopeless actors, cannot even reject the script to play a different role because it is prewritten.  

If this presupposition is right, how can you make sense of the Bible? How can God say I put good and evil before you to the Jewish people? If this presupposition is right, is it not written before they are born that they will choose evil not by choice but because it is written and predestined? If life is predestined and determined, nothing in the Bible makes sense and will never add up. How can God get angry with anyone if people act evil according to the script of God, which is prewritten before they are born and is predestined therefore, and they have no free will to choose good rather than evil?

 

This misconception is related to a few verses of Paul. We cannot read a few verses from Paul, however, to miss his point in its totality and to contradict the entire Bible. In reality, we need to add the Bible with Paul’s verses to make sense of the Bible and Paul himself. God who wrote through Paul is the same God who wrote the rest of the Bible and God cannot contradict himself at all. If Paul’s few verses seem to contradict the entire Bible, for sure we are reading them wrong. After all, Peter did say some messages of Paul are hard to understand and many do misunderstand them to teach heresy by standing on their misconception of Paul’s teaching.     

 

In reality, however, our faith is the faith of free will to choose good rather than evil. The Bible is written to teach us the difference between good (God) and evil (everything else), so we can choose God rather than anything else, including ourselves. We have to deny ourselves, our intelligence, our wisdom, our identity, and our ways as worthless trash; as all glory, honor, power, and worship belong to the almighty God.

 

If we have free will to choose, however, how can God know and determine the future? Before God can determine the future, he needs to know the future of our free choice and its complex and interweaved consequences. Since God, specifically the Heavenly Father, is all-knowing God, God does know the future of our free will despite its complexity. Besides knowing the complex future of our free choice, God does also determine the future of his preference. God does not only know the future but knows that the future will be as God planned it. This is because God works day and night to make sure that the future of his choice is what is realized. If you want to predict the future of your choice, you have to make it happen. If God wants the world to end tomorrow, he ends it tomorrow. If God wants a child to be born next month, he makes it happen. The best way to predict the future of your choice is to make it happen. That is why God and his army work 24/7 and forever to build things the way God planned them. God will work diligently to make sure everything happens as God planned and spoke about it.

 

Despite having social, cultural, self-control, legal, and other restraints on our free choice, we can create numerous social realities by our choice. And since God is working with the free will of billions who can create countless parallel social realities of their own, God needs full knowledge of all future possibilities of people’s choice. If you insult one person, you create a different social reality rather than if you unconditionally love the same person, for example. That is why the all-knowing God knows all the choices we can make and the social reality that they create in both the near and distant future. Then after using his almighty nature direct them to his end.   

 

In this process, God intervenes in different from, which include judgment, education, enlightenment of the brain, change of heart, and soon to create the world of his desire given the free choice that people wish to make. Our will, therefore, is free unless God decides to manage it for God’s end. Given God’s intervention in our free will and environment, however, our pure free will often is mainly expressed in small and silly choices that we make on small scales of our social and heavenly interaction. God tests us with small things, say stealing 1 birr (or dollar) from home or accusing a brother of a small lie. If we choose good, God will build that character up and will test us with bigger challenges. But now we are built up, and we have skewed will to the good side. That is why we have better odds of growing toward God if we pick the good side in small and silly choices.

 

If we choose evil, however, God will give us bigger evil to choose from good. If we have good hearts, we will turn back from the bigger evil. Some of us are accustomed to small sins but we will be shocked by bigger versions of the same sins. When such shock happens, it is time not only to avoid the bigger sins but also to correct the small sins we are accustomed to. Yet some of us follow our custom to the dark side. Slowly our lives start to become more and more predetermined, the good will grow toward good, and the evil will grow to ward evil. We always have free will to choose good from evil, but as you grow in good, God will plant more good-will to make you better and better. If you choose evil after evil, God will grow your evil side for his judgment through you and his glory that will be manifested in your downfall.  

 

That is why when evil people see good people, they see fool suckers that they can play with. When good people see evil people without morality, ethics, and holiness, they cannot understand how a man can be such a savage. Their brain and spirit are programmed differently and they seem two different species than the same species. It is possible for evil to turn to good, and for good to choose evil, yet both good and evil do grow in you. There is path dependency on our free will which is solidified by God’s intervention. Path dependency, however, is not predestination. What is important is to watch out for small sins, as they will grow up to a bigger sin without your conscious effort. Always also remember that the kingdom of heaven starts small like a mustard seed, yet without your knowledge, with the work of the heavenly father, it will grow to be a giant tree.   

 

The next important point is that most of us are not predestined from the womb, though some are. Even though people are not born to be evil from the womb, as there is nothing written to support such a claim, God does grace some people to his side from the womb of their mother. If Jesus is coming, he needs John the Baptist to come before him. So, John the Baptist has the privilege of having better odds of joining the kingdom of heaven from his mother’s womb. To direct the future as God planned it, God gives grace to the chosen few, who won the lottery of God, with the special privilege of joining heaven from the womb. Many persons of God in the Bible are predestined to be in the kingdom of God unless they choose to exit afterward. But those are few among large masses. It is not for all of us but for the lucky few and even those people can fall under sin if they choose to sin.

 

In this process path dependency of good and evil is also intergenerational, as children of Abraham 3500 years ago had a better chance of knowing and following God than say Indians of the same era. After all blessing of parents does last to 1000 generations and the curse of parents does last up to 3 to 4 generations. Yet this is an odd issue, as Jewish people do fail and many Gentiles also worshiped God better than Israel even before the coming of Jesus. That is why God says a child is not holy or sinful by the work of his parents, though he is blessed or cursed due to them, but by his acts. His parents can make him close or distant from God to determine his odds but his future is still in his hand. It is highly likely idol worshipers will have idol worshiper children but is not predetermined dears. Otherwise, the history of Jewish people would be better and the children of the faithful would be always faithful.

 

When we read the Bible, we need to read the entire Bible to add it up. Since God is one God, and truth is one truth, our understanding of the Bible has to add up. Of course, we do not understand all in the Bible, but what we understand has to add up. You cannot pick a few verses from the bible to tell Jesus to jump from top of the temple, as angels will protect him is written; but you have to read also that tempting God is sin. Whatever you believe and you think you know, you need to add it up, therefore.